A Proposal
Electronic Arts is a three billion dollar company.Activision is a billion dollar company.
Take-Two? A billion dollar company.
Combined, that's over five billion dollars in revenue. So what are these three industry powerhouses doing to seed the future of gaming, to encourage the next generation of great developers?
Crickets chirping.
That's bad for us, and it's bad business. It's crazy bad.
So here's an idea. One of these giant companies should hire one person whose sole job is to find independent developers who are worth supporting. Take a look at what they're working on, e-mail them, and send them a check.
Seriously.
I don't mean some formal program with applications and interviews and all those layers of bureaucracy. I mean looking at someone's work just like the rest of us can, deciding it's brilliant or could be brilliant in the future, and funding them for a year or two.
What do you think Tarn Adams could do with a check for 100k? How about the husband-wife team who develop Mount & Blade?
In a business sense, it generates an unbelievable amount of positive publicity. And if one of those developers turns out to be the next Will Wright, the chances of him (or her) signing with your company is exponentially higher--because you believed in them first.
Scratch that 100k check 10 times a year. That's only one million dollars. And you could use it as a tax write-off, so it's not even really costing you the full amount.
Isn't it worth spending .10% of your revenue (that's not one percent--that's one-tenth of one percent) on finding people with vision?
Just reduce the budget of a team sports game by a million dollars. None of those games ever get finished, anyway. Who would even notice?
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