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Razor Blade Games?
Oxygen99 writes "There's a story on the BBC News website regarding the financial impact on game developers of the next generation of consoles. The article states that while the cost of producing games increases exponentially as new technology comes online, consumer prices stay approximately the same, leading to an unsustainable financial environment for many small developers. With many small development teams already hurting from the crippling costs of development for the X-Box, GameCube and PlayStation 2, what happens when the X-Box2 or Playstation 3 arrives? Are the days of small scale game development over? Will we ever see a new Jeff Minter? Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?"
Increased maturity of a market => less place for little player.
The days of the 8-bit micro was the golden era when it came to small developers(otherwise known as geeks in bed-rooms/garages/basements). You'd have the same person doing the coding, graphics and sound and still have something that did n't look amaturish compared to the big guys. You just cant do that these days, and especially so because graphics and sound have much more prominence then playability did back in the day.
:)
I still remember those 1.99 games being available at my local newsagent. Ahh let the nostalgia begin
they already did that.. you got sega gt and jet set radio with xbox for the same price as without.
Will you people PLEASE stop perpetuating this rumor.
The only consoles to be sold at a loss were the Dreamcast and the XBox. The XBox is no longer sold at a loss.
no
Nintendo has feared that this was coming since they decided to create the Gamecube. They saw that more and more we are only getting sequal's and games with a Disney license since they are a sure fire seller. In response to this the former President of Nintendo (the mighty and wise Hiroshi Yamauchi) started a little project called the QFund. It has multiple purpose's, but one of them is to promote the idea of less expensive development (Nintendo has been doing numerous internal things to drop their production costs). The QFund has a few restrictions on it that help to this point. First of all any project gets money from QFund must finish the game in one year. If they go past that point they can loss funding. They also must use GBA connectivity. Some might claim that is a gimmick to get more people using that for Nintendo, but some of us believe this could actually lead to some real innovations :P
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Snood is a nearly-exact knockoff of Taito's Puzzle Bobble: Bust-A-Move, played only by players who are unwilling to either buy a console or install an emulator to get the Real Thing.
But yes, I get your point that simple games such as Bust-A-Move can be fun without requiring too much of a budget. The problem here is finding that killer game formula, a needle in a haystack.
Will I retire or break 10K?
consoles publishing is very similar to that of mainstream movies, print, and pc gaming. (independent pc gaming is fairly healthy now, but is about as 'popular' as art-house movie theatres)
a console has a barrier for entry - just like getting your film into a loews cineplex, getting your PC game into CompUSA, or getting your book into Barnes and Nobles.
-developers- can remain small - but small publishers evaporate.
this is not a new twist in gaming, it's an emergent trend from the last 10 years. certainly, it's a market that costs money to break into. you either have it independently, or you pitch for it.
what does it mean for the industry?
well it nearly guarantees that games will continue to be as derivative as hollywood, and the ny times fiction list.
Anything remotely 'new' will get beaten into the ground in long-running strings of sequels (gta, doom, die hard, and Tom Clancy novels are not so different)
Innumerable 'knockoffs' will get published to try to ride the wake of what is 'new', and maybe once every 4 years something really cool and different from the norm comes out.
but it will quickly be emulated, immitated, and desecrated.
will it go the razor blade sales model?
no. that's ridiculous. the razor-blade sales model relies on producing inexpensive pieces, and packaging them as an expensive whole. (even with 4 blades in a refill, gilette is making money hand over fist - even on the cute handle)
Nintendo has shown that using your console as a loss-leader is not necessary (they make money on each console as well as each game) their lack of market share in the US and Europe is more directly due to nintendo's tight control over game developers, and their resultant small selection of games. microsoft and sony resorted to dumping, to try to capture large chunks of the market. with the new consoles becoming more and more complex, and incorporating more and more general functions - they most certainly will -not- be 'given' away. (xbox2 and ps3 almost certainly will carry pvr functionality)
they may be sold at a marginal loss, so long as there is healthy competition in the market, but it would never come down to handing someone a console. primarily because there would then be no 'attachment' to the title. everyone would own every console in short order. What xbox/ps2 owner would pass up wind waker or sunshine if they didn't have to pay for the GC? likewise with ps2 owners buying halo, and xbox owners buying gta:vice city. and if there's no brand loyalty - well then who's to say that MS will -ever- get their money back from game sales to support eating the cost of the console? particularly from the 'casual' gaming market - who would buy maybe a half dozen games. (and most likely, the 2 best from each main system). 2 games does not cover MS loss on the xbox, or Sony's on the ps2.
