How many people are on the publishing side?
MW: We have eight right now, and we’ll probably max out at about twenty, twenty-five. And again it’s more like a movie production studio model, you know, we’re never going to buy distribution or manufacturing or any of that stuff, we just sort of outsource it all, and manage it.
So do you outsource your marketing and your PR and that sort of thing?
MW: Well we do it, but we use outside agencies and freelancers. Just like with the developers, we really enjoy working with those independent artists as well, because we think that creativity stays fresher and if you have a big staff of people, no matter how genius they are, eventually everything starts to look the same.
What happens when you get big?
MW: We’re not gonna get big.
MW: Nope. We’ll do ten or twelve games at a time, max, and we’re committed to stay this size. God Games was twelve people when we sold it, and we did 100 million dollars in revenue that year. And that’s kind of where we want to be, and we grew after we sold it, too, we were kind of like “okay we’re part of a big company now, we’ll hire some help.” We got up to around 30 people, and that was becoming uncomfortably big for us. We liked to stay lean and really creative and really get behind every project as a team, which means we can’t do that many games.
MW: We have one producer, and we basically work... our idea is to let the professional independent game developers do their thing, and we work with people we respect, and they have budgets and milestones and all that stuff just like any other publisher, we just don’t attach 20 producers to it, which are typically people that have never made a game, trying to tell people like Alex [Seropian], who you just met, how to make his game better.
I think that’s absurd. And again, that’s part of the reason we don’t try to own the IP. You get a publisher with too much control and they can’t help themselves, they start to think they made the game.
So you try to keep it pretty hands-off from your perspective, but you have to really choose who you’re going to work with?
MW: Yeah, and we provide... again, everything’s for hire, as long as you have money, right? You don’t have to have everybody in the same building. So if our developers need some help with something, like voice acting, or you know, cinematics or whatever, they get in a tough spot in development and say “hey we could actually use some help,” we’ll get it done.
We know how to do all this stuff. But if they don’t need it, we’re not going to force it on them, you know? And when you hire all these people then you end up feeling like you have to use them all the time, so you start imposing your will into places where it shouldn’t go.