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Epic's Rein On Next-Gen And Secondhand
Computer and Video Games has an interview with Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games. He expounds on Epic's role in the next generation of consoles, along with his opinions on the industry in general, and the sales of secondhand games. From the article: "Unreal Tournament, the original, is still our biggest-selling game ever. Because we sell our games now in instalments, no single instalment is going to sell in the same way as a single game across multiple formats. We're really recapturing a lot of the original, with less jumping around - it went a little crazy with the double and triple jumps. It'll be toned down and a little more skill-based."
To ask for royalties on used games is perposterous. It's completely contrary to the Doctrine of First Sale.
Even if by some miracle it wasn't, how do you expect to expand that model? If we sell our game as an individual, we have to make out a tiny little check to Epic? No? Then a small company does? No? Well, where do you draw the line? It's all in a scary realm which trounces on a company's ability to do business, and introduces unfair competition.
Perhaps they could make the margin proposition more attractive for retailers, encouraging them to slow down or eliminate their used game sales.
Perhaps they could eliminate support for "used" / transferred games - like MMOs and such already do.
Or perhaps they could just suck it up and keep their noses out of other peoples' bottom line.
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You know, and if you had paid some attention, you would have learned that UE4 is indeed in existence, they have already talked about that. Currently only Tim Sweeney doing stuff with it, but it is obviously being worked on for 2 years. And that with UE3 not yet powering any title on the shelves (that I know of). Weird, but true.
Unreal Tournament was 6GB compressed. Next Generation games are going to be 20GB plus, and how we're going to fit them on DVD9's I don't know, they'll probably be a few of them. On the PS3, we're going to be using the majority of the space on those Blu-ray disks. So, online isn't really the best option in some instances.
Downloading 30Gb isn't really feasible. What online could be, is the back-channel to get additional content. Patches and things like that. I think what Valve has done is great. It'll be interesting to see where marketing fits in. Now they're going with EA in the future, the biggest publisher of all. You can't do one without the other, otherwise no-one knows about your game. Unless you have the huge marketing budgets that major retailers have when launching your game, so I think there's still a very important role for retailers.
That says it right there, doesn't it. MS is going to have a hard time keeping content on discs. People argue whether you need the space between BD-ROM and HD-DVD for video, but I think this is even more important on the video game side. This is one of those things that could become a big problem for MS.
What about Nintendo? For some reason I don't see it as such a big problem (maybe because they aren't focusing on HD this and HD that), but it could still be a problem.
As for the used game comment, I don't blame them. There are many times that I would like to buy a game used and have money go to the publisher to support the people who made the game. The problem is that shops like EB would just take that as an excuse to raise the price higher (used games already cost enough). I buy very few games these days because they just cost too much for the risk. I agree with him that the price of a DVD would be an ideal price ($20-$25), but I don't know how they'd achieve that (except making most games smaller, which in many cases might not be so bad :). There is no good system for this right now, but I think moving to a steam/iTunes like model (where you buy the game online and download it for $15 instead of buying a used copy for $15) makes a lot of sense. That would allow people to play older games, but without paying much, and still have the money go to the publisher. Plus these days it would be feasible to have people download PS type games (one or two CDs) here in the US (let it run overnight). It might be a while before you can do that with current and next-gen games due to bandwidth problems.
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Sure, music will probably be the largest assets, but there are nice ways to losslessly compress them.
Games already use lossy compressed music. For instance, Dance Dance Revolution Konamix and Katamari Damacy use Sony's VAG codec which is supported by PS1 and PS2 hardware, and Unreal Tournament 2003 and newer use Ogg Vorbis audio. Do you expect publishers to go below the quality of MP3 at 128 kbps on console games? The only music compression that can get really tiny and still be listenable is reorchestrating the soundtrack as tracked music, whether MIDI or MOD or XM or whatever, and nowadays only handheld games can seem to get away with real-time wavetable synthesis.
Textures tend to be bigger than compressed music, so unless you synthesize textures (as is done in .the .product), they tend to fill the disc. In addition, there's a tradeoff between raw loading time and decompression time.
He has a problem with secondhand games, and I see his point - support and infrastructure costs going to customers who haven't paid the developer.
On the other hand, though, he's not going to have any luck convincing me or anyone else that we can't resell something we've bought - games, books, music, teddy bears - no one will accept limits on the First Sale doctrine.
But, there is a way out. An article recently on Gamasutra here talked about how the pricing strategy for games and the entire sales model is based on an old, old way of doing things that's far more suited to cabbages and sealing wax than digital information. If game companies got over the retail model, and instead did interesting things like web-based delivery, episodic content, subscription-based models, and so forth, they would solve the secondhand-games problem and make more money to boot. This becomes more possible as game consoles and even handheld systems gain Internet connectivity.
Steam (as badly implemented as it is) is a glipse of the future.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.