Team17 Dares To Be Digital

Now in its 20th year, Worms developer Team17 is about to turn its back on third-party publishers and pursue a future of self-published, 100 per cent digital projects. Studio director Martyn Brown explains the unexpected decision…

2009 is the year in which Team17 moves from traditional game developer to a digital-only self-publishing business model. How long have you been preparing for the switch and what prompted the change?
It began around late-2005 when it became pretty apparent that there would be opportunities online. It all crystallised when we saw Live Arcade for the first time. We switched the 360 on and just thought ‘wow, this is the way to go’. At the time, we’d been wavering on whether to do Worms for Live Arcade since Microsoft had been chasing us about it. It was one of those things where the platform holder was saying, ‘oh we have the next big thing’. And we’ve heard so much shit over the years that it becomes difficult to be believe, but when we saw it we were really wowed. From that date it was a case of asking ‘what can we do [with this technology]?’ Obviously, we were the first European studio on PSN as well; we did Lemmings, which was a launch title in all territories. So we got used to doing digital console titles very quickly and after spending six years self-publishing in the early-Nineties, when Team17 first started, it felt like we could do that again. We’d also had a bit of a rollercoaster ride with various third-party publishers. It was hard to find a long-term partner that we could relax with. Developers and publishers are very different beasts and it was sometimes like a power struggle. Once you’ve done your own thing then moved on to that sort of relationship, it’s a difficult position to be in. We’d actually tried for five years to get a new Alien Breed signed up with various third-party publishers and there was interest here and there and we’d built such a compelling case for what we wanted to produce that I couldn’t believe that it never got signed. We were very close to a couple of major deals with very big platform holders, but for one reason or another it just didn’t work out. So the thought of not having to go through all the retail pitching, greenlight process, and all the rest of it felt too good to be true.

Those publisher relationships were particularly damaging to Worms: A Space Oddity, on Wii, if we recall…
Again, that’s one of the reasons why the opportunity to take things into our own hands would suit us a lot better. With A Space Oddity, we allowed ourselves to be directed into a mass-market product, which kind of broke a lot of the things that Worms is about. And actually being asked to remove the online mode, which was in and working, was particularly frustrating. It was dropped four months before release simply because they had no confidence in their own ability to test it, not because it was broken or anything. And that really pissed us off to be honest, so I’m pleased that those kind of things don’t exist any more.
So, if we were – and we are, actually – doing a new Wii Worms it would be massively classical and would play online and would have everything else that a Worms game should have. And that’s for us to actually do that now. There were some reasonable ideas in A Space Oddity, but I think, hand on heart, we shouldn’t have gone in that direction, but it’s very difficult to argue with a third-party publisher when they steadfastly believe that they’re right. But now we’re not levered so much by the cash or a big stick with a pound sign on it, we can make our own decisions, which, hopefully, will lead to some more common-sense thinking that only benefits the quality of the game.

And you had an even worse experience on the recent Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust?
It was a difficult project. Team17 was hired to produce a game based on a spec by Vivendi. They had a story and they’d hired Adam Sandler’s screenwriter to do that independently of us, and I think for the first six or seven months when we were doing the concepting and working with this team over at Vivendi there was an extremely positive mood. Unfortunately, about a third of the way through the project, the whole Activision-Vivendi merger happened and the crux of Vivendi’s Larry team ended up leaving. The whole thing went into an enormous vacuum and we had no idea if the project would ever get finished. Activision decided that they didn’t want the game and tried to find a buyer for it, and because of this whole situation, the motivation levels at Vivendi went through the floor. There was no love coming from the owner of the project and once you get in a state like that it’s very hard to rescue because someone has to care. The last six to 12 months were pretty difficult. The script was nine months late and that impacted on the voice recording so we couldn’t do any of the animation keyed to the voices because we didn’t have them. Everything was a big rush and it all ended up in a bit of a mess, which is regrettable. Because it wasn’t our IP and I was unsure whether it would be finished I was hesitant in allowing Team17 to go above and beyond in order to rescue the project. We’ve experienced enough to know that if we’d worked all that overtime only to see the game canned, that wasn’t a risk worth taking. In the end it got signed up and we just ticked the boxes we needed to get the thing through. It’s obviously not been a high point for us and it’s never nice to get a kicking, but we’ve had to take that on the chin and accept that whatever content came from the vision at Vivendi just didn’t strike a chord with people and that’s fair enough.

