“We're just a bunch of starving kids working from home, basically,” Miller said. In its first month under the Apogee publishing model, the game brought in $20,000. Hall, Romero and the Carmacks developed Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons in ten weeks. So I had to promise them - I had to pay a bunch of money upfront to get their first game, Commander Keen, and I had to promise them some guarantees.” “John Carmack and John Romero and Tom Hall, they were completely in disbelief that this whole shareware thing could work. “It's funny, though, that the people who were most opposed to this idea were the guys that eventually became id Software,” Miller said. People would call in, make the order, give us their credit card, and we shipped the game.” And eventually we added an 800-number, which was standard for the day. “But it worked out well enough to where we were making a lot of money that way. “At first they would just send my company a check, which is a pretty high hurdle,” Miller said. And it worked, even without the conveniences of online banking. It’s a familiar system nowadays, but 33 years ago, the idea of episodic releases and free game demos was fresh. “And some small percentage of these people - we estimated 1 to 2 percent, there was really no way to track - would finish the game and think, ‘Wow, I really like this, I want more of this,’ and here's the big splash screen telling the person exactly how to order it.” “We were using all these platforms to freely distribute our games and people were downloading them by the hundreds of thousands, in some cases by the millions,” Miller said. It was 1987, and Kingdom of Kroz was the first game published under the Apogee banner. The other two episodes would be available to purchase only. Miller changed tactics - he broke the game into three chunks that he called “episodes,” and released just the first one on the boards. It was an ASCII-based adventure game with 60 levels, much larger than his previous efforts. The donation model clearly wasn’t sustainable as a full-time gig.Īnd then he made Kingdom of Kroz. Other developers enjoyed them, but the games ended up netting Miller less than $10,000 combined. “It was like, ‘What do I do? I guess I'll just throw these online because I don't want them just to rot on my computer drive,’” Miller said. Miller, approaching his mid-twenties and obsessively building video games in his spare time, designed two text adventures and attempted to have them published by Infocom, a prominent producer of interactive fiction at the time. They employed an early version of the “free to play” model, known at the time as “shareware.” Initially, developers would publish their games, usually in full, and ask for donations from other BBS users. At the time, burgeoning developers congregated on pre-internet bulletin board systems like CompuServe, GEnie and Prodigy, trading programming tricks and sharing their work. Miller launched Apogee in 1987 as a way to publicize the ASCII-based games he was building out of his childhood home in Texas. Epic also promises to cover up to 100 percent of a game’s development costs, including salaries, advertising and publishing fees. In late March, Epic Games launched a multiplatform publishing initiative touting “the most developer-friendly terms in the industry.” Under this deal, developers are guaranteed 50 percent of a game’s revenue once production costs are recouped, and they retain full creative control over their own titles. Or, a huge company will simply buy the smaller studio outright, devouring its existing library and creative talent, and overseeing all of its future products. In some cases, the developer also signs away their intellectual property rights, losing creative control over the game entirely. However, in the realm of AAA publishing, it’s common for independent developers to sign contracts granting them less than 10 percent of a game’s lifetime revenue, in exchange for marketing and financial assistance from a multibillion-dollar organization. Publishing deals in the video game industry are generally kept secret, with terms hidden behind non-disclosure agreements and the threat of legal fallout.
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