This week I’ve been presenting internally our company business plan for 2011. Part of this is the Stardock Customer Report 2011 (which we’ll be making available publicly soon) along with our road map on the studio games (this doesn’t count future titles from our partner Ironclad who developed Sins of a Solar Empire nor does it address next steps in the Demigod franchise.
This journal entry will likely only be of interest to either techies or biz types. So if you’re looking for interesting game feature stuff, you’ll probably want to skip this.
The Road Map
Essentially every studio has a road map. They just don’t make it public for obvious reasons. Since we’re privately held, we can pretty much do whatever we’d like and one of the things we like is to keep our fans up to speed on what the heck is happening here.
So below is the road map for the studio developed (Stardock Entertainment’s studio) titles.
Kumquat
Kumquat is just our internal nickname for the engine. It was called this in honor of former Stardock developer Mike Duffy who created the predecessor “Pear” which we licensed from him after he left to start his own studio. Pear is what all Stardock games from 1997 through 2003 used (Entrepreneur, The Corporate Machine, LightWeight Ninja, Galactic Civilizations I). It was a fantastic game engine for its day but was 3D.
Kumquat is a new engine that was developed originally for Society which is the free to play MMORTS that we’ve been slowly developing for the past hundred years or something like that. We decided to have the first game that used Kumquat be a fantasy strategy game, namely, Elemental: War of Magic.
Now, when War of Magic was being made, we obviously had very high hopes for how it would be received. So we pictured having Elemental: War of Magic – Expansion 1…2…3. And then you’d have Elemental: War of Magic II and so on. But when Elemental: War of Magic was released it was very buggy and even after the bugs were largely fixed, the gameplay wasn’t what we had envisioned it being. We had cut or altered so many features from the original design to match what Kumquat could do – at the time – that we ended up with something that few were pleased with.
But work on Kumquat has continued non-stop and so in December it was decided that rather than continue the War of Magic line we would use the opportunity to create a new fantasy strategy game in the Elemental world that would succeed War of Magic and then just give that to everyone who bought War of Magic in 2010 it for free with steep discounts for anyone who buys it before it is released. That’s where Elemental: Fallen Enchantress comes in.
Elemental: Strategy Games
The effect of this is that we’ll eventually have War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress and <Untitled third branch>. This isn’t really very different than what we did with Galactic Civilizations II with the exception of the intention to have them be stand-alone and thus allowing the separate entities to continue to be potentially developed on their own path based on what players ask for. If the strategy games were primarily multiplayer games, we obviously couldn’t do this because you’d be fragmenting the player base. But these are primarily single player games that happen to have (fairly crummy) multiplayer support.
One nice thing about this is that it gives us, and players, a lot more design flexibility. Fallen Enchantress is a pretty radical departure from War of Magic. Based on what I’m seeing, I suspect most people will prefer that by far to War of Magic but only time will tell. But in any event, we will be making a v1.3 of War of Magic that will be on its own code branch.
As a game developer, I can tell you that this is pretty exciting stuff. Consider the challenges other strategy game franchises have. Some players would have liked to see Civilization V be more along the lines of Civilization IV. Others would have preferred it to be far more complex and others would have preferred to have it streamlined.
Elemental: RPG games
Now, as some people may recall, after War of Magic’s difficult launch, we had to re-evaluate our staffing levels and reorganize. This meant some painful layoffs back last Fall which came from people slated for the RPG title. After War of Magic, it was recognized that the game studio was being run like a hobby and not as an engineering process like our enterprise software unit. This meant we needed to bring in full-time designers and full-time project managers onto the studio. Thus, the second studio team, designated for the Elemental: RPG, got largely zapped. This year we will begin to reconstitute this team as we bring in a lead studio developer and some senior developers to help ensure that we don’t have another War of Magic episode.
The Mod Layer
As some people may remember, I was planning to take a sabbatical last year. Clearly that didn’t happen. I am still planning to do this sometime early this year. With Kael and Jon Shafer here now, I am comfortable that the games unit won’t need me to intervene. This will let me create what I’ve creatively named “Mod Layer”. The idea is to create a piece of middleware between Kumquat and future games that would allow people to make games using mostly Python. I’ve started the planning part of this with our DesktopX lead developer so that we can use Expression Blend to create “objects”, and then manipulate them via Python and render them in Kumquat. This way, modders can easily create a wide assortment of games that are either 2D or 3D and potentially portable to (at the very least) Xbox Live Arcade and Windows Phone (though I’d like to also do iOS but Xcode is the devil still so I may ask some Stardockians to make that part for me <g>).
