On The Need For New Videogame Funding Models

Thanks to Costik.com for pointing to entrepreneur Gordon Gould's comments on possible new videogame funding avenues, as he notes "the coming console shift to Xbox 2 and the Playstation 3 is going to once again raise the bar on development costs", meaning "a shrinking number of titles per publisher slate w/increased pressure on those titles to be out of the ballpark blockbusters." He suggests that "developers' ability to gain more control over their destiny is handicapped by the relative scarcity of funding sources", but this may be changing, as investors from outside the industry start to fund development (as seen recently at MMO creator Turbine.) However, Greg Costikyan weighs in with a response, arguing that "...even looking at something as goofy and hit-driven as the game industry, an investor is already taking a big risk, and his or her instinct is going to be the same as the publishers': be conservative in what you fund."

Comments

unfortunate consequences...

[BTWR]

The unfortunate consequences that this brings, not entirely unjustifiably, is that daring new games will not be made. When every 5 years or so brings a new genre (FPS, violent vigilante games), we'll simply see 10 clones of those, instead of new ideas. When developing a game costs millions of dollars to make, with entire teams of workers to go at it (as opposed to the Atari days when one guy made the whole game), you kinda can't blame them for not taking huge risks.

Even Nintendo's very creative games this generation, Pikmin and Viewtiful Joe, were made (I'm totally speculating) only because they were pet projects of titans of the industry.

Games should be cheaper to make

[xyu]

You'd think hardware manufacturers would make dev kits that make it easy to make games. That way games could be produced faster, hence cheaper.

I remember talk of Nintendo's kit that they used to build Wind Waker and FF:Crystal Chronicles. They were supposed to be able to build games in under a year with it. Anyone know if it is working?

Also, the recently resigned Nintendo president set up some sort of fund to help pay for games:

As reported last year, Yamauchi-san announced plans to establish a game development fund in Japan. Thereby, Yamauchi-san will invest venture capital into budding game developers and related visionaries.

Re:Games should be cheaper to make

[Scorchio]

Errrrrr.. no. The technology is getting more and more complex. Sure, it's easier to write a previous generation game on current generation hardware, than previous generation hardware. Using all the bells and whistles the new tech provides certainly isn't easy.

However, you're spot on about content, though. It seems that we're heading towards project teams with a handful of programmers and a army of artists, animators, modellers and musicians.

Re:The risk?

[Incoherent07]

Agreed. You do start to wonder why, if modern games get better and better with every generation (or so the hype goes), people still even play games from the 1980s. Is it, perhaps, that simplicity has advantages?

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the hardest part of making a game is the artwork. And yet, strangely, the artwork isn't the most important part of the game! (Some will argue that, I'm aware.) The gameplay, dare I say it, is the most important part. If publishers instead concentrated on making good games, and skimped on the artwork perhaps, wouldn't that decrease the cost of the development cycle, and therefore mitigate the whole problem the article discusses?