Swen "Lar" Vincke discusses why indie developers should think about retail releases more often compared to only going for digital publishing on his personal blog.

Larian’s distribution strategy can be summarized as follows, sorted by how we prefer a sale to be made.

• 1. Direct Sales – Via Larian Vault & forums. Full control, largest margin, allows direct contact with our players.
• 2. Steam – Reliable, report on time, pay on time and regularly, are very developer friendly
• 3. Other digital sales – Easier than retail, monthly payments, you occasionally ned to yell a bit to get your money.
• 4. Retail in key markets – It’s possible to work with civilized companies that are ok, even if they are stressing for the moment.
• 5. Retail sales in non-key markets – Need to work with either finished goods deals, so sales/messaging can be controlled – be damned sure about who you are dealing with.

Rock Paper Shotgun has interviewed Swen "Lar" Vincke on Dragon Commander and on the move of Larian Studios to become self publishing.

RPS: Yes, the game does seem quite different to your previous offerings, can you explain why you went that route?

Vincke: I have this little notebook here full of game ideas that I’d like to do, and I’ve tried pitching them to publishers, several times, and I’ve never managed to get funding. Since we’ve said that we will now go completely independent it was time to take a look in the little notebook and see what we’re going to make. Out of that came Dragon Commander. It’s a blend of genres that I’ve always liked to play – my gaming education was in the Amiga times, and the C64 before that – and I remember playing this Cinemaware game, Defender Of The Crown, which was something I liked, and it was a genre that faded away. But if you put modern production values on that, and add all the innovations of the intervening years on that, then you have something appealing. And in any case I would like to play it, so we said “okay let’s bet on that”. It’s risky! I pitched it to the usual suspects and they all looked at me… suspiciously, let’s put it that way.

Swen "Lar" Vincke continues his articles on publishers with a short one about why developers should be carefull in discussing the marketing budget with examples of how that budget is sometimes spent.

It’s extremely hard to argue whether or not marketing costs are allowed. So make sure that they are capped, that there is a detailed plan that’s updated continuously (which requires your approval) and work with continuous reports, preferably monthly. If it sounds too much to ask, it’s not. It’s what publishers put in their contracts when dealing with one another, because they know how things work.

Otherwise you’ll encounter situations like - ”Sure I went to a casino, but it was with the editor in chief of magazine X. We want to be in magazine X, right ? And the guy indeed likes strippers. But you got the article right ? Nobody wanted to write about your game otherwise” might be one of the arguments you hear.

All I ever got was dinner and a sandwich (not at the same time)...

Larian has a free humorous Chinese New Year promo, offering up a Dragon Commander in-game item in return for your email address:

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Swen 'Lar' Vincke writes about the "quality over quantity" debate and his own internal battle with the subject. He also mentions Project E in passing and although fans will know this is a full RPG, he confirms it saying "project E is very much what people expect from us, a big RPG with all the stuff that goes with it". He also discusses the data that suggests polish is better than game length at the end of the day:

Enthousiastically the designer told me – yeah cool, it’s going to be really epic, really really epic. Sadly this was quickly followed by him being disappointed because I told him –we should cut. This didn’t go down well and he argued quite strongly and well against it, but in my mind the decision was already taken – every single alarm bell ringing very loud inside of me. Looking at that very long and high wall,   I knew that without intervention this game was going to be way over budget and really late.

So I told him, cut about one third, rewrite the story in such a way that we can still add the one third (for  the unlikely event that we’ll be ready with it ahead of time) and then we’ll see.

I broke his heart, and I also broke mine, because the small boy in me actually wanted the world to even be larger. But the big boy said, you can’t do this. Probably one third isn’t even enough, you might have to cut half.

Once again, Swen Vincke has blogged about Larian's plans to make "the very big RPG that will dwarf them all", with more interesting insight into the business side. On the cost of making Dragon Knight Saga:

Here’s a break-down of what it cost us to make the Dragon Knight Saga

• 4M € employees
• 900K€ freelancers
• 270K€ outsourcing of artwork
• 200K€ hardware
• 700K€ software licenses
• 400K€ localisation

for a total of 6,5M€. That’s a lot of money and as the Dragon Knight Saga was released via co-publishing deals , it also meant that we needed to take care of the majority of this investment ourselves, since the publishers only contributed partially to the funding.

