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Ubisoft publishes indie dev Outerlight, lifts best ideas for AC:B, leaves them to die
- Thread starter ghst
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shaowebb said:
you should know that Steam doesn't accept EVERYTHING. I read a recent interview with a man behind an upcoming 1C digital store and he said that Steam accepts what's acceptable for american audience or they think what's acceptable for american audience. This could be bull, this could be not, since we know that some rejected indies went to Desura. Sometimes devs disagree with Steam management on initial price. Anyway you shouldn't forget about Appstore.
FINALFANTASYDOG
Member
subversus said:
Great example of a man with a dedicated fanbase(each game sells 5000+ at around $25), but due to disagreements can't get his games on steam(yet)
That's under very bold assumption it's a game made by a single guy in a year. What if the team is bigger and development longer?subversus said:
So that'd be basically a bank specialized for indie developers. It might work, but still sounds very risky. "Startup indie dev" means inexperience and possibly some unpredictable mistakes in the process of creating the first game.
Didn't Carpe Fulgur already publish a finished game to the West, rather than making the game from the ground up? Sounds like a huge difference to me.
_Alkaline_
Member
That's pretty terrible.
Contradictions:
- Publishers are purely motivated by greed, everything is about money and return on investments.
- Ubisoft deliberately tanks its own investment on a developer, leaving them to die and stealing their ideas.
Really? I don't think this is how the real world operates.
AC:B was a guaranteed hit regardless of multiplayer which isn't a big draw for the series. There's no reason why both BGT and AC:B could not both be smash hit profit makers for their publisher, they're not in the same market whatsoever. They're not rival games or franchises.
Were ideas lifted? Who knows, its not like ideas couldn't have been lifted from elsewhere, the publisher relationship did not have to exist for AC:B to offer its own take on The Ship. Not to mention the gameplay has roots in other games and other scenarios. This concept is not unique to Outerlight.
Bottom line is if Ubisoft pulled support in any way, it was not for greed, which is why they seem to be getting lots of stick in this thread.
Judging from that interview, Outerlight were probably a pain in the ass to work with and acted like douchebags and produced a game Ubisoft weren't confident in. From someone coming to this story cold, that interview sounds out of order. He's basically bad mouthing someone who gave him financial backing and advice/criticism and that's very bad in my eyes. He's too good and talented to take advice from experts who produce some of the best games in the business? Yeah ok.
- Publishers are purely motivated by greed, everything is about money and return on investments.
- Ubisoft deliberately tanks its own investment on a developer, leaving them to die and stealing their ideas.
Really? I don't think this is how the real world operates.
AC:B was a guaranteed hit regardless of multiplayer which isn't a big draw for the series. There's no reason why both BGT and AC:B could not both be smash hit profit makers for their publisher, they're not in the same market whatsoever. They're not rival games or franchises.
Were ideas lifted? Who knows, its not like ideas couldn't have been lifted from elsewhere, the publisher relationship did not have to exist for AC:B to offer its own take on The Ship. Not to mention the gameplay has roots in other games and other scenarios. This concept is not unique to Outerlight.
Bottom line is if Ubisoft pulled support in any way, it was not for greed, which is why they seem to be getting lots of stick in this thread.
Judging from that interview, Outerlight were probably a pain in the ass to work with and acted like douchebags and produced a game Ubisoft weren't confident in. From someone coming to this story cold, that interview sounds out of order. He's basically bad mouthing someone who gave him financial backing and advice/criticism and that's very bad in my eyes. He's too good and talented to take advice from experts who produce some of the best games in the business? Yeah ok.
szaromir said:
Then they're fucked. That was just an example that being indie you don't need to be in top 20 to be "successful" and that "success" is quite a vague concept for indie games because they're widly varied in:
a)team size
b)expenses
c)countries
Let's take for example Zeno Clash and Red Orchestra 2. The former was developed in Chile with a team of 7 people during the course of 2 years. The latter is being developed for 2 years with 20 people on the team located in Georgia, USA where rent rates are higher and so are salaries.
Zeno Clash postmortem said:
Both are indies. Both made/make FPS games. The only difference is that RO2 is mp-focused and Zeno Clash is SP-focused. But Red Orchestra 2 will have to move more copies to be considered successful because costs are higher.
On the other hand you AAA-development isn't that vague. You need:
a)minimum team of 70 people (most times 100-200).
b)in most cases all these studios are in Western Europe, Canada, USA or employ specialists from these countries (see People Can Fly) = these guys are quite expensive + you've to rent an office for them, be able to mantain good working conditions and all that.
c)pay for soft licenses, equipment, middleware.
d)you have to market the title (50% of the whole budget these days).
As you can see it's quite easy to calculate what costs to make AAA-title since we all know where it's developed with what team size and by whom. And so it's easy to say when the game is successful and when it's not. The same can't be said about "indie" titles. Because even marketing costs can be varied from nonexistent to expensive banners on major gaming sites.
