Scottish independent developer Denki is to scale back it business and cut a number of staff as it restructures its operations.
“It’s with a heavy heart that I have to announce a major restructuring of Denki that will inevitably involve losing many of our supremely talented colleagues – not to mention friends – from the team,” MD Colin Anderson wrote in an impassioned blog post.
“After ten years in business and despite weathering some truly awful periods in the industry during those years, it’s the first time we’ve been forced to take such extreme measures. So it’s probably a good indication of just how tough the market conditions are becoming for mid-size developers at the moment.
“My advice? If you’re an independent developer, and you’re not selling games directly to customers yet, start worrying, because this industry is changing beyond all recognition.”
Anderson noted that Denki has been unable to find a publishing partner for Xbox Live Arcade word game Quarrel, and went on to address in more detail the reasons behind the company’s recent troubles.
“Denki has been running on an old business model. We rely on “the industry” for funding. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except we’re making games for people who love games – which isn’t necessarily “the industry” unfortunately.
“As a result we haven’t been able to find the right publishing partner for Quarrel. Despite the game being finished, super polished, and everyone who plays it having great fun with it, we’ve slowly been remembering why we got out of the traditional games industry for so long and escaped to Interactive Television in the first place: this industry doesn’t value good games. Players do, but the games industry doesn’t. Instead it values low risk games – not even “calculated” risk games, just low risk. And that leads to bogus sweeping generalisations such as “Gamers don’t play word games”.
“We’ve realised we’re “not normal” and don’t make games that fit neatly in to income forecast spreadsheets. And we’re okay with that. Mostly. We also know we will always find it a challenge to get support for our games within “the industry”, and we’ve reluctantly accepted it’s now time to stop trying – despite the tremendous pain it’s going to cause us.
“So today we’ve taken the extremely difficult decision of restructuring and scaling back the business. It’s hoped this will give Denki the opportunity to build itself back up with a different business model as a publisher of an entirely new category of game – not Casual Games; or Hardcore Games; but Denki Games.”