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."
Duke Nukem Forever?
Then there's the few examples like Napoleon Dynamite or Pi, that show you just how little money it takes to put an excellent story to the top of the charts and become insanely profitable. But of course the industries look at those as anomolies and go back to cranking out Batman Twelve with Tom Cruise and Lindsy Lohan.
Let's see some real innovative games, then I'll cry when only 80 a year succeed.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
That is just way, way too much money. Something's gotta give.
Why, I can make you a really top-notch game for HALF that much! (Flash is ok, right?)
Game Company Database
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.
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
I think you may be underestimating the videogame purchasing power of people who don't care about videogames: Parents and other relatives of small children. Licenses like Shrek, Spongebob and the like make nice bank in the videogame realm - no matter the quality of the games - because relatives of children are willing to buy those kinds of games on pure spec, figuring that their kids will like it because it has Famous Character X in it. Add in kids shopping with adults, grabbing an adult's arm and saying "Can I have that Batman game?" and you've got nice sales. Enter The Matrix was panned by virtually every "serious" gamer, both for gameplay and for bugs, and it sold tons.
Trying to judge the overall videogame market by a) what's good and b) people who are so into games that they talk about them on the Interweb ignores a huge portion of real world sales.
I just googled it. Top 10 games of 2005, by sales.
ONE movie tie-in (Spiderman, which some gamers insist did not suck)
TWO other licensed properties (Madden, which definitely did not suck, and Pokemon.)
The other seven, while almost all sequels, were popular for the game itself, not for being tied to some summer blockbuster.
1 - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - PS2 - Take II Interactive
2 - Halo 2* - XBX - Microsoft
3 - Madden NFL 2005* - PS2 - Electronic Arts
4 - ESPN NFL 2K5 - PS2 - Take II Interactive
5 - Need For Speed: Underground 2 - PS2 - Electronic Arts
6 - Pokemon Fire Red W/ Adapter - GBA - Nintendo of America
7 - NBA Live 2005 - PS2 - Electronic Arts
8 - Spider-Man: The Movie 2 - PS2 - Activision
9 - Halo - XBX - Microsoft
10 - ESPN NFL 2K5 - XBX - Take II Interactive
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.