Half a Year and a Million Miles To Go
We'll see
When we started SUMMONER, every decision we made felt at times like shopping for luxury watches you had zero intention of buying. Sure I’ll add a platinum band. Why not? This isn’t going beyond looking at the total in your shopping cart then clicking out. We were going through the motions of our professional dream, but often felt like the floor would give out beneath our feet. Surely we’d never actually hit that “buy” button, right?
Summoner is totally independent, fully self-funded. Gig by gig, hour by hour. We never had runway or time to build with a safety net below us. Everyone here downsized their lives to make this happen. We sold cars, moved to smaller places, and bought less. To be here more than half a year later, on the surface, feels a bit like a miracle. But we’ve been wrestling with this idea for a few weeks now and want to explore how a self-funded creative studio started by a few knuckleheads is not only still in business, but seems to be growing. We don’t believe it’s luck…Okay, maybe a little.
First a little background on the journey so far.
Summoner has been open for eight months and worked with over a dozen clients so far (good)
Summoner has been fired once (bad, but also sort of good)
Summoner has lost every single pitch pitched**
**Maybe a note for a later post, but one of the biggest learnings of the past eight months is how hard unpaid pitches punish small studios. Summoner likely won’t be participating in pitches for a while**
Summoner hired our first creative director in May
Summoner has shifted its branding from an “agency” to a “studio” in order to separate ourselves from the endless negative connotations that come from agency branding
Although tired, everyone at Summoner is happier than they were in the corporate world by a factor of thousands
Okay with that out of the way, why do we think Summoner is still in business half a year later?
Game studios (our primary clients) are looking for a new model
The traditional agency model works really well for fast food and skincare and sports utility vehicles, but it has always felt at odds within game studios. It’s expensive, often outsourced to junior teams, and typically built around generating broad appeal when most games demand exactly the opposite. Summoner was created to give game studios an alternative to creative development with a crew that have all cut their teeth in or around gaming. We are independent and lean by design, which means no insane overhead, no account managers, and certainly no hand off to junior teams. You want us, you got us.
As the past half year has progressed, we’ve been lucky enough to discover that this is what most of our clients are looking for – a new model built specifically for games by a team that came up through gaming and understands the unique relationship between a title and its players.
Summoner is its own brand
Before starting Summoner, we were shocked at how many massive agencies are relatively free of their own unique identity. The idea, we assume, is to be as personality-free as possible in order for your clients to not be scared off by a clear brand, which they may fear would leak into the work you do for their account.
It is an understandable fear, but our philosophy is that having a unique perspective helps both Summoner and clients understand immediately if we’ll be a good fit together. The agency mischief speaks often about turning down more clients than they accept mainly for this reason. Mischief understands that their unique tone and brand and voice might be terrible for a client and they’ve created a brand strong enough to gauge who will fit well with them and who won’t. Summoner is in a constant state of defining our brand, but what we have put out so far has resonated with our clients and is the reason we constantly push ourselves to put our inspirations and obsessions into our studio DNA.
Alright, a little luck, okay?
No shit we’ve gotten really lucky. To anyone looking to start their own thing, accept the luck. Be grateful it appeared and use every ounce of it to your advantage. Focus on what you can control and ignore everything you can’t. That goes for luck and misfortune. Jordan, our resident Bluey expert, hit us with a gem from a recent episode, which has recently become a guiding Summoner ethos. In short, the episode, after some events occur, introduces the concept of “we’ll see/ maybe” based on a Chinese proverb. The story goes as follows:
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
More than half a year in business and still we have no idea what the future holds. We don’t think we want to know. But our focus remains clear: to love what we do and make work we’re proud of with people who share our vision within the games industry. Does that win us work? Does it alienate us from bigger accounts? Won’t that be great? Won’t that be terrible? Maybe maybe maybe maybe.