Ted Price is one of the stalwarts of video game development. He founded Insomniac Games as an independent video game development studio in 1994. Since then, the company has sold more than 28.5 million video games. The president and chief executive of Burbank, Calif.-based Insomniac is perhaps the biggest die-hard PlayStation developer outside of Sony. Even as many other studios go cross-platform, Price’s studio has made games exclusively for the PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3. Its big hits include “Spyro the Dragon,” “Ratchet & Clank,” and “Resistance: Fall of Man.” The latter was a key launch title that got the PS 3 off the ground in the fall of 2006 and squared off against Microsoft’s big title,”Gears of War” for the Xbox 360. Price also served the industry as chairman of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, which gives out the equivalent of the Oscars of the game industry. The company recently decided to open its first satellite studio in Raleigh, N.C. and is working on Resistance 2 for release this fall. Opening that studio is no light matter, since the company cares about its small-company culture and has been named three years running as one of the “Best Small Companies to Work for in America” by the Society for Human Resources Management and the Great Places to Work Institute.
VB: Why did you set up your new office in Raleigh, N.C.?
TP: When it comes to location, North Carolina has a thriving game development community in the Research Triangle. It has the colleges with strong computer science and art programs from which we’d like to draw. There’s a lot of talent on the East Coast that would like to work for Insomniac but doesn’t want to make the move to California. This is an opportunity for us to be available for talent.
There is [game developer] Epic [already in the region], Ubisoft’s Red Storm (Tom Clancy) studio and there are others. It’s a thriving game community that is very supportive of other companies.
VB: How is this consistent with the overall strategy of where you want to take Insomniac?
TP: We’ve always had the philosophy of quality over quantity. We’ve also had the problem of pressure to expand. As our production processes become more efficient, we have more opportunity. But we want to keep the Burbank office small and focus on just a few games at once. By starting in North Carolina, we can create more games, more intellectual property, but continue that small company feel in both places.
VB: Is game development changing and causing this expansion?
TP: That’s not the pressure we’re under. It’s self-imposed pressure. It’s opportunity for all of us. We love making games. We love to come up with new concepts, but because we want to remain relatively small, we can’t do the things we want to do.
VB: You’ve been interested in the past in different kinds of business model opportunities for game developers. I think what used to happen was that game developers became publishers.
TP: Perhaps. I don’t know too many who successfully made the jump from making games to publishing games. It’s different skills. We focus on what we do best, which is developing games.
VB: But I suppose there should be a way to become a bigger company and still focus on just the part about developing games? Foundation 9 or Bioware/Pandemic forged that path to become stand-alone development companies. Do some of those alternatives looking interesting to you?
TP: What’s most attractive to all of us is to maintain the core philosophies we’ve had from day one. To create a company where people are creatively free, where there is a lot of communication, where politics and bureaucracy don’t get in the way, and where the games are key. That’s why we’re moving in this particular direction. Read the rest of this entry »