I’m on the plane back from a media tour in San Francisco where I demoed Elemental and talked on a wide variety of issues. This next week I recommend keeping an eye on the Elemental site as most of the coverage will come around there.
A few quick highlights in no particular order:
Re DRM:
I talked to Chris Remo at Gamasutra at length. I explained to him that our anti-DRM policy isn’t because we’re a bunch of hippies. In fact, I told him that if Stephanie (my PR minder who was about to become horrid) wasn’t there, I’d be trying to harvest his organs right then and there. As a greedy, cold blooded capitalist, my job is to maximize profits and I do that by trying to maximize sales. Piracy pisses me off emotionally and if I thought requiring retinal exams would increase my sales I would. But reality is, piracy is an overblown excuse.
Re Steamworks vs. Impulse::Reactor:
I may prefer Valve to Microsoft as a the gate keeper to digital distribution on the PC but you know what’s better than Valve as a gate keeper? Having nobody as a gate keeper. The problem is that right now, there’s no real alternative to Steamworks. The publishing market is divided into three groups. The indies who want to sell their stuff in as many places as possible. The titans who have the capacity to exist within themselves (think EA and Blizzard) and the guys who basically could care less if the PC became a closed platform because they see it as just another place to sell their cross platform stuff.
The main advantage of Impulse::Reactor is that it doesn’t require a game developer to bundle a third party store with their game which is a pretty big deal.
Re Elemental:
Elemental is a strategy game that exists in an RPG world. The thing is, Elemental’s release is the beginning of the adventure, not the end. We plan to keep working on Elemental for the next year or more after release. There’s just so much there we can do, especially with the modding tools and such.
Re Consoles, iPads, etc.:
Huge markets. My main issue is that the games I like to make the most require a lot of memory (by console terms). Elemental uses a gig of RAM to deliver its world. I can’t do that on a 512MB console and I’m not willing to sacrifice the game for cross-platformness.
Re Can NEW (i.e. non-sequel) turn-based PC-only strategy games thrive:
Yes. Our demographic is highly selective. But if you deliver a good game, you will see the sales.
Re Random House:
Having Random House’s Del Rey writing team develop the fictional lore of Elemental definitely made a big impact on the game’s design. I think users will very much like the way the game almost feels like an RPG even though their “role” is to be king (or queen).
