#developer publisher relationship

[askagamedev]

Could AAA(A) game studios sustain themselves by switching their teams over to (multiple) mobile games?

It is possible, but not necessarily feasible. AAA(A) game studios have a lot of experience building AAA(A) games, but building mobile games and building big budget games two different beasts. Producing a blockbuster movie is notedly different from producing a television series despite there being a lot of crossover at the basic level. There's a lot of valuable (and thus expensive) platform-specific expertise that is often missing when considering such a pivot.

Typically, the IP owner/publisher takes a different approach if they want to move into the mobile game space from AAA games. What they'll do is either contract or acquire a veteran mobile game studio (with expertise on that platform) and have them build the mobile games using the right IP and supplement the mobile game's development with developer consultants from the AAA team. The AAA team then continues to do what they have experience doing - building more AAA games, and the new studio builds the mobile title. If things go well, the publisher typically acquires the mobile studio or starts its own up to take over the development and maintenance of its new successful mobile game.

If the AAA studio leadership themselves want to get into mobile development, that's usually a more gradual process. This usually starts by pitching and getting a green light from the publisher for a (small) mobile project in addition to their normal AAA project(s). This allows the dev studio to hire some mobile experts and try to prove that they can succeed in the mobile space. If the small project proves successful, the studio can parlay that into increased investment from the publisher - bigger mobile projects, more people working on those titles, and so on.

Intelligent Systems, best known for developing the Fire Emblem strategy game franchise, is a great example of this. In addition to the mainline Fire Emblem games like Three Houses, they also develop the mobile game Fire Emblem Heroes in house. FEH has earned nearly a billion dollars over its five year lifespan, making it the longest-running and highest-grossing Fire Emblem title.

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I've been wondering about this for a while, when a game like Apex Legends makes as much money as it does, does that money go straight to Respawn or does EA get it and they decide where that money goes? Respawn is producing other games, so would EA give some of that money to those games or could they give money to other EA games not under Respawn? I hope that makes sense?

It is important to realize here that Respawn is part of EA and not a separate independent entity. The nutrients from food I eat don't go only to my right hand and not the rest of my body. Those nutrients are generally used to sustain my entire body. My body will, of course, favor the parts that it thinks it needs with those nutrients - muscles grow bigger and stronger if they are exercised, fat deposits grow if the body is getting extra energy, injuries need to be healed over time, and so on. Also, certain parts of the body will receive fewer nutrients if they are deemed less necessary - like how unused muscles will atrophy over time.

Similarly, EA uses the money they earn from Respawn's games (and all of their other games) to sustain all of their development studios as well as all of their other costs (marketing, publishing, HR, taxes, rent, benefits, legal, licensing, paying off debt, etc.). Centralized costs like legal, HR, benefits, recruiting, etc. don't necessarily earn money directly for EA, but still cost money and are necessary for running the company. These costs must be covered by the parts of EA that do earn money directly. Anything the company earns beyond those total overall costs is profit, which is usually reinvested in the company and/or paid out to shareholders.

That isn't to say that Respawn gets only what it needs to survive and nothing more. EA (like most publishers) has an internal bonus system that is supposed to reward the parts of the company that do well. If the company is doing well overall, all company employees get a bonus. If a specific part of the company is doing better than expected and the company is doing well, the specific part gets a bigger bonus as a reward for being a major driver for the overall company success. EA could also decide to invest more into Respawn so it can tackle bigger projects and hire more people in the future. 

In like manner, if Respawn’s upkeep costs more money than expected and their games fail to meet corporate expectations, it is likely that Respawn would get scaled down to reduce costs (which usually means reduced headcount). They would likely lay off the extra employees and/or transfer them to a different studio under the EA umbrella to work on a different project. This is what happened to Bioware’s Montreal studio after Mass Effect: Andromeda failed to meet expectations - some of the studio employees were let go or quit, and others were transferred to EA Motive to work on Battlefront 2.

In summary - Respawn is part of the whole that is EA. The money EA takes in from Respawn’s games (and all of EA’s other games) is used to sustain EA as a whole, including paying for all of the necessary non-development costs. EA generally rewards the entire company when things are going well with bonuses, and will reward specific business units even more for exceeding expectations with even bigger bonuses. Business units that don’t meet expectations get downsized and those saved resources will be reallocated to other units.

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A bunch of you have questions about project development shutting down for some reason...

I’m guessing it has to do with two cases of fairly high-profile projects being shut down. For those unaware, the two cases in question are:

Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2, where publisher Paradox Interactive has removed the project from developer Hardsuit Labs and has delayed its release indefinitely

Anthem Next, the rework of the game that Bioware was working on rebuilding

Both of these situations have some similarities, so I’ll try to address them in a batch today.

