After the impressive reception of its back-catalog on Steam, Oddworld Inhabitants is back in the saddle with a new mission statement and another developer rereleasing some of their classics. Founder Lorne Lanning recently did an interview with GameInformer, a follow-up to an announcement interview done way back in 2005 for The Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot. The title was cancelled after the company shifted from publishing with EA, like the previous title Stranger’s Wrath, to Majesco.
Lanning says the shift happened because he felt the situation at EA was “unworkable.”
“We found that if the publishers don’t own your IP, they don’t have any incentive to push your game,” Lanning explained. “Publishers use your own company against you because they know that you have a burn rate. They know that this is your family of kids that you need to feed every month. So if they make a deal with you, then they realize, 'Oh, you know what? We should have done this thing in that deal, too,' They might start playing games with you. And then you find that your check is not showing up because they want to renegotiate.”
Unfortunately, Oddworld did not find its new publisher much better and ultimately decided to cancel Fangus.
"Yeah, we had every intention of building the game, and then the shenanigans started, so we just said, 'We’re not going to play this game. If that’s how you want to play, then we’ll go play with someone else. We’re going to take our ball and go home.' Because what I saw, down the road, eventually our IP would wind up hostilely acquired by people who cared less about it,” Lanning said. “So in Fangus, while we were still excited about it, while we were still building it, I would say it this way: Sometimes developers get fired by publishers and sometimes developers fire publishers – and that’s probably all I should say about it.”
Fangus was intended to be a hardcore title with a deep story and adult themes, despite the Oddworld franchise originally being sillier with some black humor. Lanning said the change in tone was meant to follow the trends at the time, like the rise of Grand Theft Auto, but times have once again changed.
“We are not focused on doing story games in that way anymore. That doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t license the property to another developer who does very good story games,” he said.
Instead, online and digital distribution is the way of the future for Oddworld Inhabitants, as their experiences selling on Steam were overwhelmingly positive.
“We have a lot of interest in seeing how the digital distribution mechanism really works. I’ve got to tell you, we were blown away. For the first time, we’re able to tell where our sales were coming from, how many dollars we were making per day. We never got to know who our customer was before.”
“We’re looking more at where social gaming and networking is colliding. We’re looking more at free-to-play item sales rather than $60 of product,” Lanning added. "I believe the future of gaming is going to be based more on usage – it’s more like our electrical bill.”
“If I give gamers something that’s free to play, they can get engaged – that’s like the free demo, right? But if they want to get more engaged, then they start micro-paying, so they might find after $10 into the experience, they’ve gotten plenty, and that was enough and that was fine.”
“Our focus is not to build big, long story games,” Lanning concluded. “So the idea of building another Stranger, for us personally, is not even on our radar. It’s a whole different chemistry coming. And that’s what we’re interested in.”
Developer Just Add Water is currently revamping Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath for PlayStation 3. Oddworld Inhabitants has yet to announce any new titles at this time.
