In this episode:

Jordan continues his insightful conversation with Lorne Lanning, co-founder of Oddworld Inhabitants and creator of the Oddworld series. Lorne dives deeper into Kickstarter campaigns and the realities of crowdfunding for games. He shares practical advice on gaining visibility, leveraging celebrity influence, and understanding the challenges of raising funds through platforms like Kickstarter. If you're an indie developer or considering crowdfunding for your game, this episode offers essential takeaways on strategy and execution.

Topics covered:

• Strategies for Kickstarter success in game development
• The importance of a unique pitch and understanding your audience
• Lessons from successful and failed Kickstarter projects
• Securing funding and marketing your game idea effectively
• Lorne’s personal experiences and lessons from running crowdfunding campaigns
• How to balance business goals with creative vision
• The future of AR, VR, and other technologies in games

For more game industry tips:

• Learn more about Jordan & Bright Black
• Listen on iTunes | Spotify (Support the show and leave a review)
• Visit www.playmakerspodcast.com for the full blog post and more!

Timestamps:

00:00 Lorne’s experience with Kickstarter successes and failures

04:12 How to stand out and gain visibility on Kickstarter

09:10 The importance of leveraging a social media following for Kickstarter campaigns

13:36 The Kickstarter success of Exploding Kittens

16:56 Advice for game developers building unique game mechanics

22:00 Lorne's thoughts on AR and VR's future in gaming

24:07 Challenges developers face with publishing platforms

30:46 Nintendo's historical publishing policies and their impact

35:04 Final thoughts on maintaining quality and building a long-term fanbase

Resources & media mentioned in this episode:

• Kickstarter
• Exploding Kittens
• Ori and the Blind Forest
• Cuphead
• Limbo
• Inside
• No Man’s Sky
• Pokémon Go
• Stranger's Wrath
• Abe’s Quintology:
• Abe’s Oddysee
• Munch’s Oddysee
• Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty!
• Oddworld: Soulstorm
• Abe’s Exoddus
• Farmville
• Nudge (book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein)
• An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Built Hollywood (book by Neal Gabler)
• It’s a Wonderful Life (film)

Hi you’re listening to Playmakers, I'm your host Jordan Blackman, and you're listening to episode five. This is part two of my interview with Lorne Lanning, the game industry treasure. I kind of want to call him an icon—he’s either an icon or iconoclastic, I can't really tell. In any case, the great Lorne Lanning. This is part two of my interview with him, and in every interview, I go deep with a game industry leader to bring you information that helps you stay at the top of your game.

You're listening to Playmakers. Okay, so this is part two of my interview with Lorne Lanning, creator of Oddworld. If you didn't hear part one, I definitely want you to check that out because it's going to give you a lot more context about Lorne, where he's coming from, and what his message and art are all about. I think all that is key to understanding what's coming up in part two.

We’re going to talk about how someone can get started today and get funding for their content, for their idea, for their IP. We also have a pretty wide-ranging discussion about the game industry, Nintendo, Apple, Google, and everything that's been happening. We get the benefit of Lorne’s incredible experience at the cutting edge of the game industry for decades.

If you want to make your game, make art, and succeed at it—Lorne talked about this in the first part of the interview—he discussed trying to build two bridges at the same time: a business bridge where he’s able to sustain his business and be successful, and a creative bridge where he gets to share his message with an audience. He was trying to build both bridges at once.

If you want to build both bridges, you cannot miss either part of this interview. Here’s part two with Lorne Lanning.

I am contacted regularly by aspiring designers, even proven designers, seasoned designers that want to keep getting their ideas—ideas they feel passionate about—into the games they create. They’re upset that they can't find anyone to support them. Occasionally it does happen, and I'm thinking of the Inuit game that was released a couple of years ago.

Never Alone.

Never Alone. That publisher actually, which is a new model, tried to do the things we’re talking about—like shine a light on the plights of indigenous cultures and highlight topics that wouldn’t normally be considered viable, highly marketable game content. It's not like we have an audience saying, “Oh, next year I'm gonna spend $50 on an Inuit game,” or any game about the Inuit.

