Q: What’s the biggest mistake that a successful studio can make?
A: Walking away from its key franchise.
Q: Why would a studio do that?
A: Because the staff get bored.
Q: Why is it a mistake?
A: Well…
The Stay-Foolish Urge
In a recent news item by Develop, it was revealed that Media Molecule spent over £4m ($6m) on research projects in a bid to decouple itself from LittleBigPlanet. A largely simulationist studio (as most of the Bullfrog/Lionhead alumni tend to be), most of this money seems to have been spent on exotic projects like using laser data to create worlds. Its intent? To remain at the cutting edge of innovation in game design through technology, and to avoid becoming known as the LBP studio.
Studios that do this think of their games in the same way that Pixar thinks about movies. In this view it’s important to keep on the move, to always have a fresh marketing story to spin, and to keep the development team engaged with new ideas. The intellectual property is considered less valuable than the creative culture, so they don’t really want to have to spend a decade staring at the same characters doing the same things year in, year out. They want to stay fresh.
In games, abandoning a franchise because you’re bored is suicidal. It is more important than ever to understand that real success comes from exploring a franchise ad infinitum and branching out from it, not bar-hopping from retail release to retail release. You personally may get to work on more than one franchise, or many games under the umbrella of one, but studios should always be focused on single franchise publishing.
A Bird in the Hand…
This has always been how the industry works, and yet its history is littered with rock stars (both individuals and studios) who thought that they had authorship status among most of their fans, only to fail when they tried to act upon it.
The most valuable asset that a game maker has is not talent, assets, brands or budgets. It's fans. Fans take a long time to find and inspire, and building a conversation with them that turns into value (them buying stuff) is long-winded but well worth it. Well-nurtured fans become your biggest advocates, your marketing channel through social networks and your repeat customers. They form a culture around your franchise that can at times be demanding, but is incredibly loyal.
However fans are loyal to the franchise, not to you. All publishing focuses around a key franchise. In books and movies, that franchise is a person, an author or actor. In music it’s a group. However in comics it’s the character and in games it’s the world.
In the same way that comic fans stay with the characters and not the writers, game fans are loyal to the world and not the worldmaker. They neither know nor care that a different team made StarCraft and StarCraft 2. They have no idea who the creative director behind Assassin’s Creed is. Only 1 in every 100 of them has ever heard of Warren Spector, but plenty loved Deus Ex old and new.
Most fans have no interest in who makes the sausage, they just like the taste. It is through the world that the studio gets to have a relationship with most of its fans, not a forum or a Facebook page or a Twitter account. This is why Nintendo still makes Mario games, Sega still makes Sonic games and Square-Enix still trundles out Final Fantasy games. It’s why Hideo Kojima is stuck making Metal Gear games after all these years, and why the rejuvenation of franchises like Syndicate gains attention. It’s why Blizzard only has four brands which they keep re-releasing, why when Left 4 Dead 3 is announced it will be a big deal and why CCP has returned to its roots with EVE Online.
To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s the franchises stupid. While some fans will become so engaged that they attach themselves to the studio, for the majority this is not the case. While it may appear from the studio forum that fans will follow the studio anywhere, their posts are unrepresentative of the main body of fans. Studios who only listen to that are confusing an echo chamber with reality.
Throwing away a franchise is essentially rebooting your business in the hope of striking it lucky because you’re bored, which is like giving away your house in exchange for a lottery ticket. The studio which does this will eventually find itself in deep trouble.
Overcoming Fatigue
Most studios that walk away from success in the hopes of finding greater success disappear down a hole, never to return. They spend 2, 5, 10, 20 or 100 million dollars on research and ego trips, and then have nothing to show for it. They go from being sustainable to loss-making, and eventually start to compromise in previously unacceptable ways. This leads to weaker games and either a shut down or a fire sale.
Meanwhile the ones that keep working on the same franchise for a decade keep being successful, and some of those manage to use that success as a launch pad for a second, third or fourth franchise. They play the long game and they win because they understand loyalty.
However franchise fatigue is a problem. It is difficult for most creative people to only work on one idea. They need to find ways to stay rejuvenated, work on new things and refresh their perspective, otherwise they become formulaic. But there are ways to do that without rebooting from scratch.
The smartest way is: Keep working with the franchise, but not on the same game.
Nintendo has used its key characters in many contexts over the years for this reason. Mario Kart is not the same game as Super Mario World, and Zelda titles invariably have a new key action that changes the game significantly. Nintendo’s designers realise that their successful franchises are a platform for experimentation rather than an impediment, and this is why they remain the most successful game company in the world.
A second way to avoid franchise fatigue is: Do not spend all your money on boondoggle technology research. Spend it on gameplay research.
Simulationists often make this mistake. They forget that they’re in the business of making fun and come to believe that they are the gaming equivalent of CERN. They form core technology or research teams within the company whose job is to go out there and find the new thing, but they usually end up achieving very little. There is no quicker way to pour hard-earned profit into the void than working on non-specific technologies that your CTO reassures you will have a wide variety of uses.
Unless you’re a hardware platform, having a core technology group which spends all of its time creating evolutionary artificial intelligence systems (or whatever) is pointless in the long run. A fancy technology is a dead end if there’s no game behind it. It also has a sapping effect on studio morale, as those not in the research group start to suspect that the research is going nowhere, the company will not grow, and their share options (if they have any) will not vest.
Experiment with actions, dream up new roles for players to play and new game dynamics instead. Build them using cheap, off-the-shelf tools and then choose some of the more interesting ones for further development. Worry about whether you’re building interesting gameplay, not whether your coding chops please Techthulhu, and then will you know what tech you actually need.
Foster, Don’t Diversify
The lesson is simply this: Commitment wins.
Worrying about diversification, or signing up to a deal with a publisher that removes the ability of the studio to commit, is a bad idea. If you’re not thinking in terms of how a world that you created which people love can be explored in 100 ways then stop, go back and think about what’s led you to that point. You’re on the wrong track.
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