Origin Stories
Or: How We Decided to Not Do Dumb Stuff
-Justin Fischer
Anybody who has worked with me for any sustained period of time knows that I love quotes and aphorisms. I’m a veritable jukebox of them. One has stuck with me since I read it in the Michael Crichton book Sphere as a teenager:
“If what you’re doing isn’t working, do something else.”
Which, of course, is just a corollary to the old adage “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” In this case, the over and over again is the modern western game industry, from a few different perspectives.
Personally, I’ve been laid off three times. Two of those happened in a three-year time span, post-COVID. Each time I was at an independent studio that got acquired by a major, “stable” publisher. Each time after working my tail off to ship difficult projects. All due to some handwavy “refocusing” or some such corporate speak. The first studio lasted just shy of five years, post-acquisition. The second, just over four. The third (in which Brock also got laid off)…a mere seven months.
Best of all, the most recent one happened while I was living with my family in an AirBnB for months, unable to return home after fleeing the Eaton Canyon Fire. You know, just to put a little cherry on top of an already shitty situation, because why the hell not?
And, while one does learn to roll with these things with enough repetition, at some point you have to look in the mirror and ask, “Why do I keep doing this to myself?”
Maybe I shouldn’t leave so much of my job security in the hands of executives who seem quite content to profess their concern for their employes, while in the same instant liquidating thousands of jobs. We’re not naive - we know how publicly traded companies work. They serve the shareholders, first and foremost. But, whether it’s corporate greed or shareholder greed, the end result is the same: someone you’ve never met gets to blow up your life. And strangely enough, it ALWAYS seems to happen right before quarterly numbers get reported to Wall Street. But, hey, I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
My brother is a firefighter, and that community has a saying: you can drive for the idiot in the right seat [meaning the officer in charge who rides shotgun], or you can BE the idiot in the right seat. And, as he said to me, “I think you’ll be happier in the right seat.” So, rather than spend our severance packages fighting tooth and nail to get a new job in the WORST. Job market. EVER. Brock and I decided we’d had enough of the C-suite’s charnel house. If executives’ mismanagement is going to land us back in the unemployment line, those executive might as well be us.
It was time to do things on our own terms.
Simultaneously, the other insanity-induced repetition is coming from the major publishers themselves. Matthew Ball’s illustrative 2025 state of the industry report captures the challenges western development is going through quite clearly:
Spending on games is down from its COVID peak
Traditional growth engines have stalled
Fortnite and Roblox are eating everybody’s lunch
Budgets continue to skyrocket while revenue drops
Eastern developers are gobbling up western market share, but the reverse isn’t true
Now, an optimist might give the major publishers the benefit of the doubt and say that these re-orgs are a painful necessity in order to adapt to these new market realities. But a glance at their stated strategies reveals conservatism when what is required is bold imagination. Instead of rising to the challenge, executives are doubling down on strategies that no longer to work. Focusing on a dwindling list of already overly exploited intellectual properties. Making games for the largest audience possible by taking the fewest creative risks, and utilizing the most ubiquitous mechanics, regardless of whether or not that makes for a better product. And, in the face of additional failures, retrenching even further by bunkering up with even fewer IP, while taking even fewer creative risks.
Now, it’s not as if major publishers don’t take risks. They do, but generally only on one axis: scope. They’re trying to buy their way to success using the things they can do better than anyone: throw hundreds of bodies at a problem and make lots of stuff. Check the recent marathon of layoffs over the past few years if you’re curious how that’s working out for them.
What they’re doing isn’t working, but, not only are they not trying to do something else, they’re doubling down MORE.
A funny thing about me: my heroes aren’t game developers. They’re people like Miles Davis, Tina Fey, Trent Reznor and George Lucas. People who looked at the status quo and went, “Ehhhhhhhh…nah”. Thus, when Brock and I started thinking about what kind of company we wanted to make, it came down to a simple premise: the industry is doing things that demonstrably don’t work, so, don’t just do something different - do the exact opposite.
In an industry of companies not taking any creative risks, take nothing but creative risks. In an age of thousand-developer teams, spin up single-digit-sized ones. When your contemporaries are pulling their hair out to make something everyone will like, make something a segment of people will love. When the industry equates scope with value, ship smaller experiences that can better work around the overabundance of entertainment options we’re all bombarded with, all the time.
And that, in a nutshell, is Airlock Games. We recognize that the times have changed, so we’re changing with the times: take the circumstances as they are and pick a strategy that actually stands a shot at working.
And then sprinkle horror on top of that. Because we love horror.