But we do know that for racing, for shooting, for puzzles, we can estimate how much money will be spent next year. So when someone comes out of the box and says, “We’re making a game about Inuit life, trying to shed more light and compassion on their plight,” it's not something VCs are likely to jump on and say, “Oh yeah, that’s going to be a huge moneymaker.”

But it's their mission, and they're trying to make more games like that. They’re seasoned guys who came out of Activision and other big companies. But they recognize that at the publishing level, the world is ripe for this kind of content. Games are perfect for it. Just because it can't compete with a shooter doesn't mean it shouldn’t be made. So how does that get figured out? Digital distribution allowed these types of games to start happening.

That’s what I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on. For designers, whether seasoned or relatively fresh, who want to do that—who don’t necessarily have pre-existing IP or a following—how do they get their voice heard or develop their voice? Because it takes time. It took the film industry time to figure out what a director was and how to develop directorial talent.

It’s funny because right at the beginning, we saw a lot of propaganda with film, in different ways.

And we had the studio system.

Yeah, then you had the studio system with its own agendas. But you know, Hollywood's kind of fascinating. It’s a bit of a sensitive subject, but let's touch on it. We were dealing with immigrants.

I think we’ve been doing pretty good on the sensitive subjects so far.

Yeah, I’ve got a great book on the wall called How the Jews Built Hollywood.

By the way, I’m going to put all the books and artists you’ve mentioned up on the website.

I think it's called How the Jews Built Hollywood. It’s a fascinating book because, at the time, you were dealing with a minority that, even though they were making money and successful in business, they still couldn't get into, you know, my wife is Jewish, right? So I’m kind of, I’m not Jewish, but I understand a lot of the plight.

They weren't allowed in the country clubs. They were treated like second-class citizens in the social scenes. And what they started to do was shape motion pictures. Take It’s a Wonderful Life as a great example.

They started shaping stories, wanting more stories that reflected a country they’d like to see. They were making stories of a higher ideal—of people getting along, being more tolerant, noble, honest. These were stories of fairness, how they wanted to be treated. And that reflected in the content they made and greenlit.

Granted, it was still a business and everyone’s trying to make money, but there are some great stories about this stuff—Mayer, Goldwyn, what they went through, what they cared about, their personal tragedies and successes, and the types of stories they backed. It's really inspiring, the foundational days of building that empire. I think the book was called An Empire of Their Own, sorry. An Empire of Their Own.

That's the title of the book?

I believe that's the title, yes. It’s fascinating because, again, you're dealing with a discriminated class that found a vehicle to portray what they wanted to see—a better fairness in the world. And, who’s to say how much impact Hollywood has had on how we behave as a culture today?

As dysfunctional as the United States is, and it’s severely dysfunctional right now, it’s still the place where people flee to, right? It’s kind of like Rome. If you were on the outskirts of Rome, you were in real trouble. But if you went into the heart of it, it was a lot more civilized, depending on your status. The United States is kind of like that. I meet Uber drivers from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia all the time.

This is still the dream of the world—to come here.

Yeah, and so, the United States—it’s so many things, you can’t summarize it as one thing. It’s a nation built by immigrants, and that hasn’t stopped. My point is, An Empire of Their Own is a great example of how an industry was built by people who were being discriminated against.

And the media they generated was not hateful. It wasn’t trying to stimulate unrest; it was trying to stimulate a higher goal, a higher tolerance. Personally, I find that really fascinating. It’s a great example. When we look back, people—especially older folks—say, “What happened to the good Hollywood movies?” You know, the It’s a Wonderful Life kind of movies you watch at Christmas time and just love.

But, you know, the bad ones all get forgotten. So it seems like there were just good ones, but there were a lot of bad ones. I’m not going to be able to name-drop this well, but I feel like there’s still a tradition, especially in TV, of getting different kinds of people out there and making people comfortable a little ahead of mainstream society.

Yeah, yeah. The problem with TV is that it’s dictated by the sponsors, driven by advertising. The reason TV is free to the home is it’s driven by ad sales. If advertisers have any problem with the content you're displaying, you're out. That's it, you're out.

