Join The Club
Ustwo Games CEO Maria Sayans recently came under quite a bit of heat for an interview with Game Developer at London Games Fest, people caught onto the following: "We've been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security," when discussing Ustwo's strategy—specifically how the studio's current state seems unsustainable.
"If we did something like Alba or Assemble With Care, we would have to do that for a lot less money," Sayans explains. "There are people doing really, really well in those spaces on PC for much smaller budgets, that we will never be able to achieve because we're based in London and have employees with pensions and so on."
Ustwo Games employs just under 30 people, and at its peak Monument Valley 3's dev team had around 40 people working on it. The studio has also been producing games that cost anywhere between £7 million to £10 million, "we need to lower that," Sayans admits.
Article continues belowIt seems like the idea to pivot the strategy was made after Netflix removed Monument Valley 3 only half a year after it was launched, which isn't great, given it was exclusive to the platform. Sayans discusses how mobile no longer offers a "solid base to build a long-term business around". So now, Ustwo Games is looking to create "meaningful singleplayer experiences" for PC and consoles.
"[With the ports], we learned this audience does exist on PC and console," Sayans says. "We also looked at the Monument Valley IP and explored 'okay, could this IP come to PC and console? What would that look like?
"We saw a lot of potential for the Monument Valley IP to be maybe reset and reinvented for PC and consoles, but what became clear was that our development budgets were too high for us to achieve a safer break, even if we were aiming for PC and console." But making successful games on PC also isn't as simple as it perhaps should be.
"Pricing [a game] too low is playing with the sustainability of the team, right? So, if in doubt, price it a little bit higher because you can always discount later," Sayans says. "This is not going to be a very popular thing with players, but the truth is you have a cohort of people—your day one players—who are most likely to be your core fans for whom the difference between £5 and £10 [is going to be negligible]." This is where I point towards Aggro Crab's confusing yet accurate price explainer for indie games.
We'll see that we've got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry.
Maria Sayans, CEO of Ustwo Games
And now we've come full circle, back to the fact that Ustwo Games seems to be spending more than it's racking in: "We've been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that's something we're looking to change going forward.
"I think going forward, we'll see that we've got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I've been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability, but I think that's a shift in how we want to work with people going forward."
I can see the logic behind it, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating. In the end this kind of mismanagement rarely has anything to do with the devs working on games, yet they always seem to be first on the chopping block. It's tiring to exist in an industry where you just can't seem to do anything right.
