I was thinking for a good topic for my first post in the Official Frozenbyte Blog, but after running into a dead-end after a dead-end, I realized there’s only one way to start it off: by disappointing our readers!

It’s not something I wanted to do. We’re working on some very cool stuff at the moment, and I’d love to tell everyone about it. But I can’t. Let me explain.

“What’s so secret about your work, Mr. Big Shot Game Developer Guy?”

Ever since I started at Frozenbyte, I’ve been constantly running into this question. Let’s assume I’m talking to a nice lady at a bar (for argument’s sake…) The conversation could go something like this:

• Her: Oh, you’re SO funny! Are you like a professional comedian or something?
• Me: Actually, I make games.
• Her: *blank stare*
• Me: You know, Xbox and PlayStation and such.
• Her: Oh, cool! So what kind of games are you working on?
• Me: Umm, I can’t really tell you.

…and it’s all downhill from there. So why can’t I brag about the work our team is doing, in order to take the nice lady home and impress her with my limited edition Big Daddy figurine?

NDA

NDA stands for “Non-Disclosure Agreement”, and most people in our industry have signed several of them. Most people in any industry are familiar with them, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, let Wikipedia educate you.

I have an NDA with Frozenbyte, and Frozenbyte has tons of NDAs with publishers, contractors, middleware companies, etc. So there’s a lot not to disclose. But talking about our products - games - especially, why can’t I tell what we’re working on?

Marketing

To over-simplify how things work for traditional third-party developers like us, this is the model we use:

1. We make a game
2. A publisher sells the game
3. Profit!

Making a game is certainly a delicate process. But marketing (and eventually selling it) is just as delicate, and a good marketing campaign is very well planned in advance and carefully timed to gain maximum visibility for the product.

So let’s say I announce on this blog that we’re making a game where you’ll be able to shoot at mutant cannibal hippopotamuses with a gerbil-powered laser weapon shaped like an Ibanez axe and take a look at what this would mean for us in two different scenarios (we’ll ignore the scenario where Ibanez sues us for trademark infringement for now…)

Scenario 1: Unsigned game

In this scenario, we haven’t actually signed the game with a publisher yet. This means we’ll first have to convince a publisher that our idea will make them billions of euros (or dollars, but then we’d need to be making gazillions…) Even if the product acquisition guy at the publisher’s end doesn’t go umm, this doesn’t really fit into our portfolio…, their marketing department might still have some doubts about their ability to sell this game to the buying public. I’d rather like to have a conversation with them (ok, how about we make the laser hamster-powered instead…) than lose out on a publishing deal because of a silly blog post.

Scenario 2: Signed game

As I said, our job is to make the games, and the publisher’s job is to sell them. I assume they do their job, and let me do mine. We have detailed plans and schedules, as do they. Sometimes they’ll come up with silly ideas that they think would really help sell the game - but I hope they ask us before announcing them to the public. The same goes for us - we might think it’s a great idea to announce Hippo Killer 3000 two years before the launch date, but they might think we just destroyed their marketing plan. And maybe we did. Oops.

Maybe I’ll just let them do the marketing - and hope they come up with a better name than Hippo Killer 3000.

And other reasons…

Besides marketing, there’s plenty of other reasons to stay tight-lipped about projects that aren’t near completion. There’s still innovation in the game business, and where there’s innovation, there’s idea theft. A publisher might hear about our idea and put one of their own teams working on a very similar game, even when we’re still looking for a publisher (oh wait, did that already happen…?)

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So, the point I’m making is this: games media is where you can read about our games (ok, of course we’ll also tell something about them here). But if you’re interested in how they’re made (and by whom!), then you might just have come to the right place. Welcome!