American culture is quick to dismiss the abilities of teenagers. But often, the biggest barrier to, say, teens making video games, is the doubt we've taught them to harbor.
"the developers get 70% and MakeGamesWithUs will take 30%."
That's incredibly generous. When I was making games in high school I'd just be thrilled that anyone was actually playing my games. Good on them for not being greedy.
Western culture is quick to dismiss the abilities of teenagers, mostly because parents perception of kids lack their actual ability by quite some time.
Mostly, however it is because the teenagers have never really had to show responsibility nor have they ever been allowed to really do something real.
I hope we can be a small part of enabling kids to do real things. Personally, the experience of building something that impacted other people's lives (albeit in a small way) at the age of 16 really shaped my outlook on life. We hope to expose more kids to this experience as it will give them a unique sense of fulfillment.
Yep, Teenagers aren't dumb. I'm slightly biased on this matter, being one. But, for example, one of the top developers of PHP at the moment, nikic, is 17.
Don't forget the qualifier - "the company will take all profits from the game until the cost of hiring artists for the graphics is payed off".
So, what do they offer?
- Tutorials/community? Ubiquitous and free anyway, no value added.
- Analytics? Useless to everyone not doing highly targeted design (read: social games)
- Art? Well, as per the above, the devs pay for it anyway.
- Fit and finish? Now this is actually worth something. But all game devs should develop this skill anyway, and if you're a teenager learning game development, that's a good time to learn.
- Networking libraries? Could be useful.
The overall package might be worth something, but probably not worth having another finger in the revenue/IP pie. I say IP because, what happens if you publish game XYZ with them, independently iterate on the concept, and self-publish XYZ 2? Better to just own your work outright.
Thanks for the feedback! I think you're underestimating the value of some of the things we add to the process such as the work involved to get good art, as well as being the place where they can learn about fit and finish. We want to let developers focus on the coding / game-design while we handle the not so fun parts. Instead of having to worry about the not so fun parts you can spend that time building a second game and make even more money!!
For those who don't have money, we take all the risk out of making a successful game. While the developer in some ways ends up paying for some of the art costs (ignoring the fact that the process of getting the art done itself has cost to it), it is guaranteed he will not lose money on art and promotion, which we see as a big win.
We hope the overall package will be worth it, and we plan to add more and more tools / support to make it worthwhile, potentially features like allowing others to beta test your game and A/B testing logos etc. If you can think of more features that would make a revenue share worthwhile please let us know! We want to build things our developers / potential developers need.
MGWU founder here - one more bullet point to add, we promote the games as well. We've found students want to write great games, get great art, and then have people play their games - it is of value to them to have someone offer the whole package and worry about promoting the game. We don't take ownership of the code so the developer is free to reuse and/all their code in a different game as long as its not with our art/title.
Also - analytics have been incredibly useful in spotting steps in tutorials that have been too hard or levels that need to be tweaked or reordered.
There's definitely quite a lot that can be done by high-schoolers. I only heard about it second-hand, but UC Santa Cruz ran a 4-week residential program for high-school kids who had never programmed before, to learn programming and then immediately design/implement a videogame while doing so, and came up with some pretty good results: http://www.sokath.com/cosmos2011/doku.php?id=games
"the developers get 70% and MakeGamesWithUs will take 30%."
That's incredibly generous. When I was making games in high school I'd just be thrilled that anyone was actually playing my games. Good on them for not being greedy.