IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Activision Talks Independent Games Competition

Posted June 1, 2010 by James Brightman

You may recall that back at the D.I.C.E. Summit, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick casually mentioned a half-million dollar indie games competition without really providing any details. Now the publisher is finally ready to unveil its plan for the contest, and IndustryGamers was given the full scoop by Laird Malamed, Senior Vice President of Development. Malamed tells us why Activision felt the need to launch an indie contest, how the publisher has always fostered development culture, and he also responds to critics in light of the recent Infinity Ward mess that's tarnished Activision's name somewhat.

Before we get into the full Q&A, however, here are the basics. Activision today put out a call for submissions, and the contest is open to all independent developers located in the U.S., either individuals or teams. Developers can submit either completed or in-development games (including game concepts/proposals), and the competition will be conducted in two phases; round one takes place starting today through October 2010 with first and second place winners chosen. The first place winner will receive a cash prize of $175,000 with the second place winner receiving $75,000 to assist with the development of their game. Submissions will be accepted through August 31.

Details of the second round will be announced “at a later date.” From what we understand, round two of the contest will see another 1st and 2nd place winner chosen next March, resulting in a total of $500k in cash prizes between the two rounds.

“This competition underscores our commitment to supporting the creative spirit and innovation of developers,” said Dave Stohl, Executive Vice President of Studios at Activision. “I started my career as a software developer, so this opportunity is something I’m personally very proud to offer to the industry’s young visionaries.”

A full breakdown of the rules and how to submit is available on this Activision website.

Here's our interview with Activison:

IndustryGamers: Can you give us a sort of a brief overview of how this came together, what this contest entails and what Activision is hoping to accomplish?

Laird Malamed: If you look back historically to Activision’s history, prior to Bobby Kotick and Brian Kelly taking over the company in the early '90s, Activision was founded on the principal that game makers should be known for what they do, and it really goes to the main company beforehand, Atari, where game makers were anonymous. Activision was founded to sort of correct that. Game makers' names are on the games, and they were given credit and they were celebrated as artists.

That continued in the industry, where everyone sort of knows the history that a guy in his garage makes a great game and all of a sudden it’s published. As the industry matured and budgets got larger and production values went up, we really sort of went away from that in many ways. Yes there were some smaller games being made and web games being made, but you really had to be part of a big company, or a big independent developer to see a vision come to light. In the last two years, that sort of switched back a little bit, driven by mobile platforms and driven by greater web access, and it really seemed appropriate then for us to celebrate our roots in history, and that spirit of independent game making with this competition.

So the motivation was to tap back into our own roots in history, but also to realize that the next great game that we make may come out of somebody that started making games by themselves or in very small teams. We really want to foster that notion that it is a successful way into the industry...

That’s the motivation. The process is in the celebration of people having great ideas. This isn’t a competition around making games and winning a prize; this isn’t a festival.

The goal is that you have an idea for a game, and you submit to us a 10-page game idea. You include with that a development theme, the scope of how many people you need, how you’re going to get it done, and a budget is part of that as well. You can also submit a video or game demo if you have one already, but it is not required.

We have a panel of independent judges, and they are going to evaluate the number of submissions we get and they’ll give to us a short finalist list, and from that, the grand prizewinner and the second prizewinner will be selected. There are two phases; the first phase they are going to launch, there’s the first half of the money, and then another that starts later in the year. We decided to break it up so that people who may not have time to put everything together for this round aren’t locked out by timing. This gives people the opportunity to participate.

IG: So is the goal, in addition to the money, to give the developer a full publishing contract then?

LM: If you win, you’ve given us a first-right to publish the game. If you choose to do so, we do. The prize is really around the money. Again, fostering that independent game feeling, the winner may be for a game on a platform we don’t produce for, or maybe they don’t want to have a publisher produce it. They may have a way they want to distribute it, or they have something that is not in our areas that we publish in. So we didn't want to limit it so that you felt you had to make something we want to publish.

We’re not going to judge it on something we want to publish. We’re going to judge it on something that is original. Does it break new ground? Is it feasible? Is it cool? We have percentages that will go out with the rules on exactly how the breakdown works, and presentation is part of it as well.

We specifically didn’t do it as “is it commercially viable to us?” We’re Activision, and we have one certain way of looking at the world, and other publishers different ways, and there are lots of ways that things are seen from different points of view. And we didn’t put in that we’d publish it as a guideline, otherwise we’d be fostering people to try to guess what we like, and not what they really want to make. We really wanted to strengthen creativity of independent game makers – people who are in the industry, people that have gone off on their own, people that are aspiring to get into the industry, students that want to get into the industry. There are so many game programs now, I imagine we’ll see a lot submissions from them, which is great. That really helps foster that.

IG: I had it in my mind that the publishing deal would be the big dangling carrot for whoever is out there. So it’s interesting that the grand prizewinner could go without a publishing deal from Activision.

LM: That’s right. That really is to give flexibility to both parties. The prize money only goes so far; what if their idea goes beyond scope of the project, but they still want to get this done? So this could be a seed amount that gets them to the next stage. We really didn’t want them to have to build a game idea to the prize size. They can say, “I can get this game done, but that first $75,000 is my issue right now, because I can't hire anyone to get started, can't do a prototype to get that publishing deal.” We don’t want a bunch of mini Activision developers out of this contest. The vision will really come from creative people who think about this on their own.

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.