Risks and Rewards

Well, it's been an interesting week hasn't it? Painful at times, yes. Writing this blog without a blog preview feature is a pain the ass for example. We know, we know. I'll say this though, it hasn't been boring!

I started writing this post because I had a long time GG community member (who you all would probably know...I'll leave it up to him if he wants to identify himself) email me late last night with a message for the web team.

He wrote:

Quote:
Hi Brett,

I don't know the names of all the guys that are working on the new web site, but could you pass on this message to them. It was something Trip Hawkins said back when I was visiting EA on some work related thing back in the mid 1980s and I always remembered it:

"Pioneers are the guys with the arrows in their backs."

Keep up the good work....

In such a rough week, it was a nice sentiment to offer. Definitely inspiring for me, and much appreciated. Even in just two years at GG, I've seen plenty of arrows in the back of Jeff Tunnell, probably most pioneering personality I know in the games industry, so perhaps it's true.

Small companies come up with great ideas all the time, but few have the courage to move on them or the tenacity to see them through. Most stay within the confines of what has worked in the past and live in that box. GarageGames certainly has not. For example...

- Torque in 2001 for $100 / seat would have been laughed at as a business pitch by just about anyone in the games industry at the time.

- Selling indie games via digital distribution only (as was done on GarageGames.com) was pretty unproven in 2002-2003. Heck, selling any games at all while skirting retail was just not done, but GG embraced it and forged ahead.

- Creating console games for a totally unproven digital distribution channel in 2005 (the original XBLA), was not something a lot of companies wanted to jump into with both feet. Marble Blast Ultra was an original launch title for XBLA and is still there today as one of the best selling games on the service.

- Getting schools to adopt game engine software for use in the classroom was a brand new idea in 2005. Almost all schools used open source software with no tools, no books, and no curriculum material. This was a risk, spearheaded by Davey Jackson, that rarely gets mentioned. Today, Torque is ubiquitous in higher education games curricula and now K-12 schools are getting in the game as well.

With all this success under GG's belt, it would have been pretty tempting to play it safe and just keep making games and game engines. Instead, Jeff and Josh really wanted to reach for the stars with InstantAction. GG didn't have the kind of money to pull something like that off in early 2007, but found a partner with the same vision for merging the best of games with the best of the web in IAC.

And so here we are...InstantAction has over 1 million users. Rokkitball and Legions, both brand new IPs from GG Studios introduced last year, are hugely popular on InstantAction, and more 3rd party games are coming online with increasing frequency. Titles from superstar studios like Luma, Alex Seropian's Wideload, Max Gaming, Bad Habit, Mad Otter are definitely keeping the InstantAction community updated with fresh new content all the time.

Sometimes taking risks can backfire of course. Sometimes it just achieves mediocre results. GGE, while a good idea that I still think has significant potential, has received little attention for a year. Ironically, it continues to grow and a modest pace.

Torque Shader Engine (now TGEA), finally getting a 1.0 release in Feb. '07 (before the IAC deal, but not before the huge glut of work necessary to close a deal like that), definitely did not recieve the care and attention it deserved. Because of that, many users either stuck with TGE, or worse, felt burned on their investment in TGEA. A lot was promised and not everything was delivered.

After the IAC deal, GG did some restructuring. It needed a web team to build and run InstantAction. It needed a game studio to create great new content build specifically for the web. It also needed a team to keep pushing Torque forward. All the people you see frequently posting and active on GarageGames.com now are part of that team. It's a talented bunch with a crazy work ethic, and now clear goals with the resources to execute.

We spent most of 2008 getting the house in order...merging code bases for efficiency / portability, getting feature complete with TGEA and Torque X. We also expanded the the reach of Torque games by creating paths to the Wii, Xbox 360, and iPhone. One glaring item that didn't get addressed? The website. It needed it. Really badly. The backend had been with us since the very beginning and it had become very difficult to extend cleanly. Adding new features was nearly impossible. Re-skinning...no way. We had to start from scratch, and it's easy to overlook all that the old site did, all the users it supports and all the traffic it handles. It's not easy, and there were a couple failed starts before we the project had any proper success at all (though not by Jacob...he's still batting 1.000).

I certainly wasn't happy about launching the site without all the features we had in the old, but it needed to be done and we went with what we had finished as of last Friday. Today we're expecting to push out an update to address some of the glaring issues around the community side of the site. More will be coming, but most importantly, we'll be able to go well above and beyond what we had previously because we're working from a new base. It was a risk of course, but in the end, I'm confident it will be well worth it.

In summary, what I'm saying is...bear with us on this. Taking risks to achieve our goals is part of our culture. We won't always make perfect bets, but we'll get it right far more often that we get it wrong, and sticking with us through 2009 is likely to have some huge payoffs. I'm already psyched about writing the next Torque 3D blog for Monday!

As always, thanks for reading.