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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?"
When economic pressures like this get built up, that provides an opportunity for someone to deliver a solution to some of these problems that reduces cost and/or time of development. For example, rather than producing Hollywood-caliber graphics on a custom basis for each game, perhaps that function is better served by standalone companies that create characters and associated animations that game developers can license for use.
Bottom line is that the demand side will determine what happens here - if the market can sustain higher prices for games, the current trend could continue for a while. If a big-budget game flops dramatically, however, you'll see a restructuring of the process that could result in a major shakeout within the industry...
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It's too hard to make Beowulf clusters from old Gillettes.
Smaller shops will likely continue to innovate, especially in new markets like cell phones and PDAs, where compactness of code and short development cycles pay off quickly. You will not likely see Doom XXVIII on your Samsung NPH-3500 phone, but you might just see Bookworm coming soon.
Don't be fooled into thinking that consoles and PC are - forgive the pun - the only game in town.
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I see the game industry moving along much the same path as the movie industry did. Today, independent films are still made, movie enthusiasts support them, and they are a great way for individuals or small groups to get noticed and get on large projects that make real money.
I am hoping that moviegoers are getting saturated by the overly formulaic movies they're being given, and will shift the focus back to smaller budget films that are more original. But I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the movie biz right now. For those that crave original, small-budget films, there's no shortage of them.
There will always be a high demand for the latest and greatest games/consoles from the pre-teen to the post-teen age groups. The thing is, we have gotten a taste, starting with Pong, and will never get enough until you jack us straight in, and get a virtual reality that is more than a messy abortion. Addiction is a word that comes to mind, and people will do anything to pay for their addictions.
"Sheep just follow the easiest path and run from scary noises and intimidating creatures." - Me
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
To me this is good news for gamers. True, it will result in a lot of lowest common denominator crap. But this analogy suggests a lot of positive aspects as well. For one, I personally happen to like blockbuster movies, and I'm glad that the market is such that someone can justify spending $300 mio or so on the LOTR trilogy (to name just one example).
At the same time, there is space for the little guy in the film industry to some extent. Innovative filmmakers can still make a name for themselves on a superlow budget (e.g. Clerks. In my view this applies even more to the gaming world, where a clever idea can be a huge hit without requiring dozens of programmers and designers to implement (consider Tetris).
Anything that makes really stunning high-budget output possible is more than fine by me.
Peer Pressure
Should develop smaller games. For every Grand Theft Auto 3, there's a Tetris.
The Big Hollywood style productions can be handled by the huge companies, while the smaller companies can do innovative things like games that actually have gameplay value as opposed to eyecandy value.
Gameplay value is timeless and largely not driven by technology. If need be, license the high end graphics from someone else rather than reinvent the wheel. But someone should be working on making games playable, re-playable, and fun.
A prime area for small-time, moderate budget development? AI. *Good* AI, that learns and adapts, for example, is something I'd like to see. AI that gets lazy and complacent and forgets sometimes, for that human feel, and to prevent things from getting too difficult.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Why do video game prices have to go up because the the technology is improving? Computers have consistently become more complex, but their prices have been going down. The number of people playing video games is also going up quite rapidly, resulting in more customers for video game companies. Maybe they have to do more development, but that is the same for all new technologies. If video game companies are losing money, it's because of nothing but a crappy business model.
(I think that the answer to this factoid observation is self-evident, but I'll post it anyway.)
The costs of developing large-scale games only affects the developers of large-scale games. As noted abundantly by others, such games tend to fit certain well-defined genres: RTS, MMORPG, FPS, RPG... indeed, the whole reason we even have and know these acronyms is because the styles of games have become extraordinarily pigeonholed.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Take Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - the game only works because gamers have been trained to go along with the scripting and accept the monolithic linearity of the missions. If you do, however, you get a pretty grand experience.
But the point is this: A few game niches have become so overproduced that independent developers can't hope to compete - but the rest of the market is wide open.
And what a wide-scale market that is! How many genres have barely been tapped, or not yet invented? How do you even classify something like Popcap's Insaniquarium? Or PaRappa the Rapper, or Dance Dance Revolution? Those are pretty easy games to design and develop, and they're fiercely fun. Window dressing is extra - but for these innovative games, window dressing is secondary to gameplay. (What a novel concept!)
Bottom line: Independent developers should not mimic Electronic Arts and try to compete in these highly stylized, overbudgeted affairs. But there's plenty of untapped gaming out there, just waiting for someone with a smidge of vision and a touch of imagination. Go get 'em, guys!
David Stein, Esq.
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There never really was room for small players in the console market. Look at the old Atari days. You had Atari and Activision and them some other big compaines moved in. There where some little guys but not that many and they sort of lived in the cracks that the big boys did not want. Only home computers let little game makers live. Even then if you where a small company starting off you might do better starting with a less popular computer than the Atari, C64, or Apple. Writing for a getting a CoCo game reviewed might have been easier than getting an Apple II game reviewed.
There is room for small game companies. Just not on the Playstation or the X-Box.
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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
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Game programers should stop re-inventing the wheel and use common game engines, at least for the graphics. I realize that lots of games have been made by liscensing the Quake 3 engine or Unreal engine, this seems like a potential way for smaller developers to have access to reasonably good looking technology to drive the PS3, xbox 2 or N5.
