Feargus Urquhart Interview

GameSpot chatted with Obsidian’s CEO and co-founder Feargus Urquhart at the International Game Developers Association Leadership Forum last week and comes back with an industry-focused Q&A. Here’s a couple of snips:

GameSpot: Do you think it’s getting easier or harder to make it as an independent studio these days?

Feargus Urquhart: I think it depends on your perspective. I think originally you could be an indie developer and not really have to be a business man. And I wouldn’t say that I’m a business man, but I have some of the traits that go along with that. And I have had to learn a lot of things about accounting, and taxes, and other things to a point. I think in the past, it was possible to be effective without being really focused on business because the teams were much smaller. If you were eight guys and you made a bunch of money on your previous product, you can go six months without signing a deal. Our burn rate is $1 million a month, so we have to have games all the time. I am not independently wealthy, so I think a lot of it is harder now if you don’t understand that you really have to focus on the business side.

GS: Your conference session was probably the first one this year where the words “mobile,” “social,” and “microtransactions” haven’t come up. Is that just because Obsidian is as big as it is? So those options just aren’t as viable?

FU: It’s our focus. I’m not a believer in the death of the console. And that’s because there is no way that 20 million people buy a Call of Duty: Black Ops, and that means the console is dead. I understand people’s reasoning behind why they believe something is going to happen with the consoles, but I still think you can be very successful if you know what you are doing. I think you can see that with products like those from BioWare and Bethesda, and the kinds of products they are building with DLC follow-ups. So I think what we try to do is explicitly understand how the kind of products we want to make fit into the market we are targeting. That often means we need to figure out how to make games not just a rental. And how to prevent re-sells back to GameStop. Those are our things to solve. It’s different from the mobile and social markets. Their problem is how to attain attachment rate; ours is how to retain our attachment rate. So there are two sides to the coin, but when it comes to us, at least for the big role-playing games, there is a parallel to Hollywood. People still go see Transformers. You can still make money with a $200 million movie. So I still think there is still a place for that kind of entertainment, and there will continue to be.