Star Fox 开发商 Velan：北美游戏工作室如何生存

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In This Edition,
Velan Studios’ Guha and Karthik Balak on…

• Its Nintendo partnership

• Surviving the modern game industry

• US dev costs

• The IP opportunity

When I saw that Nintendo’s new Star Fox remake was developed by Velan Studios, I got excited. Finally, I had an excuse to invite Guha and Karthik Bala onto The Game Business Show.

If you’ve never encountered the Balas, they’re 35-year game making veterans who founded Vicarious Visions and worked on some huge franchises, including Guitar Hero, Tony Hawks, Spider-Man and Skylanders.

I’ve met them numerous times since they formed Velan in 2016, and I’ve always been struck by their ability to balance the business and artistic sides of making video games.

“Most of the work we’ve done is in the PC and console area, where the craftsmanship involved matters a lot,” Guha told me. “It’s not like we can crank out a prototype, put it out in a test market, look for KPIs, and optimize a perfect game. That’s just not how this part of the industry works. These are real artistic expressions.”

Over ten years, Velan has released six games and grown to 120 staff. But it’s not been a smooth journey. It’s faced project cancellations, job cuts, and then there’s the story of Knockout City. The ambitious live service dodgeball game was published by EA and attracted 12 million players, but it struggled to attract and retain enough players, and the game’s public servers closed down in 2023.

“Ultimately, we had to face some of the harsh business realities,” Karthik says “We showed it behind closed doors at E3 in 2018. We thought we had something. It was early days for live service. Then the landscape shifted a lot. It’s still a great game. We want to bring it back, but we have to do it differently. Enough things have changed that may make it more sustainable.”

Guha added: “It was a time when a season-based PvP, game-as-a-service game, was the thing to do. Structurally, they tend to have a lot of costs. There’s a server component, but there’s also just the amount of content you need to keep pumping out. So, it’s not a great venue to experiment with things that are truly out there. Maybe it’s okay for tried-and-true mechanics, but even that’s very high risk.

“There’s that, and also the dynamics of the market are changing very rapidly. Enabling technologies, consumer attention, where entertainment is coming from, and the nature of discovery. Developing a game that’s structurally high cost over multiple years, when the world around you are changing, is not the right way to approach innovation.

“We talked to a lot of experts after we launched, and it turns out the experts are better historians than they are forecasters. You never know what’s actually going to happen.”

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Velan has modified its approach. It makes games in far shorter timeframes, and mixes these riskier concepts with bigger, double-A-level projects in partnership with IP and companies like Nintendo.

As a result, it’s expanding. Velan has just opened a new office in Toronto. And in today’s The Game Business, we are going to explore how it gained the trust of Nintendo, the opportunities around IP, the ideal business approach for mid-sized studios, and overcoming the cost challenges of making games in North America.

You can check out the full extended interview above, or read the highlights below

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How to win over Nintendo

Velan has developed two first-party Nintendo games: 2020 mixed reality racing game Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, and this year’s Switch 2 Star Fox remake.

It’s rare to see Nintendo trust independent Western developers with its treasured brands. It’s a very exclusive club. So how has Velan gained that trust?

“We’ve had a longstanding collaboration with Nintendo,” Guha explains. “Our first game with Nintendo was Spider-Man for Game Boy Color in 1998. From there, we’ve been on the launch of every system.

“People ask me, how you build relationships throughout the industry? “You make promises and you keep them, and you try to exceed expectations. If you do this consistently over time, you build trust, you build relationships, and you build interesting opportunities to collaborate. Over the course of 35-plus years, that’s what we’ve tried to do. Star Fox is just the latest output of that.”

Karthik added: “The Nintendo partnership is a very special and unique one, and the bar is really high in terms of what we need to make. But that’s always been the case. Even when we were third-party with Nintendo. And it helped us back then. We made really good games that Nintendo liked, which gave us the opening to have conversations.”

The Balas first worked with Nintendo IP at Vicarious Visions, via a collaboration with 2015’s Skylanders Superchargers.

“That was a big moment for us, because we finally were able to integrate Nintendo characters into one of our games,” Karthik says.

The middle path

Velan’s strategy is to find a “middle path” for a game studio that is neither indie nor triple-A.

“We’re finding a natural cadence, where we can do a double-A-scope game with an established or licensed IP,” Karthik says. “That could be a partner project or a licensed IP that we’re directly licensed, and we can make a double A investment around that because there’s an audience. Then, with more original IP, or something really out there in terms of gameplay, we can make more of a triple-I level investment with an even smaller team.

