Slashdot Mirror
Only 80 Games A Year Will Succeed
0110011001110101 writes "Next Generation reports on the risks involved in game publishing and development. A report has been released suggesting that, in the next generation, as few as 80 games a year will turn a profit. Development costs in the next generation are set to rise from $3 -$6 million per title to $6-$10 million, with some cases surpassing $20 million." From the article: "Screen Digest's analysis shows that in the U.S. in 2004, titles based on licensed IP, such as Madden NFL 2005, sold 23% more units than titles based on original content. However, the short term revenue gains of licensed IP, does not necessarily translate into greater profits. Licensing costs are rising as IP owners become increasingly aware of the growing importance of the games medium."
It's already been mention in lots of other articles that Nintendo's revolution will be a lot cheaper to develop for since the focus is on gameplay and not on all the expensive shiny bits.
Sure, there will be a lot of games for the revolution that won't turn a profit, but with significantly lower development costs, there will also be a greater number of successes. With the revolution, hopefully designers will be rewarded with profits for good gameplay in whatever niche they are aiming for, rather than making a good game that fails because they had to spend way too much money to have it look pretty for the average consumer.
Given this, I have to wonder again at the possibility of lower budget games and their financial viability--okay, so you lose out on the "gimme eye candy" market demographic, and probably the "I buy the games the magazines tell me to" crowd, but with reduced development costs you don't have to sell anywhere near as many units to turn a profit.
Mostly I just think it's sad to see the videogame industry spiral into the same bland mire as much of the movie industry--avoiding risk and innovation, pumping huge budgets into a handful of games on the premise that a few will have huge sale numbers and hopefully keep the money flowing in at least as fast as it's bleeding away.
Perhaps they mean there will only be 80 profitable console games or big budget titles per year, but there will be plenty of mobile phone and web-based games (even more than there are now) that are produced with meagre sums and turn a reasonable profit.
I guess in this sense, the gaming industry once again parallels the movie industry. You end up with a small pool of mega-studios producing the blockbusters each year while an ocean of indies, hobbyists, and wannabes fill the niche markets.
Only 80 games? That's pretty damn good. The movie industry is lucky to get 1 good movie a week or about 50 a year. I bet the TV industry has even less overall. Does the music industry put out 80 really succesful albums a year?
If the game industry can "only" put out 80 successful games a year and I only play 12-24 I will remain one happy gamer. Heck I may even pick up 1 or 2 unsuccessful games.
I wonder how many "break-even" games they make a year?
http://www.kubuntu.org/
I have my own little indie game company, and I'll produce 2-4 profitable games this year alone, sure we measure our costs in tens of thousands of dollars, but we don't spend more to produce a fun game than we need to. And like the big boys, we develop a lot of our own IP, and then license our tech to bigger companies looking for a cheaper solution. It is amazing how many hours you can waste playing a game where the entire graphics budget was $20k for some custom 3d models done by an artschool kid.
:)
The big boys are suffering from being too big. They spend all this money to keep up with the Jones's throwing more and more tech into the same boring games over and over again. And because it costs so much to produce all that content, you end up with a never ending stream of bugs and patches, and support costs. At somepoint the whole structure collapses under its own weight, and ceases to be fun.
The last two games I've played for fun were Black & White 2 and Darwinia... I terms of pacing, game play, and interface the games tried to do the same thing, but Darwinia actually did it right. Both had clunky interface flaws, but Darwinia's interface suffered only from its intentional quirkiness (a nod to real world OS process management) while B&W2's suffered from intentional crippling (buying broken gesture support, poor palette layout, etc).
Like indy film to hollywood, there is still hope for games.
the little guy
So, maybe 80 games a year will be profitable. But how many will be profitable because they have a hype machine pushing them, and how many will be profitable because they are actually fun to play?
There number one goal is value: for the players *and* the developers. By keeping costs down, smaller companies can afford to develop for them, and maybe even *gasp* take some risks. I'm looking forward to their library. Having smaller companies willing to take a risk and make a genre bending game can only help you, but if the chance of success is so small and development costs are so high, many companies may not be willing to give it a go.
A big misconception about HD, though, is that by supporting it games will look good. This is patently false. The revolution will be able to output at DVD level qualities. I've yet to see a game that convinces me I'm watchign a DVD and not playing a game. All HD does, is output more pixels so you can see your crap visuals more sharply. A theoretical game for some system in the future that outputs at 480p and convinces me I'm just watching a movie on my home DVD player will blow away your average viewing public more than Call of Duty 2 for the 360 does. I'm sure the Revolution would have an easy time outputting a big red square at HD resolution, but that's not the point. With the hardware we've got, we haven't even maxed out the visuals on standard definition!
So, keep it cheap, and focus on making convincing textures, lighting, and physics (the things that really matter), and not just spewing out more pixels. The Revolution is where it's at!
I understand that life's not fair, just why is it never unfair in my favor?