“You lose a lot of money on passion projects,” according to Boomzap Entertainment CEO Christopher Natsuume.
As part of a panel on ‘Organising Projects: Financing vs. Killing it’ at PGC Digital #6, Natsuume shared details of the two-year development failure surrounding Last Regiment, a Colonial-style turn-based game with robots.
“What we learned after we shipped it was that there’s a very small, very vocal audience that really loved that game, and nobody else in the world wanted it,” he said.
“It didn’t matter what features we added or how we could change it, there’s nothing we could have done to increase the number of people that actually wanted that product.
“That’s a piece of information we probably should have paid attention to earlier.”
“Midlife crisis”
While still happy that the game was made, the CEO does admit that it sits in his life like an “expensive sports car” that he purchased during a “midlife crisis” rather than a real business decision.
“We lost some money on it…we came a little bit under dev costs,” Natsuume told the panel.
“But what we really lost… was time. Two years that we could have been building something else.”
BoomZap Entertainment is a casual indie developer based in Singapore that has released over 50 games across mobile, PC and console since forming in 2005.
Luck of the draw
During the same panel, Natsuume spoke on the luck of the industry and how it very much feels like a “lottery”.
“What you’re doing is that you’re going out and buying lottery tickets,” he said.
“But they’re really expensive lottery tickets because the price of that lottery ticket is a good game that’s well made, that has good gameplay, that’s marketed well…that’s just the price of admission.
Adding that: “I haven’t met anyone in the industry that I think can reliably tell you that this lottery ticket is definitely going to win, so you have to back your studio with the idea that some of these lottery tickets will be small victories, some of them are going to fail…
“But you do know that this lottery ticket is going to be expensive. And that is something you need to know from the beginning.”
Natsuume previously appeared at PGC Digital #2, where he spoke on his belief that the industry has become too focused on data.
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