Hard Day's Knight

Canadian developer Silicon Knights knows all about protracted development. Its current Xbox 360 project Too Human was first announced for the original PlayStation in 1999, before moving to Nintendo's GameCube. And when a game has been knocking around for such a long time it inevitably falls under the eyes of critics. With its most recent showing at E3 2006, the game was savaged by the press.

Here, Dyack takes on the marketing of videogames, the obsession with hyping a game years before it's finished and why games reviewers need to be more critical of the work they're assessing.

In the second part of our interview to be published on Thursday, Dyack talks about the lessons learned from working with Miyamoto and Kojima, the evolution of Silicon Knights and why format holders need to develop a unified console if the industry is going to evolve.

Denis Dyack: More than anything what we're concentrating on is that the next time we show our games they look spectacular. We're concentrating on making the biggest impact possible.

I'd say Too Human is the best game we've ever made. It's far more advanced than anyone outside of the company knows. We're probably at a much further advanced stage than a majority of games that developers are showing to the press right now but we're just not talking about it. And the reason for that is after E3 2006 we really started to rethink previews and the way games are shown to the press.

We're getting to the point where we don't ever want to show a game again until it's finished. It's almost pointless. The media has a hard time with looking at games before they're done. If you take the movie industry as an example, how often do you see a movie before it's completed? You don't. I think our industry needs to start doing that too.

Some games are shown at shows for four or five years in a row and that's not good from several levels. The first problem is that we need more critics in the press. We don't have critics, we have fans. Would you recommend a game before it's finished, when you know it's not coming out for another year?

I don't think we should start doing press on a game until it's finished. When a developer gives the controller over, the game should be final. The movie industry waits until the film is in the can, then it's marketed for six to nine months and then it's released. Developers need to complete the game and then ask what the press think about it. If the press hate it, I can't do anything about it because it's already done. That's what I want, that's what the press wants and the marketing departments too.

Look at the marketing campaigns for our industry, they are generally booked five or six months in advance. If the game slips then money is wasted. That's why you get games that are rushed to stores because companies don't want to loose that marketing money. It's those kind of things that are hurting our industry. It's an immaturity thing.

A few years ago technology was changing so rapidly that if you were working on a first-person shooter you had to get it out the door ahead of the competition. Overnight, one game could change everyone's perception of a genre if it was so advanced. These days technology just doesn't matter as much because changes are so incremental. It's all about the content and the entertainment value. Look at someone like Peter Molyneux, who talks up his games because he's so passionate about them. But a year or so later when he's had to remove a couple of features he gets hammered in the press. It's not the developer's fault if he tried, it's the fault of the industry. This is a huge problem.

I honestly believe showing games in advance like this is going to go the way of the dodo. The PR people who are helping market the game should be able to play the game so they understand everything about it. The press should get a copy a month in advance and be able to play it from start to finish, not to get three days to review a forty hour game.

The industry needs to be more honest. I question the relative value of previewing a game. Rather than say you think it's going to be game of the year why don't we wait until it's finished and then decide. Even though Silicon Knights had a tough E3 one year I still think the press needs to be more critical. I hate previews and interviews where a writer says how they see a game maker as a 'God'. That they feel intimidated by someone who makes these great games. They should be intimidating him, they should be his critic. Every time a writer refers to a developer as a 'game God' I vomit internally.

I'm not in marketing, but I would say that marketing budgets should still be working for a game three to six month after release. Every marketing person would love this model because they don't have to worry about when the game is coming out. They know that come November the game is going to hit the shelves because it was finished in February. It's been manufactured and it's ready to go.

Writers, critics, journalists should base their reputation on the their opinion not on the developers' good faith that they'll get a particular feature done in time. Marketing departments fly the press out to shows and give them trinkets and try to get their best favour. That needs to go away. We need critics, we need better marketing models, we need this change in the industry.

There's no choice, there will have to be changes. Games are becoming insanely expensive. Usually, marketing budgets either equal or exceed the costs of development. Development is getting harder so the chances of slipping become greater. Why on earth would we ever want to take these huge risks with that kind of money? Publishers' that can't afford to hold back the marketing of a game until it's finished, they're not going to last in the industry. There's too many games on the market competing with each other to take those kinds of risks. We're going to see fewer games on the market because of the costs involved. It's inevitable.

That's one of the reasons E3 died. It had no purpose any more. If Silicon Knights needs to show the press its game we can fly them over to our studios and let them play it. The press that we got at E3 didn't make any sense, it never justified the amount of work that we had to spend on it when we should have been working on the game itself. Three months of development time to produce a demo for a three day show? That's crazy. At a show like E3 ten games get real attention out of five thousand.

I think the marketing guys love it. For the marketing people at Microsoft it's their dream. Quite frankly it's a dream of a lot of marketing people in this industry because it's a model that works and is reliable. But from a development point of view it's a complete switch on how we market games and how we manage ourselves from a cash flow perspective. It's about changing the business model.

Denis Dyack is president of Silicon Knights. Interview by Matt Martin.