So TV is only going to be so informative, especially the news, which is a joke today. I stopped watching it 30 years ago, and I got a lot smarter because of it. I rejected newspapers, television news. When I learned what was going on, I had no room to fill my mind with bullshit.

What do you pay attention to?

I largely pay attention to whistleblowers, people being prosecuted by governments, people represented by human rights organizations. Whistleblowers are interesting, and alternative press.

I think WikiLeaks is upholding a lot of the status quo stuff. If you know what's really going on in this world, you'd realize WikiLeaks isn't revealing everything. If they claimed to be what they are, they'd be exposing much more.

The best they give us is that Hillary sent some emails calling someone a jerk for running another country. Please. I don't believe in WikiLeaks' authenticity because the real crimes are far greater than anything they've revealed. It's like, you've got to be kidding me. As for Snowden, why did he give the information to journalists to release it piecemeal? I don’t trust that either.

I think Snowden's legitimate, but why didn’t he just open-source it all? Why not let a million people go through it? What happens when we crowdsource a scientific problem? We solve it faster, right?

He took an episodic model to his leak.

Exactly. I don’t want to trash these outlets, but I don’t believe they’re the holy grails they’re made out to be. Snowden revealed important stuff, no doubt. I just don’t trust WikiLeaks. There are far more dangerous things we should be aware of, and none of that has shown up on WikiLeaks. So, come on, who are you kidding?

Do you think—this is kind of going back to some game stuff—do you think that any talented team could craft a successful Kickstarter? Do you need celebrity or IP at this point?

I think you need visibility. I was having a talk recently with someone who's been very successful multiple times with Kickstarter, and he said, "Look, if you have a well-known designer, proven IP, you've got the winning chemistry for Kickstarter." Outside of that, you have the most successful Kickstarter ever, which is Exploding Kittens. Alon Lee wasn't necessarily a household name for game designers, right?

I was a fan of his. I knew what he did—I think he's brilliant—but he wasn’t necessarily like, “Oh, Alon Lee is doing Kickstarter,” where he's drawing millions of people. But the cartoonist he worked with had a million Facebook followers. So, the cartoonist who did Exploding Kittens, along with Alon Lee’s brilliant approach to ARG campaigning—boom, they got over 10 million on a Kickstarter.

So yeah, if you had something like that—I guess you could say it was a celebrity cartoonist being used for an off-case example, an out-of-spectrum example, deck playing cards for a magic-like card game—that was way out of the box, but they had the science. You had a guy who knew how to implement the science better than anyone else, Alon Lee, or Jordan Weissman would be in the same class. They worked together; I'm sure you know their history.

And then you had a heavily followed cartoonist who could draw the eyeballs to the campaign. If you were following him, he could post on Facebook, “Hey, I’m doing this thing, if you want to get involved,” and everyone was like, “Ah, I love your stuff!” That drew people over. Then, how they executed it—making every tier unlockable.

They did a number of things. I talked to Alon after that success, and I asked him, "Hey man, can you tell me what you did?" I did the same with Chris Roberts, Brian Fargo, and Tim Schafer—I'm out there trying to learn. In this case, you had a celebrity, the most successful Kickstarter ever, but the celebrity came not from the area you were trying to sell, although it included the art in the package.

They raised over 10 million. So the combination of celebrity and science enabled that to happen, but really it was because of social following, not because of "pop." It wasn’t like a Kim Kardashian-type celebrity, right? I’m sure if she did a Kickstarter, it would be the most enormous one ever, for the latest, you know, hair curl, whatever it would be.

Exploding Kittens could also work, actually.

There you go—Hollywood explodes kittens. I think it's a really tough sell, and I think it’s gotten harder because of the failures. The failures can be attributed to people getting money on hope. They were always asking for less money than they needed, which is really dangerous. Like, we'd say, “Well, if we’re going to make a new game, we need five million.” Who’s going to do a Kickstarter and ask for five million? You're not going to get it. But ask for 500,000, and maybe you’ll get five million. It’s crazy.

They always say to ask for a small amount, because people don’t want to be part of a Kickstarter that fails. People only want to participate in Kickstarter once they see it's going to succeed.

So it's a weird effect, right? You can't... And they're all saying, "Oh, I want to back guys that are honest." It's like, eh, kind of you do. But really, you need to be led to it. You know, who are we kidding?

