Given our current economic realities and the steps many studios are taking to survive, our industry is at a very interesting crossroads. In case it helps others that may be about to embark on this path, I’d like to share what it was like to leave a senior level position in interactive gaming and start all over again at my own studio. Before it happened to me, I knew people who left the big leagues for something smaller, and I had to ask myself, “Are they crazy”?
Rick takes a break from making gams to smile for the camera
Life at a major gaming studio is fantastic. There’s incredible support, smart people and most importantly, you don’t have to worry about paying the bills. Shortly after opening Trilogy, my partner Michael Pole and I met with a well known industry insider. His first words to us were, “Well guys, how does it feel to be nobody?” It was a real shock. Gone was the prestige and status. I was starting over and quite frankly, at times it felt like it was from scratch. But four and half years later, I am sitting in my office with a beautiful view of the Santa Monica mountains and outside my door are forty of the most talented and tenacious people I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with. So yes, there is indeed a life to be had after walking away from the comforts of the greatest gaming company in the world. But it hasn’t been easy.
The Buddy System
Fortunately, I wasn’t doing this alone. By my side was my friend and mentor of 20 years, Michael Pole. He had actually recruited me to EA in 1997. We met in the early 1990s on the softball fields of the San Fernando Valley and as luck would have it, he was about to start working as a producer at Electronic Arts. I had just started a small development house in Burbank called Vortex Media Arts. A few months later Michael called and I started working on a product for him based on the Madeline TV series. It was the first interactive game targeted at girls. A friendship was born.
Many years and many products have been produced by both Michael and me since that time, including Knockout Kings, NASCAR, Medal of Honor, Spyro, Riddick and The Hulk. Michael went on to be head of worldwide production at Activison, Fox Interactive and Vivendi, while I stayed at EA, first at Redwood Shores and then at EALA. In 2005, both of us were looking for something more than we could find in the corporate environment. We started Trilogy Studios.
Raising the Dough
The biggest issue we faced in starting this venture was simple: Money. Although we both invested (VCs like you to put your money where your mouth is), we needed more seed capital to make it work. We went the venture capital route, making the tour of Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto. Although the VCs we met loved our track record, investing in an interactive gaming studio is an investment in the entertainment industry, which to a VC, translates to high risk. Our original business plan was also met with some criticism. We planned to build next-gen games for the Xbox 360 and PS3 platforms. We’d need a publisher, yes, but we also planned to take advantage of the direct-to-consumer digital download capabilities of offerings such as Steam. We felt we couldn’t miss. We had experience creating hit products and we had some great people. But VCs like scale. Betting the farm on a single product and then expanding was not an option for them. Although we could not convince a VC to fund us, several of the partners did, as angel investors. And our angels got us off and running.
Expect the Unexpected
The next great lesson we learned is that despite the best laid plans, be prepared for them to blow up. And blow up they did. Nobody in the industry -- and I mean nobody -- expected the next-gen systems to see such a slow adoption rate. We were stunned. Here we were with money raised and eight months of heavy investment in a next-gen, original IP and the market had vanished. Major publishers were scrambling around, trying to deal with shrinking revenue streams. The last thing they wanted was a new game from an unknown studio with a long production timeline, despite my or Michael’s reputation. The risk factor was simply too great.
This is where being a small company had its advantages. We were lean and we were nimble and we could change direction quickly. It became obvious that our next-gen dreams were over for the time being, but what to do? I had a studio full of 3D game development heavyweights. It was at this point that Michael turned us in a completely different direction.
Charting a New Course
On a Friday in June of 2006, we finished work on the vertical slice of Daybreakers, our next-gen IP. On Monday I turned the development team in an entirely new direction: Virtual Worlds.
The ability to be flexible, adapt and let go of our original plan had saved us. We went to work for MTV on production of a 3D social gaming space based on Pimp my Ride. This change was not met with enthusiasm by everyone in our employ. Everyone had signed on to do next-gen and we were taking them into the unknown world of real-time social interaction and casual gaming. It wasn’t long before the expected happened. Some people walked. Their personal desire to work in the area of gaming that they desired overshadowed their belief in Michael and I as leaders. Disappointing, yes, but completely understandable.
Out of this crisis, came clarity. We were in a new space. There was excitement with this new area of online entertainment. It felt eerily similar to the pre-launch days of the original PlayStation where anything seemed possible. We quickly became experts in this new, growing field. We aligned ourselves with one of the smartest people in the business, Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com. We turned a corner.
In hindsight, it was the right decision. Traditional gaming revenues have remained relatively flat, while the casual online space has exploded. We were now well positioned for growth as demand for our services was high, just the opposite of where we had been a year earlier. Perhaps there was a bit of luck involved, but I’d prefer to chalk it up to the tenacity and flexibility that Michael and I exhibited. We simply refused to fail.
Since that time, we have further expanded our capabilities to include the production of in-browser MMOs utilizing Flash. We have created a proprietary engine called Firefly, which takes full advantage of the capabilities of the Flash 10 player. Our goal is to infuse our online casual MMOs with all of the ingenuity and innovation that our backgrounds as traditional next-gen game developers strive for. So things did not exactly turn out as planned. It turned out even better than expected. When I started Trilogy Studios, I had no idea that I’d feel like it was 1999 all over again.
_ _
Have something interesting to share? Want to be featured in a future "Industry Insights" op-ed column? Please email your pitch to james@industrygamers.com.
Reader Comments (0)