Which was my point from the beginning. If you don't know how startup indie developers perform statistically, investing blindly in them is a bad idea. I'm not saying becoming an indie dev is a bad idea - people who start their own companies in every industry have usually very low chances of succeeding, but if they want to fulfill their dreams (whatever they might be) they have to take the risk in the first place.subversus said:
In the film industry, studios bury and even shelve films they paid to produce all the time. They also may infrequently spend oodles on developing something that never makes it into production.kaizoku said:
Same goes for the music industry, and there are probably countless examples of companies shelving/burying one record to ascertain the success of a different record.
Heck, there are some examples of a publisher leaving a AAA title to die just so it wouldn't interfere with their tentpole AAA title.
Wow. Just...wow.kaizoku said:
To just take the massive multinational corporation's side like that, with no qualms...you either must have really liked Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, or you're one of those people who believes that corporations should be treated like people... :lol
It'll only get worse in the future. Publishers bought a ton of studios and expanded like crazy(and some still do) when their profits aren't growing at the same pace. They need to answer to shareholders and can't risk to lose their AAA pet projects. So they try to keep the competition in check by simply buying them out. You can be a 'veteran' developer for 10 years, building hit after hit after hit but when one projects bomb you're dumped like a piece of shit. Even a request for more creative freedom or some meddling with the 'vision' of the publisher can get you axed. As an indie dev you don't have much choice but to knock on the door of these publishers(see Bizarre/activision) because you can't possibly put the same marketing muscle behind your title to get noticed.
How about I'm being objective and unbiased?Dambrosi said:
I'm not the type who defaults to the romantic indie underdog. Yes it's major corporation vs small indie but I know which of the two has brought me more joy over the years.
Corporations get a rough ride as they're an easy target but let's face it this industry needs them and we need them as gamers, it's not like our beloved industry is in ruins is it? Some companies are struggling but as gamers we've never had it so good. It's silly to eat out of their hand and love it then turn round and call them evil bastards.
But the key point is if ubisoft felt they could make money with this game as it was so great, they wouldn't have 'sent it to die' just because it was similar to AC:B's multiplayer.
Maybe Ubi were really sinister here but feels like people are looking in the wrong direction if we're going down the 'steal ideas then shut them up' road.
FunkyPajamas
Member
I call BS on the whole thing. Ubisoft can't possibly have a single good QA team, let alone an excellent one.
My take from the article is that they partnered up with a publisher expecting the same level of control they had when they were self publishing. They should have know the nature of the industry. Never heard of Bloody Good Time before today but I just went and played a bit of the demo and while it's the same type of gameplay as ACB the execution differs greatly. Saying Ubisoft sent it do die isn't all that accurate as the game itself isn't all that great. Ubisoft could have done better in marketing it but thats about it.
Just out of curiosity, how old are you? There are certain benefits to today, sure, but I don't see how anybody who was playing games ten or even twenty years ago could suggest that now is the Best of Times. Not with the DRM, limited installs, day one DLC, online passes, Games For Windows Live, game companies dropping like flies, and an entire industry homogenized around a grand total of five tightly controlled genres.kaizoku said:
charlequin
Banned
szaromir said:
Are you just going to reject every scenario people present until you can prove to your satisfaction that indie development is a terrible idea? So far your response to everything people say on this subject is "yeah, but what if instead of a lean and efficient indie team with few members, they wasted more money being big and ponderous? How would they make money then?"
We're talking about very small outlays of capital, though. Indie Fund is intending to lend on the order of $50-$200k to each team, with funds only going to teams who have already successfully brought a game to the playable prototype stage without external funding.
kaizoku said:
This is how the real world operates all the time. For large companies, cultivating innovation internally is extremely difficult for a variety of reasons, which means that identifying external sources of low-price innovation becomes a necessity to avoid stagnation. In more positive situations, that involves incorporating those external sources in such a way that their principals are well-rewarded, but quite often things wind up like this instead.
To suggest that this doesn't happen suggests a lack of familiarity with the technology and content sectors, both of which produce stories like this all the time.
I am extremely curious how you pulled a whopper like that out of the actual text available to us. I would especially like to see you examine the section in which specific economic terms are spelled out and justify those terms in the context of your comments.
FunkyPajamas
Member
Does not compute.kaizoku said:
I think those issues are all a little overblown, honestly.Sqorgar said:
-DRM can be annoying as hell, especially when it makes a game unplayable. That said, I personally have never run into any of the remotely serious problems other people talk about.
-Limited installs are more of a "message board problem" than a real life problem IMO. In practice, I don't think that many people are installing/uninstalling their games enough to run into an issue.
-Day one DLC has no effect on me. I don't want to pay for it, so I don't. There is still a complete game to play without it.
-Game companies "dropping like flies" doesn't really mean that much either, to be honest. All industries go through phases where it's hard to do business. It's tough for game companies now, yes, but phases are phases.
-I play a lot more than 5 genres and have no problem whatsoever finding games to play.
