The Open Source Future: How we can finally get the game we want. (Pt. 2)

(Continued from Part 1)

Alright, so with all that buildup out of the way, let me present you with:

THE SOLUTION

The answer to all these problems hit me like a ton of bricks while reading people's comments about not wanting to pay for the Monte Cristo MMO.  The exchange was something like this (apologies if I'm misquoting people)

"I'm going to get the Planet Offer, it's like an investment so that Monte Cristo will make something better in the future"

"I'm certainly not!  If I'm going to invest in their business they can pay me part of the profits!"

Damn right, I said, but then I thought, well, why Monte Cristo?  The problem isn't with the idea of investing, but with the fact that it's an investment in Monte Cristo's profits rather than the game.  What would be the problem with leaving the profits out of the equation and investing for a return we all want... the next Sim City 4?

Why not turn the traditional way of making games around?  Instead of companies making games for us in the hopes of profits, why can't we make a game (or more accurately, have a game made) for ourselves, in the simple hope of a great game?  Why must we be passive players in the marketplace?  We have the capital to make it happen, we just need the right framework for organizing it!

Here's a rough outline of how this could happen:  Organize a non-profit vehicle to collect "investments" in creating a game, whose overall direction can be decided by the community.  I'm not talking major equity positions here, I'm talking 50 bucks, the same as you would pay for a game.  If $50 from every player is enough to fund commercial studios' games (plus profit!) why not ours?  Those who donate would be the "shareholders" of the project;  Each 50 dollars would give you one vote in issues that the community wants to decide, for example how important the inclusion of a certain feature is. Figure out a reasonable game budget beforehand, and assemble that amount of capital.

"Ha, yeah, right," I hear you saying.  "Good luck with that.  Who wants to donate to some project that might not even happen?  You'll end up with a thousand bucks and some sad-looking 'GOAL' thermometer all stuck down at the bottom."  While it's true that this is the most challenging part of the whole equation, I think it could work if you do it incrementally.  What do I mean by that?  Well, let's face it, it's true: nobody wants to put their money towards something that doesn't exist yet, unless they can be sure that it will exist in the future.  The way around this is to gradually build support without scaring people off by demanding that they get their wallets out.  How?  With a very pedestrian fundraising tool well-known to walkathons the world over: the pledge drive.  You don't ask for money, you just ask people to pledge that they will pay when the pledge goals are met.  This is a first step that people can take without all the commitment anxiety; It's easy for people to say "Sure, if this thing takes off I'll be in, let me know then!"  If the pledge goals aren't met?  Nothing happens, so nothing lost.  And if they are?  Then people will feel more confident investing, since they know that 400,000 other people (or whatever) are on board with them!  You can even take some steps to make the donation process less leap-of-faithy... but more on that later.

So, if that part can be done, the next step is to decide what we want; create a framework for the community to decide what the broad goals of the project are, what is important, what is secondary, and what kind of commitment people can make to help.  This would be a lot like what Monte Cristo did with the Cities XL forum, with the difference that we would be able to set policy rather than simply suggest it.

Next, hire a lead developer; Someone with solid industry experience.  Obviously someone like Will Wright, if he would do it, would be the holy grail here, but there are plenty of other talented developers out there.  Lay out the foundations of the game and figure out what kind of resources and time frame are needed.  Then, assemble a team and start making the game!

During the development process, maintain a continuous dialogue between the community, who are the "shareholders" of this project, and the developers; Let users share their suggestions and ideas with developers, and let developers sound out the users on features they are thinking of including.  This way the community can be part of the game's creation, and make sure the most important and desired features make it into the release.

"Now, wait a minute," you're thinking.  "What if they make this game and I'm disappointed?  Or they don't finish before the money runs out?  I'll have wasted fifty bucks on a crappy, half-finished game!"  Well, I won't lie, that could happen.  Life doesn't always go the way we planned.  But ask yourself, aren't you already running that risk every time you buy a game?  How is that different from when you spent fifty bucks on City Life and didn't like it?  Or Societies?  The difference with this model is ownership.  Unlike every commercial game that's ever been released,
 
This project would be open source from day one.

A lot of the frustration people feel when they get burned by a bad game stems from their lack of ability to do anything about it; You bought it, the store won't take it back, the developer can't be asked to support it, and you're stuck with it as is.  But with an open source game, even with some rough edges, even blatantly unfinished, the user has the ability to take it and make it their own.  As a little thought experiment, imagine if Cities XL was being released as it is now, but with the source wide open.  Would you be disappointed?  I wouldn't be!  I'd be excited!  Even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted from the get-go, I would be pretty certain that all the talented mod teams out there were gearing up to make it spectacular, and furthermore, I would know that it would continue to get better, without having to be beholden to Monte Cristo or anyone else for support and releasing improvements.

So even in a worst-case, utter failure scenario, you're still left with something you can build on, that you (the public) own.  I'd certainly rather have that than some CD-ROM I can use as a very expensive coaster.

But I don't think it would fail.  I think that are plenty of reasons why making a game this way could not only result in something as good as what commercial studios put out, but better.

