Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (45 page)

Gower never advertised
RuneScape
, but players found it. Every aspect of the game’s design encouraged mass adoption: it could be run on cheap or ageing hardware; there was no
installation required, so work and library PCs could play it; it didn’t lock out players without credit cards. And, of course, its price was unbeatable. So existing
players recommended it to others, and there was no barrier to joining, other than the time it took. There were hundreds of users within weeks, and then the numbers jumped up: to
thousands, tens of thousands. The code was extremely stable – Gower had written it to run on very modest server hardware to save money – and it stayed running even as the numbers piled
on. The servers were managed by a company in Philadelphia, the most cost-effective supplier that Gower could find, and cost thousands of pounds. As the game’s player base expanded, a second
server was added, and then a third. The number of users was becoming huge. And then Gower ran out of cash.

Living with his parents in Nottingham to save money, Andrew Gower consulted with his brother Paul: how could the popularity of this game be harnessed to cover its costs? They considered asking
players for donations, but it wouldn’t be an ongoing solution: after a single, small payment, gamers would feel they had paid their dues. And charging for use would undermine growth, and
chase away their existing players too.

The Gowers hatched a compromise: what if they sold gamers something? For five dollars a month, a player could purchase extra features – objects to collect, places to go. This additional
material would run in parallel with the free game, and be integrated with it. None of their customers would lose any of their game, but something extra would be dangled in front of them.

Their brainwave now has a name: ‘freemium’, meaning a free hook to gather interest, and premium content for the profit – it’s become one of the most common business
models on the internet. But Andrew and Paul Gower were making it up as they went. They had no idea if it would work, or even how to run a commercial enterprise, so they turned to a businessman whom
Andrew had encountered while considering jobs. Technology entrepreneur Constant Tedder had been runner-up in the quest to recruit him, but Andrew’s rejection hadn’t soured their
relationship. Tedder looked over the brothers’ business plan, and declared it workable. The three of them formed a company to control
RuneScape
and collect its
income – it was called Jagex Ltd, after a brand name that Gower had included on all his games while at university.

Paul had helped with games in the past, and had created various pieces of content for
RuneScape
: graphics, objects and places. Now he and Andrew shifted into a high production mode
– for three frantic months they made pieces of world they hoped would be worth five dollars a month. Their sums were simple: of their 300,000 players, if just 5,000 took out a subscription,
their company would be viable. But even this still seemed ambitious – internet users rarely expected to pay for content in 2001.

And yet, 5,000 subscribers joined within the first week. ‘We were like: “Wow! We’re OK!”’ says Andrew Gower, but they were better than OK. The player numbers
generated a surplus, and then a healthy profit, which forced the company to shift its identity – no longer the amateur diversion of an enterprising coder, Jagex had a user base and
responsibilities. ‘Now that they were giving us money, we couldn’t really ignore all their emails like we’d been doing to date,’ says Gower. They hired a van and moved to a
tiny office in a business incubation unit outside Cambridge. There, sitting on cardboard boxes, they started interviewing for their first employee: someone to answer those emails.

The social networking effect, and its growth pattern, is better understood now, but Jagex was swept up in it without any warning. As they provided more content for
RuneScape
, there was
greater value in subscribing. The number of paying customers grew, and those people became advocates, encouraging friends to join. With more subscribers came more staff – graphic artists,
world builders, administrators – and so they created more content. It was a circular system, but all the elements expanded simultaneously: creators, content, players, income.

‘We grew completely organically,’ says Gower. ‘There was no marketing or anything – it was all just word of mouth. And we could barely keep up. We were spending all our
time buying new servers, trying to keep the system sustaining the number of players, trying to
keep up with the floods and floods of emails, and trying to produce ever
more content.’

Jagex gathered staff and worked its way through ever-larger offices. But the
RuneScape
technology was creaking, and so Gower entirely rewrote the code – again alone.
RuneScape
2
launched in 2004, just as rivals turned up with technology that matched its predecessor’s, and the spiralling success continued.

‘That feeling of growth was so exciting,’ says Gower. ‘Everyone was having a really good time. We had the number of subscribers written in a big number on the wall, and every
time it hit a nice round figure we’d celebrate.’

They didn’t have to wait long for a landmark. In 2007, six years after launching,
RuneScape
had a million paying subscribers, and another six million playing for free.

RuneScape
had hitched a ride on the explosion in internet use, but its business was genuine, and its profits real. Perhaps there might have been more British internet
games entrepreneurs in the UK had coding continued to be a hobby for longer – Andrew Gower’s timing is unusual. As it is, internet businesses often favour the first arrival to a market,
and with its freemium role-playing model, Jagex stumbled upon and was able to make the most of entirely fresh territory.

By the time they were thirty, the Gowers had become extremely wealthy men. The 2008
Sunday Times
Rich List put their worth at more than £100 million, while some estimates suggest
the number might be many times that. These are paper valuations, and have certainly been volatile, but they nonetheless hint at a fortune that has allowed Andrew Gower an unusual freedom early in
his life – a freedom he has since dedicated to the same hobby that made such riches possible.

In 2010, Gower resigned from the board of Jagex and founded a new company called Fen Research. Its aim is to build tools, perhaps even a programming language, to help new developers create
games. ‘I want to make making computer games easier,’ he says. ‘This is
remembering back to my childhood, when I was making things for the Spectrum
– it was a lot more straightforward than it is today. You didn’t need to do a huge amount to make a game, and the ones you made would be comparable to the best games out there.’
There’s a personal aspect to his plans – a sense that this is a mission for Gower. ‘I do think the whole bedroom coder thing was very important. A lot of what I want to do with
this project is about bringing back bedroom coding.’

