The Grumpy Gamer Speaks

Ron Gilbert, well-known for his work during the golden age of LucasArts adventure games, is also well known as The Grumpy Gamer. Gamasutra has up an interview with Gilbert, discussing his career in the post-Threepwood period of his life. From the article: "It's actually kind of frightening, you know. You sit down with a publisher and the minute you mention anything like an adventure game or something story-based or adventure-game-like in any way, the meeting's basically over. So the publishers do have a huge resistance to this. And I think a lot of it is that they cannot point to anything like this that is successful in the market today. So it's very difficult for them to put anything behind it. It's a very difficult process."

Comments

Re:more GTA bashing - yea.

[NeilTheStupidHead]

Don't get me wrong, I play San Andreas just as mush as the next guy. SA looks great, the game play is fun and the controls are easy. And yes, I can pull a lot of social commentary and some story out of it. I also turn SA off and fire up my old consoles and play Chrono Trigger or FF7. Even though these games look like crap by modern standards, I still enjoy them because, either because of the quality of the gameplay or the story. Heck, I even bust out the old Infocom text adventures on occasion.

What can it possibly cost?

[Cadallin]

To DO an adventure game nowadays? Let's say you wanted to do a SVGA (SCUMM-style) 256-color 640x480, animated, with full voice acting game? Let's say you pull all the stops, go whole hog, and get like, Tony DiTerlizzi to do your background paintings and Character designs, put together your own studio, etc? I mean, jesus, it probably wouldn't be more than like $500,000. How can the market NOT support this? Even with fairly modest sales you'd expect a couple million in revenue. Let's suppose you sell 60,000 units at full retail price of like $40 and recoup $20 of that after packaging and the retailors cut, that's still $1.2Million. And honestly I'd expect a game with decent writing and production values to EASILY sell in excess of a hundred thousand units.

At this point I'd half expect someone to be able to make a game in their freaking basement, and then jump start a studio off just a few thousand digital download sales, with a few thousand in revenue. I mean really, we've got the Gimp, various free audio editing tools, Python is Free/Free. Studio recording equipment is Ass-cheap. What's stopping people?

Re:What can it possibly cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tony DiTerlizzi to do your background paintings and Character designs, put together your own studio, etc? I mean, jesus, it probably wouldn't be more than like $500,000. How can the market NOT support this?

Are you kidding? $500k is so far below budget for a modern game that it's almost laughable. You simply won't be able to produce a viable product (i.e., one that people will want to buy) for that amount.

1) It doesn't take too many people to code an actual game engine. A team of 8 or 10 core developers could put together a decent 3D engine, networking code, audio code, UI, and manage platform portability. They'd be stressed out, but they could produce something workable in 1-2 years.

But just one of those developers, on a yearly basis, is going to cost you $70k (for someone with a bachelor's degree) ... And it's going to cost you in the mid-$100k's for an experienced coder with a PhD. To wit: I'm a professional software developer, and have a PhD in Computer Engineering from a prestigious university. My salary is ~$130k per year (not counting bonuses, stock options, etc). My manager's salary (he has similar academic credentials) is $170k per year (but he gets many more stock options than I do, as well as larger bonuses). I'd guess that the core development team alone is going to meet (or exceed) your budget.

2) Yet, the majority of development in modern games isn't spent in the "engine". It isn't spent figuring out how to write the server. Nor is it spent figuring out how to make a fancy scene renderer run smoothly on different OSs. Where the majority of time & money is spent in modern games is in the graphics & scripting (initially), and in technical support and customer service (once deployed). This means that you will need to hire ...

- graphic artists (for 3d modelling as well as 2d textures)
- an audio team (which will require musicians and a composer)
- storyline writers / quest writers / etc.
- scripters (who actually write the scripts for the various encounters)
- testers & quality assurance

And, of course, the customary "big company" things ... (which we can try to ignore for the sake of simplicity, but which tend to be important the minute you start trying to manage a company of more than > 10 people)...

- customer service department
- IT department
- marketing department (to determine what kind of game to write)
- human resources department (to manage these boatloads of people)
- finance / payroll deparment

3) According to this, most modern games cost well over $20 million to produce. And many games (the example being given at that link being Halo 2) spend tens of millions in marketing costs alone. I couldn't even begin to imagine how much a game like World of Warcraft cost to develop & maintain (imagine just the costs of setting up a data centre!) ... it wouldn't surprise me if it were in the hundreds of millions of dollars.