So I think all of that's really tricky navigation for the person or group doing the Kickstarter. You have to have some avenue of support that's going to bring the eyeballs because it's not just going to come because everyone is scouring every Kickstarter and finds yours interesting. You have to be highlighted.

You know this better than anyone with your experience in free-to-play games, mobile games, things like that, right? If you're going to have an app go anywhere on an iPhone or Android, you have to be featured by the Apple Store. Or you need some enormous outlet of visibility somewhere else that's drawing people to the Apple Store.

Without the acquisition side handled, you're in deep water.

Exactly. I'm sure you actually understand that science much better than I do because you've had more experience and success in those areas, where you're dealing with free products and need 100 million people playing so you can monetize less than 1%.

A tiny fraction, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Which is a very different philosophy than what I've been executing. I'm still a bit stuck in the old world, quite frankly, in terms of the type of content—story games, premium-priced products. Different categories. My admittance here is that I don’t understand the science of free-to-play as well as the people who execute it.

One way to think about it, though, is that it’s really the same thing. Let’s say you’re marketing a giant blockbuster film. All that marketing content is your free content. The trailers you show, the ads, everything you do to motivate people to make that final move of going to see the movie—that’s the monetization step. But you've given them all this free content: interviews on TV shows, commercials, billboards. It’s just one way to conceptualize it.

To that point, when designers or small teams ask me about Kickstarter, or even getting publishing deals, they say, "Well, we believe in our game, and it’s an idea right now. We might have a little bit of a prototype, but this is what we want to make happen." What I’ll say is, what’s really special about it? Let’s say it’s animation.

Maybe that’s where your team's skill set shines—you do something extraordinary with animation. To some degree, I'd put Ori and the Blind Forest in that category. It’s an animation art spectacle, really wonderful. So if that’s your strength, where can you make, before you start crowdfunding, some small examples—tiny, bite-sized examples? Think about YouTube attention spans. Maybe your animation is unique, and if people could see it in a game, it might stimulate interest. I think right away of the first imagery I saw of Cuphead.

I don't know Cuphead.

It’s the Fleischer-style animation from the early 20th century.

Oh, like Popeye-style.

Yeah, it’s like original Popeye-style. And as soon as you see it, you're like, "Holy shit, this is like 1920s animation in a video game!" It perfectly works. You think, "Oh my God, they could create a whole genre out of this if they wanted to run with it." And they should. I don’t think it’s released yet, and they've been working on it for a while. But it’s really cool. The second you see it, animation fans all over the world could be interested in your game.

When I first saw the little Flash version of Limbo, you know, it was like five years before it came out. I was waiting. I was just waiting with my money.

And what's the new one now? Inside? And people are just loving it, right? Voting it best game on Xbox, stuff like that. But the point is, that little clip you saw of Limbo got you interested. If it had said, "Follow us here, we'll be doing a Kickstarter soon, we'll tell you when it is," maybe you'd say, "Sign me up, I want to know more about this," right?

No Man's Sky did the same thing.

No Man's Sky, yeah. Let's take Cuphead as an example, because five seconds of footage could tell you the promise of the game. You get it when you see it, right? It's something extraordinary and extraordinarily different.

Even though we're familiar with everything it's doing, we just haven't seen that combination done in a game before. So when we see that, let's say you're trying to make Cuphead, and it hasn’t been done yet. What I tell them is, create your five-second test, your 15-second test, something that shows you’re different and special. Then, don’t put it on Kickstarter right away. Go into the animation communities that are already sharing this stuff—animator.com, the animation collectives.

Go to these places and say, “Hey, guys, we’re working on this thing. We hope to get this started as a real project next year. Please follow us, please like us.” And if it’s cool, the animators will support you. If it’s subpar, your friends might, but strangers won’t. But if it’s cool and quality, you’ll start getting traction.

So even if you don’t have celebrity or a brand, you have to find an entry point to get an audience to support you. Even if you're crowdfunding, the endpoint is not Kickstarter itself. You've got to get started somewhere else. Let's say it's an animation community. Or you're doing a game in sand art or finger painting—put it into the hobbyist community that's into finger painting. Get thousands of followers to support it, then do your Kickstarter. So you have traction coming from a segment of the audience, giving you support. You’re not just cold-stepping into it, waiting for the time to run out, and hoping you win.

