Source: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...tertainment-survival-success-and-independence
This is an interview with Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment.
I suggest reading the whole thing. He's very blunt and honest in it and goes into a lot more detail about the realities of being a mid-sized independent studio.
Hopefully for them they can find a good publisher to buy them and get out of what sounds like a very negative cycle.
Summary:
This is an interview with Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment.
I suggest reading the whole thing. He's very blunt and honest in it and goes into a lot more detail about the realities of being a mid-sized independent studio.
Hopefully for them they can find a good publisher to buy them and get out of what sounds like a very negative cycle.
Summary:
- "I've got 200 people and they've all gotta be paid. That changes your whole mindset... That means there's always a gun to your head"
- "I mean, yeah, I'd like a Lamborghini in every color of the rainbow, of course, but really we just want to be in a financial situation where we're not worried all the time. Worry is the gun to your head. It changes how you make decisions."
- Feargus notes how there's only about 10 independent developers of Obsidian's size (~100-200+ staff) left.
- Feargus talks about the challenges they've faced with their titles and the budgets they're given. For example, the notably flawed multiplayer implementation in Dungeon Siege III was about all their budget could afford them, even though they knew it wasn't going to be acceptable in the modern market.
- Similarly Feargus notes that their projects were frequently shorted QA resources due to other, more prominent projects at publishers shipping. Sometimes they'd only have two testers on their game as they were nearing launch.
- He also notes that Obsidian had made a lot of bad decisions with their internal development process in their historical projects. Obsidian would dive into a project without really planning out what to do and it would cause massive problems and delays, and ruin their relationship with their publishers. With few publishers available anymore, that becomes very problematic.
- On disagreeing with publishers as an independent dev: "Well, you have three choices: you can spend your own money, you can lie, or you can do what you're told. And, generally, we've always chosen that we'll just do what we're told - even when we don't believe in it."
- Obsidian is now favorable toward the idea of killing games early, as it works out way better for both the publisher and the developer. We've seen a few publishers like EA take up this strategy as well.
- Feargus talks about how when you're working as an independent developer with a publisher, there's a large number of things outside of your control, so these days Obsidian just tries to really focus on doing the things they can control well and then signing contracts that guarantee things like minimum numbers of testers to assuage some of the other issues.
- Due to how independent development contracts are set up (unless you're say Bungie/Respawn/Gearbox), even in the optimistic case (toward the AAA game), they would make more money off of shipping two Pillars of Eternity games than they would from a $50 million AAA title.
- The vast majority of Obsidian's staff is working on Armored Warfare (based on other interviews, seemingly 140+ people), but as most of the team has been on the game for 2-4 years now, they want to work on other projects as this was pretty obviously a needed-to-survive contract work project for them. There's an implication here that the staff is not satisfied with the current situation, but that Obsidian doesn't have a solution to it as it stands.
- Feargus implies that Leonard Boyarsky is working on a pitch for the type of $30-$50 million project that could employ that much staff, but they'd need to find someone who is actually willing to fund that from Obsidian, so I wouldn't necessarily hold my breath here.
- On the differences in what he expected in 2003 (when Obsidian was founded) versus today: "I thought we would have our own engine at this point - and we tried. I thought we would have been purchased by now. I thought we wouldn't be as big as we are."
- "I am fine being independent in 13 years. I would be okay if we got purchased, but I would be fine independent."
- On the next 13 years: "We can keep doing great stuff with Eternity. I'd love to turn Eternity into more like a Skyrim product. I'd love to do a science fiction game. I just want to keep making role-playing games - I do, and the team does. Whether that's independent or not, making RPGs we can be proud of is the goal."
