The music industry is notorious for exploiting talented young would-be rock stars. To Mike Wilson, the founder of ION Storm and co-founder of id Software, the gaming industry is treading the same dangerous path.
Concerned with the consolidation of power in the hands of a few big game-publishing companies, Wilson plans to hand creative control back to the game creators themselves. His new publishing co-op, Gathering of Developers (or g.o.d), will be officially announced in January as a company built by developers, for developers.
"It has become painfully obvious to me that there are no publishers out there who truly understand the development side of the business or what exactly is a good game, for that matter," says Wilson. "Regardless of their 'happy-talk' philosophical discussions about being a 'partner' with their developers, there is a definite lack of trust and understanding on both sides."
In recent years, the game industry has become dominated by a few "big boy" publishers like Electronic Arts, GT Interactive, and CUC, as well as companies like Eidos and Activision, which have deep pockets and great distribution. (These bigger companies have also been busy acquiring plenty of smaller developers.) Many game titles that hit the shelves will have a big-name label on them, but were actually created by a small game developer who is only receiving royalties. Thanks to competition for shelf space and marketing, the small developers have no choice but to partner with or even sell out to a big company.
"The proven hitmakers out there still deal with the fact that their publisher is in business to promote themselves and have a bunch of marketing guys from completely unrelated industries looking at their products like a can of soup on the shelf," explains Wilson. "If a product flops, the developer sucks. If it's a hit, it's because the suits made it happen due to their incredible marketing prowess."
Wilson says g.o.d is intended to eliminate that dead end by creating a publishing company that understands independent developers and regards them as contributing partners. Wilson plans to model g.o.d. on his experiences at id Software and ION Storm - independent game developers that successfully fought for creative control of their games and marketing.
Gathering of Developers will launch in early January with a line-up of at least five development companies and four to five games for 1998. Judging by the interest generated from preliminary announcements, Wilson thinks that number will quickly grow. All the founding development companies will not only have a stake in g.o.d., but they'll have control over the creative process of their games and their marketing. The games will contain both the g.o.d. brand and the game creator's brand. Additionally, Wilson plans to keep creators informed, dollar by dollar, about where the profits are going.
But there are certainly hurdles to competing with heavies like Activision or GT - namely, shallow pockets. And although g.o.d. has lots of "interest" from private funders, it's currently looking for backing.
"The area of concern I would have is what sort of distribution connections would g.o.d. have lined up. In this competitive market it is hard to get shelf space and to penetrate all of the foreign and domestic markets," explains Brian Raffel, founder of Raven Software, the creator of Hexen 2 which was recently acquired by Activision. "The bottom line is that developers would be trying to take publishing/distributing into their own hands, and that is not an easy task!"
But Wilson is convinced that the talent of the long-unrecognized game creators can speak for itself. As he puts it, "The power is not in the hands of the big companies.... They simply want us to believe that it is. The power, like in any entertainment industry, is with the talent. Ask Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, or Quentin Tarantino. Ask id Software or ION Storm."
