It’s been a bit over a week now since the launch of Canuck Play’s first title, Canadian football 2017 for the XBox and PC Desktop. Like any other game, or movie, or TV show, there have been both positive and negative reviews. We get daily tweets, emails, and Facebook posts telling us, not only how much fun people are having with the game, but also how they’d like to see it improved going forward. We listen to all of it so please keep that feedback coming. We evaluate everything and try to address the suggestions that we can.
The Past
During its development and especially this past month, Canuck Play, and this project in particular, has had a great deal of media exposure. Radio and TV interviews from coast to coast and from outside the country, as well as local and national newspapers, have given us a shout out. Thanks again to all those that took the time to speak with us, and everyone that listened in or read the stories.
The 2 most common questions asked have been;
- What was the impetus for doing a project like this? This is probably a story for another day.
- Why is there no professional license attached? This is something I’d like to speak about here.
Let’s jump inside a blue Police box and go back in time to April of 2016. That’s when, after several weeks of trying, we had an opportunity to sit down and try to present our plan and ideas for bringing a licensed Canadian football title to market. Part (but not all) of our proposal included;
- Microsoft as a publishing partner covering costs of most hardware and software. This included XBox development kits (which are themselves worth a few thousand dollars) and the same publishing agreement as large game studios.
- We had the Peterborough Innovation Cluster providing us office space and administrative services – free of charge. They are also specialist in funding services.
- We had a proposed development budget that comprised of $500,000 private funding which was to be combined with various dollar matching* digital start up grants such as the Bell Digital Media Fund, OMDC, and other job creation grants. There were also tax incentives such as SHRED available. Tax incentives come later in the project but are still accounted for on the budget. This meant the total proposed development budget was pushing up towards the $1 million mark.
- We also had a playable prototype – the same prototype that was used as part of the pitch to Microsoft. So we were more than just people with an idea, we had something to show.
- People extremely passionate and knowledgeable about sport.
*A dollar matching grant means that, for every $1 you wish to receive, you need to already have that $1 in the bank. Some of these grants are stackable - you can use money from one grant to dollar match towards a second. But all have minimum amounts you can apply for.
In summary, our proposal was backed by two solid partners covering major portions of expense and a budget that was in-line with expected returns for a Canadian football video game. It’s important to keep in mind that a Canadian football video game, licensed or not, is not going to generate a million in sales. It’s just not. It’s a smaller sport only played inside a small market country. Even a fully licensed title, at best, is a break even opportunity – at best. A small budget and a small team building it for the passion rather than the dollars, along with supportive partners, is really the only viable way to bring something of this kind to market.
What we discovered during our one brief face-to-face meeting was that our definition of what a Partnership could be did not line up with what other’s wanted a Partnership to be.
With that the project suffered a rather large set back. As an unlicense title the project lost about 95% of its private funding (only our own money was left in the pot). Without private funding, we no longer had access to the dollar matching grants. Compounding the loss of up front funding we were no longer able attract any additional sponsors. “Half time brought to you by XYZ!” was no longer something we could do.
Beyond monetary setbacks, the lack of a license also meant we ran into challenges attracting the attention of others in the Canadian football community such as the Player’s Union, Football Canada, Canadian Football Hall of Fame, or even the national broadcast partner. For whatever reasons, many never returned our calls or emails.
The end result of all this being the whole project fell to two people. The funding to create upwards of 6 new full time positions in the city simply went away. Here is where most sane people would have said “$&#@ it!” and walked away from the project. But my partner Sheryl and I are a bit crazy and thankfully, we were not quite on our own.
We still had the support of Microsoft and the Peterborough Innovation Cluster, and an opportunity that was never going to come again. No established game development studio in the country has ever shown, even the slightest, interest in a Canadian football game project. So if there were ever the chance, this was it, we could not waste the opportunity of having those two partners on side.
Sheryl and I went back to the drawing board and reworked what we thought we could do with just our own private money and 18 months to deliver. It meant facing a hard truth; it meant that this was no longer going to be a game with bleeding edge AAA visuals and 50 play modes playable on every game platform known to man. It became, at that point, the very definition of “An Indie Game Project”. It would be a game with what we termed ‘functional visuals’, one play mode, and a goal to lay ground work. If an aspect of the project couldn’t be done in-house by us, it had to be set aside for later. If adding a feature meant time away from the core, that feature would be set aside for later. Start small, start basic, and start to grow.
The majority of our personal funding went towards a motion capture system to allow us to bring animation into the title - the game currently has around 200 unique animations. The rest was used to cover basic expenses through development.
The Present
Scoot forward in time 18 months and Canadian football 2017 releases on two platforms. Everyone, especially us here at Canuck Play, acknowledges the game had some bumps coming out of the box. It’s the sort of thing that happens when you have a small team missing critical partners. I am however happy to say that the vast majority of those bumps have been ironed out. Since the game’s release we’ve already reworked the passing mechanics based on player feedback as well as addressed other items that were discovered post release. With these updates the player feedback on our Facebook page has been overwhelmingly positive. When a commenter writes “Everything they’re doing is perfect.” we try not to argue that point.
Updating and improving the title will continue to be an ongoing process. The plan for this title, at least since April 2016, has been to release a foundation and iterate. And iterate. And iterate. While large studios work on a yearly cycle, we’re currently planning on a monthly iteration cycle.
The Future
There is good news. With the revenue generated from just the first week of sales, we have been able to reinvest funds back into the title and I’m happy to say we have hired a very talented 3D modelling agency to work with us - something we had lost the ablity to do earlier. Our first task is to bring the game’s various on-field player models from 1st generation visuals to Next Generation visuals. We will be replacing the existing 2 variations of player model with between 6 and 8 variations, each unique to their position, with the aim to be 1st in class and compare directly to any player model visual produced by any studio – any – studio. This contract has just been signed and work just started, so we’re a few months away from them making their debut, but it’s important that you to know what is coming down the pipe because it’s your support that is allowing us to do it.
Along with new visuals, we will be investigating new features. We have been approached by an eSports company with the idea of adding an eSports tournament mode to the game. And given the great fun everyone had during the title’s Launch Event tournament, this is something we’re looking into. We’re also looking at adding a basic season mode.
And there’s more good news. I’m also happy to announce today that Microsoft has approved our proposal for Canadian Football 2018 – tentatively scheduled for the June/July 2018 period.
The Razor for 2018 is ‘Full Customization on All Platforms’. While this is technically a fairly trivial thing to do, there are legal questions around what can and cannot be done. Canuck is subject to Canadian laws for ‘User Generated Content’ (UGC) which differ greatly from American law. Just because company XYZ in the US can do something, doesn’t mean we can. We’re currently working with a legal firm in Canada that specializes in video game law to determine what’s possible. Obviously we’ll keep you posted about that along the way.
Thank you again for your continue support of this project.
David Winter
President and Co-founder