One of the real problems is that there is little room for games with lower expectations. I'd be really happy to buy a bunch of ten hour games that had less technical wows but much heart, especially if their retail price was reasonable.
How many gamers do you know that buy the latest games at $50? Most games sold at $50 are the blockbusters that sell to the general public rather than the hardcore gamers. But it's the hardcore gamers who buy more than 1 game every few months. I buy a ton of games but I've learned to be patient and buy games a month or two or even 12 later than the release date, simply to get the game for $20 or less. There is a big market for new games at lower prices that is not being tapped.
Not everyone has 40 to 80 hours to sink into the latest rpgs and not every game needs to be Final Fantasy VII. I really love the Ikaruga's of this world. Final Fatasy VII cost $35 million to make and had a staff of over 100 people. On the other hand, 95% of Ikaruga was made by THREE people. (For instance, the music was written by the same guy who did the game's background art!)
I kinda get the feeling that the industry might be heading towards another major evolutionary period, similar to the market crashes of the late atari era... I'm just not sure what it will look like.
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What is needed is for game developers to stop throwing money into the photorealistic hole. Anime is a perfectly acceptable graphic style designed for mass production. By reducing the amount of "detail" using artisitic license you can focus more on game play, scripts, and quality assurance.
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I've been programming for many many years on many different platforms, I'm an expert in C and x86 assembly and I've done a lot of stuff with OpenGL and a good amount with DirectX not to mention being proficient in just about any area of programming you could think of. The problem is that a game engine like DOOM 3 is not a stand-alone work. It is rather the evolution of the first DOOM engine through all the iterations of Quake. I could write the first DOOM engine. I could probably even write something like Quake 2. But as a small developer, I cannot possibly break into this market when I'm competing with people who are evolving and reusing code that they've had for years. They just keep making it a little better. I can't do that because I don't have years and years of succesful 3d projects to draw from and improve upon.
No small developer can jump 6 levels of technology to get to the current state-of-the-art and compete with large developing firms. Programming, like everything, is an iterative process; so as games get larger(code-size) and more complex with more and better technology packed into them, it will be harder and harder for small developers to break in the market. Most of them end up buying a decent 3d engine from someone else. And with faster graphics cards and games like Warcraft 3 and PlanetSide, all games are beginning to rely on evolved technology. A small developer's game (whether its an FPS or an RTS or an MMORPG) can't compete with the beauty and speed of a large company's engine that has been revised and rewritten and composed of a multitude of high speed algorithms and computing tricks that have been drawn from a large code base. Which relegates us all to the realm of shareware...or, on the bright side, perhaps open source community projects.
Take the PS2 for example.
For starters you need a $15,000 development station.
Then you need to licence the SDK for an amount Sony will decide.
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.
Then you pay Sony $8 for each game you sell, plus the costs to produce the special CD's the PS2 needs.
Then do the same with Microsoft and Nintendo.
Don't forget several programmers, artists and people to figure out the maze of licencing procedures for each console.
Making console games is in no way something a single person can do, sadly. The consoles are VERY tightly controlled.
That's not what he means.
Let's say company A makes characters. Company B can either buy them or sub-contract them to create new characters for their games.
Therefore, letting the game company worry about the game itself. This is commonly done with sound effects and music. (outsourcing, more than licensing though)
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.
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Solutions will arrive automatically. Thankfully we've already seen the start of this via Middleware - software by a third party which is hired/loaned and used for development. PS2 and Xbox have successfully helped build an entire middleware community and a new source of revenue. Now small bedroom programmers can either be responsible for middleware or the "end game" software.
Let us not lament- Sony is the current market leader and also happens to be the only manufacterer who opened up their console for easy programming (anyone remember the Sony Yazoo (or whatever it was called) for the PSX - a home development system) and is also selling Linux kits without a free cease and desist letter to anyone who uses linux on their PSX.
There's still space out there for bedroom developers, it's just that bedroom developers are changing!
Frogmanalien
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency (Eugene McCarthy)
-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.
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If you are looking for a handheld console that has a free SDK, can be used with any development environment on Linux, Mac or Windows then have a look at the GamePark 32 which is available in Korea and soon into Europe.
:)
I recommend looking at the GP32 site though as it has better descriptions, reviews, news and gives you a great overview of what is possible. It is the first 'Open' console that's been produced and already has quite a 'bedroom' community that has sprung up around it.
Not only it is open, it just happens to be the most powerful handheld console out there and there's ports of Doom, Heretic on it already as well as Atari ST, Gameboy, SMS, PC Engine and Megadrive emulators. It has a built in MP3 player and you can also plays DivX movies if you pay a small fee (3.50/$6) for the player. All the commerical games for it are very cheap too - most in the 7/$12 bracket.
In short it is superb and runs on standard Smart Media Cards so once you've bought the console you aren't tied to buying proprietry hardware like the Gameboy.
So, you have no excuses now - buy one, start developing and make money!
I think you forgetting a great market that moved away from this kind of mentality and has not collapsed under a pile of crap games: the pc game market. Sure, they have crap games out there. But they don't survive. The good games become popular and the companies that make them produce more games. The setup of the pc game market does not prevent a 15 year old super coding genious from producing the Next Great Thing in his basement while still allowing for large companies like Blizzard et. al. to produce greate and not so greate games in mass. The console world can take a page from the pc game market and let the consumers decide what is a good game and what is a bad game.
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