Charity gaming outfit OneBigGame has its first hit on its hands. Martin De Ronde, the company's founder, told Wired.com in a phone interview Thursday that initial sales for Chime, released as a download Feb. 3 for the Xbox 360, were "tremendous."
The Starlight Children's Foundation and Save the Children charities won't be the only benefactors. In the long run, Chime developer Zoё Mode could eventually reap rewards. That's because OneBigGame's unique, pro-bono business model allows developers to retain the rights to their games.
"We have a limited exclusivity period," De Ronde said. After a year, games published by OneBigGame will revert back to their creators and either be removed from the OneBigGame market or altered to remove all reference to the publisher.
"I think Chime is going to be our first franchise," De Ronde says. Not for OneBigGame, but for Zoё Mode, which he believes has "a tremendous opportunity to take it into multiplayer modes – to create an in-house version."
The potential for profits down the road, he says, are an additional motivation to get developers and designers to donate their time. In the long run, projects created for OneBigGame could have commercial potential.
Luckily, De Ronde hasn't had much trouble getting designers to offer their valuable time and resources. There are currently 15 projects in different states of development for OneBigGame. The two furthest along are an iPhone game from Parappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura and the tongue-in-cheek Minesweeper Adventure from Beneath a Steel Sky's Charles Cecil. De Ronde hopes both will see release within four to six months.
Eventually, De Ronde hopes to get OneBigGame on a schedule where games are being released quarterly, perhaps even monthly. But he doesn't want to rush games to market and deliver a compromised product.
"It's important for us that people buy it because it's a great game, not because it's for charity," he says. "If that’s the case they might as well donate the charity straight to the charity of their choice."
De Ronde also has his heart set on becoming more involved with the charities OneBigGame benefits. "I really want to strengthen our relationship with our charity partners and make sure that it's a new way of supporting charities as much as it’s a new way of raising funds." His ultimate goal is to eventually use the money raised to fund serious games that help charities reach their objectives.
"For now," he says, "we’re happy to focus on our two big partners and send them a big, fat check at the end of each quarter."
Image courtesy OneBigGame
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