Digital storefronts, Steam’s Early Access program, crowdfunding, and community involvement have led to a renewed PC gaming market, one in which opportunity abounds for both established developers, new enterprises, and indie studios.
The French strategy-game outfit Amplitude Studios is one of a legion of game companies that has taken advantage of these new models. Fan feedback influenced all three of its releases: Endless Space, Endless Legend, and Dungeon of the Endless. Legend and Dungeon were both in Early Access, and Amplitude made tweaks as players found bugs and other issues with the titles. This not only helped the games sell well but also earn respectable reviews on Metacritic.
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(And yes, we also learned how How a ‘beer-together’ factored into Amplitude’s Endless strategy games development.)
Here is part two of the interview.
GB: What do you find is the strongest region for your games as far as sales?
Romain De Waubert and Mathieu Girard: The U.S.
De Waubert: If you take North America as a whole, it’s something like 45 percent. Canada plus the U.S.
GB: Here in the United States, we tend to think that Eastern Europe is the big, thriving market for strategy games.
Above: Amplitude Studios’ chief operating officer Romain de Waubert.
De Waubert: It is, definitely. It’s a big region for us. But the thing is, there are two ways of looking at it. You can look at units and you can look at revenue. The U.S and Canada are the biggest one for both. In terms of units, eastern Europe is very interesting as well, but the problem that we have is—We knew we were small and we had to focus. Therefore we decided to work in English. English is the first language we used in development. Our writer is an American. Everything is written in English first. Our communication with the community is in English. If you want to penetrate some territories, first you need to speak in their language. That’s where we’re still too small. You can see that we’re very strong in all the territories where English is the first language, or the Nordic countries where most people speak English well.
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GB: Your business model is pretty much PC development, then Early Access, then release. How important is Early Access to you?
De Waubert: Huge. Again, it’s something Mathieu and I knew we wanted to do early on. We wanted to create, before we even heard this name for it, through live development. We wanted to work live, in front of the players. They wouldn’t just be an audience. They could be actors in the game’s development. We could create games together. But for that, they need to be able to play the game before it’s finished. Also, this ties to some past development experiences we’ve had, where it was only when the game shipped that knew it had some flaws. We could have fixed those if we knew about them early on. It’s so frustrating to find out about something like that after a game has shipped. That’s why we’re so happy to be able to share the game early in development. We still focus on making the game as complete as we can when we share it with the community. But it’s restricted somewhat in scope.
GB: With Early Access, what do you feel is more important? Is it the feedback you get to make your games better or the revenue you get to help make it better?
Above: Amplitude Studios’ CEO Mathieu Girard.
Girard: Feedback.
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De Waubert: We’re actually fighting a bit with some other developers to try to make them understand that they shouldn’t expect revenue from Early Access. It’s great to have revenue, but the worst thing for a player is to buy a game in Early Access and never see it finished. When that happens once, twice, three times, they’ll never go back to Early Access and that hurts everyone. When we started, first we raised money on our own and then we went to Early Access. Before we went to Early Access, we knew we had enough money to finish the game. Early Access, we didn’t even think about the revenue we would make from that. What we wanted was the feedback – how we could improve the game, how we could make it better, what we missed, how we could make it more interesting, what features could make the game smoother and more enjoyable. Does it work across all machines? And so on. Those are the kinds of things we try to get from our Early Access.
GB: When you’re talking about that feedback, what was the most interesting piece of feedback you got for any of your games, if you recall?
Girard: There’s feedback and then there’s the fact that the community, through the Games Together program, can participate in the creation and addition of content for the game. One example is the Cultist faction we added to Endless Legend, which was designed by the community. One of our fans designed the gameplay and the lore for the faction, and then some artists designed the units, the buildings, the ships, the logos. Based on that, we finalized it and implemented the real gameplay. We made real 3D assets for the units and buildings. We finalized the concept art. But it was very close to what the fans had created on the Games Together forum. It was really impressive, and it was part of the eight factions delivered with the released game last fall.
De Waubert: This is the way we work. Games Together, when we tell them—In a week when we don’t know what to do, we’ll ask them what we should do. We allow them to vote on things we’ll do in that week or during that time. For us it’s difficult not knowing exactly what we’re going to work on at a specific moment, but we know that it’s so interesting for the community to decide for themselves what we’ll work on, what the priorities will be, what it will be like. They feel so much closer to the game’s development. It’s worth leaving a piece of the game to them so they can make it their own.
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Girard: We make very complex games, very deep and rich, and it’s amazing to see the help that the fans can bring by giving their opinions on, say, the tuning of a faction. They make amazing reports with lots of detail. We can use that to check against the code and improve the game. It has a huge value for us.
