“You can’t let business objectives guide your creative decisions,” says Bowling

By Stephany Nunneley

Robert Bowling has said while working on the Call of Duty franchise for seven years, he learned what works well and what doesn’t.

Speaking with GameFront’s E3 correspondent Wil Wheaton, Bowling said the industry as whole needs to learn how best to treat creative talent.

“I worked on Call of Duty for seven years, one of the biggest publishers in the industry,” he said. “With some of that experience behind me, you learn a lot about what you don’t want. You learn a lot about what works well, like what makes a successful franchise, you learn a lot of great lessons. And part of that is learning ‘ok, this doesn’t work. This is not how you do it.’

“I think as an industry as a whole, we have a lot to learn about how we treat creative talent. At the end of the day, what you learn is we’re in a creative field, just like film and television. Anything that you create, it’s not black and white. It requires emotion, it requires passion, and it requires people to be happy–because if you’re not happy with what you’re doing, it’s going to show in the quality of your work. That’s why with Robotoki, our entire design philosophy is focusing on [the creative team] first, and everything else second. We’re not focused on the project, we’re focused on the team creating the project. If we nail the happy team, you’re going to get a good project.

“You can’t let business objectives guide your creative decisions, no matter what. We came out running with Robotoki. We announced, and we’re like, ok. I’m self-funding out of my own pocket the start of this company, so that our foundation isn’t being shaped by those business objectives. We’re not taking someone else’s money to risk setting up this company. We’re doing it on our own, so that we can set the foundation, the way we want to build a company.

“Now that we’ve done that, we want to find partners who want to come in and be a part of that.”

You can watch the entire interview below where Bowling also discusses his firm’s first title, Human Element, which is slated for 2015.