Notes On A Revolution

So I’m the last person to write about this, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Just prior to Christmas MTV’s parent company Viacom announced that it was selling Harmonix, creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band to an investment firm. This doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is Viacom thought it was a good idea to get into this business in the first place.

If history is a good guide - and I think it is - lessons were not learned from Vivendi’s attempts to do the same. Media companies have a tendency to think of everything as media, which is fine if it is what they think it is (the issue of course being that it isn’t).

We’ve had thousands of years as a species to bed down concepts of drama, narrative, comedy, music and so forth. Media companies are good at that stuff. Media companies excel at taking something crafted according to certain rules and using the rest of their resources to make sure you hear about it.

But when there’s a constant state of stress due to not knowing if your writer or musician is going to meet the deadline you’ve set to entertain in a decidedly linear fashion, why does anyone think they can get a handle on a business where content runs both ways, when the mere concept of what is entertaining shifts so dramatically every 18 months? Hell Microsoft had been making software for 20 years when they launched the Xbox - and they still managed to lose billions - literally billions - as they figured out how to do it right.

The best, most compelling work, I truly believe, will continue to come from developers that are independently owned, who don’t have earnings calls to make. In the same way nobody sets out to write a bad song or novel, nobody sets out to make a bad game; it’s just that it’s much easier to do thanks to many more moving parts.

The people that work in M&A departments of large media conglomerates don’t see that though, nor are they paid to. They see a P&L, consumers watching a screen, and figure it’s all the same.

It, of course, isn’t. The most universally true scene in The Social Network was Zuckerburg, Parker and Saverin sitting in the restaurant, Saverin agitating to put advertising on the then nascent site and Parker telling him “You don’t know what it is yet.” That applies to game development as much as anything else. 

When even EA are down 80% over the past three years, you begin to wonder what signs need to be erected in order for people to understand that this is a very different business, one that has a long way to go.