Larian Studios - How Larian Became Self Funding
 

Lar writes in his column today what moved him to make Larian Studios self funding. In it he writes about what publishing tasks can be done by Larian and that for getting boxed copies of the game in shops a publisher would still be needed.
More information.

Another quote from there :

Sounds exactly like the kind of middle market developer we want making our games ;)

As for his comments on what it takes to get a game green-lit, I doubt it comes as a surprise to people here…

I think we need companies to have the ability to avoid using big publishers. We want quantity and quality and the former would be severely lacking if all RPGs had to be big budget through major publishers. Hopefully this approach can be shown to be economically viable.

Its just another lesson on why publishers and there marketing teams only care about action and fps games. They have no clue on how to market a rpg as it has been proven many times even with Bioware.

I always enjoy Lar's posts on how the marketing works as he shows how many hoops you have to go through for idiots who only see numbers.

One would think games like minecraft would make Marketing teams think twice before stereotyping what games should all look like, but alas, not yet.

I also hope that flops like Dragon Age 2 and Rage make some people in charge think twice before leting marketing teams decide what creative freedom should rule.

I for once as long as I have a good life i'll always buy games from Larian. Besides them being realy good, its a pleasure to endorse free-thinking in this world.

exactly, just preordered Dishonored, I suggest you do the same :)

I wouldn't call them "idiots" but just conservative. The vast majority of games and that includes FPSs and action games are losing money. Making an RPG is like begging to lose money. Unless you're really lucky and hit the right nerve at the right time but that is out of the realm of predictability because we have all seen good games sell terribly and shitty games sell like hot cakes…

I sincerely hope that Lar's plans work out and that Larian will be making money from Dragon Commander and other releases but I remain somewhat skeptical.
Doesn't seem very likely to me that digital distribution is the big money maker. Look at The Witcher 2. CD Projekt sold a mere 35K copies on Good Old Games which is a well established sales platform that is getting a lot of traffic. Larian's own online store is going to perform much worse.
And to ship the game to a considerable number of retail stores across Europe and the US is going to cost lots and lots of money.
Securing shelf space, negotiating the contracts, coming up with incentives etc. etc. etc. is tons of work and it is what the major publishers are really good at. And good luck on convincing them to stock up on a PC game (especially in North America) when the store managers could use the space for something that is likely to yield them more $ per square meter.

If going solo would be easy then a lot more devs would do it, I guess. But they aren't. So there must be some merit to having a (big) publisher that takes care of all the crap and the ground and foot work. Or maybe everyone just thinks that way and is too lazy or scared to do it themselves so maybe Larian will be breaking new ground. Or maybe they will just get lucky and pull a Minecraft with Dragon Commander, i.e. hitting the right nerve at the right time as stated above.
We shall see. I definitely wish them the best of luck. I'm afraid they're going to need it, too…

You're not begging to lose money if you invest appropriately. The problem is the one-track mind of most business people - and that's maximum return. They haven't the insight required to understand the potential of a good CRPG, and that's because they don't care about games that aren't the most profitable. End of story.

Thankfully, we have Skyrim now to set the eyes of suits alight.

Massive applause to Lars, it takes a lot of time and money to build up a good gaming IP, more time than the average suit will stick around for in a company. Only way to counter that is a good dose of self-funding.

But it could just mean more dragons, memes, and viscera.

It could mean anything.

Essentially, it means that the genre in itself is going to be attractive to suits. From there, it's up to developers to exploit that opportunity.

Still, if there's a way to avoid the suits altogether - then that's certainly the route to choose if you're about the art.

It seems he is pretty well aware of the difficulties: