Splash Damage's Paul Wedgwood (Pt 2)

So we made this mission, but we played it and played it, and it just wasn't fun. Everything we tried to make that map fun didn't work, so we cut it. We've done that with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars too – we were at a point where we'd completed 12 maps, and we cut all of them and started again. Every single map that we'd been working on – we kept one, Canyon, because it was the only one that was proven to be fun. So we said "that's got to be the template for what we continue with." It's been no different with Brink as well. That real zoomed-in focus on quality is quite important – we haven't suddenly, overnight become Epic or Valve or someone like that. That business model somewhat relies on alternative revenue streams. Epic make their money from the Unreal engine in additional to making very good games, Valve make their money from Steam and so on. There aren't that many opportunities to do that kind of thing in the games industry, and many of those exist only because you were around at the end of the 90s or the very beginning of this century, and were there at the point to make that happen.

Well, I don't know, I guess people might view that exist as Bethesda winning; others might view it as id Software's owners winning. Who's to say? It would be impossible to speculate on who was the winner in a deal that doesn't have any details announced. But I think that, for the most part, when I look around the industry I think that you can see there are many US companies that we can look up to for guidance on what it means to be a strong, independent developer of really good triple-A games.

Over here in the UK, if Crytek achieves success on the consoles with their game they'll be in the same position, because they have an engine that I think people would be crying out for if it was multi-plaform. So with Splash Damage, we wanted to create something completely new, we wanted to prove to ourselves and I guess the world that we can create a new universe ourselves, it would be credible and well-researched and well-written, people would enjoy it – and so maybe our goals a little a more modest.

We started out at the very beginning of Splash Damage with two basic goals: the shameless pursuit of critical acclaim, whilst ensuring our staff could pay rent. So far, to date, we've just celebrated the tenth year anniversary of achieving those. But they're not goals that you ever achieve, because the shameless pursuit of critical acclaim and ensuring all your staff can pay the rent are not things that ever stop. You can't say "what we want to do is get a 95% and quit."

I don't know, it's so easy for people to point fingers at those guys and say they failed because it wasn't a critical success or because it wasn't a commercial success or it was mismanaged. I don't think anyone will ever have the true facts, but there's no doubt that if you create a game that is both a commercial success and a critical success, the likelihood is that you'll succeed. And of those two things, the developer only has control over one of them generally. If you're not self-publishing all you can do is make something good and hope your publisher does a good job of selling it.

So maybe part of that has something to do with, for us, Bethesda. They'd already had massive success with Oblivion, Fallout 3 went on to sell six million units as well: this is a publisher that has demonstrated their ability to market and sell and handle PR in a very professional and efficient way. We've always been impressed by that aspect of the company. So I think we're in good hands. If it didn't work out, it would be difficult to say that it was because it was a bad game or because it was badly marketed.