This opinion column from Fireproof Studios co-founder Barry Meade originally appeared in the February issue of Game Informer.
In the games industry, we talk about mobile platforms opening gaming to the mass market, but the real accessibility revolution was in the development community. Before digital stores, publishing a game required hilarious amounts of cash, and big money invariably means small creative ambition. Triple-A games began to look the same. Thousands of sweating employees were warehoused in giant offices cranking out versions of whatever shooter/racer/RPG their bosses thought was big at the time.
Then mobile came along and changed everything. You couldn't make full-fat games like on Steam, but its digital stores enabled any broke-ass developer to self-publish a game and, for a minimal fee, upload it directly to a mass audience. Together with cheap off-the-shelf game engines, mobile took a baseball bat to the balls of the entrenched industry and the bureaucracy of retail, publishing, and bosses. Or so many triple-A employees thought as they excitedly packed their bags and left.
So maybe at Fireproof we were coasting on idealism, but in 2012 mobile looked like a gift to us. We were a bunch of jobbing contract artists, and the cheapness and openness felt like wings on our back. The market was a blank canvas where everything had been reset to zero and it was all to play for. So at the time, I was surprised that mobile developer events seemed to broadcast the same very narrow message of what a mobile game should be. Whatever you pitched, it had to be a free-to-play casual game with gated gaming sessions, locked by timers or difficulty and unlocked with cash. To make a hit you needed to hire services from PR, marketing, sales, online, user data analysts - the lot. Naturally, developers just starting out can't afford any of this, so before you sniffed a keyboard you needed to woo investors or a publisher to pay for it all, each of whom will bashfully insist on owning your company or your game before so much as flashing an ankle.
This was not the reaction to a new, fiendishly open platform we were looking for. In fact this "package" for success smelled horribly familiar: It had the sure whiff of the top-heavy console and PC business.
Before starting Fireproof, we had previously worked five years on the Burnout series for EA. By 2012, we had nearly a decade of wandering the triple-A wilderness. We were suspicious of that sector's checklist approach to success, yet we found the mobile industry, in some ways, more formulaic. We didn't have or need megabucks, so we made our own practical decisions to aid us make a living as developers.
First, as Fireproof were all artists, perhaps we ought to hire a programmer? Second, we could afford to fund that programmer plus one more of us to do art/design for 10 months total, supported by the rest of us doing contract work. Third, whatever we made would be designed to show off touchscreens and tablets as gaming hardware. Fourth, we went for high-end devices only, cutting off most of the mobile market but also most of the headache. Fifth, as quality and polish was everything, we designed a game with short playtime to ensure anything we gave players would be as good as we could make it. Sixth, we liked horror games. If we made the game world very dark, we didn't need to build lots of assets to fill it up. Horror it was then.
We wanted to make a novel game in our own style that entertained a lot of people - the base ingredients all the best games have. In 2012 we released The Room, a puzzle game set in a mildly sinister Victcraftian universe. By the standards of the bright, casual-clicking, data-fiddling, free-to-play games everybody was making on mobile at the time, our game didn't look like a hit. Besides its grimly ambient tone, The Room cost the player money up front, it didn't last for infinity, had no in-app-purchases, no advertisements, and social media doo-hickeys wouldn't help it go viral. It wasn't aimed at a particular gender, age, or genre. It was just a game in its own right, as novel, or not, as we could make it.
As we saw it, all we could do was try to make our version of what we wanted mobile games to be like. We'd put it up on the store, and if it was any good it would sell a few copies. If we made it well enough Apple might promote it, but if we never made a cent it would be a proud portfolio piece for our contract work. If we made our money back, we did well. If we earned enough to make a second game, we were laughing. And if we didn't make a game players liked, none of the above would happen.
Of all the bloody luck, Apple featured The Room on iTunes on release day. We hit number one in the paid charts in over 30 countries for a week. I think our feet had just touched the ground in December when Apple declared The Room its iPad Game Of The Year 2012. That changed everything - no part-time contract work for us. We were quitting to become game developers.