Is another studio going to pick up where Hardsuit left off for VampTheMBlood2?

Let me be clear here - (this iteration of) VampTheMBlood2 has been cancelled. The current completed work on the project is effectively abandoned; there is very little chance that another studio will be brought in to pick up where Hardsuit Labs left off. Projects of this scope are enormous endeavors with a huge amount of institutional knowledge. Only the current team of developers know how the things they built work. Any new developer who obtains the old project assets and code would have to spend months, possibly years, trying to piece things together - much like archaeologists try to figure out how ancient civilizations did things.

By removing Hardsuit Labs from the project, Paradox is removing all people who know anything about how the project works. If the current project were salvageable, it would (in a worst case scenario) be something similar to what happened with the Kerbal Space Program 2, where the publisher cancelled the contract with the developer studio and hired many individual dev team members from the former studio to continue work on the project. That institutional knowledge of how things work is invaluable if the same project code and assets are to be used. This is clearly not the case with VampTheMBlood2. Paradox is ok with dumping the work done and starting over.

Is Anthem’s cancellation because of the engine being used?

Almost assuredly not. In Anthem’s case, the Frostbite engine was already used to build something that released; if it were a problem with the engine, they would never have been able to ship in the first place. The problem wasn’t that the game wasn’t functional, the problem was that the game wasn’t fun.

What are the common causes for project’s cancellation like this?

Projects far into the development cycle are usually cancelled for a few major reasons. The first is the reality of the numbers - getting from the current state of the project to where it needs to be in order to ship is not feasible within the available time and budget in combination with the current team. The amount of development time needed could, for example, place the finished release in a terrible place on the schedule, competing with its own publisher’s other products or with a licensor or other major competitors. The required additional budget could push it way too far into the monetary loss category, especially when additional costs and factors like a new marketing campaign or changing market trends are considered. 

Why do you say these two situations are similar?

Both projects had notable changes in leadership a while back, and both had a reasonable amount of intervening development time since then. In Anthem’s case, the game’s state was unacceptable for the long term because it wasn’t meeting its goals for continued development and support. The publisher didn’t give up on it though - they gave the (new) dev team leadership an opportunity: a block of time to come up with a prototype and plan to take Anthem from where it was to a place where it could hit its performance goals (number of regular players, monetization targets, etc.) within a set of given constraints (time frame, budget). If they could prove the concept and the external circumstances lined up, they could continue development. This is exactly what the Bioware Austin team had done in the past with Star Wars: The Old Republic. Unfortunately, one or more of these failure conditions were met for Anthem and the proposal was sadly rejected.

I suspect that a similar situation happened between publisher Paradox and developer Hardsuit. When Hardsuit’s creative director was removed from the project, I suspect that the game was not in a good state or on a good trajectory toward launch. It was not where it needed to be. However, I believe the publishers still saw the potential in the project if the developers could properly course-correct. I conjecture that the developers at Hardsuit were given around six months for the new leadership to get things back on track. In a similarly unfortunate set of circumstances, I suspect that they were unable to meet the publisher’s expectations and Paradox decided to pull the plug.

But Paradox said VampTheMBlood2 is still coming!

It (probably) is, but it will likely be a completely new game from a completely new developer, rather than something built from the remnants of Hardsuit’s cancelled code and assets.

It is an unfortunate that these events transpired this way, especially because of the additional pressures and hardships of having to do this under global pandemic circumstances. We’ve only seen some of the subtle side effects of the pandemic forcing the entire game development world into remote work and I suspect we will continue to see more. There are all sorts of things that could have happened that resulted in these project cancellations, with many of them outside the control of any of the parties directly involved. 

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When developing a game and later publishing the game to a different platform (e.g. from PC to Nintendo Switch), do most of the time studios hire a 3rd party or are they done in studio?

Porting a AAA game to a new platform after release is usually contracted out to an independent or different publisher-owned studio. This is usually because the team that built the original game is usually already working on something else. Porting an existing game to a new platform often requires fewer hands than building a whole new game, so you also don’t need to field a full sized team to do it.

In my experience, working as the primary developer on a title means that you work on the platforms that have the most crossover in technical specs. This usually means that the PC/Playstation/Xbox are developed by the same team, but any Nintendo platform is often handled separately due to its much more limited hardware capabilities. The XBone and PS4 compete pretty closely with each other, but the Switch just doesn’t have that kind of horsepower. That means that a lot of additional optimization and asset fixes must be done to make it work on the Switch - enough work that it often necessitates an additional team dedicated to doing just that work.

