Game Dev Quote(s) of the Week: So Much For Common Wisdom Edition

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 12, 2014

For today, here’s a super-fresh quote from Swen Vincke or Larian Studios, which strikes near and dear to my heart. After hitting a home run, selling more than a half-million units, paying all the debts and investors and being able to fund the next game with the proceeds, Vincke snarks:

“So much for turn-based fantasy RPGs not selling, crowdfunding not working and a developer like us not being capable of bringing a game to market without the help of seasoned publishers.”

This is from today’s post, “Thoughts after releasing Divinity: Original Sin and what comes next.” I recommend reading the whole thing, if you are either a fan of Divinity: Original Sin, or a game dev, or just interested in game development. The whole article is awesome, combining some temporary business-related thoughts as well as nuggets of wisdom about building games in the modern era. Here is one nugget of wisdom I couldn’t help but quote:

“If content is the king, polish is the queen. The best content in the world will get low ratings if you have a poor UI and no gloss, or if players don’t understand your systems. These are easy things to say, but they are very hard to put in practice and sometimes you find that you may have to backtrack a lot. Don’t hesitate about this, just do it.”

I could comment on both, but as usual, I feel like I’m only a poor follow-up to an expert. But I do remember being told by one the executives at Infogrammes (now Atari) after they acquired us around early 1999 that they did not believe there was a market any longer for role-playing games. He told me this when I could look at the chart of the best-selling games of the previous year, and I remember seeing something like six of the top 20 games being RPGs. Or maybe I’m combining console and PC game sales in my mind. But I remember Diablo was getting long in the tooth and cloned, that Baldur’s Gate had been a big hit, and Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation had rocked the world pretty thoroughly. His information was about five years out-of-date, and hadn’t really been true even then. Of course, when they finally realized RPGs really were selling, it was because “the market changed.” No, they were never wrong, the market simply changed around them.

Pesky market.

There’s a lot of factors involved in what sells or doesn’t. Content and polish, as Vincke says. The marketplace. The competition. The mass appeal. Sheer luck. Who would have thought that a game with giant block environments and characters that looked like 8-bit game characters rendered in 3D blocks would become a mega-hit? Nobody. Not even Notch.

And as for polish – well, as he says, easier said than done. It can be hard to see when you are really close to it, and it’s hard to know when enough is enough. Great companies have fallen because they couldn’t settle for “good enough.” Many more have fallen because what they thought was good enough… wasn’t.

Either way, though, I’m thrilled by the success of Divinity: Original Sin. Not only is it a great game (from as much as I’ve played, which isn’t nearly enough), but it “sticks it to the man” (and to “common wisdom”) in all the right ways.

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