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Why Do Games and Game Studios Fail?
LukeG writes "This new article discusses the reason behind games and their developers failing, noting the distance of those selling the games, from those that buy them as one possible cause. Doomed games such as Bablylon 5 come under the spotlight, while the ubiquitous Duke Nukem Forever is also touched upon." For me, this article brought to mind the twin disasters of Fallout Tactics and the Farscape based game.
Look at the technology and effort that went into Daikatana.... without anybody ever playing the game to see if it was fun.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Oh yes.. New games do suck.
:P
Mainly because innovation has warming the bench, and the team is out there playing the same endless game. Bust some caps, click click death, whatever.
The money is in the innovation . Make something totally new, and chances are it will be successful.
I'm personally tired to death in blowing stuff up in the first person, I'd rather play solitaire.
Tony Hawk Pro "Pogo Stick"
R4NT.com - A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Too much product, not enough buyers. In addition, there's not enough playing time to play every freaking game available. It's as simple as that.
It's because of the upper management that keeps trying to get a product out the door as soon as possible. Doesn't matter if the game is bug ridden, plenty examples of this, or has other issues that need to be fixed first. The folks at the top and the investors want to get their money as soon as possible. Problem is that it's pretty tough to produce a decent game (believe it or not) within one year most of the time. An example of a gaming company doing the right thing is Blizzard Entertainment. The folks that own them right now (Havas Interactive I believe) understand that Blizzard knows what it's doing. So when Blizzard says the game is not ready to ship yet they adjust their schedule accordingly. Blizzard will not ship a game until it is done, even if they could make more money by releasing it earlier. Sure their games have a few minor bugs, but I can't remember any major ones in them. And can you name one title that was a flop for them? Because I sure as heck can not. More game publishers should follow Blizzard's example. To quote an article from PC Gamer on Blizzard's 10th anniversary Blizzard's strategy is this, "The game comes first". Why more game publishers have not adopted this approach after the large amount of success that Blizzard has seen may never be known.
The thing is, there are some absolutely brilliant games out there, that nobody ever hears about.
:). There was plot, humour, intelligence, and it took you back in time to interesting places. It was hard to finish. And you couldn't just look up on the net for cheats.
I remember the Journeyman Project II - I got number II as a birthday present - and I swear, it was the best game I ever played (along with Marathon... but that's another story
I was filled with the most enormous sense of satisfaction when I completed that game.
Then, I hear the news about a month ago that Presto Studios, the makers of the game, have just shut down. A real shame. I for one will remember and appreciate their work, if only on that game.
-- james
After all, what are two of the most popular and critically acclaimed games of the past 2 years? The Sims and GTA, neither of which could be said to be bleeding edge in terms of grapbics technology.
That is also very astute. When one console game takes up to 80 hours to finish, just how many are most people going to play in a year?
Games fail because the game buying public have failed,.. What people have supported with their $$$ over the years has led the game designers to have to put their investment into the flashy graphics using the latest 3D cards and such before gameplay and origionality,.. Before the age when 3D cards were the mainstay we get things like Star Control 2, Quest for Glory, Civilization and the likes,.. New and origional concepts were coming out all the time, granted you can do only so much new stuff it does not seem so much the trend these days,.. as for 3D over gameplay, look at what happened to Star Control 3, it was an absolubte joke, #2 is still playable now, #3 wasnt even fun when it first game out.
Fight Club broke records on release if I remember correctly. eXistenz sucked, i don't care how long after release you watch it. That was the worst sci-fi crap ever. I never even heard of Repo Man so I wont comment there.
The fact that games don't do well on release is a mystery. Games are announced years before release, where as movies only a few months unless you read all the rumor sites. If a game that's announced 4 years ahead of time can't succeed with it's built up hype machine then that burden falls squarely on the developers.
Are there sleeper titles? Sometimes but it's incredibly rare.
All the /.'ed article does is ask the question "Why do game studios fail?" and muse about possible reasons for a few specific games. The author's musings are those of an outsider and don't really provide any insight.
/plug For those wanting references, just check my link, or know that I programmed significant portions of all of the Age of Empires games, and my latest game, Age of Mythology, just hit stores this weekend. I've also spoken many times at industry conferences, written numerous articles, and had my writings on multiplayer cheating subject me to the slashdot effect on multiple occasions. Along the way, I've gotten to know many, many people in this business and see how a lot of different companies operate. /end plug
:)
I make this assessment as an Industry Insider and someone who helped build a very successful Game Studio from almost nothing, and has insider information on some the companies and games he muses about.
