Santa Monica.
Inside the conference room at Daenerys Entertainment headquarters, after listening to the EA management's report on company operations, everyone began the main theme of today's meeting.
The secretary distributed a set of materials, and everyone in the conference room couldn't help but recall various pieces of information about the novel in their hands titled 'Dune'.
Strictly speaking, 'Dune' is not a single novel, but a collective name for a series of science fiction novels revolving around the planet 'Arrakis', informally known as 'Dune'.
After the famous North American science fiction writer Frank Herbert released his first 'Dune' novel in 1965, he continued to refine his Dune Universe until his death in 1986, publishing several sci-fi works revolving around the planet 'Arrakis' such as 'Children of Dune', 'God Emperor of Dune', and 'Dune Messiah'.
However, these works basically revolve around a planet covered in dunes called Arrakis. In the distant future, people discovered a substance known as Spice on Arrakis. Spice has multiple functions, such as extending human life and assisting in space jumps, which helps humans achieve space travel. Moreover, for many years, humans have found Arrakis to be the sole planet producing Spice, so far too many stories have unfolded around this dune-covered planet.
Because of the well-developed background setting and grand narrative structure of the 'Dune' series, this sci-fi series quickly became popular since its birth and was even dubbed the space version of 'The Lord of the Rings' series by some media.
Similarly, just like 'The Lord of the Rings' series, many people have hoped to bring this story to the big screen over the years.
In 1984, the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, with David Lynch as director, finally burned through $40 million to bring this story to the big screen. The result, however, was not great. Despite the $40 million investment, the North American box office after the film's release was only a bit over $30 million.
In the conference room at this moment, Simon was also very curious about how the boss of De Laurentiis Entertainment could have come up with the idea of letting a director as artistic as David Lynch film a commercial sci-fi masterpiece, and even dared to invest $40 million.
That was $40 million in 1984 dollars.
De Laurentiis Entertainment was now bankrupt, and Simon quickly pulled back his thoughts. He walked to the whiteboard at the front of the conference room, picked up a marker, and wrote down a few words: real-time strategy game.
Speaking of which, EA's current strength lies in sports games, and Simon had no intention of reversing that trend.
While maintaining EA's advantage in sports games, he planned to have EA focus on developing real-time strategy games, which were most prevalent in the nineties of the original timeline. Due to the nature of the real-time strategy game model, this genre was also very suitable for the PC platform.
Although he planned to port a large number of EA's games to video game console platforms, Simon would also have EA maintain its dominant position in the PC field.
For today's meeting, Simon had done a lot of homework in advance and had personally compiled the materials everyone now held based on information from his memory.
Real-time strategy games had already appeared in the early eighties, but they only reached their peak in the nineties with the emergence of games like 'Warcraft' and 'StarCraft', and the concept of real-time strategy games was finally perfected in the nineties. Currently, various types of real-time strategy games were actually just in a prototype stage and usually did not possess all the elements a mature real-time strategy game should have, such as resource collection, unit production, and real-time combat.
On the other hand, Simon did not directly bring out peak real-time strategy games he had played, like 'Warcraft' and 'StarCraft'. This was partly because hardware conditions still had some limitations at this time, and partly out of the need to let EA practice and accumulate experience first.
In the original timeline, real-time strategy games only finally matured after more than ten years of various explorations. EA did not have experience in this area yet; if they started immediately, they would likely ruin several classics in Simon's memory.
Actually, the real-time strategy games adapted from the 'Dune' series were also quite successful in the original timeline, which was why Simon had instructed Nancy to secure the game adaptation rights for the 'Dune' series at a high price.
Daenerys Entertainment promised the 'Dune' copyright holders terms similar to 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles': a base adaptation fee of $500,000 and a 5% net profit share from all electronic games related to 'Dune'. News of this spread while Nancy was in contact with the 'Dune' copyright holders, and there was no shortage of other competitors making tentative bids, but none were successful.
Obviously, the $500,000 adaptation fee was secondary; if 'Dune' could achieve the same success as the 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' game, just that 5% net profit share would be a massive windfall.
The failure of the Lynch version of the 'Dune' film made this series, which many studios had originally coveted, suddenly something no one wanted to touch. The 'Dune' copyright holders had already taken a big fall in the film and television adaptation of this series, so they naturally wouldn't make the same mistake with the game adaptation.
Compared to the failure of the 'Dune' movie, the electronic games based on the 'Dune' adaptation were all very successful.
In the original timeline, 'Warcraft', developed by Blizzard Studio, was also widely considered a work that followed and imitated the 1992 real-time strategy game 'Dune II'.
Simon gave everyone in the conference room a detailed explanation of the key development points for real-time strategy games, including the resource collection system, real-time combat system, and unit production system. Finally, he briefly described the prospects for this type of game in terms of online play, concluding, "That's about it; the detailed plan still needs you to figure it out yourselves. Personally, I am very optimistic about the development prospects of real-time strategy games. This game genre will also allow EA to push its advantage in the PC field to the limit. Therefore, I hope everyone can treat this project very seriously".
Trip Hawkins, the current chairman and CEO of EA and also the company's founder, was the first to speak after Simon finished: "Simon, according to what you said, the development of this game has many similarities with the 'SimCity' we released this summer".
Simon nodded and said, "I've also looked at the materials for 'SimCity' and even tried playing it. The first generation of this game wasn't very successful; I think the main reason is still the limitations of the hardware platform. If it could be further refined into a 3D version, this game would definitely be very popular. However, 'SimCity' doesn't have a combat system; it's a different concept from the real-time strategy games I just mentioned".
Another EA executive then said, "So, Mr. Westeros, what you mean is, the core of this game is combat?"
