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The Importance of Self-Publishing - The WoW Diary by John Staats
Wrath
Publicado
31/01/2023 a las 11:10
por
Rokman
John Staats published The WoW Diary, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of vanilla World of Warcraft back in 2018.
A campaign on BackerKit
is currently in progress, for a second printing of the beloved WoW Diary. We're excited to highlight excerpts written by John Staats during the campaign.
If you find this article interesting, consider backing The WoW Diary --
The WoW Diary on BackerKit
Below is an excerpt from The WoW Diary on the Importance of Self-Publishing, written by John Staats --
The Importance of Self-Publishing
In writing
The World of Warcraft Diary
, I sprinkled observations about self-publishing throughout the text, but I never coalesced my thoughts into a single thesis. I did this to keep the book’s focus on the development team and the project and less on my pet theories. After spending three years writing novels and studying book publishing, I can’t help but notice parallels between book and game development and how the lessons I learned at Blizzard resonate with other industries.
If I had to pick out my favorite quote from
The WoW Diary
, it would be an observation about marketing executives—a misunderstood profession, often demonized by developers and fans alike.
Marketing people are corporate intelligence officers that spend their day researching other companies on the Internet. From gossip to press releases, they study the dangers and opportunities of working with other companies, providing vital information to executives involved in negotiations. They’re needed because research like this takes time and tenacity, and most HQ officers are too busy with day-to-day operations. They prevent CEOs from making poor contracts and know corporate law. Their advice is often more practical than fear-mongering attorneys.
Top executives learn to rely on their marketing personnel.
While serving as both the Eye of Sauron and Oracle of Delphi, marketing professionals have an Achilles Heel—they believe what they read on the Internet. When they find a press release or editorial, they take it for granted. Because companies are often secretive, their knowledge base is often outdated, limiting their perspective to the rearview mirror—the past.
Development is, by definition, a futuristic endeavor. Unsurprisingly, internal discoveries often clash with whatever potluck information marketing people uncover. Companies should never apply marketing intel to development projects—especially those directed to the entertainment industry, whose capricious audience follows trends and cycles.
Executives without first-hand experience in their field often depend on marketing people before committing money to projects, and that’s when the wheels fall off the wagon. If the top people are generic business professionals and not nerds, their chances of success are scant.
This brings us to Mike Morhaime, Blizzard’s prototypical nerd CEO.
When I joined Blizzard in October 2000, I’d seen Mike in the hallway, walking from meeting to meeting, putting out fires, addressing questions, and doing things that presidents typically do. The first time I’d heard him speak was at the company’s regular end-of-the-month birthday announcements. Wearing a rainbow-dyed afro wig, he shouted names for people to come up and stand behind the cake. As WoW staffed up, he expressed his amazement that Blizzard surpassed two hundred employees.
My first interaction with Mike involved a faux pas which I’ll relate for your amusement. At the company-wide birthday party, Mike announced “Blizzard Movie Night.” The movie was
Strange Brew
, a dopey comedy I’d seen many times before. I went anyway because I had nowhere else to go on a Friday night. It was my first week in California, and I lived out of a hotel until my belongings arrived from the East Coast, so I looked forward to meeting and greeting employees from other teams. Of the eight people who showed up, Mike Morhaime was among them.
We gathered at Blizzard’s cinematics screening room, a windowless conference room put together by the company’s AV guru, Joeyray Hall. The space included a digital projector, black leather couches, and beanbag chairs—enough for about twenty people.
Operational problems delayed the event. Mike and Joeyray fiddled with the AV equipment for fifteen minutes with no success, and it looked like the movie night was a bust.
Colin Murray was one of the few people I knew in the room. He was a Team 2 programmer and an all-around smart guy, so he offered to help. To everyone’s amusement, Colin found the problem in seconds, rescuing the screening. Mike and Joeyray stood by, arms crossed, shaking their heads, shocked that Colin had fixed the problem so quickly. Colin returned to his seat, basking in their astonishment.
The few people who hadn’t given up on the movie applauded. It was my first week working with programmers, so I complimented Colin on his smarts. “All we needed was a programmer to save the day!” Immediately, the room groaned at what I thought was an innocuous comment. I was the only person in the room who didn’t realize why Mike looked uncomfortable. I didn’t know he was an accomplished programmer.
