N'Gai Croal
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Dec 10, 2007 12:15 AM
The Rock, one of several enemy types in Q-Games' PixelJunk Monsters
In Part I of our two-part Q&A with Q-Games founder Dylan Cuthbert, he explained why he wants to turn Japanese players on to the pleasure of RTS games with his forthcoming title PixelJunk Monsters (which debuted last week in Japan) and why PSN games haven't yet caught fire in his adopted Japan. In today's Part II, Cuthbert discusses why Q-Games wants to keep its development costs low and the number of shipped games high; what draws him to collaborating with artists who work in other media; and why he thinks Sony has become so interested in smaller games. And as a bonus, Cuthbert shares with us exclusively some details and insight into the direction of his next game, codenamed PixelJunk 1-3.
In an interview with God of War creator and Eat Sleep Play co-founder David Jaffe, he told me the following about the cartoony look of his first PSN game, Calling All Cars:
I've really been thinking about "What did I learn from that experience?" And one of the things I learned was that you have to design your game--and that includes mechanics and thematic--to speak to the audience that owns the system. I had made this assumption, which was an incorrect assumption, that because the game was $10 people would be like, "Ah, it's cartoony. I usually buy military hardcore stuff, but you know what? I'm going to give it a try. It's just ten bucks." It would be an impulse buy.
The reality of it is--and I know that this happened with a number of people who bought the game--but nowhere near as many people were able to get over the thematic hump being unappealing to them, because they're looking for games that are testosterone-fueled. The number of people who got over the hump because the price was so low was significantly lower than the number of people who responded to that game in exact same way they would if it had been a $60 game, which was "Thematically this just doesn't appeal to me."
My question is this: How concerned are you that the visual aesthetic of PixelJunk Monsters may not appeal to the largely hardcore audience that has bought the Playstation 3 thus far?
I am definitely concerned that the market is forcing us to make games that look very similar to each other and this is primarily because the cost of making a game is so high, i.e. the looks and styles have to be consumer-friendly in order to sell as many units as possible and break even.
This is one thing I am trying to avoid with PixelJunk--by keeping the development cost down, and keeping the number of games we produce high, for each game, we can go with the style that we want to play with at that time and give people a much larger range of visual styles than they are used to at the moment. A cool sub-set of people are beginning to understand our stance, and hopefully that sub-set will grow just large enough for us to earn enough money to fund more of our ideas. Of course, this doesn't mean we won't make a flashy, sparkly "consumer-friendly" game at some point--we most definitely will--but what it means is that we can give each of our games our fun, unique look without being subjected to pressure in the creative process to simply make something that is glitzy and sells in order to get the development cost back. At the end of the day it is the consumer that wins, because they get a greater choice.
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