That's great advice.

Well, I try sometimes.

We'll wait for the sand art game to come out.

Yeah, the finger painting game. Which is kind of perfect for touchpads when you think about it.

True. A couple of quick questions. You’ve been super generous with your time, Lorne, so thank you very much.

My pleasure.

With the technology that's coming down and starting to get mainstream acceptance, finally we're seeing AR with Pokemon Go and even geolocation. These are things people have been talking about going mainstream for six years or something like that. And VR is now finally in the consumer's hands. What's exciting to you? What do you think are the changes coming in the next five to ten years?

It's all kind of exciting in different ways. When we really focus, we can see different slices that we can get excited about—different components. So across the board, I'm pretty excited about VR, and I'm pretty excited about AR, which I think is going to be bigger, but harder—a lot bigger—because composite reality is a million times more valuable than teleported reality. Meaning, alternative reality. You know what I mean. Being able to walk and do email with my phone and tweet is a lot more valuable than having to be at the desktop.

Adding value to reality is more valuable than just some total fantasy reality.

Yes, or one where I have to be stationary, which is basically VR because VR is not safe to move around.

And it's mostly solitary for now, whereas AR seems much easier to make shared.

Right, easier to make shared and harder to deploy with a basic platform where you could just walk down the street and see it. The end game is like Minority Report. You're walking around, you've got contact lenses. If I want to see where there's pizza on sale as I walk down the street, I'll see the pizza place, and I'll see its 3D holographic Italian guy tossing dough, flipping it into outer space, and it comes back down landing in his hands. All of that is happening in virtual space, but right on top of the pizza store. That stuff's coming. Just imagine I put on my glasses and see all the neon. I take them off, and it's gone. That's what's coming.

Pokemon Go is pretty close. You've got the training camps, and now stores are putting up signs to let people know. They'll give you a discount if you put a lure. If you're willing to bring Pokemon to their store, they'll give you a deal.

You know, it's amazing how sometimes Nintendo, with all the wrong decisions they've been making and wrong customer practices they've been employing, which is basically self-evident in what's been happening with the brand, can still come up with something as innovative as Pokemon Go. But if it were new, I think it would have fallen flat on its face if it weren't based on Pokemon.

I mean, and there have been other pretty similar products. I think this is actually based on something called Ingress, which is like a Google...

Yeah, I'm not sure.

Yeah, but nobody was using it, so what's the fun?

Yeah, you know, it's kind of like... I don't think Henry Ford was the first one to invent the car, but he's the first one to really make it happen, right? It's kind of the same thing. You need a number of components really working for you to get the momentum to hit a successful launch. Nintendo certainly has the muscle. What they've been demonstrating lately is they lack the savvy to understand what they should do to keep, to just keep developers' interest in their platforms, right? Because for the most part, developers have lost interest in their platforms, which says a lot about where they're headed.

And this isn't on their platform.

Yeah, which is smart, right? Because it is smart. So who knows where they're going? I hope they pull it out. Having released a product on their platform recently, I have little hope that they will pull it out because it's a philosophical problem, just in two seconds. So we released a product. It's in the 80-plus Metacritic for...

Is this Stranger's Wrath?

No, this is New and Tasty. So we bring it to Nintendo. We bring an 80-plus product that took us a lot of pain to get onto their platform, but they won’t give you any real promotions if you weren’t day-in-date with the other platforms.

So they don’t even understand how their wonky hardware system has created an almost impossibility for anyone to want to invest all the extra cash to make the title run on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and also be compatible with their box. Which is just like, what are you thinking? And yet, if you don’t have a day-in-date release, they’re not going to promote you on their store, even though there’s no products for their audience.

And free apps.

Free apps. So you're going to stay in this old world where you set this high bar, and what’s happening is your last two systems don’t have third-party support. Why did that happen? Now, you have customers that bought your product, and when a new game comes out that’s actually good, people actually took the time to make it run well on your console, and you’re not going to do anything to promote it to your audience. And the answer is, that’s right, we’re not. And you go, okay, now why should anyone support your products as developers? And that’s the big lingering question. And the answer is, no one is.

