Organization: Looking Beyond the Endgame

This article originally appeared on The Next Generation blog at Simtropolis.com

In a previous post I talked about the kind of organization that would be needed to handle community funding: A non-profit association controlled by community members. I'd like to explore more thoroughly the shape and direction of this non-profit organization (NPO) and its role in making our game project happen. To do that, I'm going to do something counterintuitive and start by looking at the end; in other words, to look at what happens after the project is finished. While I know this may seem wildly premature, if you'll bear with me I think you'll see how important this perspective is in laying a solid organizational foundation from the beginning.

In considering my rough calculations for a game development budget, I started thinking about the inherent problem with budgeting: that it's nearly impossible to do exactly. In a perfect world we could calculate precisely how much was needed to do exactly what we want, as use that as a goal for funding. In the real world, of course, that's impossible, as projects routinely go over or under budget, evolve as they go on, or a combination thereof. So, out of necessity, there would need to be a cushion to handle budget overruns and other unexpected expenses. But then I thought: well, if the thing is budgeted adequately, the hope is that development would be finished with something left over. What happens to that money?

There are several possibilities on that score (more on this later), but I think the best one is this: for the NPO to take the leftovers and start over again.

What exactly do I mean by that? Well, assuming this project is completed successfully, why stop with one game? Our NPO would be in a good position to move on to a new project: The new funding method would be proved a success, the dev team from the first project would be already in place, and most likely a successful project would garner a lot of attention. Why waste the opportunity? With one success in hand, building support for the next title would be a lot easier the second time around. How about working on an exapnsion package? If there are some advanced features that couldn't be completed in the original budget, the community might want to fund further work by the devs. And what about the next next generation game? No need to wait seven years for everyone to get bored of the first game and then start on a new one; better to think ahead, get started right away and get the next iteration ready while everyone is enjoying the first! Furthermore, the NPO wouldn't have to stop with city builder titles: there are other genres of non-linear games that could also benefit from this model (strategy is one that springs to mind immediately).

In short, rather than going to the trouble of organizing all this for a one-off project, only to just disband and go home at the end, I think the eventual goal should be to keep the structure in place, and create a kind of Open Source games foundation that would continue supporting new development on this model. Our "Sim City 5" would be the proving ground for this model's success, but there is no reason that it need be limited to that.

"Okay, okay," I hear you saying, "that sounds great and all, but get your head out of the stratoshpere and start thinking about the task at hand!" So how does this relate to the more immediate problem of getting our project off the ground? Well, we have to structure things with all these eventual goals in mind from the start: The NPO itself should be founded with a wider, more general mission from the begninning,
A more general NPO dedicated to open source games would give us scope to expand in the future.
distinct from the immediate project goal of "create a city simulator". Here's what I would propose: Create one overarching, long-term NPO, our "Open Games Foundation." This would be a kind of "holding company" for the project, without any day-to-day input in development. Then, create a subsidiary project to administer the creation of the game itself. Now of course, in practice, at the beginning, this would probably be a division in name only, and it would be the same people wearing both hats. But down the road, I think it will be important to have these formal divisions in place. Why? Because once you start asking for donations/investments, you must specify the terms under which those investments are to be used; you are then legally bound to follow those terms. What that means is that you can't change the direction or goals of the project midway. They have to be clearly defined from the start.

So to sum up this fairly oblique entry, here's the hierarchy I'm envisioning: A general NPO, tasked with creating open source games, and under that a daughter association tasked with creating our city simulator. This setup would provide clarity of mission for the project, but would also be flexible enough to provide a graceful exit strategy from the "formal" development side as things wrap up.