Yes, but the marketing side doesn’t multiply by 20 or 30, it actually decreases because everyone is working together to put it out there and everyone benefits. That is a massive improvement.
Also on the dev side: Does every developer have to use the same engine? If not then you have to make a wrapper for the project utilising multiple exes, so who's developing that and figuring all that out?
And then the real kicker: how does everyone get paid?? Are you doing a 20-way profit share? Who's figuring out the contracts on that? Or maybe you just do a flat fee like a magazine or something? Okay then wheres that money coming from?
Honestly revenue split on a project like this can be a nice little income booster but you'd need to basically do game a month for a collection for a year and then wait another year or two minimum to break even on all the collections to have any kind of sustainable income.
At that stage I'm sure the market would be flooded and you would be utterly burned out. It's a really good structure for occasional short term projects but it'd be unreasonable to pin any hopes on an industry swing in that direction.
In our case it depends if we invested in the game’s development as well. Also, I wouldn’t go for such a big anthology. If there’s a meaningful experience for each game then why dilute it with quantity, it is preferable to have a higher quantity of anthologies. But I have plans for a special big one.
Even if you did all that... I'm not convinced anyone would care! Getting 30 smaller developers no one has heard of to make 30 games and bundle them up... is still 30 games from developers that people have never heard of.
Well, that’s why we invited a few known devs to be a part of the roster for the next Short Games Collection #2. But I don’t fully agree with this sentiment, the main issue for us is, and always has been, to have enough resources to properly market it. Being a very small business, every cent counts.
Not trying to be harsh there - I just wanna point out that people were proposing it as a solution to make game sell better, and I don't think it does that.
Hey! I wasn't trying to say people shouldn't do anthologies, or that they are bad, just that they are very difficult to organise and not a quick-fix solution to other problems e.g. marketing or discoverability. Definitely not intended to disparage existing attempts at the format.
That's not to say it wouldn't be worth doing! It's just that it would need somebody with the time, expertise, and patience (and probably resources) to organise it properly. Which uh, not many people are willing to step up and actually do.
I actually love this idea. Maybe turning it into a mini-game experience, like WarioWare. It wouldn't be hard to structure an LLC that awards shares based on individual contributions.
Whenever the topic comes up among fellow developers, everyone agrees that it would be a great idea, and then when someone asks 'who's going to organise it then?' everyone looks at the ceiling.
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