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?
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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.
There’s also the trusting element. When working on Short Games Collection #1, I got refused in ways that ranged from “No thank you” to “You just want to steal my stuff”, peppered with “Who the hell are you?!” here and there. So it’s not just that, it’s also being open minded to collaborate.
Easier in a school setting. We ran a jam with our students where we provided a framework for making 30-second micro-games, WarioWare style.
All the contributions got compiled together into a randomizer that would play a rapid-fire sequence, followed by credits for the games you played. That worked!
• low investment per contributor
• coherent experience with consistent game loop / controls
• game structure makes variety the point, celebrating diversity
• players don't need an attachment to any single game / developer to take interest in the whole
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All the contributions got compiled together into a randomizer that would play a rapid-fire sequence, followed by credits for the games you played. That worked!
• low investment per contributor
• coherent experience with consistent game loop / controls
• game structure makes variety the point, celebrating diversity
• players don't need an attachment to any single game / developer to take interest in the whole