The implication was clear. Our down-to-earth CEO was a “suit.” When Collin explained what was so funny, I cringed and apologized, but Mike Morhaime smiled good-naturedly at the ribbing. We enjoyed
Strange Brew
, but it was Blizzard’s last Friday night screening.
Mike Morhaime hoped to contribute code to every Blizzard game, a goal I hadn’t learned about until years later. WoW’s codebase was so massive that he didn’t have enough time to make significant contributions. Mike, the programmer, made way for Mike, the CEO.
Hopefully, this self-effacing anecdote of old-school Blizzard illustrates not just Mike Morhaime’s passion for making games, but also that it exemplifies his desire to be part of the process.
Long after putting my foot in my mouth, I asked Mike how Blizzard seemed to succeed so often because there didn’t seem to be anything magical about Blizzard—it operated like any other sensible company. And yet, while other companies and titles struggled,
Starcraft
and
Diablo 2
reached unparalleled sales, and
Warcraft 3
looked like another hit. I still remember Mike’s answer. “Self-publishing. Self-publishing gives us control to hide our mistakes, exploit internal discoveries, and polish our games. Iteration is everything.”
When I didn’t quite understand, he explained the traditional approach to development. Typically, publishers give studios money to make games because games are so expensive. Since so many projects fail, publishers are nervous about how a studio spends its money.
The central flaw with the publishing model is investors have limited means of appraising new products. Development is, by definition, something new. Unlike other commercial ventures, the target audiences for movies, books, games, and music can only evaluate finished work. As a result, producers, publishers, and investors in the entertainment industry suffer a high failure rate.
Publishers are investors, not nerds immersed in gaming culture, so they only know what their marketing experts tell them. Marketing professionals are tireless researchers, making them experts in other companies. Since they never get their hands dirty, they’re unaware of context or specifics—but too often, the devil is in the details. As I’ve pointed out, marketing people only know what’s in the rearview mirror. They don’t play games, read fan forums, or hang out on Discord channels. They comb through company websites, press releases, and mainstream media.
And because investing in computer games costs so much money, publishers involve as many departments as possible—opinions and information warp with every meeting like a game of Telephone. By the time a consensus reaches the ears of developers, it’s often bizarre and nonsensical. And because so many business people have signed off on the direction, the worker bees have no one to argue with when they receive terrible feedback, decisions, and instructions.
Blizzard’s key advantage was keeping suits out of development, which kept the process flexible enough to hide mistakes while having time to explore when the dev team stumbled onto “fertile ground.” Fertile ground sometimes leads to new gameplay—the holy grail of game development. If a game offers unique gameplay, it can revolutionize an industry.
WoW’s biggest surprise was the power of quests. Quests expanded gameplay beyond the simplistic monster grind, becoming a potent attraction to casual players. Blizzard never budgeted WoW for quest development, but when devs discovered the “fertile ground,” the decision to hire half a dozen became a no-brainer.
As with WoW, game studios often stumble upon fertile ground only after the game is playable—near the tail-end of the dev cycle. Studios are likely behind schedule and over budget, straining relations with the publisher, who usually wants to cut their losses and ship the game as soon as possible. Convincing a publisher to spend more money to change direction is a tough argument. A self-publisher doesn’t need to make this case with anyone.
Computer game devs aren’t the only ones plagued by marketing decisions.
When TSR, makers of Dungeons and Dragons, sold their company to a non-gamer, it made bizarre marketing decisions. They invested in simplified versions of D&D, targeting the eight-year-old audience. The company shifted its comics lines to bookstores, where its fans couldn’t find them.
Self-publishing isn’t just a way to avoid publishing’s weaknesses. It has its advantages. It motivates creators to push themselves, as someone with ownership interest will work harder to polish a product bearing their name.
The first person to embrace the principles of self-publishing was a man named Walt Disney. Though he wasn’t an animator, artist, or writer, Walt understood how to succeed in a competitive marketplace. “We can always beat them with quality.”
A hundred years ago, cartoons were so expensive they required investors. After success with a 1920s cartoon series called
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
, Disney couldn’t negotiate for more profits from Universal, who owned the Oswald license. Instead, Disney’s backers smelled weakness. They cut payments completely and poached most of his staff away. Such are the perils of publishing.
After years of fighting with studios and distributors, Walt saved enough to work on his own IP. Disney’s pared-down studio couldn’t compete in volume, so he focused on polish and innovation.