I have this theory, I don’t really have a name for it. Let’s call it the circle of consoles. And the idea is that all the major platform holders go through a cycle where they’re popular, they’re easy to develop for, so they become popular.

Then they have to deal with a glut of content, so they close down the pipeline. This is not so much true in the case of the Apples and the Androids, but more of a Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft thing. They become filled with rules.

One of the other platform holders sees that gap. The developers are finding it annoying to work on that platform, so their next platform is very easy to work on, and you have a shift. That’s how Microsoft took it from Sony, Sony took it from Nintendo, and now Sony took it back from Microsoft.

Yeah, and now we're getting into that zone where I call it the "iron curtains of gaming," which is when you basically own a territory, which is basically a format or a device, like Xbox 360. Then you say, "You can't self-publish here. You’ve got to go through our big retail partners," which are the big publishers delivering disks. But as an indie developer, we're not going to let you self-publish.

Now, Sony started enabling that to happen, even on the PS3. Steam was really the first outside of the mobile companies. So, what happened is they got beat up so bad, they had to adapt quickly. But this is the way the world is moving.

There’s a great book, I think it’s called Nudge, about Silicon Valley business practices. It identifies the shift from the old world, where Microsoft won the operating system game — or actually created it. Microsoft created the operating system war, and it was all about becoming a monopoly and controlling everything. Which was similar to how Nintendo started, but with a more insular model that didn’t allow such scale, even though they had huge success.

Then the world comes along, and you start having platforms like eBay. What they’re about is individuals building businesses on top of their business. So you have now Google Ads, eBay stores, and so on. Then you have Facebook allowing companies like Zynga to build their businesses on top of their business. So businesses become platforms for other businesses, rather than just being successful monopolies that you try to make deals with. It’s a whole different way.

This is where we saw the term API really proliferate. It happened more in the social landscape. Social media tools were like, “Hey, get our API, write your own stuff into here, and see if you can sell it on our network.” eBay is the perfect example. You could create your own store, sell your own stuff, and handle it all yourself. But if it weren’t for eBay, you never would have been able to do it. That was a fundamental shift in terms of empowering people to build businesses on top of other businesses.

Let’s take Apple in that example. They know we need to highlight the best product, not just our product. We need to highlight the best product so our audience knows how great a device we have. So, then you have your Apple Store highlighting the top-rated products.

And developers know they can get attention and succeed.

That’s right. So when we build our product for those devices, like Stranger’s Wrath or Munch’s Oddysee, we say it has to be brought there in an excellent way. If it is, we’ll get highlighted. Because if we aren’t highlighted, we’re not going to sell anything. If we do get highlighted, we have a chance. But in order to get highlighted, we need to have high quality.

Well, that didn’t matter with Nintendo because they’re stuck in the old world. Whereas the new world is about getting our customers who bought into our installed base more games, rather than just trying to sell them our own software. And this is what Apple, Android, eBay, and others recognized. What types of Web 3.0 businesses allowed themselves to be a platform for other people to build businesses on reliably? Now, you can argue, “Well, Facebook changed the dial and screwed Zynga after they were mega-successful.” Those things happen.

But I think Facebook had to do what they did.

I agree. It became spam heaven, right? I was deleting friends who were sending me FarmVille invites.

Not just blocking the message, but deleting the friend. It was like, “What is all this noise?” But the point is, when we look at the future, it’s about that. If you have a platform and you try to keep it behind your own iron curtain, then even when other people come to make your customers happy, and you don’t do anything to facilitate that ability, your lunch is going to get eaten by someone else who is. And so, that’s where Nintendo has left itself today. Hopefully, they pull it out. I mean, they’re a legacy in gaming, right? They pulled it out from the disaster that Atari had created.

And they pulled it out from the GameCube disaster. I mean, I love the GameCube as a player, but from a business standpoint.

