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

Pressure = opportunity

[TopShelf]

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...

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:Pressure = opportunity

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

every game coming out of the pipe would be the same, homogeneous product, using the same libraries, graphics, sounds, whatever.

You just described the standing state of Shoot 'em Up Games(tm) for the past two years.

Nope - vis a vis Bookwork

[cspenn]

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.

Consider the Film Industry

[plasticmillion]

I see a lot of parallels between video game development and the film industry. As the market has become larger and more global, consumer expectations have risen accordingly. The result is that the biggest moneyspinners in the future are likely to be "blockbuster" games written by larger companies with big budgets and teams (this trend is already abundantly clear).

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.

Smaller developers...

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Small development vs. large development

[tambo]

(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.

Why I Can't make a DOOM 3 clone

[Peterius]

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.

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.