Oddworld Inhabitants founder Lorne Lanning recently talked about how he felt toyed around with by Microsoft, EA, and then Majesco. This caused The Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot to be canceled in mid development in 2005.
“We found that if the publishers don’t own your IP, they don t have any incentive to push your game”, Lanning explained. “Publishers use your own company against you because they know that you have a burn rate. They know that this is your family of kids that you need to feed every month. So if they make a deal with you, then they realize, ‘Oh, you know what? We should have done this thing in that deal, too,’ They might start playing games with you. And then you find that your check is not showing up because they want to renegotiate.”
However, their experience on Steam has been wholly positive, and digital distribution seems to be where Oddworld Inhabitants will focus their attention from now on. “We have a lot of interest in seeing how the digital distribution mechanism really works,” said Lanning. “I’ve got to tell you, we were blown away. For the first time, we re able to tell where our sales were coming from, how many dollars we were making per day. We never got to know who our customer was before.”
“We’re looking more at where social gaming and networking is colliding. We’re looking more at free-to-play item sales rather than $60 of product”, Lanning added. “I believe the future of gaming is going to be based more on usage it s more like our electrical bill. If I give gamers something that’s free to play, they can get engaged that’s like the free demo, right? But if they want to get more engaged, then they start micro-paying, so they might find after $10 into the experience, they’ve gotten plenty, and that was enough and that was fine.”
“Our focus is not to build big, long story games. So the idea of building another Stranger, for us personally, is not even on our radar. It’s a whole different chemistry coming. And that’s what we’re interested in,” concluded Lanning.
Source: GameInformer.com
