Why Blizzard & LucasArts is but you isn't?

Recently I had the privilege to have a conversation with the CEO of a games company managing several studios with more than 100 employees. I won't be giving names or disclosing any personal information to keep things anonymous. During our talk he told me about how he started his company about 20 years ago and how things evolved for him and I gathered some of the highlights from our talk and wanted to share them here:

1. Stick to what makes you special.
2. Build a world slowly and steadily.

I understand that at a first glance these are qualities that should be obvious to anyone making games but I've found that even though the self-evident nature of it all it's easy to forget about having to adhere to these values. 

So let's expand on these a little bit and I will also have some lowlights at the end for you about what I've found disagreeable about some of the aspirations and values.

Sticking to what makes you special breeds two advantages. One advantage is that you master your craft iteration after iteration and you become better at making the kind of games you want to entertain with. The other advantage is the fact that your audience starts to expect titles with a similar set of values as you start making a name for yourself. This is much like when we say Paradox Interactive and you say historically themed complex strategy games.

So during our conversation I listened to a story in which this core value for this company hasn't changed in twenty years and if you were to look at their track record they've been pumping out a lot of games featuring the same few mechanics, mastering them with each iteration. In essence this not only gives them the edge in knowing their domain so well but also saves them a lot of time as they don't need to reprogram or redesign certain aspects for their games. That means you save time and money and you can focus on other things that are also of great importance to your players. Of course with each iteration they are bringing improvements on these other segments as well. For their company with every new game they're adding a new narrative to their universe.

And as you can guess this is not something new and it's a lot like Blizzard's Warcraft series if we were to pick an example. It's easier to see this in a lot of successful game companies. I'm confident you can come up with examples yourself.

Of course this doesn't mean that you shouldn't reinvent things or you shouldn't ever try new genres and it also doesn't mean that a game company successful in one kind of game won't be as successful in another. The idea here is that this kind of consistency will give you an edge over time in terms of production and in terms of eloquently delivering a new message through your selected medium.

This brings us to our next nugget. As I was researching their games I've found out that there were hundreds, if not more, games that were proposing the exact same or a similar set of features with slightly different narratives. The gameplay was similar, the art almost a copy, the storefront a doppelganger... So what made them distinguishable after all? How do they dominate their genre and keep their popularity in the market whereas all these other games seemingly equal on all ends have no way of competing with them. Of course the answer to this is a combination of things but I found that the one distinguishable value between the competition was the insequential and omnidirectional nature of the narrative universe. What I mean with that is you could play any of the games to enter their universe and you could continue playing any of the prequels or sequels without having to worry about picking a continuation as the stories are of separate periods yet of a connected set of characters, background and world. The benefit of creating such a universe is not only the indifference in point of entry for a new player but also the fact that the games were perfect matches for the already existing fanbase.

Think of some of the newest Star Wars movies in which they are depicting background stories of the more beloved characters and these movies do not require any kind of foreknowledge of the original Saga for someone to enjoy them. You could take a person who didn't know anything about the series and still enjoy the picture as they are self-standing stories. This way LucasArts not only attracts its fanbase but also recruits newcomers who haven't experienced the Star Wars universe.

I'm going to end this blog post here and will write about some of the values that I haven't agreed with in the next post. Hope you enjoyed this bit!