2
VANCOUVER — In the video and computer game industry, there are many reasons to go, or stay, independent. But developing innovative, new content isn't necessarily at the top of the list.
With so millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours at stake, and as the term "risk mitigation" becomes as common as "first-person shooter," it's becoming more rare for companies, large, medium, or small, to develop a game that doesn't depend on recognizable brands.
"The big companies are the ones that can afford to take the risk, but creativity is stifled because of rules and policies," says Douglas Tronsgard, speaking from the Yaletown office of his company Next Level Games. The Calgary-born CEO was part of a panel called Innovation and the Reality of Games at the two-day second annual Game Design Expo in Vancouver in January.
"In a big company, if I create a new game and go to the marketing department, they'll say, 'Well, how many units is that going to sell?' And I'll say, 'I have no idea.' They won't green light it unless it's going to sell two million units." Smaller companies are more "agile", says Tronsgard, when it comes to developing new content, but in less of a position to take a financial risk.
Since forming Next Level in 2002, Tronsgard—who left Black Box when Electronic Arts, the largest video-game publisher in the world, purchased the company—has spearheaded the production of such franchise spin-offs as Super Mario Strikers and Spiderman: Friend or Foe. As an independent, midlevel company with just over 100 employees, Next Level is simply not in a position to risk thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars on a project with an untried, untested property that might not sell to a publisher. So why go indie if not to produce original, creator-owned content?
It's all down to the freedom to choose which projects to work on and with whom, and to run the company the way he wants, says Tronsgard. He must be doing something right — besides its financial successes, Next Level has won a number of awards for work environment, including a B.C. Business magazine award as best company to work for in the "over 100 employees" category.
Kelly Zmak agrees with Tronsgard that developing original ideas, at least where content is concerned, is risky. But the California-raised CEO of Vancouver-based Radical Entertainment, purchased by Paris-based Vivendi Games in 2005, doesn't see the industry's reluctance to develop new or original intellectual properties as a sign of conservatism.
"We're becoming more sophisticated and mature in the way we approach our business model in that you have a portion of the business, a large portion, saying 'It's safer if I do what I know,'" says Zmak, who moderates the Expo's Innovation and the Reality of Games panel and gives a talk called Creating an Original I.P.: You Must Be Crazy. "But that's not a conservative view, that's a smart business view."
Conservative or not, results of the current industry business model include what Zmak calls "phenomenal growth" in software and hardware sales, and in expansion of the industry's consumer base. And companies of all sizes are benefiting.
"We still have a very large pool of the small, fiercely independent players in Vancouver, as well as the second-tier work-for-hire guns," says Zmak. "And some of the big players are becoming even bigger. The nice thing about the Vancouver area is how diverse it is, and how they [different-sized companies] feed off each other. They're all necessary to maintain a healthy business environment."
With all this money going around, innovation might be the last thing on developers' minds. Still, Zmak warns that, without it, "You just become stagnant. The hardware, the software, the consumer expectations, the visual expectations, the medium we work in, is constantly moving. You have to push beyond 'This is what we did before, and this is what we're going to do again.'"
Special to The Globe and Mail
