March 2001 Sputnik Summary


Ken Williams and Mark Siebert talked about the founding of Sierra and Sierra today. Ken is a co-founder of Sierra and Mark Siebert is a producer currently working at Sierra. A compressed version of Ken's presentation (no movies - sorry) can be downloaded here.

 

Summary 1

Ken gave an interesting presentation, some good questions were asked, and then there was an hour or so of schmoozing. Approximately 65 people attended.

 

The majority of Ken's talk was discussion on his seventeen rules for making games. I personally found his insights into some of the bitter realities and the craft of making games quite useful. Here is my summary of his points - my paraphrasing probably doesn't exactly match his meaning, but I hope most of the important points come through:

  1. Seven second rule. This is not filmmaking. Don't make the player inactive with no way to escape for more than seven seconds.
  2. Games must have "Wow" value - from ten feet away.
  3. Notwithstanding #2, gameplay comes first. Outpost sold well, and made Sierra 400,000 new enemies.
  4. You need a business plan. This will tell you that you need to net four times your development costs - including overhead, QA, etc. - to break even.
  5. Your team must be passionate.
  6. Lead, don't follow.
  7. There's money in the niches.
  8. You need a hook - advertising has little effect, but PR works.
  9. Shoot your own dogs (see #3) - don't ship them.
  10. The first ten minutes must be great. Many critical people - buyers, sales clerks, reviewers, some consumers - will never get beyond it. Don't save everything for later. And have an attract mode!
  11. I don't know what is supposed to go here.
  12. Marketing begins in R&D.
  13. Surprise the player - hide special things to add replay value and a reason to explore.
  14. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Under design and save time for polish. If management makes you ship something unfinished, it's your fault for not leaving time to finish it.
  15. Don't copy
  16. Think series or, best of all, perennial
  17. Even if you win, you lose - it's a brutal, hit based business.

Personally I think that #10 and #14 spoke to me the most. I've seen too many products with a terrible out-of-the-box experience, and too many projects that fail to finish something large, instead of finishing something small.

 

Summary 2

Another summary, anonymously contributed...
Disclaimer: the following are edited, non-verbatim, notes from the Q&A session. Any errors, due to the author hearing what he wanted to hear, instead of what Ken Williams actually said, are entirely the author's fault.

 

Q & A

Q. Consoles vs. PC?

A. We got focused on market-share in the PC market. We didn't want to give up #1 status in PC market. Putting 20% of R&D into console would probably have lost us #1 position in PC. PC designers who have been making games for 10 years are going to get a rude wakeup on Xbox.

 

Q. Top three things you would change about how you ran Sierra?

A. Hardest thing was running it as a public company. Biggest mistake was probably going public. Having to ship product that were 99% done just to meet the quarter. Shipped products (like Outpost) that probably should have been thrown away. Letting Sierra get too big was a mistake. Thought division concept would work, but couldn't find division heads that were as passionate about product as Ken. So it didn't really work.

 

Q. What is your dog criteria?

A. Anything that turns off a customer so they don't want to buy a game again. Doesn't play right. Doesn't feel right.

 

Q. Massively Multiplayer Games?

A. Suspect Ultima Online loses money. It goes for a fringe crowd. You got to do it, but you can't bet your company. You can spend 10% of your R&D betting on big hits. Guess ERTS lost $5 to $10M on Ultima Online. Most people are afraid of the social experience.

 

Q. What are you doing now?

A. Spend summers in France. Winters in Mexico. Roberta is thinking of doing small game with Ken coding.

 

Q. When you were private, did you ever suffer a cash crunch?

A. Started running out of checking account. Venture capitalist called and convinced Ken to take money. Two subsequent rounds, and then took it public. Don't think VCs want to fund game companies right now. People don't realize that distribution is king. If Ken were making a game today, he would go to ERTS or Sierra for distribution. Wal-Mart is only going to buy from five labels. As a developer, approach a publisher, and try to keep trademark, brand names, and sequels for yourself.

 

Q. I'm trying to start a development group. Any advice?

A. The sure-fire way to win (as a developer) is to give them something that floors them. Half-Life came in with something that just floored us.

 

Q. What did you look for in prospective hires?

A. As the company got bigger, I didn't get to hire anyone. I was only hiring divisional managers, which happens only every five years or so.

 

Bio

Ken Williams was CEO of Sierra On-Line Inc., which he founded in 1979 and guided through its acquisition in 1996 (for approximately $1 billion) after eight years as a public company. At the time of the sale, Sierra On-Line was the leading developer and publisher of entertainment/consumer software for personal computers worldwide. Mr. Williams continued with Sierra as its CEO until early 1998 when he started an Internet communications company, www.worldstream.com, of which he remains the chairman. Mr. Williams considers himself a software developer, not a corporate bureaucrat, and was heavily involved in the games Sierra produced, including programming some himself "in the early days." Mr. Williams is married to bestselling computer game designer Roberta Williams (Kings Quest, Phantasmagoria) and has two sons. He is currently retired and divides his time between Mexico, Seattle and the south of France.

 

Mark Seibert is a producer for Sierra who has worked on a huge array of games.