Think this game got back into the news recently as THQ bought over the rights to the game and released a graphical remaster, with an expansion soon to come. But this game was largely forgotten by the public for years. With THQ's announcement of a new DLC, I wanted to speak about its past.
The open-world fantasy action role-playing action video game Kingdoms of Amalur was funded by Curt Schilling, Major League Baseball pitcher. The project cost him a full year of his salary, and the studio that made it quickly went bust after his sponsorship ended, laying off all their employees. Personally don't have much sympathy for Schilling's losses, considering he later revealed himself to be connected to the American alt-right. But it's still a cautionary tale into just how expensive video game development is and how it can become a massive financial hole.
Thing is, based on both my personal opinion and aggregate review scores, Kingdoms of Amalur is a pretty good game. If I hadn't known how the studio ended up, I would have thought it would have sold a lot more than it did and been at least somewhat successful, much less been a money pit.
What went wrong?
I think the first problem was timing. KoA fell into the same genre, and was thus competing directly, with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one of the most highly acclaimed video games of all time, and which was barely a year old at the time KoA came out. Had KoA released today, it would have had a much larger following - not only is the games market much larger today, but it also is somewhat more tired of fantasy open world titles such as Skyrim (which has now been repackaged so many times there's a running joke in the games community about the future of gaming involving Skyrim-playable toasters and smart fridges).
The second thing was the cost. Open-world RPGs are extremely expensive to make, easily climbing into the tens of millions, because the entire model of video game revolves around artistic and graphical fidelity and scale (which is very labor-intensive). The number of copies needed to break even is so exorbitant that even if your game is good - heck, even if your game is amazing - it may simply be unfeasible solely because the target audience is too small or you don't have a large enough marketing budget after paying millions in development costs.
So what are the lessons here?
- Start small. Don't begin with your dream. Make smaller prototypes and build up.
- Timing is key. Even if your idea is great, if it releases at the same time as someone else with more money releases a similar project, you will lose by sheer scale.
- Don't build an open world video game, lol (unless you've got the funding of a whole corporation)
