Economics of a 2D Adventure

Thanks to The Grumpy Gamer (Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame), for his excellent look at The Economics of 2D Adventure Games. "First, this is only a thought experiment. This is not something I am planning on doing, or even have a huge interest in doing, so please don't feed the rumor mills. Second, this article contains gory and gruesome details about the games business and, in particular, marketing and distribution. If you'd rather remain blissfully oblivious to the horrors of what goes on behind the scenes, this is the place to stop reading. If you're one of those people that can't help but stare at a car accident, read on."

Comments

The first thing I noticed

[loopback_127001]

In the budget was this: Testing Subtotal: $30,000 In case anyone wants to ever wonder why the game industry releases consistently buggy, shitty product, there's your answer. Testing. ALL the testing for 1 year. $30k. Half the salary of a single developer. I would assume that's either for hiring a single real person at 30k to do the testing, or else to pay 30k to a contractor service for some amount of hours of testing. I think it's interesting, especially given that the stated numbers are from his experience in the industry. Perhaps in this specific case, with a known engine and no cutting-hedge technology, spending such a tiny amount of testing of the game could work out, if you also have the developers and everyone else playing the game / testing along the way as well. Overall, a really interesting breakdown of how things would work for even an extremely simple game idea, and how much money is involved.

Re:The first thing I noticed

[AltaMannen]

I don't think it was assumed testing is full time for the full time of the project.

Until you have something "playable" the programmers and designers can do all the testing and that is going to take a certain amount of time.

Also, going with the publisher approach may mean that they have an additional testing team that goes under "publisher overhead". Most titles today have way higher testing costs than $30k, but this is a low-budget project.

other scenarios

[JackBuckley]

This is an interesting article, but the situation is quite hypothetical--the odds of someone trying this development model for a 2D point-and-click graphical adventure are slim. For real fans of this genre (who also might want to make a buck) it might be more interesting to relax some of the assumptions about part-time or hobbyist programming staff and the infeasibility of internet distribution (and/or even a shareware model). Developer/publishers like Spiderweb Software (makers of the Exile series, among other Ultima-type RPGs) help with the back-end stuff for small-time or hobbyist shareware developers. Similarly, sites like Home of the Underdogs promote and help sell "scratchware" games. The real question to me is, can a scratchware/shareware/late night after work development team make enough money to break even (given the real and opportunity costs of creating the game)?

I think he should rethink the "PC Game only" part

[Thag]

In particular, the Game Boy Advance is the #2 console, and would be both cost-effective to develop for and well-suited to a 2D adventure format.

You could easily do Monkey Island on it.

You're going to have to go through Nintendo, but you'll have to go through a distributor on the PC side too.

Jon Acheson