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?"

Comments

Re:Pressure = opportunity

[Monkelectric]

Agreed! Fundamental business model changes are at hand, but I think they'll be a tad bit different then what you suggest.

What has been the trend in all entertainment venues right now? Movies? One of the worst years for movies, average drop of is HUGE. Games? Things could be better. Music? Teetering on bankrupcy.

For whatever reason (bad economy?), consumers are a *little* smarter about what they're purchasing. People are tired of mindless teen movies, boring first person shooters, and bullshit pop music. Now I'm not claiming that every last consumer has wisened up, but that enough are atleast to reduce profits to critical levels.

We are at a low low LOW for creativity on all of these mediums. Normally, companies expect a ceartin ammount of idiots will buy a shitty product no matter what. But now, people hop on the internet, talk to their friends, and now you only need to know someone who knows someone who tells you a game is bad. "Yea dude, this guy I know bought red faction, its fucking lame."

I think what is going to happen is a market is going to be created for Independant movies/games/music. independant music is already here. I'm hearing *good* new inovative music and it just takes a little work to find it. I get to reject corpratism, I get to hear *good* music cheaper then I would, and good artists get my money directly.

A few years from now? I expect independant games / movies should start to show up. However, thats just my hope. It could be that once the economy loosens up, people will go right back to buying shit. But I have hope :)

Re:SDK

[dackroyd]

-1 Wrong:

Then you need to licence the SDK for an amount Sony will decide.
You need approval for your game from Sony in order to buy the development kit - this is to prevent the PS2 market being flooded with crap. Once you have your kit, all the Sony tools are free. (but not as good as the third party tools from Sn Systems.)

Then for each game you need to spend about half a million dollars to get it approved and tested by Sony. They can reject you for any reason and make you pay to have it tested until they are happy.
The testing procedure is paid for by the license fees per disk. Again this is a hurdle to prevent crap being released on the market - or would you prefer publishers to be able to publish buggy games in order to hit their deadlines ?

Then do the same with Microsoft and Nintendo.
Your first game doesn't have to be released on all three consoles - why not just target one.

The consoles are VERY tightly controlled.
Because there are already too many professional games companies making games for the market to support - it is not in anybodies interest in the market for amateurs to flood the market with sub-standard crap.