What that said to establish my knowledge, know that I would love to write my own version of the question with a detailed look at what I consider to be the real answers. However, that would take weeks and result in about a 20,000 word novella.
That said, there are a few big themes that loom over the industry that I can summarize. (This is not a complete list)
1) Production Values and feature demands for an "AAA" title in 2002. In a word: HUGE Moore's Law applies here too.
2) The large number of titles (PC and consoles) released that compete for the player's dollars and attention.
3) The cost of development. Because of #1 and #2, you get pressure to out-do your competition. This leads to #4
4) A "Tiering effect" of PC games (and console games). You have the "best" titles taking home the lion's share of the money, shelf space, review space, and mindshare. The majority of titles can't make money at the top level of production values leading to #5
5) A substantial (majority?) of game projects don't make back the money used in production. This means you either a) eventually close shop or b) have a system where successful titles subsidize the unsuccessful ones.
6) The side effect of 1 through 5, that causes publishers to be conservative in an effort to stay profitable. That leads to increased emphasis on franchises and less support for innovative and risky titles.
7) How talent is defined and treated. Many, many companies are created by their owners as vehicles to make wealth for themselves by most efficiently exploiting their workers. Game developers and programmers especially consider themselves to be more than mere assembly line workers. This is why you get a lot of churn of staff and people that consider themselves exploited. This is partially the fault of the employees because...
8) A lot of people get into the Game industry because they love games, and approach it as a passion, not a business. Reality (life, family, needs, mortgages, etc) intrudes with personal maturity. If the initial setup was exploitive, you see a lot of burnt-out, disillusioned people leave the industry.
9) The production demands of an extreme niche of the software industry on people. That is 90 hour work weeks as normal only to have something shipped despite your protests because to make a release date.
10) Equitable distribution of credit, recognition and compensation. John Carmack's Ferraris may have inspired thousands of dreams, but the state of the business has left a trail of broken promises of royalties, credit, recognition, or even a sane working environment.
11) Companies that believe that the games are produced by the top people; the C?O's, the management and marketing people, not the artists, designers, sound engineers and programmers. (*cough*) Believe that "Those people" are just there to mechanically realize the vision of the "creative" people, and they get what they deserve.
12) I'm getting tired of typing...
!!! Nothing in the above list is an absolute that can be applied to every single company in the industry. They just are general issues that push my hot buttons.
* The opinions expressed here are those of the Author and do not reflect or represent his employer in any way.
and they've fucked their most ardent supporters (bnetd anyone?)
i've bought every blizzard game from blackthorne on floppy to starcraft to diablo but after what they did I did not purchase WarCraft III, yea I'm just one consumer and yea they dont' give a fuck about me but at least I make an effort to be consistent, where they do not.
The emphasis today is on special effects and graphics -- without 3D animation and full-motion video clips seamlessly (cough) integrated into the game play, the execs figure it won't sell.
We have PCs, NES, SNES, Genesis, PS, X-Box in the house, and my kids spend more time playing old FUN games such as Dragon Warrior IV, Solstice, Landtalker, Shining Force II than they do Final Fantasy XI or Baldur's Gate.
I still think Civ II is more fun than Alpha Centauri or Civ III -- I may later change my mind, but I still need more experience with C3 before it gets fun -- Civ II was fun out of the box.
Do games keep needing to get harder?
Design for Use, not Construction!
I disagree with #2. A game doesn't have to have a multiplayer component to be successful. Recent examples include The Sims, Deus Ex, Tropico, and Railroad Tycoon II (which has multiplayer, but it's practically a different game).
I would agree, though, that you have to decide up front whether you're making a multiplayer game or not. Some games (Deus Ex, Tropico) just don't lend themselves to being multiplayer games. That's OK--just done try to pound a single-player game into a multiplayer hole. Your reviews and sales will suffer badly.
This process occurs in movies, TV, books, music, theatre, and, of course, video games. There are surprises both ways. The Blair Witch Project was a movie that was not expected to be successful, but was hugely so and has changed the movie industry. Citizen Kane was an important film (often considered the greatest American film) but a commercial failure. Yet Orson Welles was given unprecedented freedom from the studio to make the picture, not because they respected him as an artist, but because they thought he would make them a fortune.
