Company Killers

It's been a little while since I put up an update. I made a huge amount of progress on the last prototype, getting a nice set of basic needs features in and cleaned up. Also, I set up a local code repository so that I have some history and won't worry about making changes or losing code. More on that another day.

This is a quick post on the nature of RPGs with regards business. Part of this blog premise is that everyone -- and by "everyone" of course we refer to a small set of Games Industry people who grew up with a deep seated love for one or another great old RPG, from the most dedicated junior QA guy to the jaded exec producer who has seen it all -- everyone wants to make an RPG.

Whether the concept is the classic quartet trope of fighter-priest-archer-mage or a "innovative" romp into the realms of a futuristic science fiction "twist" never before seen that turns the RPG on its head, they are all laden with scads of items and weapons and toys and rods and monsters of every shape and dimension and hidden villages in the obligatory lava-ice-forest-desert locale.

The key word here is lots. If you indulge anyone about their pet RPG, it's almost like asking about their D&D character. "Let me tell you about my dark elf ranger...." "Let me tell you about my Japanese demon RPG idea..."

"It's got LOTS of cool monsters and LOTS of great weapons and armor and LOTS of..."

When doing design on any game, you can usually spot poor design discipline in the concept of "more is better". If something is cool, then two must be cooler. And hundreds is mega-cool. RPGs are famous for this. Diablo is one of the best examples, and in those cases it really works.

But let's talk budget for a second. RPGs have monsters and locations and items and weapons galore. Often they will add skills and spells and mounts and classes as well. Each one of these systems takes time to design. And they take art to create. And they take programmers to implement. And if you are trying to do anything more than the most basic sprites with color changes (red slime, green slime, blue slime, meme slime), then this budget gets wildly out of hand super fast.

"Oh, but Square does it all the time", you cry! And what about Blizzard!?

Well these companies have nearly unlimited budgets. And truth be told they have extremely good design discipline. There are a lot of internal checks and balances. And they are also, simply-put lucky.

The title of this post is "Company Killers" which is the Industry slang term for RPGs. They are considered company killers because they suck such massive resources that the end result rarely is able to pay back the cost of development. There are lots of stories of otherwise healthy companies that have had a string of successful (critical and/or financial) games, embarking on someone's personal RPG (or more commonly these days MMO-RPG) and that is the last project that company attempts before closing it's doors.

So grab a mug of ale, join in on the wishful RPG meme, and raise a toast to all those past companies that tried and failed and are no more.