American McGee Interviews Brian Fargo

You might remember American McGee for his past at id Software and his American McGee’s Alice titles, but I’m not sure if you were expecting to find him in the role of interviewer, with inXile CEO and Interplay founder Brian Fargo on the other side. The interview is brief but dense and I’ll do my best to offer a representative snip without quoting too much:

AJM: (DRM-free) is committed to with both your Kickstarter campaigns. Can you talk a bit about the math behind this commitment? Is there any chance the games will generate meaningful revenue after release (outside of the money raised via Kickstarter)? Do they need to in order for you to be (successful) with them? And what’s the definition of success in this context?

I’m not sure of the math but putting DRM on a game ends up pissing off the legitimate users of the game for an impossible battle against pirating. What’s the point? In general I believe that people who were going to buy your game will most likely do so if you get it in front of them somehow. During my days at Interplay we used to do a fair amount of business with the hardware manufacturers bundling our games with a hard drive or a PC in which they paid us only a few dollars for our games and then they could advertise (Comes with $150 of free games.) Well they would sell hundreds of thousands of units with our games and no matter how much volume they did our retail sales never dipped. There are just audiences of people who are buyers and others that won’t pay or weren’t going to buy it anyway. And beyond that we have been pre-paid to make this game so it would be doubly outrageous to then add DRM to the very people who made it possible. I’m not entirely certain what is possible from a sales perspective outside our backers but I feel pretty strongly that when we deliver the epic, moody and reactive game that we promised that its sales will match that of other games of scope, scale and excellence.