Yeah, so with all this time and lessons, I think we see another familiar pattern emerge, which is the older they are, the more they get entrenched in an older legacy with older dysfunctions. And out of momentum, scale, and the solidification of large organizations, bureaucracies, they try to keep old business practices into the future. And what do we see? Someone else eats their lunch. Remember Netscape? Remember when people mentioned Netscape?

Well, Nintendo really created the whole... I believe it was their idea that the publisher should pay for all the manufacturing costs to Nintendo.

Had Atari not started that? I'm not sure. It was before my time.

I'm not sure either. Remember the seal of approval? You had to have it officially licensed.

Well, no matter what, they had to manufacture the cartridges. But it was the same with Atari. It wasn't until PlayStation, I believe... What was the NEC model that was out there? NEC...

Oh, the TurboGrafx?

Yeah, TurboGrafx. I think you even had to go through them to print your discs. In consoles, you still have to pay a licensing fee.

A licensing fee. But they could have charged the licensing fee on sale instead of on manufacture.

Yeah, but then they would have carried the financial risk for the manufacture, right?

You could pay for the manufacture but not pay for the license until it sells. That would have been nice.

Yeah, because even with Abe's Exoddus, we're paying what, $7.50, seven-ish dollars per licensing fee to manufacture a 99-cent disc?

Well, yeah. And so this creates the environment where everyone is so excited to go digital.

Right. And you get all the hassles with the cost of goods to physical retail and all the limitations. But digital has been a massive breath of fresh air in a lot of different ways. I think because of it, it's allowed us to rebuild the business. Like I said, unless I was going to go out and give financing and really prove to investors why I was going to make them a lot more money, which would have been my day-to-day life, just ensuring that that money came back. And if that meant turning a story into a war story instead of a noble story, that’s what I would have had to do.

Instead, we were able to use the power of the brand to redistribute content that we own, to build financial resources, and to then go and start executing on newer content, getting to where we are now, where we're really delivering brand new content.

And so as far as that new content goes, what's next?

We got Soulstorm. It's not a remake, but it's inspired by Abe's Exoddus. The short of it is this.

I wanted to retell that story because time, money, and business shaped it into something that was not the original vision of how Abe's Quintology was going to unfold. At the time, I had this story about Soulstorm Brew and addictions. Abe's Odyssey was a story about how the slaves wake up and free themselves of their oppressors. Abe's Exoddus was really going to be part two of that, which was, the slaves wake up to the fact that their own habits and addictions bring their own oppression. And then they have to free themselves from themselves.

Story of my life right there.

Oh, I wouldn't know anything about it. So, having some experience in these things... But in reality, what happened was Exoddus wound up being a game we had to get done in nine months. As a result, scripts were due next week. It's got to be executable in nine months, that type of thing.

It wound up being a story. The team did a great job, no baggage there, but it wasn’t the story I had planned as the second piece in the Quintology. So it threw off the intent of the big epic story—the five-part story I wanted to tell.

When we made New and Tasty, we asked the audience, "If we succeed in this, what else would you want us to make?" And they said, "Do the same thing to Exoddus." I mean, they said, "Yeah, new content," but we were like, "Well, we can't really afford new content." So we asked again, "What would you like us to make?" And they said, "Do the same thing to Exoddus if you can do a good job with New and Tasty." And then we did a good job with New and Tasty, and it was successful. And I was like, “Shit, kind of promised them we’d do Exoddus, but I really want to change it."

I really want to change it back to the original vision of what that story was supposed to be, along with the gameplay that would go with it. So we dove in thinking we’d start doing a remake. Then we got some mechanics working that are pretty wild stuff.

And we went, “OK, shit, we just dug our hole.” Now we’re building a whole brand-new game based on a story about brew and addictions. It will still take place in some of these facilities in concept—Soulstorm Brewery, you know, Rupture.

It's a reimagining. So it's a whole different take inspired by that original story. But it's getting back to what the original intent was. It’s actually part two of the Quintology, but I want to be careful in saying that until it's out. Which I just kind of blew. But really, that's my intent—that it really is that. And so far, so good, so fingers crossed.

