Company start ups & Approaches

[Yard Sale]

I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who have attempted to start an indepedent studio out there. As I'm sure a lot of them might have failed and some ended up with a publisher and employee funding. So whats the best route for making an indepedent studio? A good game pitch simply won't do it. Finding dedicated indie developers (who will work for little to no payments) is dramatically challenging, so it rests in your connections to create a staff. So lets say you have enough staff to work on a small-scale title. Now, we have to check legal restrictions for a company name, trademarks, and so forth. Of course, the team leader will end up forking out the majority of money for the initial registrations of trademarks, servesr, hosting, LCC, etc.

So thats two accomplishments down, what about a title? Some developers think making an MMORPG for their first title will be their best bet in making it big in the industry. Well, has anyone here tried that? Yeah, it usually doesn't work out unfortunately. I think the common ground for indie developers is 'starting small, going big or giving up'. Try remaking old 80s games, puzzles, side scrollers, mini-rpgs, small-scale strategy games. I would use this as a 'test' title. Testing your staff, testing how well you can market it, testing if it can pop some interest to the gaming community. Here is the interesting part.. We want to make money, right? We also want our game development company to be successful. Should we release this first mini-game (assuming it had say, 3D graphics, top notch engine, innovating gameplay) for a price? How many consumers see a price on a mini game and run away? Things like this make me wonder how easy it would be to release your first few titles for free to the public? Clearly these free games (if developed correctly) will get some action, even poor quality free games get played - they just dont get popular. So, what do you think? Would the outcome of developing a couple small-scale titles for free be worth it in the long run? To say the least, its publicity and it DOESNT make the game look cheap and it probably had a very small development cycle compared to games that sell from 49.99 to monthly fees or subscriptions.

[Coyote]

Some developers think making an MMORPG for their first title will be their best bet in making it big in the industry. Well, has anyone here tried that? Yeah, it usually doesn't work out unfortunately.
Prairie Games - Minions of Mirth.

Three Rings - Yohoho Puzzle Pirates

It does work sometimes. But you need to have a good concept and people who know how to make it happen. What you usually hear about clueless wannabes thinking they can whip up their own World of Warcraft with their high-school and college friends within a year and make millions.

[Dan MacDonald]

Cryptic Studios first games was City of Heros, their company was founded on the premise of making that game and they recieved angel funding to do it.

[Yard Sale]

Yes I'm well aware of companies who start with MMORPGs. I've even worked for some, such as ArenaNet. Cryptic Studios also gets funded by the same people - NCSoft. A lot of it boils down to connections, if you have staff with a lot of background and one good publishing connection - you might get some funding. So if you have the connections, the experience, the staff, and more importantly the time, I would go for it. However, if you don't know the right people - you're in for a difficult time with MMORPG development.

EDIT: Also, is it the best route for YOUR company? Think about upkeep on MMORPGs. A large majority have a shelf-life of merely months. Competitors release expansions every 6-9 months as well as constant updates yet they still lose a vast amount of players every month. Eventually, you're going to have to stop development on the title and work on another. Such as Cryptic Studios and ArenaNet working on unannounced titles while still pushing out expansions. They know they need a back up plan - and well, I think as an indie developer, it might be wise to do that backwards with the 'start small, go big'. So even if/when you start MMORPG development cycles - you still have something to fall back on. ;)

[Applewood]

I'd advise trying something the way we started.

Get some commercial work in (porting, original cell-phone (read: small) dev, etc) and take as little as you can live on as pay whilst trying to build bankroll for one unfunded medium-big project to be sold to a publisher. Keep that game in a genre that doesn't require three trillion artists to be contemporary.

Just remember that it ain't a business if you're not making a proper living at it. Ignore all this bollocks about "my costs for the year are 50 bucks" - you need to pay your mortgage. If not now, then in a few years time. Make sure you can do that with commercial work before even thinking of an unfunded project.

If you have no industry contacts to bring this about, either find someone who does and wants to work with you, or go get a job in the industry for a bit and make some of your own. These people won't seek you out.

Just please don't delude yourself you can work on a bejewelled ripoff in your spare time and that will somehow get you the money you need. It won't, period.

[MrQ]

The first side project I attempted to make was a mmporpg aimed at smaller server numbers. We had a small team of about 5 proffesional developers and we managed to get our 3d engine and intergrated server/client system setup that handled multiple server load balancing. It was good fun to work on and we learnt alot, but it came clear very quickly that there was no chance we could finish the game in the next 10 years :P.
Scince then I have worked on a few failed side projects, many half finished games and a mod that was very close to being picked up for retail. The best thing to come out of all of this is the lessons learnt. Knowing who are the right people to work with and of course the invaluable business contacts and experience.
I wish that I had actually started developing smaller casual game titles when we first set out, we would probably have much better ground to stand on now if we did.