Eat Sleep Play co-founder David Jaffe 

In Part I of our three-part Q&A with David Jaffe, he talked about the reasons behind his departure from Sony--where he created such blockbuster franchises as Twisted Metal and God of War--to co-found Eat Sleep Play with former Incognito boss Scott Campbell. In today's installment, Jaffe explains the challenge some top developers face in being fairly compensated for their work relative to the revenues they bring in, discusses his hopes to eventually cash out of Eat Sleep Play for a big windfall, and talks about his desire to work on experimental games once he's gotten truly paid.

You're very connected in the industry, you've worked with a number of people and you've met a number of people over the years. Do you get a sense that the concerns that you had about the remuneration to people in your position relative to the remuneration to the publishers is a growing concern among creative people in the industry?

Gee, here's the good news--and I hope it comes through in your writing how honest I am--I could either stall you while I look up "remuneration" or I could just ask you what the hell it means, because I have no clue.

Well, it just means "payment." You know, like the money coming back to you.

Okay, so ask me again.

So the question is, do you get the sense from talking to other developers that they feel like creative people relative to the businesspeople are not getting a fair share of the revenues they could both in industry itself and then relative to other media?

Well, in the industry itself, I mean certainly. I've only talked to Lorne [Lanning, co-founder of Oddworld Inhabitants] a couple of times, I don't know him that well, but when we've talked that certainly was a point of frustration with Lorne. The thing to remember is if you look at a lot of the games, if you look at why games make money, there's a number of reasons.

I know people who work on games that are licenses, be they sports franchises or be they the new Pixar film. Those games make a lot of money, but you don't really hear a lot of those guys grousing about it because they know that while they've done a good admirable job--and they're going to be compensated like most employees in the game industry would be--they know why those games are selling: it's because it's a Spider-Man game or a Pixar game or what not. If they can make a great or even good game, fine.

If you're looking at more original IP that has really connected with gamers, you really have three scenarios. Either it's from Japan, and culturally when it comes to this issue--at least this is what I've been told a number of times--they genuinely aren't expected, because of the culture to make a windfall. [Metal gear Solid creator Hideo] Kojima is not expecting to make a crap ton of money and [Nintendo chief designer Shigeru] Miyamoto is not expecting to make a crap ton of money. I don't really know the scenario in Japan but that's obviously where a lot of the key original IP comes from.

Then if you look at individual developers like Bungie or BioWare or Epic, those guys are very well compensated. I get the sense when I talk to certain guys in those realms that they don't really have the issues that I would have. Some of that may be that I was working for a publisher and they're working directly for a developer, maybe they got a better deal. I hear it from some people, but I don't hear it from all people. Let's put it this way. I haven't heard it from the guys at Epic. My understanding is they're all very happy and satisfied with what they've seen from a game like Gears of War.

So is it an isolated case? I don't think so. But it's not all over the place. I think some people do simply have better deals. The thing to remember is I was an employee of a publisher. If I was a developer and we had made this deal in the beginning, and we had made three or four hit games, maybe we could have negotiated that kind of deal. Eat Sleep Play is going to put us in a position to do that.

After you made the decision eight months ago to say, "All right, I should have done this after God of War, but we're doing it now," what advice did you get about setting up your own company?

You talked about negotiating--I certainly tried to negotiate with Sony before we left and said "Look, let's make something work here," and we never could come to an agreement over what we felt was fair compensation and what they felt was fair compensation. After that, when we decided "Let's set up our own company," the great thing about this is that we're not plagued with a lot of the issues that a lot of startups face because I'm in business with Scott Campbell. He's built a company before. He sold a company before.

These guys who I'm teamed up with--all the guys who used to be Incognito--they've done it before. We've worked together as a team for years. We have Sony's backing. We have Sony's blessing and support, so it's not like I'm the guy sitting there going, "All right, how do I get the 401(k) plans working?" or "How do I make sure payroll hits this Friday?" because I have a partner who's really strong at management and running the company while I'm dealing with the design, the creative and all of that. It really is a great partnership that's worked for over ten years, and there really hasn't been those startup growing pains because a lot of these guys have already been through it before.

Now in terms of--

You know, I did get this one guy on my blog. He posted anonymously, like the coward he is when he got wind that I might be doing this, and he called me "kiddo." Like, "Good luck, kiddo, you're going to need it. Wait until you get out there in the real world," because apparently he works as a developer as well. I'm not saying he's wrong and we're not going to encounter our own share challenges. Of course we will, I mean everybody does, but it's like with that kind of attitude I'm like, "Of course you're having a s--tty time. You have a f---ing bad attitude." So that was the advice that I got. It reminds me that we are going to face challenges, but to face everything like we always have, with a positive attitude, and we'll probably come through it.

In terms of the games you've announced, you've announced, a remake of Twisted Metal Head-On for PS2.

