THQ's Danny Bilson
The Core Games EVP on studio growth, defeating the trade-in market and the importance of blockbusters
They do. In my group, they all need to be blockbusters. You're going to see Space Marine from us at E3, more in particular I think we're going to be playing it at gamescom. It's Relic making an action title - it's spectacular, I'm telling you. Everything has to be spectral, so I'm not just boasting - I can't even do business unless it is. The only thing for me is it doesn't scare me at all because I spent 20 years in the film business. This is much more like that is now. You've gotta open and you've gotta kick ass or you're in trouble.
They had a great idea. They'd made a game before, then they came in with this great idea and I thought: "Okay, they've done their practice run. They've built their tech, now we've got great creative this should be a very safe bet." But you know what? There's no safe bet in games, everything's very hard. And the bar is really high. Every time anybody ships, we gotta move up. When Call of Duty ships, you've got to move up because they're moving the bar up. Red Dead ships, we've gotta react to it. Especially in facial in that game. Nothing's good enough, and when we ship we ship, but nothing's good enough because the guy with 60 bucks, he wants the best.
And that's fair. That's totally fair, I totally respect that, and it's our job. I get paid to figure out how to give that to him.
That all comes from experience. The trick to my job or anyone who has my job is knowing what good is. If you know what good is, you're fine. If you don't know what good is, you don't know anything - you do a lot of research, and everything comes out bland and sideways. But if you're passionate gamemaker or knucklehead like me, you know what good is. When you see this [gestures to Homefront art] I can probably tell you what you thought about it.
Okay. You probably thought "cool world", right? You thought the character faces and animations are kinda f*cked, the bodies are not so hot, but the environments are unbelievable, you've never seen anything like that, and you're probably wondering what's the combat going to be like because I've only seen one little fight, what's the mission variety going to be like, what's the mechanics going to be like and the experiences? That's what I'd be thinking if I were you. But me, I'd be totally blown away by the world. You got me already, just polish up the rest of that shit and I'm there. Close?
That's pure strategy. What they used to do - show everything. I don't need to buy it, I already saw it, there's no surprise, I feel like I saw that movie. We're much more moving towards movie marketing, which is build the dream... Absolutely show enough of the game to support our claim, but do not over-expose it. Leave the surprise for the moment to moment experience to the player. Don't spoil it with a level by level walkthrough game trailer. I don't need to play it anymore, there's no drama, no surprise, and then I'm just in a shooting gallery seeing how much I can score. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in building virtual reality, and taking you and me to places we've never been. That's what I want to do.