Lar has made another update to his blog where he briefly explains the revenues of a game with the promise to explain more about this at a later stage.

On a 39,95 game in Germany, this is a typical breakdown found in royalty reports (numbers rounded)

• The state (VAT 19%): -7,5€
• Retail: -10€
• Inflated publisher costs: -5€ (Logistics, sales and payment conditions)
• Cost of goods: -1,5€
• Net revenue: 15,95€

So if you sell 100K units in Germany, your net revenue in theory is about 1,6M€. For the record, most games do not sell 100K units in Germany.

Lar writes in his column today what moved him to make Larian Studios self funding. In it he writes about what publishing tasks can be done by Larian and that for getting boxed copies of the game in shops a publisher would still be needed.

So after having sat through several of those defining first-impression moments where I saw the marketing guys pick up their blackberries after seeing a couple of minutes of footage of the games we were working on, I came to the conclusion that if the game wouldn’t look and move like a first person shooter at the same stage of development, and didn’t feature a big hook that could be communicated in one phrase, it would never work. The only thing that would work would be if I showed a powerpoint where I say – dude, the previous game sold 3 million units – so even if you don’t get it, there’s a market.

Somewhere in between one of those meetings I made the decision that the only way we could break through would be by doing it ourselves, without the involvement of a large publisher. Given an environment in which record sales require massive polish which in turn requires massive investments, I needed to find a way to get access to that investment, without the shortcut of getting it from a publisher.

So I asked myself, why do you need these people anyway ? Seriously ?

An English PC retail version of Larian's Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga is available in the UK as of today. Since mail order is strong in the UK it should be relatively easy to get your hands on a retail version now, if you still prefer boxed to digital.

Thanks, Dark Savant!

Lar has updated his blog with an article on DRM, why he used to pirate games, bought them and what he sees as the future.

But secondly, I think the entire DRM argument is part of a dying model, at least in its current form. Traditionally we expect people to pay for the entire experience present in the box, even if the game doesn’t turn out to be as expected. Even a demo can be misleading, a lot of them are even made to be misleading. I have an entire collection of games that I bought but only spent a couple of hours with. If you have limited disposable income (as I did when I pirated), at the price games go, paying full price for only a couple of hours of entertainment is quite expensive. It’s also unfair, especially if 90% of the game doesn’t match what’s on the back of the box. Of those thousands of pirated games I played, there were only a few that I played through, with most of the games in my collection only receiving 5 minutes of my attention.

I did pay for the few games that I played over and over (some of them I even bought multiple times because I lost the activation codes ). But in some cases, I paid for crap, and then I felt cheated, because when I bought it, the box told me the game wasn’t crap.

Lar has a final blog post for 2011, wishing the community the best for the holiday season and summarising Larian's 2011. Lar confirms Dragon Commander for 2012 and covers off their ridiculously busy year - 5x kids games, an iPhone game, Dragon Commander, Project E and possibly a Facebook game. On his hopes for 2012:

With a bit of luck we’ll have had a good release for Dragon Commander and there’ll actually be a market for our crazy genre-buster, the latter being a term I picked up from the press because I had no clue you called a game like that a genre-buster. I love that game and I cross my fingers that I’m not going to be the only one

Project E will have been announced, and I expect there’ll be some interesting reactions (read hateful flaming mixed with some hopefully ardent support) for what we’re doing with that one, but I learnt a long time ago that you can’t please everybody.

An interesting post on Lar's World, with Swen Vincke thinking about the 6-figure cost of doing voiceovers for Dragon Commander and wondering if the money could be used better to develop other features. I'm pretty sure I know how our readers will feel - and also what the final result will be - but it's worth a read:

I’m sitting with an egg. That probably doesn’t mean a lot to you, but it’s a popular Flemish expression for ‘something’s bothering me’. We say – “ik zet met een ei”

The egg of it is that we’ve been making some fuzz about all the choices and consequences in Dragon Commander.  Right now however, all these choices & consequences only exist as text. And now we need to find a cost-effective way of translating all that text into animated dialogue.

Obviously, we also want whatever dialogue animation we put in the game to be as good as possible, so everybody’s saying – have you seen LA Noire ? And I say, yeah I’ve seen it.

