DayZ made me a great deal of money
This forced me to answer a big question: what will I do with my life now that I can do nearly anything? It completely changed my life within a few short years, everything I had before was gone and replaced with new things. New people, new places, new experiences, new opportunities. Overnight my old life was discarded like dust in the wind and replaced with a new one.
DayZ is an unreconciled emotion for me. It was enormously commercially successful. It helped ArmA2 sell millions of units, and the standalone itself has done over three million units at full price barely a year after it went into early access. For three years it consumed me. The desire to make something worthy of it’s promise versus the reality that it needed to be done now, with old technology, using the old ways of making games. The drama of that game, and its development, is so complicated for me that I can’t resolve how I feel about it. I do not even know where to begin. Ivan and Martin being arrested as spies in Greece, clones coming out, dismantling my old life, the friendships lost, the enemies made, the whirlwind of video game conventions and business meetings. So much happened, that all I could do is simply put the last three years in a box in my mind labelled “DayZ” and move on without seeking to understand it.
Walking away from DayZ one of the hardest things I have ever done. But the reality is: I sold DayZ to Bohemia, I was working with them as a contractor, and that contract had ended. I was becoming a problem. The danger was there for me to be a burden on DayZ’s development. My ideas are radical. I have no interest in half measures. I do not want to make safe games. I do not want to make games the way we have been making them. I want to fail as often as I need to in order to deliver the kinds of games that I actually want to play.
On Everest I decided more than ever that I wanted to make video games, not money. Instead of buying new things I sold what meagre things I owned and put all the money I had made aside to chase the wildest ideas I could think of. I wanted to make the video games that nobody would dare make. I wanted to take the crazy ideas and I wanted to put the best people and money behind them. What if the most experienced video game staff in the world collaborated on the most esoteric and hardcore survival games without trying to please a major audience? What if games were made that did not seek to make money? What if we could get an incredibly well resourced team to just focus on making great games with no distractions? I sat in base camp and I thought about the games I have always wanted to play, and I realised that I had the opportunity to do that. In return for creating DayZ, I’ve been given the opportunity to make video games from an entirely economically independent standpoint. I don’t intend to squander that.
Last year I met a company called Improbable. My first meeting with Herman Narula, the CEO from Improbable, was one of the most surreal I ever had. The technology I had always wanted and tried to make was finally here. DayZ was born out of my aborted attempts to make a database architecture to support my wild mass multiplayer ideas. But now, I didn’t need a ten year plan to make my grand visions of multiplayer come true. I could do it now.
I believe we are on the cusp of a new era in making video games. The old ways we make and release games are tired, old and tattered. They worked when we had a retail focused market where you needed the distributor hyped about your game, in order to get them to stock shelves. I am rejecting these old rules and approaches; the focus on hype, on market research, and cool features. The technology exists now to make the kinds of video game worlds I have always wanted. Liberated from the constraints of intense community focus, freed from guilt of using other peoples money; I am working with Improbable to make one of the games I have always wanted to make. The other morning I woke and realized that, finally, I truly did not care if I made the money I have spent back. It was an incredibly liberating feeling. Already the process of development has been so emotionally rewarding that I consider the entire budget of the project to be money well spent. This is what making video games is about for me. It is about trying new things; being bold.
It took getting to the summit of Mount Everest, and finally leaving the emotional burden of DayZ behind me, but I finally reached a point where I just wanted to make great games with the most amazing people.
Working on my first improbable game is the most exhilarating thing I have ever done.
