Designing and developing video games for the big players in the gaming industry is fine, says Queensland-based games maker Auran - unless you want to make real money.

Last week’s announcement of an Auran game based on the wildly popular Battlestar Galactica sci-fi franchise would seem to be great news for the company and a win for the local economy. But Auran was contracted to develop the game for Vivendi Universal Games, so it won’t reap rewards if the game is a hit.

That doesn’t bother Auran founder Graham Edelsten. He’s busy preparing the September launch of the company’s own game, two years in the making.

“I don’t do very much contract work. I hardly do any because I’d much rather develop my own intellectual property, because that’s the only way you make money,” Mr Edelsten says. “(Contract work) is working for wages.”

The Battlestar Galactica game will be available as a digital download later this year for the PC and Xbox Live Arcade. It will focus on space dogfights, giving players the option to play as either the humans or the Cylons, and feature levels based on episodes from the show’s first two seasons.

The Battlestar Galactica development will deepen Auran’s ties with Sierra Online, a division of Vivendi Universal, but he hopes the real payday will arrive when the company’s own “massively multiplayer online” (MMO) game, Fury, is released in September.

The company hopes to replicate the success of Vivendi’s popular MMO game World of Warcraft (WoW), which has eight million active subscribers all paying a monthly fee to the gamemaker.

WoW participants battle each other in a vast, virtual world, but the profits are real. Vivendi Games attributes much of its revenue growth to the success of WoW. In November 2006, the company reported earnings of $143.3 million for the first nine months of 2006 - an increase of 186 per cent on the same period of the previous year. “This significant improvement was driven by growth in revenues, with an increased proportion relating to the higher margin of the World of Warcraft business,” a Vivendi press release says.

But it is frustrating for Auran that the buzz surrounding the Battlestar Galactica game launch has overshadowed its announcement of plans to release Fury.

Auran chief executive Tony Hilliam says Fury represents a massive effort on the company’s behalf. “(It’s) the biggest online game ever to be developed in Australia,” Mr Hilliam says. “It has been in development for more than two years with more than $10 million invested to date.”

N3VRF41L, Auran’s publishing arm, will market and distribute the title in Australia, while US-based Gamecock Media Group will handle North American sales, but local success is high on the agenda. Mr Hilliam believes the competitive nature of the game will strike a chord with sports-obsessed Australia. “It’s kind of like football with swords,” Mr Hilliam says. “You run around with your team mates using specialised skills to try and beat your opponents.”

Auran has grown from humble beginnings. Founded by Mr Edelsten and a games developer 11 years ago, today the company employs 75 people. Ownership is divided between Mr Edelsten and Terry Hilliam, whose family is better known for establishing the Neverfail Spingwater company.

They’re an unlikely pair to run a gaming business. Neither has a background in computing or entertainment. “I’m a barrister by profession . . . I got into computer games by sheer accident,” Mr Edelsten says. “A young fellow had this idea for a game and he reckoned that computer games were a big growth area and he convinced me. I invested some money.” Auran released its first game, Dark Reign, in 1997 after two years of development.

“It was distributed internationally by Activision, and it was a huge, worldwide hit,” Mr Edelsten says.

“It won PC strategy game of the year in 1997 and actually made me think this business was easy. How wrong I was.”

In the videogames industry, Mr Edelsten says, you’re only as good as your last hit. “It’s a very risky business . . . (But) if you get a hit the rewards are unbelievable.”

Predicting what flies and what flops is a tough business, and it’s sometimes the esoteric ideas that really take off. For example, Auran struck it big with a railroad simulator. “Trainz is another one of our very big international products. It’s probably the most advanced railroad simulator in the world.” Mr Edelsten says.

The game has been translated into 30 languages, with Auran taking on a full-time online community manager to run Trainz forums. Edelsten says the Trainz online community is 250,000 strong.

Auran is keen to build more online games and communities. Selling a subscription to a game instead of a boxed product has benefits. “It’s much easier to stop piracy, forgery and counterfeiting,” Mr Edelsten says.

Originally from Theage