Secrets of the Game Business

EDITED BY FRAN OIS DOMINIC LARAM E

CHARLES RIVER MEDIA, INC.

Hingham , Massachusetts

Copyright 2003 by CHARLES RIVER MEDIA, INC.

All rights reserved.

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Publisher: Jenifer Niles

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 Laram e, Fran ois Dominic.   Secrets of the game business / Fran ois Dominic Laram e.        p. cm.   ISBN 1-58450-282-7 

1. Computer games—Programming. 2. Computer games—Marketing. I. Title.

QA76.76.C672L365 2003

794.8'1526—dc21

2002154755

Printed in the United States of America

03 7 6 5 4 3 2 First Edition

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To my dad—I wish you would have lived to see this.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, many thanks to all the wonderful people who contributed to the creation of this book: the authors who wrote such wonderful articles, the dozens of industry insiders who agreed to share their wisdom in interviews and case studies, and, of course, the entire crew at Charles River Media, starting with David Pallai (who actually came up with the idea for this book and offered me the editor's job) and Jenifer Niles. I am humbled by your talent and generosity.

Thanks to the readers who inspire me to continue writing these books and articles with their kind letters. You have my undying gratitude.

And, of course, thanks to Julie for pushing me to do something productive with my time!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Sean Timarco Baggaley

Sean began his game industry career as an artist in the 1980s. He designed and programmed several games in the 1990s, ported a popular PC soccer management sim to the Amiga long after the platform had been pronounced dead, and was responsible for naming the comp.games.* newsgroup hierarchy. He recently wrote the user guide for RenderWare Graphics, a popular middleware solution, and currently works as a freelance writer and game design consultant.

Ed Bartlett

Ed Bartlett is business development director for the legendary London-based independent developer The Bitmap Brothers. At nearly 27 years of age, Ed is already less than three years from his 10^th anniversary in the industry. With well over 10 published titles to his name on formats ranging from PC through console to handheld, he has intimate hands-on experience of QA, production, product acquisition, game design, and business management, all at the most senior levels. Ed also works extensively with the IGDA and has a passion for writing, with numerous published features to his name.

Tom Buscaglia

Tom is a principal in the law firm T.H. Buscaglia and Associates in Miami, Florida. He has been the chapter coordinator for the South Florida Chapter of the International Game Developers' Association since its inception several years ago, and is a moderator for the IGDA's Business and Legal Web forum. He is also the president of BallroomGames, Inc., which holds the exclusive license for the use of the Arthur Murray Dance Studio name and materials in conjunction with developing a series of games based on the exciting world of ballroom dance.

Beverly Cambron

Beverly Cambron is the founder of Rocco Media, LLC, a public relations and marketing firm. Before entering the world of game industry public relations, Beverly was a litigation attorney in both Texas and California. She received her degree in finance and international business from the University of Texas at Austin, and her law degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Beverly has contributed to several game industry books, magazines, and online publications, and is a published writer on the subject of wine.

Melanie Cambron

Melanie Cambron is a recruiter for game industry leaders such as EA, THQ, Infogrames, and Sony. Featured in several books for her industry knowledge, she is a popular guest speaker at universities and high schools on the game development business. Melanie is frequently interviewed by major media such as the Dallas Morning News and serves as a consultant to the City of Austin's Interactive Industry Development Committee. At E32002, she moderated the Will Wright and Yu Suzuki panel on game design secrets. Her monthly "Interview with the Goddess," featuring industry celebrities, appears in GIGnews.com.

Chris Campbell

Chris has worked as quality assurance lead on the Age of Empires game series. He has also worked in the quality assurance field in several different sectors, including telecom, supply chain, and finance. For fun, he runs a videogame trivia mailing list, and has been an avid gamer for more than 20 years.

Sande Chen

A Grammy-nominated music video director, Sande Chen is an award-winning writer active in the gaming industry. Her past credits include Terminus, Siege of Avalon, and Scooby Doo. She has written for numerous publications, including the Boston Globe.

Thomas Djafari

Thomas has been working in the game industry for over 12 years. During this time, he has occupied various positions, has worked for major publishers, and has also completed independent projects. He has been evaluating proposals made to publishers as well as seeking financial support for teams, earning knowledge from these two points of views.

Fran ois Dominic Laram e

A game development professional since 1991 and a full-time freelancer since 1998, Fran ois Dominic Laram e has designed, produced, and programmed more than 20 games for half a dozen platforms. In addition to this book, he edited Charles River Media's Game Design Perspectives and has written more than 50 articles and book chapters for and about game developers. He holds graduate degrees in management and computer science, teaches graphics programming and other computer science topics at Concordia University, and moonlights as a comedy writer.

Philippe Larrue

Philippe Larrue is a research fellow at INSEAD to William Lazonick and Mary O'Sullivan. He completed a Ph.D. in economics from Bordeaux University in May 2000. His thesis focused on the coordination of research and innovation activities in the early years of an industry. He particularly examined precompetitive research consortia to assess the extent to which and under which conditions these can be efficient vehicles for collection action during this early stage. This research was applied to the case of advanced batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles. While still devoting some time to these issues, he is now working at INSEAD on a cross-national comparative analysis of the institutional infrastructures supporting the funding of startups in France and the UK. This project is carried on through the case of the videogames industry.

William Lazonick

William Lazonick holds a joint appointment as distinguished research professor at INSEAD and university professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is also Professor-II at the Norwegian School of Management BI, where he teaches a doctoral course on innovative enterprise. Previously, he was assistant and associate professor of economics at Harvard University (1975–1984), and professor of economics at Barnard College of Columbia University (1985–1993). He specializes in the study of industrial development and international competition. Many of his published papers can be accessed at http://faculty.insead.edu/lazonick/.

