In the first part of our chat with newly independent Larian Studios' founder Swen Vicke (the man behind RPG Divinity 2 and the upcoming Dragon Commander), we covered the state of games journalism. In this second part we'll be going into the business side of the industry and examining the developer-publisher model, both the good and the bad, and discussing what can be improved or abandoned altogether. Head on for another fascinating read and over to Swen's blog for more.





Swen: I've been in greenlight rooms with all of these large publishers, and it's extremely rare to find one that cares for an RPG, and if there is one it's usually the lone voice at the table. The ones sitting in that room just don't get what it is or what it means, which has a lot to do with how these executive boards are being organized. It's much more common to find those people among developers and press, to be honest.

Sean: It's understandable. Selling this grand, deep experience...it asks a lot more of you to appreciate. It makes sense a lot of them wouldn't get it or at least wouldn't be into the idea of selling it.

If they're into the idea of selling it, the moment you start explaining it to them what exactly is required to develop it, they go completely crazy; they go green with fright.

It's such a hard genre to develop, also. It has the problem that the best way of doing it is in a layered approach - that means you build slice by slice on top of each other, meaning you can only actually show the game when it's finished. For marketing departments, this is a disaster. They like a vertical slice model where you have all features at day one or almost at day one present in the game.

When you describe all that, it's a wonder RPGs get made at all anymore.

It's because you have the guys who are idealistic about it. There are a lot that want to make an RPG, but they know if they want to make a living, that's not necessarily the best message to walk into a board room with. I've been in board rooms where just mentioning fantasy RPGs is considered a bad thing - just the fact it's fantasy. I had a request from a publisher made four of five times over the course of several years - so they must've really meant it -- who said 'come to us with a real life RPG and maybe we'll consider it, but we'll never in our lives do something that's fantasy'. Which I don't get either.

The business dev guys are better known as the 'gatekeepers' - they're the guys who select which games they'll have to pitch internally. They're a very limited crowd - there's not that many of them in the world deciding which games you're going to play.

It's inspiring in a way you guys can succeed on your own terms. You made it this far and can now do what you want - you don't need a publisher anymore. That's a good sign...all hope is not lost. (laughs)

This is a luxury position to be in, and a rare one. But more guys are finding it. I love what's happening with Psychonauts 2 and the crowdfunding -- that's fantastic.

Even from the publisher end, things are changing, like with that Activision and Bungie deal, and the Respawn Entertainment and EA deal where both developers retain rights and creative control.

That's because the guys are funding it themselves at first, so there's little risk. In the publishing world it's quite simple: if you take the risk of the funding yourself, usually you shouldn't lose your rights. It's when you have to ask for money that they want your rights.

The traditional model in my eyes is unfair; it's almost slavery in some cases. Developers need to know what they're signing, what they're getting into.

Hire a great lawyer to read over your contract.

But often the lawyers are not deep into the industry and there's unfortunately not enough of them. They don't know; they don't realize what's happening. They're going to be good at the technicalities and formalities, but there's a lot of hidden tricks and traps where if you haven't heard from somebody, you wouldn't realize at all.

There's a developer I know working with a publisher that I'm increasingly upset with. They're pretending to be 'the indie publisher' and saying they're offering fair terms and all that. So the developer asks me to have a look at the contract and I say 'My god, it's one of the worst I've ever seen'. I explain it to them and they're going white. (laughs) 'But it can't be; he's such a nice guy'. 'I'm sure he's a nice guy'. (laughs) This stuff happens all the time; it's part of the world we live in. But at least you should know so you can make the choice and not be coerced into it.

It's hard because as soon as you as a developer accept the money, you have to finish the game. You might even have great terms when you start, but typically you're going to run into delays, especially if it's your first game. That's the moment where you get squeezed. It's when you can tell a good publisher from a bad publisher. A bad publisher will use that moment to take more rights or whatever he can from you; the good publisher will say 'I planned on this; I buffered for it; I have an extra budget, but guys, this is the last money I can put into it, and obviously I want a return on that money'. These guys exist, but they're rare. You have to find their phone numbers and guard them with your life. (laughs)

Nowadays if the rights are with the publisher, it's actually the publisher developing the game and the guys making it are just work for hire. I hate Game Connection; it's like a line of prostitutes among developers -- forced to prostitute themselves, but that's a different story. I hate it when I see it; I've been there plenty of times prostituting myself. If they're selected where the publisher is going to work on their game and the publisher is going to finance it, then they find themselves in contracts where they have no creative control whatsoever.

I've suspected as much; I've gotten that vibe from some games where it just feels like the developer is peforming a technical service.

That's exactly it. And they're preferably outside the company so they don't have to fire them afterwards. The third party manages all risk internally and dealing with mad employees if something is cut and the publisher just has a contract to kill and doesn't have to bother seeing these people. It's much harder to fire an in-house developer -- people you have to work with every day.

Secondly it's a lot easier to get cheaper rates with third-party developers, because they're happy to be working on a game -- they've got something to pay the bills.

Then it's a mutual thing -- just for the industry and gamers it doesn't work out so well.

The problem goes back all the way to the beginning. It's actually the developers' fault for being organized this way. Back then there were a lot of developers who had almost complete access to the revenue streams generated by the industry; it was just mismanaged. The guys who could manage this became the publishers and got very good at it, and suddenly we found ourselves in a situation where it wasn't the developers deciding anymore, it was the non-creatives. This happens in plenty of creative industries, of course. It's a bit of a pity. Before we start development, we should have some obligatory years of business school, so we don't fall for the same trap. (laughs)

It's very hard to balance creative and non-creative groups of people -- that gets you in trouble as an industry. But now is actually the right opportunity to grab the power back so it becomes different, so instead of the developer being the service, it's the publisher being the service. So you hire the publisher to do the publishing job while the developer keeps a sufficiently large part of the revenue so he can finance his next games.

There's a quote I heard from a TV producer who told me, "If you're not allowed to fail, you can't be creative." I found that to be so right. This particular broadcaster [he was with] was public and had a lot of room for failure, but they made some great things as a result. If the developer would have more access to a larger part of the pie in this industry, he would at least be able to finance a couple of failures, and maybe you would have much more innovation in our industry. Not that the model is completely broken: we've got some great games as a result of the publisher, but I think we could've had a much more faster evolving state of the art if it would've been the other way around.