As an idealist, I often sound like a yes-man or fanboy. That is because I get so excited about the SD philosophy. Its a game company fit for the United Federation of Planets. In the future games will be made for the enjoyment of creation, not to make money or crush little geek's spirits (EA games). Quality is of course a function of money and most companies seem to hire businessmen to run their game companies. This is IMO why so many games suck. Due dates and general interference with the creative process have greatly hindered the industry. I think that SD has the potential to become the most successful game making company if only they continue to grow. I am so tired of capitalism getting in the way of beauty. Not even paintings are able to escape the evils of monetary motivation and it shows in contemporary art. I really am not sure about the other "fanboys" in the forum, but I think that is probably the reason why most of us give SD such a wide berth when they have setbacks.
But yes, go make me another game!
I know that to the inidividual 21 million seems like a lot, but what is the profit actual profit margin for the company? In all honestly, Brad is completely right. If you look at the top sales on steam, only two are strategy games and those two are a sequel to a highly acclaimed and venerable series and an expansion pack to another highly acclaimed sequel to a beloved licensed game. In 2010, the console market had more than 50 games which sold over 1.6 million units, which if we do a simple calculation, assuming $60 dollars a unit, we find that each of these titles grossed more than 96 million each, the vast majority of which was in the first month. If we compare this to the steam figures, all of these titles gross more than any on the steam list which gave the data for the 21 million.
You do know that that the 5 after Civilization indicates that this is the 5th iteration of an existing franchise with an existing installed base right?
Civilization 5 is a huge success -- for a turn based game. But even its revenue would fall into the "niche" area.
Let me put it in perspective, Riot Games, who makes League of Legends just was acquired for $400 million. And that's a PC-only game.
I like making niche games and turn-based games are. But let's be honest here, if we weren't a privately held company run by a lunatic, there'd be no way we'd be putting some of the industry's top talent onto this kind of thing. But this is what we enjoy doing and it does generate more than enough to make us happy.
It's really not a legitimate concern. Companies don't make games. People do. Companies are merely the container for people to do "stuff". You bring the right people onboard and you can have a good thing of any genre.
In my personal opinion, RPG's are harder to make than turn-based 4X games which in turn are harder to make than RTS's which in turn are harder to make than first person shooters. By harder I mean purely design, not the talent or expense in making them (i.e. there's a reason why Valve is #1 at FPS's -- it takes incredible talent and resources to create something as sublime as L4D or HL2 but the basic design is fairly straight forward).
The publisher being a publicly traded company whose only job is to maximize shareholder value? Yes. It was a great success for them. They did what they were supposed to do -- produce something that generated the best return on investment they could. Whether it makes hard core strategy fans happy or not is completely irrelevant unless they represent a measurable and material effect on the ROI.
This is why I wish we could hammer home the difference between a publicly traded company and a privately traded company. Privately traded companies can do whatever they want.
I always see people trying to ascribe to Stardock (or Valve for that matter -- another privately traded company) motivations that only make sense when you're talking about a publicly traded company.
I don't want to sound rude , but i have to ask :
Will you and Stardock continue to "clone " the gameplay mechanism of the older titles , like you did with
Galactic Civilizations series ( Master of Orion clone )
Elemental : War of Magic ( Master of Magic clone )
upcoming RPG ( Realms of Arkania or Krondor series clone ??? )
?
I think this is a matter of the changing social norms within our societies. As most business endeavors become more and more corporatized, the general public tends to ascribe to all corporations an ethos which is easily stereotyped. Thus, as the public mind set begins to see the normal corporation becoming faceless and out for maximized profits, all corporations are assumed to be part of this broad categorization. Honestly, Both public and privately traded companies do in fact tend towards maximization of shareholder value, but the distinction is how that value is defined. For a publicly trade company, shareholder value is easy to define as overall return on investment, or more simply increased valuation of stocks. Whereas for a privately traded company, shareholder value is defined much harder to define as it is based directly on what the private shareholders consider valuable. For instance, some privately traded companies desire to increase the valuation of the company itself so that it can be sold for a much higher price, where as others desire to increase the stability of the firm while also developing products of quality. In the case of SD, it is safe to assume the latter.
