Slashdot Mirror
Death to the Games Industry - Part II
hapwned writes "Following up on Greg Costikyan's first part of his article from last week, The Escapist goes for round 2 vs the Game Industry. Costikyna goes on to explain what they should do instead: 'One thing developers can try to do - and should do, if they can - is to take over that first additional piece of the value chain. They should try to fund their own development. If you can fund your own development, you get some big advantages. First, you can negotiate a higher royalty rate with the publisher, because they have less capital at risk. Second, you are not utterly at the publisher's mercy during the development process; if the publisher-side producer wants you to do something really stupid (and horror stories abound), you can tell him to screw off. And third,you can retain ownership of your own IP, so if you build a successful franchise, you (rather than the publisher) reaps the benefit.'"
While in an ideal world I would agree with the points made in TFA, and there are many companies in the games world moving in this direction (Valve's Steam, for better or worse, is at the forefront of the "Kill the publisher" movement) eliminating the publisher from fundraising and distribution is not that easy. The biggest advantage of having a publisher is that the risk of producing the game is largely lifted from the shoulders of the developers. Once developers start bringing in venture capitalists and other sources of investment, they become culpable if the game fails at market. Not to mention that the shift from publisher to VC just passes the control of your game from the hands of the publisher to the hands of the VCs.
The second part of TFA, regarding digital distribution, is also flawed in the real world. They give examples of games already available for direct download and mention that waiting "half an hour" or so for a game is no worse than driving to the store. However, many modern games are pushing the capacity of DVDs to their limits, and already multi-DVD games have been seen. Most people simply do not have the bandwidth to download several Gigs in "half an hour."
While I commend what the article is trying to acheive, I simply do not think that changing the business model for game development and distribution is as easy as it makes it seem. Established game companies, like Valve, will likely need to take the lead in changing the model rather than the new developers. That said, there are definate advancements being made in that direction and I believe the model is moveing steadilly towards innevitable and positive changes.
The point is not that everyone should be like George Lucas. The point is that if we take the focus off the superficial stuff, we could get some quality development done without the Lucas-style budgets budgets.
Yes, there's risk. But it needn't be as huge as the publishers want us to think. The problem is that they have strict (though misguided) standards for their output, which require a certain level of monetary input. Changing the output standards necessarily changes the necessary input resources.