Industry legend scrapped his dream project. Open-world RPG lost to publishers' „terrible offers”
Ron Gilbert quit working on an RPG due to a lack of funding and criticized modern publishers who follow rigid formulas to decide which projects are worth investing in.
Ron Gilbert has many games to his name, but he is most associated with the Monkey Island series. His latest work is the roguelike Death by Scrolling, and he previously had an idea for an RPG game that never came to fruition. The problem turned out to be the publishers.
A game not worth investing in
After Return to Monkey Island came out in 2022, Gilbert started dreaming up a big 2D open-world RPG, kind of like Zelda. However, during a conversation with ArsTechnica, he admitted that he would no longer work on it due to a lack of financial resources and time.
I just [didn’t] have the money or the time to build a big open-world game like that. You know, it’s either a passion project you spent 10 years on, or you just need a bunch of money to be able to hire people and resources.
The developer, of course, reached out to publishers who made him offers, but all of them "were just terrible." According to Gilbert, the issue was that the genre was too niche, and they didn't want to invest in it because they didn't see a big money-making opportunity.
Doing a pixelated old-school Zelda thing isn’t the big, hot item, so publishers look at us, and they didn’t look at it as ‘we’re gonna make $100 million and it’s worth investing in.' The amount of money they’re willing to put up and the deals they were offering just made absolutely no sense to me to go do this.
Publishers only want specific titles
Gilbert stated that compared to the early days of his career, many of today's publishers "are very analytics-oriented." Companies have come up with their own secret formulas to figure out if a game will make money. In his opinion, this is why "many games look exactly the same as they did a year ago."
When we were starting out, we couldn’t do that because we didn’t know what made this money, so it was, yeah, it was a lot more experimenting. I think that’s why I really enjoy the indie game market because it’s kind of free of a lot of that stuff that big publishers bring to it, and there’s a lot more creativity and you know, strangeness, and bizarreness.
Gilbert thought about using crowdfunding to raise the money. However, he concluded that even this route is not as easy as it once was. He even stated that "Kickstarter is practically dead now as a way to finance games."
What's interesting, Death by Scrolling was partly created to call out the attitudes of those publishers. The game's action takes place in a "purgatory taken over by investment bankers," and its concept was born from "looking at the world today and realizing capitalism has just taken over, and it really is the thing that’s causing the most pain for people."
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Author: Martin Bukowski
Graduate of Electronics and Telecommunications at the Gdańsk University of Technology, who decided to dedicate his life to video games. In his childhood, he would get lost in the Gothic's Valley of Mines and "grind for gold" in League of Legends. Twenty years later, games still entertain him just as much. Today, he considers the Persona series and soulslike titles from From Software as his favorite games. He avoids consoles, and a special place in his heart is reserved for PC. In his spare time, he works as a translator, is creating his first game, or spends time watching movies and series (mainly animated ones).
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