Heather Maxwell

Heather Maxwell has been working in the games industry since 1996. She has worked at Activision, Electronic Arts, and Red Storm Entertainment in a variety of production roles. She has a BA from Vanderbilt University and an MA from the USC School of Cinema-Television.

Mason McCuskey

Mason is the leader of Spin Studios (www.spin-studios.com), an independent game studio currently hard at work on a brand new game. Mason has been programming games since the days of the Apple II, and has run his own game development business for several years.

Mitzi McGilvray

Mitzi McGilvray has spent the last 15 years in the interactive entertainment business. She has worked with such premiere game publishers as Midway, Electronics Arts, Activision, Maxis, and Time Warner Interactive. Her production credits include NCAA Football, Michelle Kwan Figure Skating, Figure Skating, March Madness, NHL 97, Wayne Gretzky Hockey, and various ports of SimCity and SimEarth.

Prior to founding Slam Dunk Productions, Mitzi was most recently a senior producer at EA.COM, where she was responsible for building budgets and business plans for mass-market online games, project management, game integration, and leading production teams.

Mary O'Sullivan

Mary O'Sullivan is an associate professor of strategy and management at INSEAD. She completed her undergraduate degree in 1988 at University College Dublin. After two years as a business analyst at McKinsey & Co. in London, she went to Harvard Business School and completed her MBA there in 1992. She then joined the Ph.D. program in business economics at Harvard University. Having completed that degree in June 1996, she spent six months as a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. Her broad research interests include political economy, the history of economic thought, and economic history. Oxford University Press has just published her book Contests for Corporate Control: Corporate Governance in the United States & Germany. O'Sullivan developed the elective course on "Innovation, Strategy, and Corporate Governance" at INSEAD since 1997. She has been twice awarded the prize for the Best MBA Elective Teacher at INSEAD.

Javier Otaegui

Javier F. Otaegui is project leader of Sabarasa Entertainment, an Argentine game development outsourcing studio based in Buenos Aires. He has been creating games since 1996, when he started Malvinas 2032, a local success. Nowadays, he is leading outsourced projects for American and European customers. Javier can be contacted via e-mail at <[e-mail]>.

Terri Perkins

Terri Perkins ventured into the online game world with Lambda Moo and a 1200- baud modem while completing a bachelor's degree in education in 1994. She has administered and worked with volunteer programs for the Realms of Despair MUD, Everquest, and DragonRealms before finding her home as founder and director for Funcom Inc.'s Anarchy-Online volunteer program. She has assisted in public relations, customer service design, project coordination, and consulting for various game organizations and companies.

She presently works in IT for Information International Associates and devotes spare time to combating Internet illiteracy and studying cyberculture.

Borut Pfeifer

An avid gamer since the second grade, Borut Pfeifer co-founded White Knuckle Games, with his partners Dedrick Duckett and Doug Hayes in May 2001. His responsibilities at White Knuckle Games include serving as lead designer and AI and gameplay programmer. They are currently working on a third-person cyberpunk noir action role-playing game entitled Reality's Edge. Borut can be reached at <[e-mail]>.

Jay Powell

Jay Powell received his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has arranged numerous deals across the globe for PC, GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox games. Jay regularly provides advice for the development community through GIGnews and has lectured twice at the Game Developer Conference. Jay also contributed two articles to the Charles River Media book Game Design Perspectives. With almost two decades of gaming experience, Jay's industry insight has allowed Octagon to create and maintain a property evaluation and acceptance methodology that exceeds the standards and expectations of the interactive industry.

Kathy Schoback

As director of external publishing and development at Sega, Kathy Schoback oversees relationships with Sega's external North American developers and publishing partners. She has served in various roles in her tenure at Sega, including head of Dream-cast third-party publisher management, regional sales, and consumer service. Kathy has also worked on the Game Developers Conference as part of the management team, and is currently a board member of the International Game Developers Association.

Michael Sellers

Michael Sellers is the founder of Online Alchemy, a game development studio in Austin, Texas. He has co-founded two other companies, Archetype Interactive in 1994, where he led the design for Meridian 59, and The Big Network in 1997, where he led the development of several online games and the ground-breaking MyPlace community software. Following that, he spent three years as a senior designer for Electronic Arts, leading such efforts as SimCity Online, The Sims 2, and the next Ultima Online, and contributing to the The Sims Online. Sellers has a degree in cognitive science.

Tom Sloper

Tom's game business career began at Western Technologies, where he designed LCD games and the Vectrex games Spike and Bedlam. There followed stints at Sega Enterprises (game designer), Rudell Design (toy designer), Atari Corporation (director of product development), and Activision (producer, senior producer, executive producer, creative director). In his 12 years at Activision, he produced 36 unique game titles (plus innumerable ports and localizations), and won five awards. He worked for several months in Activision's Japan operation, in Tokyo, and is perhaps best known for designing, managing, and producing Activision's Shanghai line. Tom is currently consulting, writing, speaking, and developing original games. He can be contacted at <[e-mail]>.

Grant Stanton

Grant Stanton is executive vice president of TSC and a professional recruiter in the games industry. He has recruited development staff and executives in the games industry for over 12 years and has consulted with numerous game company startups offering strategies for staffing. He is a second-generation recruiter in the industry, his father having helped staff companies such as Midway, Taito, Atari, and Collecovision in the early 1970s. He can be reached via e-mail at <[e-mail]>.

Johanna Wilson

Johanna Wilson is the CEO and a founder of OpenPath Products. She has over a decade of IT experience and has spent the past five years managing and growing wireless Internet technologies within wireless carriers and enterprises. OpenPath Products develops standards-based wireless software tools for creating and testing wireless applications. OpenPath Products uses these tools to create SMS, WAP, and J2ME wireless games.