so what -does- this mean?
it does mean the end of originality on the store shelf - but that's been not-so-slowly happening since the early 90s.
perhaps if electronic distribution catches on, then this trend can be avoided - but i'm not holding my breath.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
XBoxes are still sold at a loss (remember that retailers do make a profit on those units figure MS gets less than $150 per X-box). I'd guess that the cost of a unit is around $200, it was $300+ when introduced. The whole program, including games sales (which are quite profitable) generated almost $1 billion in losses for MS this year (ending in June). Many consoles are sold at a loss initially, since the manufacturer knows that eating a few months of losses might give them a year of profits on the back end, when a better console might still be sold, so they tend to pack the best stuff they think they can resonably get away with at the time.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The problem here is not the characters, but the fact that the games were not willing to explore any new ground story-wise.
I mean, I remember playing "The Lion King"; all you did was play the storyline of the movie! I already knew exactly everything that was going to happen. Big whoop.
Now, if they had made it more of an RPG, with an action component, and extended the universe with a new story, THEN it might have been interesting. Combining likeable characters you already know with NEW adventures might have made for quite an improvement!
But no.. they followed formula, formula, formula. Though I must admit, the ability to throw the other player around in a two player "Chip and Dale" game made it worth every penny at the time. };)
Will we ever see a new Jeff Minter?
Why would we need to see a new Jeff Minter when the current one is single-handedly (well, with some financial support from Lionhead Studios) making a GameCube game right now: Unity.
Somehow, I doubt that Unity will cost $30 million. Smaller scale game dev is still possible -- so long as you don't want $29 million worth of theatrics, and $1 worth of a game.
1. Doesn't allow mouse control.
PS2 supports USB mice.
2. Doesn't have high-resolution > 1024x768. And even if it did, that doesn't mean much to people who don't have HDTV.
Why would you need high res when playing on a TV?
And current gen consoles do support HDTV, although
very few games actually use it. Next gen it will be pretty much a standard.
3. You are locked into the game...no modding.
Xbox has a hard drive and lots of mods availables.
4. You can't always freely connect with other large groups over the net without using a system that was developed to monitor your gameplay...like Microsoft's.
Sony doesn't monitor online gamers at all.
5. How about setting up a 32 player server with a console?
How about it? Most console online games use one machine as server.
6. Ever try to backup your console game CD?
There's piracy on consoles, if that's what you mean.
7. Can you upgrade you console system without throwing out the entire box?
Can you upgrade your PC spending less than $300?
8. Why do you say consoles are easier? PC game interfaces are exactly the same (on screen configuration and controls)?
Installation, compatibility problems, patches...
9. Consoles are sold separately from PCs. An investment in a console is not an investment in my PC. Why would I do that?
So you bought the latest greatest graphics card because it improves the performances of your word processor?
Wrong. The article says exactly the oposite. It says the development cost have increased "exponentially" but not consumer price. More customers certainly compensante for some of this but not all. Hence the prediction that the market will restructure in consideration of these economics.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Not everyone has 40 to 80 hours to sink into the latest rpgs...
Many older Nintendo RPGs made it a point to advertise "over 100 hours of game play." Now, however, I am finding it really hard to complete an RPG that takes even 40 or 50 hours. I think this is indicative of the greater and more complex time constraints many of us are facing.