In contrast, it's easier than ever these days to play online, with or without people you know personally; you don't have to buy expensive modems and such to get consoles online; access to indie developers has increased by about a billion percent as there are many more high profile avenues for them to get their work distributed and advertised (XBLA, Steam, all the indie awards, etc.); the internet being in full swing not only means better deals for games online but also a better ability to find good deals locally; and I would say the average game these days is better than a lot of generations in the past (such as the NES era, let's say, where the designs were very limited simply by the hardware and "difficulty" too often came from bullshit deaths and you simply had to memorize the level).
I don't know that I'd personally say that this is the best gen ever, but I've been gaming since the Commodore 64 and this gen certainly has a strong case to be made for itself. Just like with music, movies, TV cartoons, etc. a lot of people seem to think almost by default that the good old days were better, but there was a lot of crap to put up with back then that goes unremembered.
Reading comprehension problems? Nowhere did I say that indie development is a terrible idea. All I'm saying is you can't reliably tell what games might take off since they rely on unreliable marketing methods (mostly word of mouth, which might not happen even if the game is good) and you also don't know how developers outside of Steam's top 10, which are equivalent to Halos and Assassin's Creeds of AAA development.charlequin said:
Sorry, but that's bullshit and you should know. It's like saying banks aren't to blame because the crisis, because we, before the crisis, never had it so good. That's bullshit. Big corporations are guilty of inflated prices, unfair working conditions and a lot of bad things that happen not only to videogames. And they all do it for one reason: money.kaizoku said:
Yeah, they produce big games and you love it and you can close your eyes and enjoy, just as you can raise your finger to the third world and ignore how they're losing their everything thanks to us. And I understand it's your good you're defending and all of that, but blaming someone who complains because a big fish ate him and threw him away? That's maybe going too far.
OK, Kaizoku, tell ya what.
I'll concede that, with the game itself looking pretty godaverage in its promo movies, and Angelfly's lukewarm opinion of the game, that there might have been nothing Ubi could have done to make the game sell, even on XBLA, where it had an actual demo (WTF Outerlight dudes, no Steam demo? Fuck you then).
(Please don't think that I'm putting all the blame on Ubisoft, btw. The game looking meh, no Steam demo - once again, WTF? - and Outerlight having unrealistic expectations (maybe) could have contributed just as much to the game's stillbirth as Ubi's gross negligence did.)
Agreed?
I'll concede that, with the game itself looking pretty godaverage in its promo movies, and Angelfly's lukewarm opinion of the game, that there might have been nothing Ubi could have done to make the game sell, even on XBLA, where it had an actual demo (WTF Outerlight dudes, no Steam demo? Fuck you then).
(Please don't think that I'm putting all the blame on Ubisoft, btw. The game looking meh, no Steam demo - once again, WTF? - and Outerlight having unrealistic expectations (maybe) could have contributed just as much to the game's stillbirth as Ubi's gross negligence did.)
Agreed?
cuyahoga said:
You're absolutely right...and how many of those projects end up being any good when they see the light of day? The company will release it if they think they can recoup any money on it.
I picked up BGT on its release day, and it was worth the $5 I paid. But not more. It is an interesting idea, but I think it's a step down from The Ship, which was also a good idea with spotty execution (is a good online game with no players still a good game?). Of course, nobody I knew picked it up, so that was also the last time I played it. These guys are not masters of their craft like many other independent publishers. They have good ideas, but I think they do need help to actually make a product that can stand in the market.
Also, the two events are unrelated; as mentioned above, Ubi didn't need to publish with them to develop their own take on it. EA didn't publish an Activision game to release their own take on COD.
My favorite genre is MMORPGs, Adventure games, WRPGs, JRPGs, Shoot'em ups, and Beat'em ups. Tell me we have the same or better variety in these genres than we did ten years ago. Heck, even FPS, RTS, Strategy, Stealth, and... well, just about everything, actually. There's not nearly as much variety in the game industry as there used to be.Monroeski said:
charlequin
Banned
szaromir said:
No, you just implied it in ominous tones. "Would it really be a good idea to lend money to.... those people?"
More specifically, you asked an original question which was certainly reasonable, but you haven't been willing to accept any of the answers you've been given. Several people have broken down how even 10k sales a year can support a 1-5 person team indefinitely (and enable them to pay off a seed loan) and pointed to concrete examples of developers working in teams of this size, selling figures similar to 10k for each title, and being able to continue indefinitely.
Which (as I have mentioned) is all beside the point of the matter I was talking about. Small business loans are not about finding projects that will become "hits"; they're about finding people who are likely to pay off some or all of the loan you issued. For this sort of loan you're looking at teams that have reached the playable prototype stage with moderately decent project management (i.e. people who are ready to ship) and with low upfront costs (again, we're discussing a range of $50k-$200k here.)
All business lending is actuarial. If you actually had to identify hits reliably upfront it'd be impossible to get financing for any startup business. What you need to do is identify people who can plausibly pay you back and build your loan terms to cover the risk spread on those people, and there's absolutely nothing about indie game development that makes it worse for that than other forms of startup business, many of which are far more capital-intensive, market-sensitive, or failure-prone.