Category: Game publishing
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The Name On The Pitch Deck
I was once part of a company that got bought out. The new owners did what new owners often do — looked for ways to trim costs, pushed out anyone approaching retirement age, declined to renew contracts for people who asked for what they’d already been promised. Efficient, on paper. Sensible, probably, from a certain…
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The Game Nobody Was Making
I was in early. The studio was the kind of open space floorplan that the industry fell in love with at some point — no walls, sight lines everywhere, the ambient noise of other people’s work as your permanent soundtrack. The Executive Producer for the project was already there, playing an extraction shooter at their…
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Interpreting Thelonious Monk’s “25 Tips for Musicians” To Game Development
In 1960, saxophonist Steve Lacy was hired to play a series of performances with Thelonious Monk. During that time he wrote down a list of tips — things Monk said, observations he made, advice offered in the way that advice often gets offered in a working band: casually, in the moment, not necessarily intended to…
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The Hypothetical Cost Of A Hypothetical Game
There’s been no shortage of conversation online in recent years about game revenue — new monetization models, rising prices, season passes, microtransactions, the economics of live service. What’s talked about considerably less is the other side of that equation: what it actually costs to make a game in the first place. Most publishers stay quiet…