I think this is an unfair assessment. To call GalCiv a clone of MOO is a moderately shallow comparison. While both games take place in space and have a strategic map filled with planets, the meat of the game is fairly dissimilar. They utilize different tech mechanics, battle mechanics, ship building mechanics, fleet building mechanics, planet improvement mechanics, resource mechanics, and map mechanics just to name a few. Both games exist in the same genre, 4x TBS, and thus there is some ground for comparison, but to call it a clone is a bit on the silly side. As for Elemental and MoM, this is a less shallow statement, but is still a bit out of place. While it is true that Elemental was built to be similar to MoM, there are many difference between the two which have been discussed at length in the general forums. Considering the vast library of games produced since the inception of video gaming, it is fairly easy to claim any current game to be simply a clone of a previously developed game. Half Life is a clone of Doom, Starcraft is a clone of Dune 2, WoW is a clone of Everquest, etc. I think a better question to ask when the time comes is what features will make a SD RPG stand out from the library of previous RPGs, and even then, the answer is ultimately irrelevant as long as the game is fun in its own right.
The question is, did Civ V become a short-term success at the expense of the long-term? Some of those grognards are upset enough that they may not come back (this is an opportunity for Stardock BTW) If you want an example of brand damage, look at the Total War series- which has lost sales steadily due to churning out enough crap that people don't trust them anymore. That said, it's an economic true-ism that larger corporations tend to have a tendency to become overfixated on the short-term and risk-averse.
One thing I've always thought about Stardock and you personally was that you guys took a longer-term view on things, and I think that's good for your bottom line in the end, as it builds loyalty. (good customer service in games- most publishers don't seem to understand the concept. Stardock does.)
I like how in some threads I am singled out as a long time fanboy and others I am a board troll. I am a very dynamic poster.
Lord Xia, you need to stop trolling and trying to derail the thread. Stupid fanboi. Keep talking and I'll stick you in my re-education facilities with the rest of the trolls.
Perhaps you are a bipolar fanboy troll. Don't worry it happens to the best of us.
I typically stay out of arguments, but I do wish to point out that GalCiv is most certainly not a clone of MoO, since it's original iteration came out in the same timeframe as MoO.
Well all TBS games are clones of Chess, Checkers, and Go.
The original GalCiv came out almost 10 years after Master Of Orion was originally released and was much closer to that of MOO3.
No, it didn't. It came out around 93/94 for OS/2. That was Brad's first love in the computing world. I remember this because I read all about the history of the company on the GalCiv1 website. He was in college at the time, there was a publisher shopping around for developers to make OS/2 games. It was down to him and some other college student, but Brad was chosen because he had a company quote unquote, called Stardock. I don't remember if he had legally formed it as such at that point, but I know that the other guy did not refer to himself as having a "company" so to speak, and it was this distinction that made them choose Brad over the other guy. And thus, Galactic Civilizations was born.
Wow! You are right. I feel like a sucker for only catching it when it was released for the PC
Don't feed the trolls! If he thinks these games are anything close to a clone of OOM or MOM he is obviously looking for a wall of text to ignore from people that need to correct him.
Example:
I don't mean to be rude but when are you going to make your own game Nintendo? Mario Tennis is a pretty obvious clone of Pong. And we all know you got Mariokart from watching Nascar.
And this only underlines the pettiness of a dig at a person's use of an incorrect (but related) term in what is probably not his first language.
EDIT: And I do realize the extreme level of language used in that post does cause it to be technically not accurate. Consider cultural context and the general tendency of people on the internet to use hyperbole. The core idea behind the post nonetheless remains valid.
Before someone starting to criticize : English isn't my native language .
Some " suggestion " :
Game developement :
- instead of that future RPG , try to support your older titles with patches or content updates
- buy the rights ( source code ) of Demigod from GPG
Impulse :
- OS X and Linux compatibility
- don't follow the $1 = 1€ rule like other DD services
- try to make new contract with the major publishers ( region restricted publisher catalogues )
- region restricted deals sucks , please don't advertise them to non NA customers
- improve the Impulse client a bit , don't abandon Ready to Play
- Impulse Reactor and GOO need more advertising
- start selling Steamworks titles
- Galactic Civilization series on GOG ( gog.com )
the amount of hatred and bile i have for this poster at this point is best left unsaid. Why in the world would you sell titles that force people to use their biggest competitor. If people wanted steamworks games they would use steam.. not impulse.. omg the absurdity... i can't even begin to verbalize my disbelief and dislike of this statement.
If Stardock ( Impulse ) want to survive , they will have to adapt . Just check out D2D , GamersGate or Gamesplanet . They already selling Steamworks titles .And if you check this list ( especially 2010-2011 ) you can see how many games using this feature .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Steam_titles
Now can you please list all games , that using Impulse Reactor or GOO .
Many titles that use Reactor don't use Reactor on other platforms.
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