Oddworld creator says 'F**k you' to EA

How’s that for a title?! Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning said “F**k you very much” to EA when the company wanted to acquire his studio, Oddworld Inhabitants. Now that he’s back to making games, he’s getting to do what he wanted to do all along, which is making games for fans.

“Our agreement is, you won’t be seeing our profit being spent on Ferraris and shit like that,” Lanning said. “Our profits are going back into games so we can ultimately raise to the point where we can grow our audience, who are expecting new content.”

Lanning is currently promoting the Oddworld games remake in HD and working as a micro publisher.

“On the micro-publisher level it’s very simple. We fund our own products,” he says. “We weren’t able to do that in the boxed product days, we’re only able to do that in the digital distribution landscape.

“Rather than having to have 1.5 million units in the opening week or suffer death, now if we have 50,000 sales and we’re still in business. People are still employed and we’re able to keep making content. When we released box product we would get 20 per cent of the revenue. After that 20 per cent paid back the entire development budget, if it was still selling at $60 we would start seeing $7 a unit. Because of the bricks and mortar, the plastic, the manufacturing, the gas involved in taking games to the store, the store itself and all those extra costs – not one of those costs makes a better game for the player.”

Yeah, as much as I love to have tangible games to keep in my collection, all these extra cost does make me think about how much is given back to the developers. Lannings comment about Ferraris is kind of out there, but come on, the developers should deserve some kind of bonus, right?

Lanning’s partner and managing director, Stewart Gilray, says that they do get bonuses:

“We do pay bonuses, but we don’t need to blackmail our staff by having them relying on LARGE bonuses, plus we treat our staff with respect and rarely, if at all ask them to work Overtime or crunch.”

Source: GI