The indie publisher that’s impressed me the most the last few years has been Annapurna. They really seem to know how to foster indie talent and give them the time and money and resources they need. Hopefully Dunkey will be like them! :)
(Other ones that come to mind are Curve, Devolver, Humble Bundle and Team 17. All have had lots of good games released in the last few years).
Maybe. I’d hazard that running a profitable YouTube channel (even one with 7 million followers) is a far cry from overseeing all the different units involved in making a video game.
I hope this goes well for him; if it were me, I’d stop at “branding” and hand things off to an experienced executive. I love Dunkey’s accent, his sense of humor, and his appreciation for the medium. I’m not sure I’d want to work for him.
I think people are conflating publishing and development. I would suspect this is going to be very similar to yogscast games, where they publish games from indie devs and promote them on their channels by playing them on twitch and youtube.
It can be much, much worse.
The post-mortem on this company afterwards should be pretty good, anyway.
I mean, both businesses basically revolve around marketing to the same set of people.
Publisher has a pretty big project management aspect too of course, and it gets very expensive when that goes wrong.
Yeah! I can only speak to their catalog, but to me they’re like the A24 of games. I at least pay attention to anything they put out.
Yeah, one day there will be a fascinating story about how Annapurna Interactive was more successful at its mission than Annapurna Pictures.
Every time I see Annapurna’s name I have to convince my brain not to read it as
(Anna Puma, and Una Puma, of Dominion Tank Police)
Shit, I didn’t even know they had a different division that did film. Looking at their releases there’s both great ones and some of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
Their list of releases pretty much looks like hits all the way down. That Terminator movie was supposedly pretty bad, I guess.
I guess I shouldn’t have said “successful at its mission” because they’ve released a lot of good films–and I assume that’s their mission. They’ve also reportedly been in dire financial straits, and that’s after having been bankrolled by Larry Ellison (Megan Ellison, his daughter, is the CEO of Annapurna).
“These days I feel like I play nearly every game that comes out… I play so many games that my first name is ‘video game’, okay? I understand what kind of ideas always work, what ideas never work, what kind of ideas are fresh or need to come back and what is extremely played out.”
is he serious? yes he is!
Ive checked out this guys videos before since my nephews send them to me on discord (for the memes!)… hes a clever guy but hes far from any authority on gaming… he seems to have grown a hugeass ego in the last few years…and its not surprising considering his ‘reviews’ get like 4+ million views each. Something to take notice! But if you look at the games he reviews… there’s hardly ANY indie games, its all the same AAA dreck ppl on twitter scream about. I dont need somebody to tell me the latest Sony exclusive is so damn good. jeezus… we already have crappy IGN and the Kotakus for Sonys propaganda!
regardless i think the guys a moron … its like that other guy thinking he can make the best BR game ever made… dr disrespect…so much hubris makes my head spin! SO MUCH SPINNING!
Imagine thinking that playing huge numbers of finished games means you can be an authority on unfinished games, prototypes, or early pitches
Why not? It’s what the average “gamer” thinks, judging by most of the “critical reviews” left on Steam, reddit, etc
It turns out that playing games and talking crap about them afterwards is a really easy thing to do (e.g. this entire forum’s purpose?), but some people seem to think it’s a rare skill that they all posses.
Yeah I spent some time in a game dev tutoring role, and it was one of the common things many kids assumed. Heard these so many times:
Dunkey seems well out of his teens though. :)
When we started our Game Studio some back around 2004, we would often get students with those sorts of delusions. It did not take too long to beat that out of them, though. They soon came to realize, those who didn’t run screaming from us, that making games was freakin’ hard. Today our Game Studio is probably the most challenging collection of programs on campus, given the combo of technical proficiency, interdisciplinary collaboration, and communications skills it requires. More and more of our students are cross-training, too, as it were; designers with a minor in programming, that sort of thing.
You just described Curt Schilling, who found out the fastest way to lose $100 million is to try to make an MMO.
Sounds like you’re doing it right!
Ours was a borderline scam, targeting more vulnerable lower socio-economic groups with promises of free hardware if they signed up for a course in Game Dev.
Since the Government basically paid for tertiary education via income-tested loan, for a lot of them it was a way to get income (and a free laptop) without having to show they were seeking employment. And they thought it would be easy and fun, making games!
Us experienced game industry guys tried hard to make it actually work and have some value for them but it was a losing battle, eventually the place folded amidst a kind of expose of that whole scam-education sector.
It’s the same deal with mod projects. It never begins as something modest. There’s usually a dreamer without any discernable skill who shows up and tries to rally support to remake a classic game on X engine with all the latest bells and whistles. Typically, they’re keen to be project leader, which to them means taking on more of a creative visionary/absent mentor role while pitching new features regardless of scope or feasibility. Iteration is boring - give me the new hotness!
These are lucky if they even progress to the stage of having a disappointing soda can render or a fanciful project summary on Moddb that boasts of incredible levels that haven’t been designed yet before they return to the ether.