Given that people are now torn by cell phones, PDAs, PCs, gaming consoles, television, cable television, not to mention older avenues, such as magazines, newspapers, and radio, there are less personal resources available for long drawn-out games. Oh shit, I fogot to leave room for family...and politics...well, friends really are optional...nothing gets done at PTA meetings, anyway...it's more important to get a cash loan for a down payment on this crappy wannabe sporty car...gotta be fast with no time left for driving...what do you mean you need to be picked up after practice...don't forget to stop by McDonalds for dinner...fat ass kid expects to be fed... (this isn't my life, I hope, but I think I am seeing this more and more every day in other people)
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Point taken about Dave Perry. He's a twat.
I fail to see what you're arguing here though. Perry said pixels and you're saying randomly generated graphics is a great idea. Meanwhile, the guy you're answering wasn't talking about randomness or graphics at all.
He was talking about parametric modelling and you're assuming he's talking about driving them with random numbers but I think he means as a design aid, not as a design replacement. You still have artists designing the parametric model, and you still have artists setting the parameters for each instance of the model. This input is definitely crucial.
Still, your point about autogenerated worlds is true. I think the solution, though, is to apply design time where its needed and let the computer fill the irrelevant details in. The problem with previous systems has been that the program designer decides what's relevant and what isn't and this cannot change from place to place in the game. In a cave scene, you may decide the rockface isn't relevant, or you may decide the rockface is the focal point of the area. That's a critical decision, but then other details are incidental.
There was a good paper in this year's SIGGRAPH about parametric models for buildings. It's an interesting read.
That would be a small bedroom programmer with the thousands of dollars neccesary to purchase development equipmenet and/or a middleware license. Licensing Renderware would cost you like $200,000. Licensing Havok would cost you another 50k probably. Unless said small bedroom was in a really big mansion, it'd be unlikely that its occuopant could afford the extremely large fixed costs associated with console development.
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Get back to me when my brain starts working.
Someone mentioned this above, but almost no "code" is reused in the sequels you listed above besides Doom 1-2 (almost the same game) and Quake 1-2. What is reused in the 'big' jumps is the experience of the developers and their understanding of 3D in a computer world.
Take Starcraft, for instance (I know it's not an id game, but I know beyond doubt that what I say about Starcraft below is true). The very first build of Starcraft was made by adding onto and editing the Warcraft II engine Blizzard already had. After about three complete start-from-scratch redesigns, the game was released. What is used are the ideas and concepts, but the physical Warcraft II code was not carried over. Quake III was made in a similar fashion, with start-from-scratch code.
I just finished reading Masters of Doom, and I'm fairly confident in saying that Carmack and his team could all walk away from id Software and make a new FPS called 'Mountain Dew Menace' or something with Doom 3 caliber graphics because they have the skills and the knowledge.
Just thought of something, too. I'm fairly certain Quake 2 was a complete redesign due to a part of Masters of Doom where Romero gets the code from Carmack and has trouble porting Daikatana from Quake 1 to Quake 2 because Quake 2's codebase was so radically different than Quake 1's.
So, in short, Doom 3's code has nothing to do with Doom 1's code. Only the concepts have evolved, not the actual if-thens.
Actually Atari tried to control game publishers. They even tried to sue Activision. They lost mainly because the 2600 was all off the shelf parts. The couldn't even stop people making clones.
They tried to put an end to it with the 7800. That machine had an encrytion scheme to prevent third party games from using the imporved features.
Like I said there has never really been room for the small guy in Consoles.
BTW some of the worst games came not from third party publishers but from Atari. ET and Pacman did more to tick off 2600 users than anything.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?
Hate to break it to you, but manufacturers have been selling consoles at a loss for a long time now. Their business models rely on profits in software sales to recoup their hardware development and manufacturing costs.
Besides the initial financial risk to the console manufacturer, this model causes tremendous stress to the software development companies as the manufacturer negotiates harsher deals to allow themselves a greater profit margin. With the costs of development systems going up with each new platform release, not to mention contractual obligations, console software development is not an easy market to get into. This isn't likely to improve either.
The only possibility of this situation improving is manufacturers driving-up the retail prices of consoles far enough to recover costs on inital sale - but then they price themselves out of the market. This isn't likely to happen.
With games coming into new devices, such as mobile phones, at least there's opportunity for development companies to grow into areas other than the console market.