De Waubert: Mathieu and I, we both worked on strategy games before, but we never worked on 4X games. That scared us a bit. We were big fans of 4X, but we weren’t 4X developers. That’s why we needed Early Access. We needed to attract some of the best 4X players in the world so they could help us and share with us what they need, what they like, and how to tune the game by playing and improving it. Without them we would never have reached this level of quality, and for us it’s really all about quality.
Above: Amplitude Studios’ Games2gether portal.
GB: On the Games Together page, I see that you have a minor faction hero biography for a character named Markiza in Endless Legend. Your fans, they voted on that?
De Waubert: Yes.
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GB: Who wrote this? Was it a player who wrote this, or one of your staffers?
Girard: That was our staff.
Above: A late-game map in Endless Space.
De Waubert: We can have a lot of different votes. We can have votes on priorities. On our level, Mathieu and I, we have a certain amount of things we want to work on. They all come to us. We ask them which one they want to see in the game first. Then the community decides on that priority. Sometimes it’s like what you’re talking about. We could create this hero or that hero. We write all that up and they decide. Sometimes, like with the Cultists, we tell them, you know what, guys? We saved a faction for you and we want you to be able to create it. Then they go in the forums and discuss that. They vote among themselves. Then we take the best ideas they come up with in the forums and we put them up to a vote and ask the community.
Girard: Sometimes this can all be pretty scary. We have personal tastes as well. When you see, say, the three factions picked, you have to commit to what the community’s decided. Sometimes that can be scary. When the game is nearing release, we’re asking our VIPs – the core of the community – things like, we want to release on this date and we want to fix this and this and that. Do you think it’s okay to release? They take a vote and it has to be a majority of those VIPs saying we can release. We did that for Endless Space, Endless Legend, and Dungeon of the Endless. It’s scary, but you know that the community is going to support you in the decisions you make.
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De Waubert: It’s very interesting to learn to let go in that situation.
GB: Becoming a strategy game studio as you have, what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about making a strategy game?
Girard: When it comes to development, A.I. is very complex. In 4X games it’s not just a few game systems you have to make work. It’s 10 or 15 game systems, and each of them has a different web in place. You must make the AI very specific, so you need different AI systems that work in cooperation. Also, when you develop a game that takes 300 turns to finish, it’s hard to quickly get to an endgame situation in any other way than just simulating what goes on. It can be time-consuming to tune a strategy game because of the sheer size of the content. Also, as opposed to other games–In an action game, a platformer, you can easily build a vertical slice of the game. It’s possible to build a prototype very early on that shows pretty clearly what the game will be. But with 4X, you must have almost all of the systems working. Your prototype is practically the alpha version of the game. Sometimes you have to wait a long time to be reassured that the choices you made are the right ones.
Above: Endless Space’s late-game tech tree.
De Waubert: Going back to the size of the game, making such huge games—It’s difficult to have the same level of quality all along, because of the time required. Sometimes you want to show off every single game feature in the first few hours of the game, so you don’t leave enough new stuff to discover toward the end. You have to learn to keep stuff for later. That’s something we learned on Endless Legend, where we had a lot of cool stuff going on at the beginning. People were overwhelmed by all this new stuff. But then it’s the same stuff until the end of the game. We’re improving on that now with expansion packs, so we can add more stuff to the later game.
Girard: Another aspect is that strategy games are usually very systemic in terms of features. We want to also have a strong narrative component to the game. We have a great universe and we want to inject it into different parts of the game – not only the names of buildings or units, but also things like quests, events, narrative arcs, stuff like that. It’s a big challenge, because you can’t have a fixed storyline in a strategy game. We’re working on finding new ways to inject story elements into the game.
De Waubert: For me it’s not exactly the same thing. It’s just that when we started working on the game, me and Mathieu, the first thing we knew we wanted to do was to — we were looking at 4X games out there, strategy games out there, and for many of them — not all of them, but most of them – they were extremely hardcore, not very visually appealing. The universe wasn’t very deep. Most of the time they were games for programmers, people who loved Excel spreadsheets. That’s what we wanted to work on. Let’s imagine that the people who love these games aren’t just programmers or accountants. They could be all kinds of people. They’re interested in more than just numbers. That’s something we learned and proved with Legend. People are very interested in things like great music, great stories, great visuals, great characters. It’s not just about numbers. Of course, strategy is at the core of the game, and that’s where you need a community to make sure that aspect is solid and deep. But you can have more than that. If you look at the time we spent on the interface, making the game more accessible, more agreeable to control and understand — again, that’s because we wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a programmer’s game.
GB: Are you going to make an RPG now that you’ve made a roguelike?
De Waubert: We’ve gotten that question quite a few times lately. But no. We don’t have any plans for an RPG. To make a good RPG–We saw a very good one come out a few weeks ago in Pillars of Eternity. Everyone’s been playing it around the office. It can make you want to make one, but at the same time you realize how huge these games are. I’m very respectful of what they achieved there. I don’t think I’m ready to attack that kind of challenge yet. It’s very humbling.