With the vast majority of our clients coming from the video games sector, we thought it was a good time to pose a question that is – we hope – familiar to most decision-makers in the industry: how much value can a writer add to a game project?
This is a wide-ranging discussion – wider, in fact, than most industry professionals appreciate. It is still a commonly-held perception in many companies that a writer can, at best, help out with storylines, scripts and, occasionally, manuals.
However most don’t even begin to consider the benefits a good all-rounder with solid industry knowledge can offer (especially from a marketing perspective).
At the large publishers, this is often due to the lack of joined-up thinking between the studios and their associated marketing departments. At smaller studios, the idea either doesn’t crop up or is written off as an expensive frivolity.
However, many producers, at the very least, fail to fully appreciate the damage that can be inflicted upon an otherwise polished game by something as seemingly “insignificant” as poor spelling and grammar.
A decade within the gaming industry has left us in no doubt that a genuine desire exists to produce professional, polished products that constitute real value for money in comparison to offerings from other branches of the entertainment industry.
It just requires stakeholders like us to prove that competent writers can contribute a lot to this admirable aim.