Talent agents follow the money. They have been serving the video game console industry for some time. And now they’re expanding to the social game industry.
Digital Development Management, a video game talent agency, is expanding to create a division that focuses on social games. That means it will help them navigate between the different demands required for staying competitive in consoles while expanding to the fresh and fast-growing territory of online social games.
Talent agents stay in the background of the game business. If they’re good at it, like super agent Michael Ovitz in his glory days in Hollywood, they get paid a lot of money for packaging teams together to make blockbuster entertainment.
In the old days, the agents focused on movies. But now agencies such as Creative Artists Agency, Union Entertainment, United Talent Agency, Boesky & Co., ICM, and DDM have big video game practices, where they gather together talented game development teams and represent them as they cut deals with video game publishers who take the risk of funding the projects and getting finished games into stores. They agents are like the matchmakers putting the creative people together with the money people.
DDM’s view is that everybody should not rush to the other side of the boat all at once in the shift from console to Facebook games, as there is a bit of over-hyping going on, said Joe Minton, a video game industry veteran and president of DDM.
“If the game business is the Wild West, social games are the Wilder West,” Minton said in an interview. “Companies have to navigate between the big traditional industry and the smaller but fast-growing new industry.”
Northampton, Mass.-based DDM is a relative newcomer headed by managing partner Jeff Hilbert and Minton. DDM’s North American and European game developer clients have made recent big games such as Need for Speed: Shift, Enslaved, Overlord, Socom and Tango Down. Now DDM’s connected games division will focus on games that are delivered across multiple online game platforms. It’s a recognition that games are being played on all sorts of devices, not just consoles or PCs, said Minton. Game companies need help spreading their games far and wide.
DDM is already representing a few companies through its new division. San Francisco-based Planet Moon Studios is one of its clients and has launched the Everybody Play initiative, making games across many platforms. Aaron Loeb, chief executive of Planet Moon, said DDM was instrument in providing strategic guidance for the initiative.
Other clients include 3G Studios and Heavy Water, which are both executing technology to allow games to be played across multiple platforms. Heavy Water makes digital assets for Sony’s PlayStation Home virtual world; it created the EA Sports Complex within that world. Now it is creating content that can be linked across web-based platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Likewise, 3G Studios is making multiplatform games such as Brave Arms on Facebook.
3G started in consoles and has made the transition into social games, and Minton said that parties as far away as China are getting interested in the opportunities that are arising. Minton said that developers need to take a different approach to social games. But they can integrate them with console games, so that the experience a player has on Facebook is somehow connected to the experience they have on a connected game console.
“There are ways to connect these worlds,” Minton said. “One game can show a strategic view of things, while the other game is a small subset of that larger game.”
DDM was created in 2005 and it has nine employees. It has 15 announced clients who are well known in the game business; the roster is not as impressive as those served by Creative Artists Agency, whose practice is headed by Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley, but DDM tends to focus on solid teams rather than well-known individuals.
DDM has focused on representing independent game developers who make games for big publishers. During that time, social games have come on strong, thanks to the free-to-play business model. That’s where users play games for free and pay real money for virtual goods as they play. The skills required to make social games are often far different from those needed for console games.
Social games are made by small teams who churn out the games in a matter of weeks and then tweak the games based on user feedback after the launch. Console games can take two or three years to make, with teams up to 100 or 200 people, and development costs of $10 million to $30 million.
But some console game developers have read the writing on the wall, and have learned how to make the transition to the service-based online games. Those are the ones that DDM is helping.
“The big question is how to navigate this over five years so that you move into the connected world but don’t break your company doing it,” Minton said.