“At some point in my career as an author I felt the need to separate creativity from production,” he told us Massimo Guarini, CEO and creative director of Guarini Design, to explain his concept house.
After the experience of Ovosonico, the award-winning development studio of which he was co-founder and with which he published Murasaki Baby e Last Day of June, video game nominated for the Bafta in 2018, Guarini has decided to focus on ideas, stories and subjects, no longer dealing with the production part, exactly as it already happens in the world of cinema and television.
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Guarini Design is precisely what is called the concept house: “A reality that invents new ideas and new subjects, intellectual properties, managing them at a creative level, licensing rights and providing, when necessary, also creative direction”. In fact it is a company of one or more authors who work on ideas, normally organized in outsourcing, therefore he does not carry out the work internally, but makes use of external publishers and production studios, as Guarini explained to us: “This means designing without the weight of structures, like an architect who designs and supervises and then entrusts the projects to construction companies. The concept house is a lean creative reality, a company dedicated to the creation of subjects for video games and more “.
Last Day of June, Ovosonico’s latest videogame, was conceived, developed and programmed all within the Varese studio, Guarini reminded us: “If I had to do it today, I would bring the subject, the story and the game design to the attention of a publisher, who would buy the idea and my creative direction, not the finished product, entrusting the development of the game to a studio of his choice ”.
Abroad, concept houses are consolidated realities, Guarini told us again: “This business model also exists in Italy, but almost exclusively in the film and television industry. In the video game industry it is starting to be recognized and used also by large publishers and development studios, but in our country it is struggling to take root due to the small number of publishers and large production studios which, in fact, are the main customers. of the authors “.
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At this moment Guarini Design is engaged on two fronts: the main one of video games and that of cinema and television. In the gaming world he is working on an original idea with an important publisher whose name Guarini did not want to reveal, while for cinema and TV he has developed some new subjects, currently represented by Storied Media Group, one of the most important Ip Brokers in Hollywood, based in Santa Monica.
The last Iidea census drew one Italian game industry in great ferment, and as a veteran of the sector, who has also worked abroad for many years, Guarini believes that “it is inevitable, indeed desirable, that a phase of industry consolidation will also be reached in Italy”.
For him, a natural evolution of the Italian game industry provides that small development studios, in the future, are absorbed by financially solid realities: in this way the specific weight of the individual productions would increase, concentrating the financial effort on a reduced number of titles, but of higher quality rather than dispersing it in many small video games that struggle to be noticed on the international market.
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