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Game Companies Prepare for Next Console War
domanova writes "The BBC has an article up about the difficulties games companies will face in the next round of the console war. I don't play games, and my programming is in a different world, but the last lines of the article struck a cord. "Mr Hasson said games developers were beginning to realise that they had to be more business-like. 'There are still some developers who were involved in games from the bedroom coding days.
Some of them are still making games for peer group approval - that has to stop.'"
By "peer group approval" I think he means that teams and developers are getting bogged down in making the "perfect" game or a work of art that will be approved by 99% of the world instead of 90%.
It takes a lot of cost and effort to get that last 10% and it breaks the back of a lot of companies. So in business sense, it's better to ship a product that's "good enough" than to never ship one at all because it wasn't "great".
As a consumer of games, yeah that's a moronic statement! We want GREAT games!
But in reality it doesn't pay the bills. Unfortunately it also means we're going to get saddled with commodity games... like "Aviator: The flight simulator"
Developing games is becoming harder and harder to do for small developers.
That's just not true though. Developing games that appeal to gamers who are interested into shooting their friends from the first person perspective with cutting-edge detail is harder, yes. There are plenty of small developers that continue to do just fine by appealing to those of us who are more interested in gameplay though.
If you want to make a high profile game that is going to sell millions of copies, you can go Hollywood and take your chance that your non-movie-licensed title will be the one in twenty to make it, or you can concentrate on a smaller audience and overall game quality you can respect yourself in the morning and probably put food on the table...
The reason we're seeing comments like this is not because the independant game developer has gone away, but because as the games market has grown and tons of marketing dollars have been poured into the market, the smaller developers have slipped off the radar. Remember that the journalistic machine is lubricated with cash... I'd bet more people play independant games than mainstream games (think about all those flash games, PDA games, etc...), but the trade rags only write about the ones that produce advertising dollars.
He's got two problems:
1) Is that most "peer group" targetted games fail. Mostly they appeal to too small a segment of the population to make any money even if they make it out of development. Many don't get that far as they get too complex and too niche.
2) Games like Katamari Damacy that come out of left field screw up his pre-existing business of selling licensed sports games, another FPS with fancy new graphics etc. etc. I.e. innovation takes away some of his market share. Until he owns it, he's losing money.
This isn't really new. Look at Hollywood. Most movies are nothing but old ideas with new faces designed to target a specific market and get some easy cash. But we do rarely get a new, good movie that stands above the rest. They're hard to pick out, but they're out there.
Businessmen are classically short sighted. They only see things as they are now, and make decisions that way. Once something new comes in they're scared until they can make money from it. Then they love it. If you made a bundle off every gas powered car sale, wouldn't you be afraid of someone who sold electric cars?