Prison Architect en de veranderende industrie
Prison Architect is nog steeds in alfa, maar toch heeft de game al ruim negen miljoen dollar opgehaald. Het succesverhaal illustreert een verandering in de game-industrie. Uitgevers worden steeds minder belangrijk en het zelfstandig publiceren van games neemt een vlucht.
In 2002 richtten Mark Morris en Chris Delay de studio Introversion Software op en al gauw hadden vervelende ervaringen met uitgevers. De studio moest ontzettend veel geld uitgeven om Darwinia+ uit te kunnen geven op Xbox Live. De mannen besloten al snel dat ze het beter zelf konden regelen.
Introversion moest $10.000 per devkit betalen: “Yeah, it’s ridiculous, and it’s non-refundable once you’ve bought it. You’ve got to pay – I think our quality assurance bill was $30,000 for testing with Darwinia+, and it took four years to get the game certified to a standard that Microsoft wanted. It then sold rubbish. We hardly shipped any units on Xbox 360, compared to PC.”
Dankzij Kickstarter en andere simpele manieren om je game uit te geven kunnen onafhankelijke ontwikkelaars games publiceren en dat is een groot succes. Chris Robert's Star Citizen is ook zo'n daverend succes: de game bracht tot nu toe maar liefst 31 miljoen dollar op! De industrie is duidelijk veranderd.
“We could feel that there was something in this new way of thinking – that gamers want to help to make games, we just needed to figure out how to take these existing concepts and fuse them into something that’d work for us. We spent a lot of time arguing about how best to do it and ultimately settled on our kick-starter-esque website. We really didn’t know how successful it would be, and we decided that we needed to sell 100 units in the first 24 hours to make it a viable project. We absolutely smashed this number and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“Ultimately we want to make a standalone game. Everything is subservient to that goal. We’re not interested in prolonging the alpha or ‘sustaining interest’ as such. We have a master work list of everything that we want to include in Prison Architect and we’ve adapted our development process so that we can release meaningful chunks of that work list around once per month."
“I liken the process to steering a oil tanker – we have our own vision for Prison Architect and we know the path we are heading in, however we keep a close eye on the forums, twitter and facebook accounts, and the thoughts and views of the community kind of act like tug boats nudging the tanker in one direction or another."
“I think it’s important for us not to become a slave to the masses, but equally the community have a constant a positive influence on what we do. Great examples of feedback in motion are when we’ve released a feature and the fans hate it. Under our normal process we would have just continued with that feature and piled more stuff on top of it, but now bad stuff gets culled quickly.”
Nu Sony en Microsoft zich meer richten op onafhankelijke ontwikkelaars, lag de vraag voor de hand of Prison Architect ooit op Xbox One of PlayStation 4 uitkomt. “We’re definitely going to sit on the fence and see how things pan out. Never say never and Prison Architect is our most popular game to date and it may suit a console audience, but having been burnt before we’re not going to be an early adopter.”
Prison Architect kan via Steam gekocht worden.