Sometimes the alchemy of commercial appeal and artistic daring produces a wonder. Sometimes they fight, and the result achieves neither ver well. But there is no formula -- there can't be, because every work changes the landscape, and the bigger the work, the bigger the change. And of course, originality and formulaic are opposites.
The money is in the innovation . Make something totally new, and chances are it will be successful.
The problem is the stuff that game companies have become convinced that the best route to a bestseller is to make it exactly like games that have been around for years. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's like Hollywood, where they figure with enough special effects they can really clean up, and making interesting movies is too big a gamble.
Look how much trouble Sid Meier had getting EA to back the Sims.
Games very rarely find audiences later in the same way films do. They require more time to get back into, and generally you can find a more improved game in the same genre with improved graphics, etc, that more people are playing now. Most bombed games have a hardcore community around them of people that really love the game for whatever reason, and will continue to play it until their media degrades, but most people won't.
Only a rare few games achieve success after they bombed on release, if any. I can't think of any offhand. Most of the old games that make comebacks were hits in their time (like the rereleases of old gold-box SSI AD&D games, and the myriad re-releases of old games for newer platforms like the Final Fantasy Anthology for PS2, and all the old SNES games released for the Gameboy Advance). If something bombed, few except the terminally bored, collectors, or bargain bin hunters will ever get into them. I'm one of the bargain bin hunters so I have a lot of also-ran games in my collection. Some of them were diamonds in the rough, but the vast majority of them bombed for one of two good reasons. They either were too buggy to play upon release (Pool of Radiance 2 being one of the more visible and worst offenders) or were just plain not great games.
Games fail for the same reson records fail.
Some of them are mass market crap following a formula... First person shooters are the boy bands of the computer gaming world.
Some of them are from small companies that don't have the money to break into the market, so many games die a poor death as shareware.
But I think the reason most games fail is because the board room mentality that builds them. Why take a risk on something new and untested, when you can slap some new graphics and tweek the engine on the old game?
It happends with music, movie, beer, etc. The board room mentality will be the death of them all... Creativity is dieing because of meetings where people are afraid to take a risk.
okay, back to drinking my microbrewed beer... made from people more concerned with making the best beer possable, instead of making the most profits.
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
The reason most games fail is becuase of the people developing them and who they develop them for. The thing is that I know a ton of talented programmers, and they all love games. Some would love to program game, others love the engine but ultimately they love the technical side of it but don't have a handle on the not non-technical aspects of creating a game.
You could probalbly break games that fail into one of four categories,
I think the most common item of failure would be Lack of marketing, there are some people that can make a good game but lack the backing of a distributor. This hurts alot of small game developers and caters to large developers. A good example is GameSpot, any game that they follow and cover is Always given a good score. They are also the games that have the most marketing power. A good example is the Age of Mythology, they had been covering and hyping that game for almost a year, you think that the score for that game was even going to approach less than really good? Other games that they review are more objective, so they have good and bad ones in there but a good scoring game is far from proving it will get good sales. An example was a game I loved which was Kohan. Great game, no marketing so did not do so well overall in sales.
The second biggest killer is game instability. I cannot count the number of games that have just been crappy, not ready to be sold but pushed out the door anyways, just to make a few bucks. I can only assume that these games are pushed out too early and that they programmers for these games are not just bad, but considering the number of people who are interested in making a computer game, this also a realistic possibility.
While some people don't care if a game has a story line, if the game play is shallow you are going to need a story line to draw a person into the game. Like a mentioned before, alot of programmers would love to make a computer game, the problem is that they want to program a game, not a story. They don't have writing skills to develop a good story.
Unbalanced game play. This also another big one, alot people know how to play games, it is another thing to fine tune a game. Most people are not able or not willing to make the time to balance out their games to make them interesting which always result in games that become dull once you find the "Secret".
Another thing that I want to include but that is not on the list is that programmers will often program something for themselves, and totally disregard everyone else. This can result in a poor overall gameplay, or documentation for mods. This is often a complaint about some open-source projects but I think it really comes down to human nature. When making computer games becomes more accessible to those people who are not as technical, game quality will improve. When you limit the number of people, you are ultimately limiting the talent pool of potentially good game makers.