Well it's not really a remake. What we're doing is we're doing a port of the PSP title to the PS2. We're upping it to 60 frames. We're re-resing all the textures to make it look a lot better. We're going to go in and do some minor tweaking to that game, minor tweaking to that game regarding pick-up placement, ramming speeds, under the hood stuff to make it play better for the system. Then we're also including in that port five to seven levels from Twisted Metal Black II which was never released; we're going to get that all polished up. We're also shooting a documentary about the history of all the Twisted Metals and bringing back all of the key players in the series, from the guy who did the concept art on the first batch of cars--including Sweet Tooth--all the way up to people who worked on [Twisted Metal] Head-On just to give it a really good send off and give players a real incentive to give this version of the game a try.

Where did the idea for the documentary come from?

When I knew we were going to be putting on new levels from Twisted Metal Black--I'm a gamer and a consumer and I love the idea of going into a store and looking at the back of a box and going "Ooh, look what else I get?" So it really came from going, "What else can we put on this disk? What else can we give consumers so that they don't bypass it and go, 'It's just a port, who needs it?'" They need to feel that there's a compelling reason to purchase and enjoy this title, so the initial idea came from going, "What else can we give the players to make them get jazzed about this?"

Most new companies--most companies period--operate on a five-year plan. What's your equivalent of crawl-walk-run, or do you plan to just hit the ground running? We had that conversation where you talked about wanting to do pop songs as opposed to operas.

Yes.

Is that still operative? Or are you still--

It is, it is. The plan--

Well down the line, might you do something different?

No, no, no, no, no. You never know, but we have no intention to become BioWare or Bungie. What we want to do is really make a name for ourselves in the small game space or the medium-to-small game space, both on the console side and the hardcore gamer side, and on the casual side. So when you say, "What is the long-term game plan?" the timeline is TBD depending on a handful of factors, but it's to build original IP eventually on the PC side and own that IP. Then on the console side, the plan is to continue our very positive relationship with Sony and really try to work with them to build some great titles for the sort of small-to-medium game space. And down the road we certainly would like to sell the company based on the value that we have as a developer as well as an owner of hopefully a handful of really strong PC casual IP games.

I think that's another thing--because you're such a personality online--that some of your fans and haters alike would have a hard time understanding because you're so upfront about things like "Hey down the road, we'd like to sell the company." What--

Yeah, of course--

What's--

I'd love to sell the company.

What's your--

Not now. I don't want to do like you know let's put it this way: the goal is not to look at each in ten years and high five each other and say "Hey, sweet, we kept the lights on for ten years."

Got it.

We want to build a company with some significant value and then sell it and then do it again. I mean, it's like we want to keep making games. It's important to do this. I caught myself for a few weeks there--about a month ago or about six weeks ago--starting to worry about the company and not the games, and that was a real kind of kick in the pants for me. I said, "Wait a minute. The company is irrelevant. The games are what matter. The company is just sort of a nest to couch these games that have to be amazing, and your spirit and soul and energy and passion has got to go into that. Don't worry about a lot of this other stuff that's either (a) irrelevant or (b) is in better hands with Scott's hands than mine who's better at dealing with those kinds of issues."

Certainly games are the most important thing to us, both as gamers and consumers and also as people who run this business but at the same time, who doesn't want to make money? Look, I'd love to make money if I can do it on our own terms and make a lot of money and have a great place to live and have my kid's college fund. S--t, yeah, I want to pay for all that stuff. I don't know why that would make people online turn against me.

Geoff Keighley asked me the last time we did an interview, "Well what's the plan after that?" Me, I want to make enough money where I don't have to worry about money and then I'd love to go into more experimental game design. I'd love to make emotional games work. I don't see how they could work. But if I could be in a position where I don't have to worry about where my next paycheck is coming from and I could just kind of f--k around with that and see what I could do. Not to the level of Chris Crawford and never release anything, but do it to the point where I can really say, "Is there something here beyond pure play mechanics? Can you piggyback emotional content onto pure play mechanics?" I'd love to do that stuff. So selling the company is just one step on the plan to getting to that.

But using the nest in your example, if you build something great, why would you want to fly the coop if you're rocking and rolling and making great games? From what you're saying, you're looking this as if there are stages and there's a stage beyond even this that you--

Yes. You never know what's going to happen, but hopefully the company will be successful and we'll be able to sell it, we'll all make a nice chunk of change, we'll all have sort of our futures taken care of and then we can focus on other things. But if we're making great games and the nest is hopping and people are digging it, we don't want to abandon the players. We don't want to let them down and we'd want to keep making those games but I'm not talking two years from now. I'm talking--

Right.

--five to ten years from now if we're fortunate. On one hand it's like, "Ah, don't give your plan away." Who gives a s--t? The reality of it is, is it's a plan. You never know what's going to happen tomorrow. We could hit on the next big thing for Sony and we're like, "Dude we're making so much in royalties and we love this and the fans love it. Let's just do this for ten more years." Maybe we'll make enough in royalties to retire and not worry about money. Who knows, maybe all of our games will fail. I have absolutely no clue how it's going to go, obviously. But I'm comfortable saying this is the fantasy, and it will be fun to talk down the road and see how close we are coming to achieving that. But s--t man, I don't have any pride over this. You think I don't want to be like the guys at Harmonix? Hell, I'd love a payday like that. Hell yeah.

Next: In which Jaffe dissects gamers' responses to Calling All Cars--and why he believes his $10 games must be able to go toe to toe with $60 titles