So the result of all this is that you’re now going in your own direction?
Yes, we’ve kind of wound down our third-party deals now. There certainly aren’t any in the studio itself, it’s either a first-party relationship with a platform holder or it’s us self-publishing. We have about 10 or 11 digital SKUs coming out in the next 12-14 months, which is a huge number of titles, and I don’t think we’ve been quite as energised or excited about things for a long time. There’s a big buzz around the studio because we can now do smaller projects and take risks, which, again, for a decade was almost impossible with retail games. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the theory that original games are always the best to do, because the market dictates otherwise. People have a fondness for buying sequels because of names that they trust and have a fondness for which is why, I guess, Worms keeps on performing pretty well. So, you know, we can be cautious about that. But something like iPhone is an open and easy platform to develop for and you can get to market relatively obstruction free, which is a great way to test new ideas or refresh old ones.

How different is the working model on iPhone compared with more closed systems?
Obviously, iPhone is pretty new to the scene and we like to joke that Apple has taken a sort of Wild West approach to it in that anything goes. We’re used to working with Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft who have got very hard, rigid processes such as QA and certification, which are, though entirely necessary, a pain in the arse for developers. There’s very little of that at Apple and it’s all just left to the developer’s devices. Apple’s stance is to treat everyone the same whether you’re EA or just one guy in your bedroom.
 
Is there a trade-off for that or is it all just glorious opportunity on iPhone?
Well, there are now several thousand apps on the store and there’s a misconception among developers who think that they can just self-publish and off they go. But you still have to do the work of a publisher, which is QA and certification, localisation, marketing, PR, funding… There’s quite a bit of stuff there and getting yourself noticed is not impossible, but it is hard. Overall, I think it’s great that there is such an open platform now. Five years ago this sort of thing would have been a pipedream.

There’s a feeling that the console operators are watching Apple very carefully right now…
Well, absolutely, I think it’s come along and surprised a lot of people very quickly. And I think publishers tend to have been very dismissive of the whole digital thing. But you’ve only got to look at the success of the App store, a billion apps already downloaded, and obviously there’s a willingness for people to purchase software that way. I think it’ll be some time before there’s a wider cultural acceptance of buying software that way, but it’s certainly escalating. Look at the speed with which people did the same with music and movies. It’s becoming the norm, and about four or five years from now it’s going to become the de facto way of buying software.

If everything does go online eventually, where does that leave traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers?
It’s difficult because you could have asked the same question about music five years ago, but HMV is now making most of its money through videogames and film. Games in particular are a digital media so it’s inevitable that they will go that way and I think retailers are going to have to adapt. There’s always going to be a place where you do actually buy your hardware and peripherals, but how that evolves in the future I don’t know. I think that a lot of people still like to buy physical products, but certainly, as digital grows, retail will get scaled back. And then there’s the added confusion of the second-hand market, which is all cash that really just goes to retailers and not the industry. So, obviously, retail has been struggling, but I think they need to take a look at the second-hand thing.

Do you think we’ll ever see the equivalent of a second-hand market in digital?
I don’t think so. I think what will happen, naturally, is that prices will come down. We released Worms on Live Arcade at $10, which is about £6 or, if you’re me, two or three pints. Which is actually great value for the amount of entertainment you get. And I don’t think people can grumble if they’re getting games at that sort of impulse-purchase price. I don’t think you’re going to see £40 titles online, simply because there are no distribution costs, no packaging, not even any piracy really, so it’s easier to justify a smaller price point. What we liked about Live Arcade was the fact that it was a win-win situation for everyone. The fact that we could release Worms for $10 meant that the consumer could get a bloody good deal while everyone else involved still turns a profit, so I think that’s the way forwards.

As a publisher you’ll also be working with other, smaller, developers. And you’ve already done a little to help along a couple of indie projects. Can you tell us your involvement in those projects and how such collaborations differ from traditional developer/publisher relationships?
 In the mid-Nineties we published Super Stardust on the Amiga and we’ve had an existing and very amicable relationship with developer Housemarque ever since. We’d done the early work on PSN, and Housemarque was trying to get onto PS3 and was hankering to do the same as us, to self-publish and stand alone. At that point, Sony wasn’t so keen on entrusting its development hardware to unknowns so it made sense for Team17 to bridge that gap between the two of them. But for one reason or another the legals took such a long time and it got to a point where, financially, it wasn’t worth our while participating. However, we were able to convince Sony to get together with Housemarque and make it work. It eventually all worked out and if you check the credits at the end of Super Stardust HD you’ll find a lot of thank yous. We actually enjoy doing it too, it’s nice to look after the good guys and we’re certainly going to be working with other people in the future.