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Economics of a 2D Adventure

Posted by Zonk on from the put-the-hampster-in-the-microwave dept.

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."

9 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. The first thing I noticed by loopback_127001 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The first thing I noticed by AltaMannen · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:The first thing I noticed by TwistedSquare · · Score: 4, Informative

      Though they did say they would be using an existing engine, which should reduce the amount of testing needed by quite a bit to my mind.

    3. Re:The first thing I noticed by raisedbyrobots · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I agree. When was the last time you found a bug in a 2D adventure game? That's because it's just a new story on top of the same engine. As long as you make sure you can play through the entire game, you're pretty much fine. Really the only testing you need on the playable product is to play through the whole game a few times to make sure it's possible to win. The only real bugs that can occur then are broken room or item objects in the game. In most of these cases, the worst that happens is the user can no longer win, which is a valid choice for some adventure games. (Although recently most adventure games stay away from that.) On the off chance that there is some massive unintended error, the company can just patch it. Most users probably won't notice the bug at all and will be fine without it. No one is going to get pissed because they lost a death match over a bug.

      Believe me, adventure gamers are going to be much more tolerant of bugs than players of other genres. These guys are used to dying for incredibly inane reasons. They've been trained to save every ten minutes in case something goes wrong. Click on a honey comb? Bees kill you. Walk over an ant hill? Fire ants. Look at old woman? Turn to stone. Unprotected sex with hooker? Death by horrible STD. Anyone who's played through a few * Quest games knows what I'm talking open.

  2. Not what I thought... by Bluesman · · Score: 4, Funny

    From the title, I thought the article was going to be about how you can easily rack up 250 rupies for the blue ring in Zelda by going to the money making game and hitting reset only when you lose.

    Hey! Why don't they fund the new game that way?

    --
    If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
  3. other scenarios by JackBuckley · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)?

  4. Thought Experiments and Current Experience. by Musenik · · Score: 5, Informative
    First, Ron Gilbert deserves a lot praise for his explanation of the lost way of 2D games. I worked three years for Sierra Online, porting 10 titles to the Macintosh. He's right on. More recently, I've been working on a 2D adventure game that should go gold, next week.

    Thank Mr. Gilbert for observing that there are many other routes than his traditional approach. But this is the computer game industry, and tradition applies mostly to last week. The route we've taken is to design a game specifically for the women segment of the downloadable audience. They are largely unfamiliar with adventure games. For that reason, we hope to stand out among the billion puzzle games.

    Building 'The Witch's Yarn' cost, out of pocket, $10,000, including legal fees for the distribution agreement. That does not cover the principal developer's salary, but it did pay for the art, animation, proofreading, testing, sound engineering, and music licenses. Guerrilla developers can make real products (mac, pc, linux simultaenous) on real tight budgets. (the trick was to build a text adventure game that looks like a 2D adventure game - think comix)

    Now, $10,000 is all one should spend to build a game for the downloadable market. The biggest game portals charge the most money to sell your game, even more than the retail channel! Fortunately, you don't have manufacturing costs. A good selling game, might earn a developer $100,000, but less than $50,000 is more likely.

    Of course, who knows what'll be true next week.

  5. I think he should rethink the "PC Game only" part by Thag · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    --
    All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
  6. Re:I think he should rethink the "PC Game only" pa by antin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not only that, but the DS with its touch-screen would make adventure games easily playable. Playing on a d-pad or even with a control-stick would get tedious as you sent your cursor all around the screen looking for hot-spots. The touch-screen would be preferable even to a mouse for such a game.

    And as most adventure games seem to make use of large inventories, the second screen would even get a useful purpose.