Indie devs, this is how the Square Enix Collective works
Early this year, Square Enix launched a pilot for the Square Enix Collective. The community platform was meant to showcase indie game concepts to fans, who would then decide if these ideas were worthy of being crowdfunded or not. In a nutshell, it was Square Enix offering a proverbial hand to independent developers.
The Collective is built around giving developers power in terms of choice. It doesn’t take any IP, and doesn’t interfere with creative control. The team behind it really just wants to help developers self-publish. The feedback phase, during which developers pitch and get their games showcased on the Collective website, is free with no strings attached. Should your game make it to the crowdfunding stage, Square Enix asks for just five percent of net crowdfunding raised, and that’s if the crowdfunding goal is met.
The project panned out pretty well, with the Collective going live in April 2014. Since then, it has accepted a total of 30 games from 15 different countries. Most notably, the Collective helped the game Moon Hunters break its funding goal by 220 percent.
(See: Here are some alarming facts that suggest Kickstarter game campaigns are running out of steam)
However, the Square Enix Collective is still a pretty hush-hush affair, possibly due to how it is targeted more towards the Western world. We spoke with project lead Phil Elliot to find out how it’s doing.
A snapshot of the current website.
To Elliot, the Collective is still “learning”, in spite of its success in helping Moon Hunters get off the ground. It currently gets around 100,000 pageviews per month, though Elliot was coy when asked about how many actual users there were on the platform.
“So far we’ve mainly focused on developer outreach, to explain what we’re trying to do and how we’re approaching it—because, clearly, without game pitches there’s nothing for people to look at,” he explains.
Elliot has personally spent a fair bit of time on the road at events both in Europe and North America to push the platform to developers, but notes that he also focuses mainly on events and conferences that reflect their regions most effectively. Over time, he says he hopes to be able to support more of these events.
Still, his hard work has paid off. Elliot shares that the Collective now has a “pretty good momentum” when it comes to new pitches getting submitted, and that the team has learned a lot about how to support funding campaigns. The Collective has an ongoing partnership with Indiegogo which grants it a Partner page and also allows it to stream the ongoing funding campaign back into the Collective website. It also works with Kickstarter, so developers have a choice of which funding platform they prefer.
Teams who accept the Collective’s offer of support through funding get help and advice on their crowdfunding campaign, and Square Enix does as much as possible to raise awareness and build an audience for them. Developers may also choose to have their game distributed by Square Enix when it’s ready, but Elliot says there’s also nothing “forcing” them to work together.
A gif from Kitfox’s Moon Hunters.
The Moon Hunters development studio, Kitfox, had already shipped a game via Steam before, so it was hands-off for the Collective from the funding campaign onward. While one of the aims for the Collective is to find new talent to work with, or even new IP to invest in, that also depends very much on whether the targeted developer wants to go in that direction.
Though glancing through the Collective may make you think it’s skewed towards Metroidvania games at the moment, Elliot shares that the most important thing for the team when deciding which games get through, is the quality of the pitch. “That’s what people are going to judge first of all,” he says. “You might have the best game concept in the world, but if the presentation isn’t so good, it’s much harder for the community to see the potential.”
(See: The Asian developer’s dilemma: Kickstarter or Indiegogo?)
Because a good number of games have been hopping aboard the platform, Elliot says that the team is now working on letting gamers know about what the Collective is doing, and how they can help developers coming through the platform with their votes and feedback.
One interesting thing about the Collective is that it doesn’t have actual user numbers when it comes to determining votes. Elliot says that though the team didn’t know what to expect in terms of vote numbers at the start, he also didn’t want the number of votes to be the deciding factor in whether or not a Collective campaign was successful or not, because that would lead to the question: how many votes do you need to be successful?
Although enough pitches have come through the Collective’s doors that the team has enough data to set a target for “success,” Elliot still thinks judging a campaign by the number of votes it garners is wrong. “We’ve seen different genres or types or games achieve different numbers of votes—but what if there’s a lovely game concept that just falls short?”
An example of how the percentages work.
He says that if only the proportion of votes are looked at, there’s still a good indication of popularity, and the team would be less likely to marginalize more niche games or genres. Ultimately, every part of the Collective platform is still up for evaluation on an ongoing basis. Since the project is experimental, there are no templates to follow, and flexibility is important. Elliot says that the team accepts that change to some parts of the process will be inevitable, but also notes that the voting system seems to be working well right now.
While the Collective is a platform very much focused on the Western world, it’s also accepting global submissions. Philippine studio Ferryman recently submitted a successful pitch for its upcoming game, Belial: Art of the Devil. Now that you’re armed with the knowledge that the pitch is the most important thing for getting aboard the Collective, will we soon see your game on it?
P.S. More handy tips can be found here.
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The post Indie devs, this is how the Square Enix Collective works appeared first on Games in Asia.
The post Indie devs, this is how the Square Enix Collective works appeared first on Games in Asia.