"Of course not. If it were just combat, it would become yet another game concept. I believe the key to developing this game is the coordination between the real-time combat system, the resource collection system, and the unit production system. Therefore, during the development process, I hope you can spend a few months in the early stages perfecting the settings for this game; don't be hasty. Since this is the first attempt, accumulating experience is the most important thing".
As the topic opened up, other people in the conference room also began to ask various questions.
This continued until noon when the meeting finally ended.
Simon still had to rush to the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel to attend a signing luncheon hosted by the Qintex Group. Just as he left the conference room, Nancy chased after him and whispered to Simon, "I haven't reached an agreement with the 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' development team on the upcoming compensation plan. About half of them are going to resign; they plan to start their own studio".
Blizzard Studio's first game achieved phenomenal success, so the development team naturally wanted their value to rise.
Game development in this era didn't yet require the coordination and cooperation of teams of hundreds of people as it would many years later; it could even be completed by one or two people. Because of the expected massive profits from 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles', the development team members had one after another made requests for salary increases, and Nancy had been dealing with this recently.
In the end, it still wasn't successful.
However, Simon didn't care too much.
These developers probably only saw that a single 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' game brought over $100 million in profit to Daenerys Entertainment, but they didn't see the series of relentless investments Daenerys Entertainment made during the game's distribution process.
Leaving Blizzard Studio and losing the financial and channel support of Daenerys Entertainment, these people naively thought they could replicate the miracle of 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' just by mastering some key points of game development. This kind of thinking could only be described as naive.
Furthermore, with the arrival of the 16-bit console era and the further development of the PC platform, the era where one or two people could develop a game was also coming to an end.
Entering the nineties, electronic game development was destined to evolve into multi-person teamwork, with teams of dozens or even hundreds of people developing a game together. The risks involved were simply not something a few individuals could bear. Even if these people found other financial backers to support them, the possibility of replicating a phenomenal success like 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' was very slim.
After all, while 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' might not reach the heights of 'Super Mario', it was still a phenomenal game capable of selling millions of cartridges.
Simon was able to determine the success of this game based on his advantage of foresight and had invested a large amount of human and material resources into it. Even if those people mastered some tricks of game development, they would only be able to rely on luck with various games in the future.
Luck is clearly the most unreliable thing.
"If they want to leave, let them leave. This industry has never lacked technical talent".
As Simon spoke, he noticed that Nancy didn't look very worried either. His female executive clearly also understood that Daenerys Entertainment held far more advantages in various aspects than a simple game development team. A group of technical personnel leaving would mostly just affect the development progress of the 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' sequel. Daenerys Entertainment couldn't possibly grant these people the studio equity they requested just because of one game's success.
Hearing Simon say this, Nancy said, "I will conduct a new round of recruitment as soon as possible. If necessary, I can also borrow some technical personnel from EA".
"Actually, I've also been considering the matter of game studios recently..." Simon had just started when the two of them reached the ground floor. Simon said directly, "Why don't you come with me to the Beverly Hills banquet, and we can talk on the way?"
Nancy didn't think twice and simply nodded, following Simon into his luxury vehicle.
As the car drove out of the Daenerys Entertainment headquarters parking lot, Simon continued, "I feel that it's very difficult for a game studio to maintain a long-lasting and vigorous vitality. It's already very rare for a game studio to be able to develop one or two successful electronic games within its life cycle. Therefore, Daenerys Entertainment can adopt a development model similar to film projects in this regard. Assemble a team, invest in a project, and after the project ends, if there's a need to develop a sequel, keep the team. If not, just dissolve the development team directly".
In fact, what Simon was considering at this time was the fact that excellent game studios in his memory usually declined rapidly after being acquired.
It's just that this situation hadn't happened yet. EA was still far from achieving the title of 'Studio Killer'.
Originally, as a bystander, Simon was also very averse to EA's behaviour of 'destroying' studios one by one. But now, standing in the position of a boss, Simon's thinking pattern inevitably changed.
The reason those studios in his memory declined after being acquired by large game developers might be due to the parent company's constraints, but another possibility was that the game teams gradually lost their creativity. Game companies need to be profitable; they can't continue to support a studio in freely developing whatever works they imagine just because that studio once developed a phenomenal game.
Moreover, to be frank, when game companies acquire these studios, it's mostly just for the copyrights of the successful games already in those studios' hands.
Since that's the case, it would be better to follow the film development model and invest in game projects with good ideas from scratch. This would significantly reduce costs.
For example, acquiring Blizzard Studio, which owns the copyrights to popular games like 'Warcraft' and 'StarCraft', might cost billions of dollars. But if you only invest in the development of game projects like 'Warcraft' and 'StarCraft', it might only cost a few million dollars. There will certainly be many failed projects in between, but as long as one or two phenomenal works appear out of ten projects, that's a success.
After all, electronic games usually have a very long life cycle. Once a game is successful, many generations of sequels can often be produced.
After hearing Simon's thoughts, Nancy agreed, "We can indeed give it a try. Additionally, to promote the enthusiasm of the development teams, we can also promise them a share of the profits. This can also appropriately compress costs during early development".
Considering long-term gains, most people are often willing to accept lower early-stage pay.
"Take some time to think this over carefully and ideally come up with a proposal", Simon said, then smiled. "Also, speaking of compensation, do you want a raise?"
Nancy glanced at Simon sideways. "Are you planning to give me a raise, boss?"
"That depends. If you threaten me that you'll jump ship immediately if I don't give you a raise, I'll definitely give you one".
"And then I'd end up in a situation like Rehme's".
"Very likely. I'm actually a very generous person, but I'm not used to people actively demanding things from me".
"That's a very unreasonable way of thinking".
"What can I say? I'm the boss".
"..."