In December 2013 we followed The Room with The Room Two, and as of December 2014 the series has sold six million copies. So it was weird washing up at mobile developer events in mid-2013 to speak good news of our success only to notice that, based on some evidence everybody agreed about, our approach of focusing on the game's quality above all else was crazy talk.
In making games, there's always been a tension between the creative and business sides of the industry. Developers want business to use more imagination and execs think creatives need to grow a pair, or at least play golf. For all the dust our industry raises waffling about how best to make games that sell, this is pretty much the underlying argument. A common reaction to me telling our story was that Fireproof is not a realistic example of success on mobile and that by"spreading," as one chap put it, our story we were giving a false picture of what an average developer has to do to succeed. Which is a fair point, but I wasn't telling developers to shoot for Apple's Game Of The Year as a strategy, just to focus on your game. "Everybody knows you need to make a good game, but you also need (insert my career here) or you're sunk," somebody would invariably reply.
The statement "everybody knows you need a good game, but..." is a problem. In our business vs. creativity fight, it's our shared wisdom - the rules we're all supposed to agree on before slipping on the brass knuckles. I've come to see we think it's an objective statement, when it surely is not. When I hear the execs of the industry use the phrase "it must be a good game" to me they're thinking of a checklist: "Flashy graphics - check, audio - check, slick UI - check, post-launch campaign - check. Okay, I'm investing."
But to the best developers I've known it means something different, something the games community and the wider public will look at and say, "Ooo, this is good. Check this out!" Lots of failed games fit the executive definition of what a good game is. What we and other devs mean by "You really need a good game" is something that can go over big with the wider community - something capable of attracting an audience. That's nothing easy at all. When we say "good," we actually mean "great."
So to us, "You need a really good game" isn't throwaway advice. Novelty, surprise, effort, craft, and authenticity really matter in hits, just as fresh ideas matter in movies, novels, music, and more. You can retort, "Yeah that's hippie crap, 90 percent of the industry will fail trying that stuff." Well 90 percent are failing anyway, and maybe it's because they've been taught to think of fresh ideas as"hippie crap." Players want the next cool thing. Even your hit-copying business is enabled by whoever made the hits. It seems that quality is the sharp end of the industry no matter what end you make your money.
It's true that quality isn't enough, and it guarantees nothing. But if you compared the top 10 titles across all gaming platforms, the only thing they'd have in common is polished execution of a good game idea. They're not the only great games around, but are always amongst the best. The lesson is pretty basic: Quality is not a guarantee of gaming success but it is plod ding ly, unalterably fundamental to it. On balance, the audience still buys the better-crafted stuff, though they may disagree with your taste. So the market is not fully irrational, and what we do is not purely a lottery. Good stuff seems to matter. Maybe that's not much to go on, but we placed all our faith in it.
Many developers make fantastic games yet don't catch a break. In the dark of night, at Fireproof we know we got lucky in the cosmic sense and that success is somewhat in the lap of the gods. But the gods rarely pluck from obscurity. A fantastic game has to be made nonetheless. The truth is nobody knows what a successful game looks like, mainly because the audience decides, and they don't know it before they see it. But if the audience doesn't know what it wants, then surely it's the job of game makers to imagine on their behalf. I've come to realize the best game developers are their audience. They answer to their inner geek and in a real sense they think as game players before game makers.
But how you you get to that elusive high quality? Certainly you need to know your craft, and your own taste as a developer obviously matters. But, if you're a gaming nut, you already know what qualities to chase because you feel it yourself whenever your favorite new game makes your hair stand up and you squeal with delight. If you're a developer who's not chasing a great gaming experience, then I don't know what to tell you.
At Fireproof, we just didn't doubt the joy of playing a great game as a sensible, responsible, businesslike pursuit that has made many fortunes before and built the 50 billion dollar industry we all sit upon. It only requires being a fan and for us, chasing quality was the job. Conjuring great gaming moments might seem like a form of magic, but we're festooned with amazing games proving it's real. There's nothing intangible about it.
Who are you going to believe - some guy with a bunch of charts, or the hairs on the back of your neck?