Larian’s Swen Vincke on an Important Self-publishing Lesson

Larian’s Swen Vincke has found some time to updates his blog with a new post, this time concerning the lessons he learned by self-publishing Divinity: Dragon Commander. As it turns out, the retail release was very expensive, problematic, and most likely not worth it:

Looking at how I personally handled the self-publishing part of our business, if anything, I think my biggest mistake was that I let weaker sales channels or markets affect our development flexibility at the expense of the better sales channels and bigger markets. I’m mostly talking about the retail portion of our release here, though the lesson is applicable to other channels/markets too, such as territories with a low amount of paying players but complicated localization needs. It really doesn’t pay to spend most of your resources on markets where you’ll gain the least, especially if your resources are limited. That may sound obvious to you, but it wasn’t that obvious to me in the run up to the release of our latest game, and it cost us.

For Dragon Commander, at present digital sales make up 85% of our revenu and retail only represents 15%. If you take into account that the digital lifecycle of a game is a lot longer than its retail counterpart, and also a bit more profitable, then numbers like this tell the entire picture if you have to choose where to put your effort, put it in the digital side. The mistake I made was that I had our studio do pretty much the opposite of that, for all the wrong reasons. As a consequence, a large portion of our publishing investments were done in the retail side of things and that automatically meant that certain digital opportunities were lost, because obviously, we couldn’t do everything. That wasn’t such a clever move.

I guess the thing I regret the most about my misplaced belief in retail was that I let it affect our flexibility so much. Small teams like us gain part of their competitive advantage from our ability to quickly make changes when needed, and I feel I was a fool for manouvering ourselves into a position that handicapped this flexibility.

For a variety of good and bad reasons, we ended up crunching for two months to get everything ready, and during that period we really could’ve done without the constraints of a retail release. I’m sure that had we not been locked into a fixed street date, we could’ve gained a few extra points in our review scores, because we wouldn’t have had to make some last minute compromises. PC Gamer gave it 85%, Gamespot 8/10 and IGN 78%. Obviously it’s the 78% that hurt 😉

I was of course aware of the risks we were taking when the release date was set a few months before, the biggest risk being that we were still developing. Still, I thought we could manage, and to ensure there was some extra buffer time, decided to make the retail box Steam activated. That way we could have a day 1 patch which everybody would get, meaning that we could continue developing until the very end, instead of until the day the gold master was delivered to the factory. But while that worked to a certain extent, we still had to make more compromises than I wanted to.

There’s a lot of preparation involved in a retail release, especially if you’re launching in multiple countries, and in a small team like ours where the same people wear many hats, a retail release problem popping up automatically means key developers will be affected.