There is a sense amongst the games industry’s old hands that it has entered a second era of opportunity, one that has to be seized. Once again, there is a proliferation
of ideas and business models, but this time coupled with a new urgency: an understanding of how brief and how valuable the window might be. Digital distribution is going to change the industry,
they are sure, and this certainly appeals to the original developers’ entrepreneurial spirit. But other motives keep emerging: a call back to the heyday of home coding, with its creative
freedom and financial independence. For some this is simply nostalgia, but a few clearly feel a sense of responsibility – an awareness of legacy.

Thirty years after they started programming, fifteen years after they set up Blitz, Philip and Andrew Oliver have decided to help online games-makers. Like every developer, they watched digital
distribution carefully: its perfect scaling of reward to success, the transparency of the market. ‘That is one massive change that is happening to the industry right now,’ says Philip
Oliver, ‘that it is possible for very small teams to create a game, own the IP and digitally distribute. It can be one that makes pocket money, or if they’re really lucky, be the next
Angry Birds
.’

But these games still need a digital distribution platform of some kind, and making money from a success can be very hard – there has to be a slice of publishing revenue, however thin. In
2008, the Olivers founded Blitz1UP, a suite of services intended to equip novice developers. Then in 2011, they created a fully functioning marketplace
called IndieCity:
an online games shop through which even tiny developers can sell their wares. Profits, piracy and other legal issues are all taken care of – upload a game, and it’s for sale instantly
at a price the developer chooses. And it’s an international service: three currencies, worldwide posting, worldwide distribution. The modern games market is globally connected, and developers
need to be too. ‘It’s true that it’s UK based,’ says Oliver, ‘but we don’t advertise this.’

Even after decades at the hard edge of the business, Philip Oliver still has the affability of the fourteen-year-old who won a prize on television. His enthusiasm is infectious – when he
talks about IndieCity, it’s hard to believe that it won’t be a success. And although it’s unmistakably a business, there’s a note in Oliver’s rhetoric that hints that
his real reward is that bedroom coding has a forum once again. ‘We’re putting back the rungs that were taken away,’ he says. The same first step on the ladder that he and his
brother started up as teenagers.

Revolution may have been shrewd to keep the rights to
Broken Sword
, but by the late 2000s the company was being squeezed financially. Original games were costing more
money to make than they brought in, sometimes while still enriching the publisher – it was a gallingly unfair market. For a while Charles Cecil took on consultancy work. They were exciting
projects: an online
Doctor Who
adventure for the BBC, during which Cecil directed the cast and designed monsters that appeared in the show, and a console version of Charles Dickens’
A Christmas Carol
for Disney, which also asked him to narrate the game. But while these projects paid fees, the company was still just treading water – Revolution’s future
looked depressingly bleak.

But its fans had remembered it: Revolution was receiving mail asking for
Broken Sword
to appear on Nintendo’s new DS system. Handheld and played using a stylus, the new pocket
console seemed a good fit for the game. With a portfolio of letters to support his case, Cecil persuaded the French publisher Ubisoft to support a conversion, and in March 2009 a tweaked
‘Director’s Cut’ appeared. It was a
decent seller, but another platform was emerging that looked as if it might be even more lucrative.

In 2008, during
Broken Sword DS
’s development, Apple had opened the iPhone to third-party applications – anyone could post a title to be bought online through Apple and
downloaded directly to their phone. Pickings were slim and sporadic at first, but high-quality titles soon appeared. The touch-screen technology leant itself to a port of the DS version of
Broken Sword
, and there was another huge attraction: the distribution was entirely digital. The publisher wouldn’t need to hold a stock of physical merchandise, as there was nothing
physical to sell, and in any case, there wouldn’t be a separate publisher – Revolution could sell the game itself.

Cecil could have released the iPhone port simultaneously with the DS version, but he held off for a year as a courtesy to Ubisoft. When he did publish it, the new platform seemed like a gift: at
$5 the price was lower than for a conventional game, but it was set by Revolution itself and the royalty was much higher, at seventy per cent of the retail price. A digital game earned its
developer the same profit per copy as the physical version, with a fraction of the risk.

And it was very popular: later that year Apple ran a promotion for
Broken Sword
, and within days two and a half million people downloaded it; another million and a half downloaded the
sequel. Under the terms of Apple’s promotion, plenty of those downloads were for free, but they generated invaluable attention.
Broken Sword
trended on Twitter and topped the iPhone
download charts, and hundreds of brief but genuine user reviews glowed with delight. After fifteen years the game was still charming; new generations of players had become advocates and sales
blossomed.
Broken Sword
was being discovered all over again.

‘We’re beginning to get directly in touch with our audience,’ says Cecil. ‘When I used to sell games at Micro Fairs in the Artic days, we’d meet our audience and
they’d say what they liked.’ Now, without a publisher or a retailer between them, developers are connecting with gamers once again. Success on the iPhone has changed
Revolution’s fortunes, and at last it is back in the development fray. ‘For the first time in Revolution’s history,’ says Cecil, ‘we can fund our own
game.’

Driver
, the first-person city driving game that exploded onto the scene in 1999, spawned an even more impressive sequel the following year, and the
Driver
series became a juggernaut of a franchise. And then it broke down.

The third game, the strangely named
Driv3r
, was published unfinished. Reflections, the company created and run by Martin Edmondson, was owned by the publisher Atari, but the two
firms’ priorities clashed disastrously: given the time available, the developer was too ambitious, while Atari was crunching against its financial limits and needed the revenue from the game
in the bank before a crucial reporting deadline. ‘It really is soul-destroying to have to draw a line under something that is clearly not finished,’ says Edmondson, ‘but it felt
like the survival of the company depended on it and they needed the game out.’ In the aftermath, Edmondson resigned from the developer he had founded.