Xbox Co-Creators' CEG 'Middleman' Venture Fails

Thanks to the San Jose Mercury News for their story revealing that the 'gaming middleman' venture Capital Entertainment Group has closed its doors. The article explains that CEG's founders "...included Seamus Blackley [now heading to CAA as a games agent] and Kevin Bachus, who were part of the team that created the Xbox at Microsoft and persuaded Bill Gates to spend billions in a bid to unseat Sony as the dominant player in video games." The founders started CEG "...to solve growing rifts between game developers and publishers. CEG planned to develop high-quality games with established developers. It would then take those games and pitch them to game publishers and share in the cut if the games were successful." But funding wasn't forthcoming, since "...in the end the VCs didn't want to try their luck in risky hit-or-miss games." Will there ever be room in the market for an "independent production company" like CEG?

Comments

Sturgeon's Law

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing about this industry I still don't get after a decade of being intermittently exposed to/involved with it, is that while there's much more creative game development going on now than 10 years ago, the games all still mostly suck and lose money. They just do it in 3D these days.

"Fun" has become ever more elusive as the amount of content continues to explode. Everything is either the same as everything else or just plain f'ed up and wrong. For the record, the last game I liked were Rise of Nations and Crimson Skies: High Road To Revenge so I don't think I'm, ya know, too old and jaded to appreciate the occasional bright spots just yet.

But in closing, what exactly does Seamus Blackley know about fun anyway? This is the guy who gave us the Waterworld of video games, Trespasser. On the other hand, he's a master of self-promotion, so making him an agent might turn him into the Kid Notorious of the video game industry. I knew CEG would fail from the day I heard about its formation. The business model or should I say the "magic lottery" of the video game industry just isn't ready for a Miramax Studios.

*scratches head*

[jermyjerm]

I don't know from marketing, but I really don't see how companies like that will ever be crucial to the industry. Is marketing such a problem that it would be worth sharing profits with another company to solve?

I think the industry is set up now so that gamers will find the games they want to be playing without a huge focus on marketing. Buying a console is an investment, no matter how small to some, so it seems that the buyer would want a good return on their investment in the form of quality game titles; thus, they'd go out of their way to find them. Also, game culture on the internet creates a huge amount of word of mouth. While this all applies to more "hardcore" (for lack of a better term) gamers, there are already franchises there to attract the casual gamer's attention, with more being created all the time, and the amount of buzz created by the blockbuster titles is enough to attract the casual game buyer.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that no matter how much a company markets a great game (like Ico for instance), it will never be appealing to the majority of gamers, and a company that just copies a model used in the film industry is doomed to fail, because the same principles do not apply to games. People can essentially watch the same movie over and over again, but it takes a lot more to keep games fresh than to change the actors or systematically alter the plot.