If you look at some of these sales, the GameBoy Advance is selling literally hundreds of thousands of copies of their games *easily*. Everyone is all on the lame 3D bandwagon. If people would just focus on making GOOD games, then it would probably be better. I mean really, look at Castlevania .. They made it 3D and it sold terribly. The 2D versions on the PSX and the GameBoys are selling like CRAZY. THERE IS A HUGE MARKET FOR GOOD 2D GAMES FOLKS - QUIT DEVELOPEMENT ON YOUR LAME 3D SHOOTER AND MAKE A ***FUN*** 2D PLATFORM GAME. ! Sometimes you gotta go back to your roots to really appeciate GOOD games. I've been digging up all my 2D games lately and franky, they STILL blow away 90% of the lame 3D console games I own.. Blegh. Yes, Super Mario Brothers is *still* fantastic to play. Good grief, use some common sense, devs!
Games are TOO expensive to make anymore. In the last 4 years, dues to increases in technology, people want games to look cutting edge. Now you have three times the number of staff working on content and you're selling the game for the same price you did three years ago. When you did 2d, you had a cell animator to make a character. Now you have a texture artist, a 3d modeler, and an animator to make a character.
So all the publishers have consolidated down to four, half the dev companies have gone bankrupt, and the only games publishers want to make are sure-fire hit sequels. Innovation is too risky, that's why presto studios quit even though they were ahead.
You guys can talk about bad ideas and programmers until you're blue in the face but the real truth of the matter is that it takes too long to make a game anymore and the chances of making the money back on it are getting slimmer. Game developers work on average 70 hours a week and make less than equivalent jobs in the IT field. I'm not kidding, go ask a few.
Mr. Prichard has most of the bases covered but I thought I'd quickly share my very recent and personal experience in the matter.
September 18th, 2002. 9:27 am:
Payday.
I'm standing in front the office rubbing my sleepy eyes and dimly wondering why my key won't open the door. The thought that the locks have changed does not cross my sleep-addled brain. Leaning forward to find a glare less angle, I pause to consider the Kinko's-printed canvas sign leering down on me.
"Tremor Entertainment."
The logo is a dingy red Blizzard facsimile, poorly conceived and executed.
The door opens. I nearly tumble backwards in surprise. Grasping at teetering iron I manage to steady myself. The railing below has rusted out at its bases which are now milling with fire ants.
Karen, our CFO, is standing in the doorway, flanked by armed guards. She is wearing an expression of practiced concern and, oddly, poorly-masked triumph.
"There are no paychecks. The company has been shut down until the contract is renegotiated with Microsoft." Her first performance of the day.
We're told to get a few of our personal things, whatever we'll need or want while the company's on hiatus. I don't realize that I'll never see my Mr. Coffee, Thinkgeek caffeine mugs, and Rage Against the Machine CDs again. "I know it's not your fault," I tell the surly guard "but this is really insulting." He nods: a solemn, practiced, patronizing nod. Karen returns, this time demanding our now useless building keys.
"Do I have to turn in my hall pass too?" No response. The guard tells us to leave. Karen's told him we're not to touch the computers and he's getting jittery. His hand slides involuntarily to the holster on his belt. This is fucking ridiculous.
Standing in the parking lot an hour later, beer in hand, I realized that it was over.
As it turned out there were no 'renegotiations with Microsoft'. The first they heard were our frantic cell phone calls. Our Floridian CEO took the payroll money and ran. All it takes is one A-Hole.
The Tremor team included a number of brilliant, talented individuals; all of them underpaid for their dedication. The team was there for each other and for the project, not for money. This team included the Lead Designer of Starcraft, designers and artists from Warcraft 1& 2, Diablo and Sacrifice (among others.) The project, The Unseen (irony: located), was unassailably special both visually and in terms of gameplay. The contract was with Microsoft, a first-party development contract: the holy grail of game contracts. (I'll save the story of how Microsoft later rammed us in our collective cornhole with a red hot poker for tomorrow night, kiddies.)
In the end all it took was one man to destroy what so many had struggled so long to create.
Currently, the displaced employees of Tremor are involved in a civil lawsuit to recover unpaid wages. CEO Steven Oshinsky is under investigation by the FBI. He looks like Joey Buttafuco. www.tremor.net is still active, it appears.