Smaller contract/independent studios will often do the ports themselves after launch, even if they have a publisher. This is often because they may be waiting for a deal to go through and still need to pay the bills. Launching an established game onto a new platform would be less expensive than building a whole new game, and it earns the studio some money to stay afloat while the leadership tries to close a deal for a new project. 

Big publishers often have their own porting studios like Vicarious Visions (EA) and Beenox (Activision), but there are also independent studios like Behavior that are often hired to port titles. Many studios started out by porting existing titles to new platforms in order to pay the bills while they grew and developed their own original games on the side. Blizzard Entertainment is one of the more famous examples that got its start this way in the early 1990′s. 

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Do publishers try to keep the original teams in their seques or reboots of any game franchise?

Usually the answer is “yes” because it’s a known quantity - it was already successful so it seems prudent to keep a good thing going. However, there are also layers of “no” involved because there are different types of situations that could occur where keeping the team is untenable. First, the publisher makes decisions at the studio level about who works on a game. Second, the studio itself makes decisions about who to put on a team. Finally, there’s the question of the individuals on the team and what they want. 

Let’s go back to the Killer Instinct (2013) example. Double Helix (developer) was no longer available to continue development on the game because the studio was purchased by Amazon. Microsoft (publisher) wanted to continue development of Killer Instinct, so they shopped around for another studio and chose Iron Galaxy to pick up and continue development. At the publisher level, they make decisions on which studio will be developing the game. Sometimes the old studio is no longer available, so the publisher must find somebody else.

This also happens at the studio level, because the studio leadership decides who goes to which team. This doesn’t happen a lot when the studio works on only one game since there’s only one project for everybody to work on. However, in a studio with multiple projects being developed concurrently, the individual projects often have individual needs. That often means that experienced veterans can be moved around because of the needs of the project. It’s actually fairly common to send a veteran from an ongoing live game to work on a new project still in development - especially if the veteran wants to work on something new. In those situations, the team loses their veteran, but promotes from within the team to fill the departing dev’s position and hiring somebody new to fill the vacated lower ranks.

The third element is the individual developer. Developers naturally leave the studio as they find new opportunities that interest them. People aren’t immutable; we change over time as we mature and find ourselves with new priorities. Some developers are content to work on an annual release sports title like FIFA every year, while others will do it for a while, become less satisfied with it, and then look to do something else. Some folks want to change roles (e.g. go from QA to design or production) or get promoted (e.g. from senior designer to lead designer), but there’s just no openings for the desired role at the old studio. Leaving for a new studio that is hiring for such a role is a natural response. And, of course, sometimes the pay, benefits, and/or hours at the new opportunity are just better than at the former studio. This means that individual developers are often choosing whether to stay at the studio or look for work elsewhere. At this individual level, the studio leadership is often sad to see the developer depart, but understands that it is something the exiting dev wants to do.

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How is a game art direction chosen? When does a game art style get locked in? Who decides what the art style will be? Does the publisher get a say in the game's artstyle (I.E. publisher will only publish X game if it is super cartoony like Fortnite because that is what's hot right now)?

Generally, art direction is decided on by the dev team’s senior leadership. This is primarily driven by the game’s Executive Producer and the game’s Art Director (who oversees all of the other artists on the team and reports directly to the EP). Typically, the leadership has a solid idea for what the game should look and play like when they pitch it to the publishing executives. When a studio pitches a game idea to a publisher, they’ve probably got a presentation demo and concept art that shows off their art style. The publisher will usually have notes/suggestions (on a variety of elements, including art style as you noted) that the development team will then discuss with the publisher. The publisher always gets a say since they’re the ones funding the project, but the executives can be persuaded if the dev team makes a sufficiently compelling argument for their decisions. It’s a question of finding something that both sides can agree on.

Occasionally, the publisher will have a game concept they want to hire a studio to build for them. In these cases, it’s usually an established license that will influence the art style to varying degrees. For example, back in 2011 or so Microsoft wanted to revive the dormant Killer Instinct franchise for their upcoming Xbone platform. They shopped the idea around and heard pitches from various independent studios for a new Killer Instinct game and gave the go-ahead to Double Helix for the project. The executives at Microsoft had several requirements for any pitches, such as showcasing the graphical capabilities of the new console and making sure the returning characters and gameplay from the franchise were familiar to players. This doesn’t mean that the art direction for the project was set in stone, but it was constrained due to the license.

