Brian Fargo Interview on Publishers and the History of inXile

There’s a new interview over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun with Brian Fargo, covering inXile’s history and the company’s problems with publishers. Here’s a couple of excerpts to get you started:

RPS: It’s interesting that you went from something like Hunted: Demon’s Forge to this. That, to me, felt like an RPG that was all of the. (This needs to be on console, so we have to include elements from shooters and things like that) obligatory pandering.

Fargo: The original pitch for that was to be a dungeon crawl. That was what that game wanted to be. Then it got slowly changed to become more of a shooter. But that’s not my background, so. To me, that was a typical failing, where you have the arguments about what a product should be and everything that goes with it. People don’t know sometimes how little the developer can have input-wise into a product, even if it’s theirs. The opening cinematics weren’t done by us. The voice casting was not done by us. We didn’t get to direct the voices in the game. There are all these things that go on that are just pulled away from the developer, that we had no control over.

Ultimately, the people that control the purse strings are going to control the direction of the product. But yeah, how it came out was very different than what my pitch was.

RPS: When that happened, was it basically devastating?

Fargo: Extremely so. Frustrating. Very frustrating. Because ultimately. It’s like when Obsidian took a hit on their Metacritic and didn’t get their bonus. Mostly they got dinged because it was a buggy product. Obsidian, their reputation was taking a hit for shipping buggy products. They don’t control QA. The publisher controls it. The publisher always controls QA. They decide when it’s done. There’s no bug we can’t fix. There’s no bug they can’t fix. Somebody made a conscious decision because there was a list. I guarantee you the QA department had a list of bugs. They said, (We don’t care. We gotta ship it anyway.) Why does the developer lose their bonus and get their reputation killed for that?

So yeah, you can imagine even if it’s a different scenario how it can be frustrating to be a developer doing work when you’re the one that’s taking it every which way. You’re usually not making money, either. I would run the numbers on games and say, (Look. You guys are up $20 million in profit. It’s my idea. I came to you. I did 100 percent of the work. And guess what? I don’t mind if you make more money than me. That doesn’t bother me, because you took the financial risk. However, when you’re up $20 million after paying your marketing and everything, don’t you think we deserve $1 million?) Nope. So yes, it’s frustrating.

RPS: So then you inevitably have to lay off a bunch of your friends and co-workers because there’s no longer enough to go around.

Fargo: Yeah. Every dollar they give you, typically. There’s always some deals that change. I’m sure the guys working on Titanfall have a different deal, so put that on the side. But most developers have a certain kind of deal. It’s all in advance. If a publisher says. Let’s say they slow you down and you have to spend another six months on the project and your team is burning half the money in a month. That’s $3 million of your money. You’re in the hole another $3 million, because everything is in advance.

It also hurts on the creativity, because let’s say you think, (God, I have a great idea. Let’s do it.) And it takes two more weeks to do it. Now you’re in the hole another $150,000 for doing it. It’s counter to coming up with clever ideas. It’s almost like you saying, (Oh, I have a great idea, but you know what? I have to add some more money on to my mortgage.) You’re not going to be as inclined to come up with creative ideas, because you’re never getting out of that hole. You’re digging it deeper. That’s why you have. Usually the owner of the company is spending very little of his time on the project, which you’d like him to spend. Instead he’s thinking, (What are we going to do next? We’re probably not going to recoup and I don’t want to let people with families lose their jobs.)