Oddworld abandona el barco :\

There is currently only one financing model in the games industry, and that is that the publisher pays for the entire game; it handles the manufacturing, the marketing, the distribution, the advertising, practically everything, much the way it used to be in Hollywood pre-United Artists. But, as the film industry matured, it took on a more sophisticated financing structure. Today, for example, studios don't pay for a movie by themselves. They pay a percentage and then other parties pick up the other 66%; it's usually a three-party investment package. But not in the games industry. And so, as a developer, you have limited options in terms of how many parties are actually willing to finance your games, what types of games they are willing to finance, and what are the terms you face as a third-party developer to get that financing. That's not a very exciting climate.

As we look towards the future, that is not viable for developers to get those terms. Which means that if you're going to get financing on a next-gen title, the publisher is going to own that IP. And, as publishers are currently the only ones financing games, those are the terms of the industry. So, if we were to continue building games, the likelihood would be that we'd be in the business of building other peoples' IPs, and that wasn't why we created Oddworld Inhabitants.

And the reason why today seems to be the right time is that game technology is now moving in an opposite paradigm. Video game systems aren't being designed to be conducive to development, creativity, or content. They're being designed to be cheaper for manufacturing. If movie cameras were made that way, you'd have a rebellion in Hollywood. But this isn't Hollywood and it isn't a movie camera; it's a videogame system and the public wants basically a $1,000 box but only wants to pay $150 for it. I'm not saying that anyone is guilty in this process, but this is the reality of the current climate for development in video games and where it's headed. And because the costs are higher, more ownership needs to be seen on behalf of the publishers and, quite frankly, I don't blame them. They can say, "Look I used to pay for video games when they were $6 million, but now they're $16 million. And you know what? My shareholders are not going to like it if I fund your game, it's a big hit, and then you take it to someone else. That's going to hurt my stock. We need to see a path to ownership or ownership right out of the gate."

Yes, it was very critically acclaimed but it wasn't advertised or marketed because Electronic Arts couldn't get its PlayStation 2 port of our Xbox original to run and if EA isn't on all SKUs, it just won't promote the game. It was very disheartening to us that we could have a title with a Metacritic.com user metric of 9.6 [out of 10], a game that was praised as being a fusion of filmmaking and video games in terms of being less 'gamey' and more story- and character-driven ... and then to see that the largest publisher in the industry had no interest in marketing it regardless of how innovative it was.