We definitely took on a much bigger hit on cost, energy, and time to try and make it happen. And it's interesting. This gets back to your original business stories at the beginning. So we had to ask ourselves, “What's the risk, and how do we execute, and where do we fall out on this?” We decided that the biggest risk was not going fresher, cooler, and more intense. That was a bigger risk. And we’re not an entity that spreads its bets because we don’t have enough bets to spread. So we have to make sure that what we bet on wins. And it really has to be high quality.

If you look at the Metacritic on the Oddworld games, it’s consistently in the 80s. But you know how hard it is to make games, man. You really have to be committed to delivering as excellent a product as you can, even losing all the sleep that it takes to get there. So that’s what we’re working on now. We dug in deeper than we expected to. I think the audience will be really happy. Our job is a lot harder. I hope the audience will be happy. Our job is a lot harder. The game is going to cost more.

It’s a big risk, but we’ve got to make it great. And that kind of brings us back to: if we can make it great, I think we can count on a 2X return. Anything above that would just be wonderful—it keeps us in business longer and gives us more freedoms. But our ultimate financial goals on it are relatively conservative.

And it’s kind of weird, too, because we’re building something like a 20-pound product in a market today where really you should be shipping one and fostering a one-pound product into the audience—learning from the audience, refining it. Really, the way free-to-play does it better. You don’t build a AAA 20-pound product and then dump it into the audience. You have something smaller, you’re testing, learning, and iterating faster. And if it hooks, if it catches, then you really fuel it.

Hopefully, you understand enough of it that you know where it's going. But we're still building like that—premium-priced indie product in the box. It's not free-to-play. It’s not going to have the sales potential of a hit free-to-play game, but it’s the safer bet for us at this time. But it’s a lot of work for fewer returns, when we're honest with ourselves.

Right. But you're telling your story. You're saying what you want to say. And like we said earlier, 2X is a pretty good X.

2X is not a bad X. If it was a house, you'd buy it in a second. But you really have to keep that quality bar high. And I think you've got to keep some surprises high. You’ve got to make people feel your love in building the product and playing it. At the end of the day, it’s got to be all the highfalutin stuff—the philosophical stuff we talked about before—that lets us go home and sleep at night, whatever gets us through the day.

All that is really interesting until you don’t have a good product that’s good entertainment. And then all those ideas don’t mean anything because you have something no one wants. So it’s got to be a good piece of what its original intent is—a great game, fun to play, and something enjoyable whether you really digest it at deeper levels or not.

That’s what it’s got to be first. And then hopefully, you can embed the layers you want to make it deeper so that you’re hooking a fanbase, a generation, with more memorable hooks. Then they hopefully support you thereafter.

And that’s a lot of the good currency—the sort of human currency we’re riding on. A lot of people believe we actually do put our heart and soul into it, try to do a good job, and try to respect them as a gamer, customer, and player. And so far, it’s working. I have no illusions—I might go broke on this one, man. There’s never any illusions. The longer you're in the business, the more you know the upsets can happen.

Well, you never know what’s going to happen, but I think there’s no way someone could listen to this interview and not know you’re putting your heart and soul into what you do.

Well, I appreciate that.

Thanks a lot, Lorne, for coming on. It’s been great talking to you. It’s been very inspiring for me personally, and I’m sure for the audience as well.

That was part two of the interview with Lorne Lanning. After something like that, there’s so much that goes through my mind, so much I feel like I could share with you guys. But let me just close with this passing thought.

I think that when you think of these great creatives in the game industry, you often think they’re just thinking about the game, just thinking about the message, the graphics, gameplay, and game mechanics. And of course, they are thinking about all that stuff. But you can tell from the interview with Lorne, from everything to the art that inspires him, to the message in his game, to his deep understanding of the platforms and the players, you’ve got to have the whole picture.

You’ve got to understand the creative side, and you’ve also got to understand the business side. That’s a theme we’ve already seen in the interviews, and that’s certainly a big theme for this show. Sometimes you can get lost in the business world, sometimes you can get lost in the creative side. You’ve got to keep both pieces in mind. That’s what Playmakers is all about, and thanks for being part of the show so far.

Again, all the links to the people, resources, tools, movies, and everything Lorne talked about in the interview are up on the website: playmakerspodcast.com. Check it out, and I’ll see you in the next episode. Thanks for listening.