WHY THIS COULD WORK

The fact is, this development model has significant advantages over traditional game development.  The biggest ones are:

Cost Savings:  With a wide base of content creators already existing and possessing a demonstrated willingness to do some of the heavy lifting on art assets, there would be a substantially reduced need for paid artists; In fact, many of these contributors are already organized into highly efficient teams with plenty of experience under their belts.   On a lesser scale, some beta testing responsibility could be farmed out to the community, although this is not as significant an advantage since commercial studios tend to do this too. Both these, though, mean more money to spend on adding sophisticated features to the game architecture.

Direct Use of Funds:  Another great thing about this model is how it scales down the need for broad support (that would be high sales figures for a commercial title.)  The reason is, a lot of the overhead involved with selling the game after it's finished becomes unnecessary.  Typically, developers only recover a fraction of a game's sale price;  Retailers, publishers, advertisers, etc., all take their cut.  I've heard the actual percentage that gets back to the studio is as little as ten percent, although I can't verify that.  What does that mean?  With this model, 100% of the investment goes to the developers, which translates to a need for far fewer "sales" (investments) in order to meet development costs.  In this way a much smaller community of fans can assemble the same size budget as a commercial studio might have for a game with wider potential appeal.  Which also goes hand in hand with:

Tailored Design:  What I mean by this is that the developers don't need to design for sales; The game has already been "sold", so to speak, and the developers' one and only task is to make the game that the "customers" (the shareholders in this model) want.  There's no need to try to appeal to a wider audience; They already know who the audience is, and can ask them directly when deciding on the game's direction.  And that audience can literally vote on what they want from the game.  Contrast that with a commercial studio: Typically commercial developers are being tugged in four directions at once.  They want to make the game deep, but they need to appeal to a wide spectrum for it to sell well.  They want to make a polished game, but they are under pressure from the publisher to make the game as quickly and cheaply as possible.  With this model that tension disappears; the people funding the game and the people playing the game are one and the same, so the only things developers need to focus on is meeting the community's desires and focusing on quality.  Frankly, I think a lot of developers would love to work on a game like that.  Last of all?

No Profit:  Unlike a commercial entity, nothing needs to be set aside as profit.  The profit is the game itself!

But no matter how great any idea sounds, the only real way to decide if it's feasible is to take a cold, hard look at:

THE NUMBERS

So, with all of that in mind, could this really be pulled off?  Let's look at some numbers.

First, we have to determine how much a game like this would cost.  Not an easy thing to determine, since companies aren't always so forthcoming about their costs.  But let's look at a high-profile example: Spore.  Spore apparently had an initial projected budget of USD 20 million (which apparently ended up being more like 35 million by the end).  Now, I imagine that you could make a solid city builder for less that that (after all, Spore is really about 5 games all crammed together) but let's err on the conservative side and say we would need 20 million.  How many investments is that?  If you assume an average of 50 dollars per investor, that means 400,000 people.

Now, there are some variances there;  Some people (me for one!) would probably be willing to contribute more than 50 dollars;  In fact, if the people who are planning to buy Cities XL plus the PO plus some GEMs were willing to make the same contribution to our project, the number goes down.  On the other hand, there are probably people who don't particularly care about being a voting shareholder, and don't want to put in 50 dollars, but would maybe throw in five or ten dollars to see the thing get made.  So again, let's play conservative and stick with 400,000.

Is that doable?  Well, in game terms, 400,000 sales isn't a rousing success, but it's not complete failure, either.  Would we be able to drum up that kind of support?  Well, of course no one knows for sure, but I've found a couple figures that encourage me:  For one, the number of registered Simtropolis users is around 340,000.  Now, of course they're not all active or necessarily willing to do this, but that's at least 300,000+ people who are interested enough in Sim City to register on a Sim City themed web site... and that's just one site (albeit the largest).  Second, I was looking at some sales figures for Sim City 4.  It appears that Sim City 4 sold 294,000 copies... in 2007 alone.  That's right, four years after its release Sim City 4 was still selling enough copies every year to meet a major chunk of the goal.  I can't even imagine what Sim City 4's lifetime sales are, but I imagine they're well into the millions.

All in all, I think the interest is there, and with enough publicity and support the requisite amount of money could be assembled.

WHAT TO DO

So if this is possible, how does it start?  Well, another nice thing about this model is that it can grow gradually;  There is no time limit on collecting pledges, since there won't need to be any action taken until the requisite numbers are there.

For the moment, I'm setting up this blog, and I plan on shopping this idea around informally to gauge what the community thinks of something like this.  Your comments and criticism are welcome!  There's obviously a lot to flesh out with this concept, so I'll be posting further details and ideas as time goes on. 

Of course, we don't really know what the Cities XL outcome will be... I know that I personally will be waiting to see what happens with that before expending a lot of energy on this... maybe it won't even be necessary!

But if it turns out that Cities XL disappoints us, there's nothing else on the horizon to look forward to, and there seems to be some interest in a project like this, then I may undertake to do this more seriously: Establish a website, start collecting pledges, and start codifying exactly how the project would be organized.  Of course I don't expect that something like this would be successful overnight;  But I think from something small it could grow and develop into something really amazing... and that's something that Sim City fans can definitely appreciate.