Steamboat Willie
was the first such cartoon milestone. Disney mortgaged everything he owned in bank loans to pay for effects engineers and a seventeen-person orchestra during an era when sound was controversial in the film industry. There was no sound editing, so the entire take needed to be perfect. Walt synchronized his characters’ movements to the music, using a bouncing ball as a tempo in the seven-minute cartoon. For hours, the orchestra recorded the music to the moving images projected on a wall, synchronizing film and music for the first time in history.
It took other studios a year to reverse engineer the process, but by then, children at nickelodeon theaters across America clamored for Disney’s creations. The first Mickey Mouse Club was a grass-roots nickname given by projectionists and theater owners who didn’t know how else to describe the furor. When theaters played other cartoons, the children in the audience chanted for Mickey Mouse. Kids preferred to spend their Saturdays watching reruns of Disney’s cartoons rather than newer ones of inferior quality.
Instead of pocketing the profits of Mickey Mouse, Walt brought animals to his studios so his artists could study natural movement and bone structure. Disney’s Silly Symphonies featured anatomically correct animals, bringing artistic credibility to cartoons. He turned the animation world upside down with
The Three Little Pigs
, whose theme song
Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Wolf
echoed the gritty sentiment of the depression.
Not content to rinse and repeat his success with Silly Symphonies, Disney pushed his studio for four years to the brink of bankruptcy, making the world’s first feature-length cartoon
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
. With character design, realistic movement, and emotion, he showed animation had more potential than gags and childish songs. Snow White falling to a poisoned apple brought adult audiences to tears, an unheard-of reaction. Walt Disney’s obsessive pursuit of quality proved fantasy films could produce genuine drama.
This is the power of self-publishing. While studio heads have gambled on extensive projects before, none were close enough to the nuts and bolts of development to revolutionize an industry. It takes nerds like Walt Disney to set the bar.
Creator-owned comics and independent presses toppled the Marvel and DC duopoly. Small publishers covered subjects and reached audiences that the Big Two couldn’t. But rising tides lift all boats. Marvel and DC started paying royalties and launched creator-friendly imprints to capitalize on the wave. Like Disney’s cartoons, creator-owned comics forced the ossified comics industry to evolve.
Crowdfunding allows tabletop board game designers to create games with unheard-of production values. Self-publishers do it because they love games, so the industry isn’t plagued with non-nerds gumming up the market.
For the past three years, I’ve busied myself applying Blizzard’s development methods to a new genre—fantasy books. With a self-publishing mindset, I’m identifying a genre’s weaknesses and annoyances in pursuit of producing a better product. I write daily, attend writing conventions, and watch YouTube channels about authors and editors to learn about book publishing.
Today’s authors must weigh the pros and cons of self-publishing versus traditional routes. Amazon’s distribution monopoly erases the advantages of traditional publishers in all ways except one—top publishers are a mark of quality. Self-published books are infamous for typos, inconsistencies, bad writing, and pulpy scenes, while texts by traditional publishers are polished.
Recent shifts in book publishing echo lessons I’ve learned from Blizzard and Disney. In the past year, prominent book editors have left the Big Four publishers for freelance work. One reason for leaving is they spend too little time editing. Instead, their job entails unnecessary paperwork and meetings.
While no one likes bureaucracy, the biggest reason for leaving comes from a recent shift in decision-making.
Traditionally, editors put up with corporate drudgery because it allows them to champion their favorite authors. A good editor becomes a writer’s partner. They discover them and shepherd them through the maze of corporate publishing toward success. An author’s success becomes the company’s, and talented editors improve a publisher’s batting average.
For the longest time, book publishing seemed to be the one argument against the worth of self-publishing. A top publisher’s logo was a hallmark of quality that customers considered when weighing in on their purchasing decision.
This brings me to why top book editors are leaving in droves. Marketing executives now choose which books to publish. Instead of printing and distributing their best authors, publishers are driving by the rearview mirror. Marketing, not quality, decides what gets printed. The top publishers are chasing yesterday’s success, dooming their long-term credibility.
And because editors are freelancing, top publishers have fewer people looking through the submission slush piles for talented writers. Without editors championing the best work, top publishers are watering down their mark of quality. When readers learn the big publishing houses are out of touch, they’ll likely collapse.
If you’re considering a career in the entertainment industry, trust your instincts. If dumb money turns you down, self-publishing offers a viable avenue to success.
If you enjoyed this article, there are many more like it in my book, The World of Warcraft Diary, written from the lessons learned while making WoW.
I am crowdfunding the printing of its second edition
.
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