Lar has blogged about putting controversial content into Dragon Commander such as "euthanasia, abortion, illegal immigrants, healthcare, same sex marriage, drugs, religious tolerance":

So now we’re making Dragon Commander, and one of the things we’re trying to do with that  game is putting recognizable real world situations in a fantasy context. The game contains a RPG part that’s all about choice and consequence, and the idea is that you have to decide as a ruler how you want to organize the societies in the lands you’ve captured. That means you need to make political decisions, so we figured it’d be cool if we filled the game with situations that are very similar to the things we read in our newspapers every day.

Larian's Swen 'Lar' Swencke has launched a new blog that will hold his Larian "Status Updates" from now on. Lar hasn't penned a proper update yet bu there are some stories about publishers and royalties that might interest anyone that watches the business aspect of the games industry.

That was fast...Larian has released the DRM-removal patch for Dragon Knight Saga - it's a drop-in .exe replacement and make sure you pay attention to details (v1.4.9.70 required).

From Lar on the Divinity II forums:

It's been promised for quite some time and it took us a lot of effort to convince people, but we finally received the greenlight to release a community patch that removes Securom protection from DKS, including the Steam version. It might take us a couple of days to get everything sorted out and prepare the patch, but it should be here very soon.

Swen Vincke from Larian Studios has updated the offical forums telling us about how the progress for this game has been and about "Project E" as well. Apparently, Swen has been both nervous and impatient these days. A quote on how they view Dragon Commander:

Internally we look at DC as a game being split in two phases – phase 1 is the strategy/rpg part, phase 2 is the action/rts part. Since we want to be able to make the claim that you’ll make more decisions in DC than in any RPG we’ve ever produced, we made sure that for every character you encounter in the game, there are complex decision trees, and that the impact of reaching a certain point in each decision tree has an impact on the overall gameplay.

Thanks to Alrik for sending in a couple of Dragon Commander interviews with Larian's Swen Vincke. The first is a short Q&A on Facebook:

Q: Could we have more info about the RPG part (story-wise)?

They key-phrase here is going to be - "real decisions".

Every character you'll encounter has a detailed branching storyline & character arc, and the choices you make are going to have big impact on them. I realize that the phrase "choice & consequence" has been over-abused by PR & marketing departments when it comes to RPG's, but in Dragon Commander we have the perfect opportunity to confront you with many moral, ethical, political & personal interesting situations, and we'll exploit that. The extent to which this goes will only be visible once gameplay footage is being shown of that, so you'll have to be a bit more patient before you can fully appreciate how the entire choice/consequence game will pan out.

I believe one of the images that was already released here on Facebook showed you part of a flowchart ? Well, that flowchart shows all the fundamental decisions you could make around one character, and there's plenty of these flowcharts.         

...and the second is on GameStar.ru and is a translated interview from the Russian Igromir show:

And what about other possibilities? There is a global map, some real time maps and an RPG element...

- It's quite a lot actually, you will be very surprised; it’s almost impossible to show it to you now. But we are RPG makers, at heart, and we won't forgot our roots. The characters are extremely realistic developed, much better than in the previous games, of course we have to finalize it but we will have much more choices and consequences than other RPG ever in this game. And the reason why is the way we’ve constructed the game.

Get well, Alrik!

GameBanshee has a piece called Icewind Dale: The Past, Present and Future. As I write this, our editor shows me our last Icewind Dale newsbit was a retrospective at GameBanshee, so I guess someone is a fan over there. This article is mostly retrospective but then turns to the "persistent rumors" that Obsidian might revisit the IP:

It's worth considering, however, what form or shape such a product would take in the modern gaming world. Given today's technology, possibly even Obsidian's own Onyx Engine (most recently used for Dungeon Siege III), it's fair to say that Icewind Dale's stunning landscapes could be realized in even more detail and with more life than ever before. However, given recent job postings at Obsidian looking for 2D character artists with Adobe Flash familiarity, it seems even more probable that such a game could be released across multiple platforms, or even in a browser-based format. Both possibilities hold a lot of promise, especially as a Flash-based option could make for a game that's playable on everything from smartphones, to tablets, to desktop PCs, and it's ideally suited for the point-and-click gameplay that touchscreens are able to support.