John Watson’s Talk at Nasscom GDC: Banner Saga and Indie Success

Matthew Handrahan, an editor at Gameindustry.biz has published an abridged version of the talk John Watson, co-founder of Stoic, gave at Nasscom GDC.

Watson describes how originally Banner Saga was supposed to be a much smaller project but an overwhelmingly successful Kickstarter campaign forced Stoic to aim higher and produce a bigger game. After the exhausting Kickstarter campaign, the plan for Banner Saga 2 was to use studio’s money, make it an even better game, and hope for the people to come. This didn’t quite work out when Banner Saga 2 sold about a third of what the first game did. Watson describes the reasons for that, as a cautionary tale for other developers.

Additionally, Watson ballparks the costs for the upcoming final entry in the trilogy and the options they at Stoic have as to financing it. It provides some insight into the realities of independent development. An excerpt:

With The Banner Saga 3, the final game in a planned trilogy, the discussion around funding it was more difficult. “Arnie [Jorgensen] and I… all of our personal fortunes, all of our finances, are buried in The Banner Saga,” Watson says. “We’ve been doing this for four years, we spent all of our retirement money, and we haven’t replenished that yet. We both have kids, they have to go to college, and we can’t just keep betting it all every time, because making entertainment is the riskiest thing.

“It is still too early to seriously contemplate a return to crowdfunding, but Stoic’s projected budget is likely greater than the sum they could reasonably expect to raise through Kickstarter – it isn’t 2012 any more. Watson admits that he and Jorgensen seriously discussed seeking private investment, and even “shopped around” for options.

“That would have worked, but you’re paying back quite a bit. The Banner Saga 3 is probably gonna cost about $2 million to make – that’s a lot. So maybe we could get $500,000, but when you get investment you’re basically paying it back 3x… That means when we sell The Banner Saga 3 $1 million of extra money goes away [to the investors], as well as giving back the $500k. That would take the pressure off us for sure, a little bit. We would each de-leverage ourselves by $250,000, but when the game ships we’re paying back an extra $1 million.

“Is taking investor money gonna make the game sell? Is it gonna make it $1 million more profitable? No. It’ll make it a little bit better; we could spend some of that money maybe doing some more animations, maybe we increase the quality level a little bit. The quality has to reach a certain bar for people to accept it as a sequel, because we set that bar for ourselves. But beyond that it won’t really affect the profitability. It would be a vanity thing. We just want to make it better.”

When Stoic is finished with The Banner Saga, when it is making an entirely new project from scratch, investment of that kind would make a great deal of sense. For The Banner Saga 3, though, taking an investor’s money would be “kinda stupid” – a little peace of mind in the here and now in exchange for a lot more potential problems further down the road. Stoic is betting on The Banner Saga as a franchise, and once again it will make that bet with its own money.

“We have to do it,” Watson says. “We set out to make this trilogy. We can’t leave the story unfinished.”