Collective responsibility
Square Enix is changing the rules between devs and publishers by involving the crowd
How Square Enix is redefining the relationship between pub and dev
Three years since its inception, Square Enix’s Collective initiative has hit the $1m milestone in money raised through Kickstarter. This year, it has already published moody point-and-click adventure Goetia, with two more games to come before December. Each month, it attracts more pitches from independent developers than it can accommodate. Its success so far is a validation of the efforts of one man: the Collective’s creator and project lead Phil Elliott.
The first seeds were planted when Yosuke Matsuda took over from Yoichi Wada as president of Square Enix. “He had a series of things he was interested in looking into more,” Elliott tells us. “One of them was: how do we empower our community more in publishing decisions? Others included a general interest in crowdfunding and supporting new talent, building relationships, thinking about the health of the industry and supporting creativity.” At the time, Elliott was the publisher’s head of community – a role he retains today – and, as such, it landed on his desk. He began to spitball concepts, wondering if there was a way Matsuda’s ideas could somehow be combined. “I guess I wanted to find something that would make it really beneficial for teams to be able to work with us,” he says. “You know, we’re a big publisher – can we open up the scale of that publishing business? It costs us very little to do that, and we can perhaps allow other teams to benefit from those results.”
Elliott sounded out a number of contacts he’d made within the development community as a journalist for feedback. “They were mercilessly honest!” he recalls. “But they really helped me shape what was a good approach versus what was perhaps an obvious approach. Very quickly we came to the decision that we didn’t want to do something that would just be a good one-line sales pitch. We didn’t want to do it for marketing reasons. We wanted to set out with the philosophy of trying to be beneficial, and with the mindset that anything else can change apart from that.”
That was around three years ago, and the first part of the process was launching a feedback platform on the Collective website – a place for developers to submit pitches, with the understanding that Square Enix would then drive traffic from its existing community so that they could vote on whether or not they would be keen to support that game through crowdfunding. The community would also be invited to leave more general feedback about what they liked and didn’t like about the pitch. “The idea behind that first phase was to help teams build up more momentum before starting a crowdfunding [campaign], because at that time we saw a lot of teams going into Kickstarter and Indiegogo pretty cold. Because crowdfunding is such a psychological process, they go in cold, they don’t do anything in the first few days, the trajectory is [heading towards] failure, and it’s very hard to come back from there. So we wanted to try to see if we could do something about that.”
At the time of writing, the Collective has published a little over 100 pitches on its feedback platform. Each pitch gets on average around 20,000 views, an order of magnitude more than any featured game would ordinarily have seen prior to that. “Sometimes developers run [Steam] Greenlight campaigns in parallel, which is cool,” Elliott says. “And then for some of those teams – depending on [our] capacity and also if they request it – we’ll possibly work with them on supporting a crowdfunding campaign directly.”
First, that involves some due diligence on the part of the publisher, a process Elliott says is surprisingly time-consuming. “We look into their experience, try to get a feel for their passion and dedication, and make sure they know what it’s going to take to put their particular game together,” he says. “We obviously tend to check that with folks from inside our dev studios and our business, and that allows us to then officially endorse a campaign.” The benefits to a small team are obvious. Having a well-known publisher on board makes it easier to spread the word. It can send emails to its huge fanbase, communicate with the press, post to its official blog, and use its social channels to expose a game to a much wider audience. “Crowdfunding, by and large, is a numbers game,” Elliott says.
“We’re a big publisher – can we open up the scale of that publishing business? It costs us very little”
“Very simply, the more awareness you have, the greater your chances of success. Not every time, but that’s the overriding factor.”
Naturally, this requires a few things in return. The Collective will only support a campaign if a game has been through the feedback process first. The studio will also have to fill in a questionnaire, which asks about experience, licences, staffing, a game design overview and, significantly, a weekly production schedule through to release. “Basically, we try to get as much [information] as possible,” Elliott tells us. “Now sometimes I’m pretty sure teams won’t have a weekly production schedule through to launch. They may not have really thought that through at that point. So [by asking for that] we’re trying to make sure they’re as clear as possible about what they need.”
Currently, there are limits to how many projects the Collective can take on, and while it’s clearly something that frustrates Elliott, he’s mindful of resources being stretched beyond capacity. The current schedule for the feedback site allows one pitch per week, with a break for Christmas, which equates to around 45 campaigns per year. On the crowdfunding side, because it’s more time- and resource-intensive for the publisher, the initiative can only support around seven or eight per year. “There is a bit of a funnel there, and we can’t perhaps be quite as agile or flexible [as we’d like],” he tells us. “At the moment, for example, we’re booked up until October. And that’s a shame, but where the crowdfunding campaigns come in, that’s where people are backing real money, so we can’t compromise and speed up the process just for the sake of having more people in. Capacity-wise, we’re very mindful of discoverability, and because that means curation is important, I think one per week is the right amount.”
Demand has increased over time, such that the Collective only accepts submissions for two days each month. And from those, only a select few are hosted on the site. Elliott accepts that the nature of Square Enix’s fanbase means there’s a certain inevitability about the games that tend to do well, though his aim is to be in a position where it can realistically support any game in any genre. “I think as we grow, we will break out of that,” he says. “I definitely don’t want to go down a path where I’m looking at a pitch and saying, ‘Yeah, that one’s a slam-dunk because it’s a JRPG, so let’s go with that one.’ For me, that’s counter-intuitive to what we’re trying to do. My aim is to be genre-agnostic and also region-agnostic – so far the teams we’ve supported have come from the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Romania, Japan, Spain… I want us to be able to work with anybody, anywhere.”
How, then, does he see the Collective growing in the coming years? “I hope what’ll happen is that as more people understand what we’re doing, we may have the potential to help teams raise bigger amounts,” Elliott says. But I think the main growth you’ll see from us in the next year or two is where we’re publishing games and working with teams to help them get the best sales results possible.” That process has already begun with the April release of Goetia, which Square Enix will continue to support in the coming months: it made an appearance at San Diego Comic-Con, and will be on the publisher’s stand at Gamescom. Beyond that, there’s firstperson puzzler The Turing Test (due this month), with dystopian adventure
Black The Fall and anime detective story Tokyo Dark slated for 2016, too. These are busy times for Elliott and his small team, then, but he’s relishing the challenge, and is unswerving in his belief that the Collective is a genuine force for good. Playing devil’s advocate, we suggest that it may look to some like Square Enix stands to risk very little and gain much from the deals its strikes (see ‘Square numbers’ for a breakdown of the figures). His response is surprisingly forthright. “I completely understand that view,” he says. ”That was my expectation when we first announced [the initiative]. People should be cynical about this. They should be cynical about companies messing around with the indie [sector] and crowdfunding, because it’s very important for the future of the industry.”
Elliott is hopeful that over time the Collective will prove its intentions and its value to doubters but, more specifically, he’s keen it will be beneficial to the crowdfunding ecosystem. “I remember when people started first getting into it, and it felt great,” he says. “Sure, it was a bit Wild West, but it felt like you were there and along with the developer for a ride. Recently, people have become a bit disillusioned with some things. We can’t make crowdfunding 100 per cent safe, but we want to try to take as much risk out of it as possible. I think it’s vital that there’s this independent source of funding that enables teams to actually go out there and take risks and do things that investors and publishers don’t necessarily see the value in. And it’s important for us all to find good solutions to building that trust between backers and creators.”
“We can’t make crowdfunding 100 per cent safe, but we want to try to take out as much risk as possible”