Richard Garriott spoke with GamesIndustry recently about his history as a game developer, and his opinions about the Unity engine and the crowdsourced content model Portalarium is using. (As you can probably imagine, he’s quite in favour of both!)

First, Lord British critiqued the publisher-driven developer model:

“My first game, I wrote in seven weeks of after-school time in high-school, so therefore my costs were close to zero,” Garriott says when we meet after his keynote address. “I earned $150,000 in sales, and it’s been downhill ever since.

“The total money has been bigger, but the return on investment has gotten smaller and smaller, and that’s been true of the whole games industry: more expensive, more risky, smaller margins.”

The focus quickly shifts to Unity, however:

For Garriott, Unity is a “watershed moment” not just for his own career, but for the industry at large. Despite existing for less than a decade, Unity Technologies has fashioned a workable solution to the spiralling cost – risk, time, money, you name it – of game development. “Unity has fundamentally changed that paradigm,” he says. “The risk and the time and the cost have been going up and up and up, and with Unity that has been reset dramatically.”

As evidence, he offers his latest project, the Kickstarter-funded RPG Shroud of the Avatar. Garriott has been working in development for long enough to remember a time when it was necessary to build each game by “brute force” – a small team, a pile of money and a lot of hours. Within 90 days of choosing Unity as the environment in which to build Shroud of the Avatar, Garriott and his team went from nothing to a rough version of the entire game that any of his team could log into and play. In that first few months, they accomplished what Garriott believes would once have taken, “literally years.”

And that hasn’t always been the case. Garriott was aware of Unity in its earliest, most rudimentary incarnations, and he admits he would have struggled to make the case for the engine over more established – if prohibitively expensive – alternatives as recently as two years ago. Today, however, Unity seems like the best available choice for all but a rarified, dwindling group of AAA studios

And, of course, Garriott has a lot to say about the crowdsourcing of content that Portalarium is engaging in:

More than anything else, Garriott claims, this crowd-sourcing of effort and assets that will be a catalyst for Unity’s evolution. The Asset Store is still only a few years old, but, as with so many phenomena powered by the crowd, it’s growth could eventually become self-perpetuating, the curve thundering towards an exponential trajectory.

“If it had not been as broadly adopted by such a sharing community, Unity would not be nearly as powerful. Not nearly,” he says. “Everyone is willing to give each other stuff for free, or for truly reasonable prices, then that again multiplies the power of everyone who’s working within Unity. To me, that’s a unique moment.”

“It’s a process I’ve felt very separate from in a very important way for a long time. God, I’ve missed it, and I think it’s critical”
As a journalist, Garriott’s evangelism of Unity raises certain alarms. After all, just hours ago he took the stage to deliver the opening address at the company’s annual get-together. However, there’s an unmistakable sincerity to Garriott that belies any suspicions I might have of corporate alliances. Just as with Peter Molyneux, Brian Fargo and a growing number of veteran developers, Unity has offered Garriott a compromise-free route back to the hands-on development on which his reputation was built.

At any rate, click on through and read the whole thing. It’s a lengthy interview, and Garriott is pretty entertaining in his comments; he doesn’t stick to much of his usual script in it.