“For a veteran studio that is not a garage band indie, and we’re not a multi-hundred-person triple-A [company], this feels like a natural sweet spot for us. It’s something that the industry has lost a little bit, and maybe it’s coming back. It seems like a more sustainable path.”

But isn’t the middle a dangerous place to be?

“Business school says don’t be in the middle of anything, as it’s a giant hole,” Guha acknowledges. “You should be at one extreme or another, because that’s where you get differentiation. There’s a classic collapse of the middle.

“But what we mean here by ‘the middle’, is that there are lots of opportunities with audiences that are not massive. So, the puzzle is: how can you make a remarkable experience for a fanbase that’s big, but may not be a size to support hundreds of millions of dollars in production?

“There are a surprisingly large number of opportunities in this space, but it requires a different mindset. Some companies solve it by having low-cost locations. Other companies solve it with technology and tools. Some companies solve it with genre specialization, where particular teams are highly productive in certain types of games. There are different solutions.”

The Balas observe that as large companies focus on the big franchises, that leaves a lot of audiences and IPs that aren’t being served.

“The deals and partnerships are out there, where it’s much more reasonable now because they want quality that gives longevity to the IP and brings in new audiences,” Karthik says. “There is actually more opportunity now than before.

“When you’ve got an audience undeserved in these niches, and you can really deliver for them, it’s a great forcing function of scope.”

This gets to one of the key reasons Velan Studios has endured during such a tricky time. It has a staggered slate, featuring bigger, IP-based projects with more stability, next to smaller, experimental concepts.

“More independent studios should try to do that,” Guha says. “They tend to be single-product companies, and if the slate at the publisher changes, then that becomes a real challenge. Or if they’re solely investment driven and the metrics don’t show up in the product, then the funding gets cut off.”

Managing the costs of North American game development

Velan is based in Troy in New York State. And like most US game companies, it has to deal with the high costs of making games in the country.

“We are finding this balance where we have these core teams that have been together a long time and operate really well together,” Karthik begins. “With that core team, we can figure out all the risky bits and what’s core to the game, and then we can partner with co-developers, outsourcing teams, or individual freelancers, for scaling up production.

“We were observing this trend when you get into the back-half of productions, where the costs really go up, and the risk also goes up, and it’s a nail-biter to the finish line. And you’re hoping you can get done on time and hit the quality bar. Or you’re at alpha and it’s, ‘is it fun yet?’ ‘Oh no. it isn’t. we need to iterate and tune’.”

The Balas felt that should be inverted where the risk is higher when the costs are low, and the ideal is to have a small, agile team figuring things out first, before scaling up using outsource options. But although outsourcing can help with costs, it isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy.

“It is our philosophy to pay as much as we can for the best talent,” Guha says. “And we’ve also got a strong dollar. So, what are the tools and production methodologies available to us? Sometimes outsourcing can play a role. But each type of outsourcing is also a little different. Sometimes wholesale for certain types of work can be efficient, sometimes it’s highly inefficient.”

“If you don’t know what you’re trying to build, it’s going to cost you three times as much to do it outside than inside.”

Karthik adds: “North America is the most expensive place to do game development in the world. So, there’s a lot of talk about, ‘Okay, what’s the burn rate? What’s the cost per man-month? Where can we go cheaper?” But that doesn’t necessarily mean you get the same productivity. If an outsource team is half as expensive as your internal team, but it takes twice as long, or more than twice as long because you’re not set up effectively, or the relationship isn’t going well, it may end up costing more.

“But over time, you build these trusted partnerships. Ultimately, we’re all after factor productivity, not the burn rate. Not the cost per person-month.”

Guha again: “If you don’t know what you’re trying to build, or you don’t have those pipelines down, and you’re trying to still figure that out, it’s going to cost you three times as much to do it outside than inside.”

The next ten years

Ultimately, the Balas sounded hopeful for what comes next.

“The number of doomsayers... every two years, it seems like everything is done,” Guha said. “The dominant players are set, there are no new opportunities out there… it’s a harsh environment. And then somebody goes and surprises everybody. This keeps us hopeful.”

Meanwhile, for Karthik, success isn’t all about business growth.

“It’s not about the destination,” he concludes. “We made our first game Synnergist in college, and it was not successful. We thought we were going to be rich and famous, and neither one of those things happened. We were just left in a lot of debt. It was real downbeat. It was a moment of introspection in terms of what we enjoyed about it.

“And we realized, it was actually the people that we were working with day-to-day, that made it special and really fun. That’s why we do what we do. And we get to also bring joy to potentially millions of people.

“If we can keep doing that, that’s just awesome.”

Join us back on Thursday for big interviews all about Call of Duty and Star Wars. See you then.