Small studio, big time

The game industry is changing. Big companies are restructuring and staff is being redundant. Most of this staff members are founding smaller, well prepared companies.

We can see this trend on a daily basis: big development companies falling down and talent emerging into new, smaller and well prepared start-ups.

Gamers aren't expending as much time as some years ago playing only one game. Time is a valuable thing this days, and even hardcore gamers are expending less playing time. So, with less players eager to highly deep experiences with tons of gameplay hours, publishers started some time ago to cancel some products and reducing their incoming portfolio. And big developers were heavily damaged: cancelling products and having near 0% chances for a succesful pitch, big game development companies can't sustain their burn rate too many months.

So unfortunately, some of them are being forced to close its doors. Not good news, but just a market fact. But then, almost for every closure, there is an annoucement of a new, smaller studio opening its doors. Staff with several years of expertise, with fresh ideas and even eager to take some risks trying to do something new, with innovation as their flag.

Until now, this small development teams were alone. Now this trend is changing, and big publishers are approaching this small developers. They know were talent and fresh ideas are, and they also know that hidden into the hundreds of games this developers are creating are some gems that can be the next hits.

They know the market, and have the marketing strength that we as developers can't achieve. It seems like a good deal to work together to launch the new hit into the market. But again, publishers are not risking as much as developers are. It's common that developers fund all the development, while publishers are only focused on... publishing (our company is negotiating this kind of deal with some publishers at this stage).

The big problem here is that some cool projects will die in the process because the development team can't fund the project by themselves.

I think this also will change, and in fact it's changing right now, with some small, independent developers working on some publisher funded projects. Unfortunately, this projects are work-for-hire projects based on publisher's ideas. Not too far from traditional, big work-for-hire projects: just a matter of scale.

But I'm very optimistic here. I think publishers will start to taking risks with smaller developers. Why? Because with all the money they funded one big project years ago, they can now fund several smaller games. No one can predict what will be the next big hit, so betting in several small gems seems a good approach: it's just a matter of probability.

What do you think?

Eloy Ribera,

Ninja CEO at Ninja Fever.