Ultimately, these two approaches still culminate in the same thing - the publisher execs and the development leads sitting down and working something out that both parties can agree to. Remember, game development is a collaborative endeavor. The publishers and developers work together in order to bring these ideas to life. That includes deciding on an art style that all of the major stakeholders can agree is best for the game.

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What control, if any, do developers have over the marketting of a game? You've mentioned that it usually outside companies are hired to actually market games. In these cases, do developers get to see marketting material before hand? Do they get any veto power to prevent the release of awful ads or are they kinda stuck with whatever the marketting company produces?

In indie game dev, the dev team is in full control of the marketing - often because they are the ones doing the marketing themselves. Indies don’t often have much of a marketing budget (even if they have a publisher), so they have to get creative in order to get the word out. The budgetary limitations greatly affect the scope of what indie dev teams can feasibly do.

In AAA games, the budgets increase and the people get specialized. The dev team usually doesn’t get a lot of say in the marketing of the game because the dev team and marketing team are both usually run by a big publisher and operate independently and mostly separately from each other. Marketing will send requests to the dev team for screenshots and videos and ask for information about the game to build the marketing campaign around, but they do their thing and we do ours. The top leadership on the dev team does have some say in how things go (especially because they are the ones who select the screenshots and video), but usually not as a decision-maker in how things work. The publisher is usually the final arbiter.

In many ways, this should make theoretical sense - the dev team should be comprised of experts at developing games. The marketing team should be comprised of experts at marketing games. The marketing team should know what they’re doing and need a free hand to build a marketing campaign, just like the dev team should know what they’re doing and need a free hand to build a fun game. But, like how some games end up bad despite the dev team’s best efforts, the marketing campaign can end up not meshing well with the game’s design and setting unrealistic expectations among players. A bad marketing campaign should not be an indictment on game marketing in general any more than one bad game is an indictment on all video gaming. It’s just one more attempt that turned out badlyout of hundreds.

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How does the dev team leadership decide when to release their game ? What makes their chances better in October than, say, February?

This is a simple question with a real rabbit hole of an answer. There are multiple layers to this, depending on the size of the game, the size of the company, the people making the decision, and a host of other factors.

For a small team, the release date is often a factor of scope and funding. What’s our expected [burn rate]? How much [runway] do we have? What can we feasibly build between now and when the funding runs out? A small studio usually aims to release when the game and/or funding is done.

For a larger company that has multiple projects running simultaneously (e.g. a smaller publisher), there are more considerations to consider. You still have the same factors as before (burn rate, game scope) but they apply to multiple projects and you’ve got a limited supply of money. This means you have to think about a release schedule. If ComCap releases Mega Man Gamma in March means that they can probably expect revenue from it for March, April, and May. That money might be needed to keep the other projects still cooking afloat until Street Fighter Delta’s launch in July. Then, hopefully Street Fighter Delta (and maybe a bit of Mega Man Gamma) will earn money for the other games still in production, plus a little bit more to kick off the early planning stage of a Mega Man Gamma sequel. The hope is that staggered product releases keep the company working (and maybe even earning profit), so they will plan game release dates based on the “holes” in the schedule - they will need the money from sales by this date in order to keep the company running (and possibly kick off other new projects).

There’s also the issue of sales cannibalization when it comes to release dates - you don’t want to release similar games too closely to each other or you’re competing with yourself. Many buyers have a set “video game” budget that they will deplete for games (and slowly refills over time), so offering two similar games at the same time means they’ll choose one of the two and not get both. Spacing out those releases by a few months improves the chances players will buy both.

Then you’ve got the bigger fish in the pond - publishers like EA, Activision, and the like. They have all of the same considerations I mentioned above, but also others. Not every month in the year is equal for game sales - we sell a lot fewer games in the summer time when players are out taking vacations away from home than we do during the holiday season when everybody is giving each other gifts. Big publishers will naturally time their biggest expected releases for the holiday season (e.g. Call of Duty is always in November) to capitalize on the number of people buying games at that time of year. This also applies for things like licensed games - a Star Wars game will be buoyed by the release of a Star Wars movie in theaters, sports games get a sales bump when released near the beginning of the season, and so on and so forth.

As you can see, this is only some of the myriad of factors that can go into figuring out a release date. There’s even more specific factors to consider we haven’t gotten into, like when your competitors are releasing their games, major industry show events like E3, and it can even change over time if the game falls behind schedule. Choosing a release date is a complicated process with a lot of different priorities and predictions that shift over time. Sometimes we get it really really wrong. Most of the time it works out.

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