This week I'm out on the west coast on business. While staying in Redmond, I was able to hang out with Blair and Craig from Ironclad (Sins of a Solar Empire) since they're in the Vancouver area.  People on the outside probably don't realize how unique the Stardock / Ironclad relationship is in the game industry. When it comes to Sins, we might as well be a single team.

While I can't speak to exactly why our partnership has worked out so well, I can say that I think one reason is that we're zealots. That is, we are "true believers". Our mutual cause was to make sure Sins of a Solar Empire was a big success and all other considerations were cast aside.  If Ironclad needed anything from us, they had it. And vice versa.  And over time, it's grown beyond that. The experience has been so positive that now we can look at coordinating future releases together (both ours and theirs) as if we were one big company -- except that we're still independent companies. That is, by putting mutual success first, we end up with the benefits of a "bigger" company without any of the negatives.

We could or should probably write some sort of guide on the way our publishing system works and how it is different from the traditional system.  For example, typically, a game studio gets a huge advance on a game -- enough to pay for its development -- and then after release, the developer rarely sees anything beyond the advance.  But with ours, there's a smaller advance but a higher royalty.  As a result, Ironclad will see income from Sins of a Solar Empire for many years to come.

Consider the ramifications of that.  When game developers are able to see their games as revenue generating assets -- ones that generate a steady stream of income -- there's a lot more incentive to keep doing cool stuff.  As most people know, Sins of a Solar Empire is a very solid game. And yet, we've already released 2 free updates plus the third and fourth are in the works that add new features, graphics, etc.

The whole system is also just far more efficient.  Whether it be marketing or testing or design work, the fact that it's effectively one big team greatly increases what can be done and at a lower cost.  There is no single point of contact between companies. Emails and IMs go far and wide within both.  Until other publishers pick up on this, I think we have a major advantage in being able to produce really good games at a much lower price that generate a lot of money for the companies and give players a much better experience.

Forgive my typos, I've got a pretty bad cold.