Slashdot Mirror
Game Companies Face Hard Economic Choices
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the proliferation of free or low-cost games on the Web and for phones limits how high the major game publishers can set prices, so makers are sometimes unable to charge enough to cover the cost of producing titles. The cost of making a game for the previous generation of machines was about $10 million, not including marketing. The cost of a game for the latest consoles is over twice that — $25 million is typical, and it can be much more. Reggie Fils-Aime, chief marketing officer for Nintendo of America, says publishers of games for its Wii console need to sell one million units of a game to turn a profit, but the majority of games, analysts said, sell no more than 150,000 copies. Developers would like to raise prices to cover development costs, but Mike McGarvey, former chief executive of Eidos and now an executive with OnLive, says that consumers have been looking at console games and saying, 'This is too expensive and there are too many choices.' Since makers cannot charge enough or sell enough games to cover the cost of producing most titles, video game makers have to hope for a blockbuster. 'The model as it exists is dying,' says McGarvey."
As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud. Of course, many doubt that such a task can be accomplished in a way that doesn't severely degrade gameplay, but it now appears that Sony is working on something similar as well.
am i missing something, or is the answer to this 'crisis' painfully obvious to everyone?
stop making these huge, expensive games.
go back to making small, experimental fun games.
it seems so simple.
every game should be a new experience, or at least bring something new to the table. adding a few more polygons, and some better shading algorithms does not make a game more fun.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Only make good games.
I could easily predict what titles will only sell a few hundred thousand copies just by reading design proposals.
Where can I sign up to be paid for this cost cutting service?
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
It takes $25 million to take the exact same game, shine it up a bit and put a new cover on it and expect people to shell out $60 for it?
Maybe spend some of that on coming up with something new.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
When I worked at Atari/Infogrames, it was all about convergence with the Hollywood business model. Everyone was running around spending money like a Hollywood mogul. Takes only a few flops (*cough* Enter The Matrix *cough*) to send your business model into the crapper.
As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud. Of course, many doubt that such a task can be accomplished in a way that doesn't severely degrade gameplay, but it now appears that Sony is working on something similar as well.
This model is already proven in the case of my Win Mobile phone. See, IE mobile takes suck to whole new levels. There's Opera, which does much better, but is still slow as sin, even with a dual-core 400 Mhz ARM chip powering the unit. It honestly feels like Navigator 4 back on my Windows 95 Pentium 90 way back when...
Enter Sky Fire. They have a Linux rendering farm of (get this!) instances of the Mozilla rendering engine that pre-render websites for you, and you download the rendered result, much like Google Maps - in square sections, ajaxy-style.
It's fast enough for me to watch YT and Hulu video meaningfully if I'm connected via a decent Wifi. Now, it's not FPS games, but if it's good enough for a video, it's probably good enough for pre-rendering and/or AI computation.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It's true that the cost of game development is significant, and growing all the time. The answer isn't to flail desperately at the latest fad or wow potential customers with marketspeak, though. Here are a few suggestions:
1) Focus on quality instead of marketing hype. If a project isn't coming together, it's better to cut your losses than to shove a piece of garbage out the door and lose the confidence of your customers.
2) Develop your code with reuseability and extensibility in mind. Never accept quick hacks or shoddy workmanship. It never pays off in the long run. Also: quick hacks for funding milestones = long-term disaster.
3) Don't work your employees insane hours at crunch-time. You'll just lose the best ones after the project is over. Treat them with respect, pay them decently, and give them a stake in the financial success of the company.
4) Invest in internal tool and systems development. It's a longer-term payoff, but high-quality internal tools allow a small team to do what otherwise requires a small army to accomplish.
5) Betting on safe and sure things is a surefire road to stagnation and failure. You can't be afraid to shake up the status-quo and innovate. There's nothing wrong with sequels per se, as fans of your first are likely expecting a second (I'm working on one now), but you can't just remake the same game and expect everyone to buy it a second time.
Pretty boring list, huh? But I'd bet 9 out of 10 companies probably don't really follow this advice. It's sort of like advice on how to lose weight: eat healthy and exercise regularly. Stupid and simple, but it's just to tempting to take the easy road.
The game development company I work for seems to be adhering to these principles pretty well, and is hiring developers while other companies in the area are laying employees off. We'll see if it pays off in the long run.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
what's the point of this?
Best game I ever played was X-com UFO defense, circa 1993. It featured 320x240 (256 color) VGA graphics and mono sound. I don't know how many people were on the development team or what the budget was, but I'll bet it's not a lot.
Gameplay is everything. None of the $25 million-budget modern games can touch the X-com in game quality and sheer fun IMO.
But I guess console games today do cost tens of millions of dollars to develop... if cheap iphone games are putting the big studios out of business, I don't mind. Lots of little guys putting out lots of little games = more chances for a true gem to come out, as opposed to fewer megaexpensive titles by a handful of big companies.
BTW X-com would probably work just fine on a iphone, which has twice the screen resolution of the original game (!)
If you bet too high, chances are, that you lose even in capitalism.
Development costs rising to the sky are a sign of a dead-end-market. Sure the producers and publishers made a lot money in the past and want to make more in the future. But the market now turns into saturation and now suddenly not everyone can make the return they hoped for. Instead they have to hope for a blockbuster - a failed hope for most of the competitors.
Let's face it, what makes a blockbuster:
* Development costs are only the least part of the equation.
* First you need a new fun idea. (New to most of the audience, might be stolen from an older lesser known game.)
* Be right in time, hit the nerve.
* Control your development team, hit as high as possible but not higher or you produce an epic fail.
* Polish the game with much effort. This is like polishing a diamond, if you have one. If you don't polish, you cannot advertise.
* Advertise, Marketing Campaign, Total Madness.
Now the publishers think that polishing shit or well known titles plus an expensive marketing campaign make profit, because that's where the money goes with successful games. But they are plain wrong if they haven't got a novel game to start with. Let them fail... badly.
And how, exactly, is moving part of the compute load to the "cloud" supposed to reduce development costs?
OnLive is amusing. The technology isn't that interesting; it's the business model. Casual games can have a "console-like experience". It also has the ultimate answer to piracy. Since the game software runs entirely in OnLive's data center, there's nothing playable the end user can copy. The OnLive client is just a video player.
But they need an incredibly good bandwidth/latency combination to make it work. They need 5mb/s with under 20ms or so round trip delay to equal the console experience. Unless they have a data center at each cable headend, they're not going to be able to deliver that.
Worse, all the capital costs fall on the provider. Who's going to fund this thing?
I have a Playstation 3 and ..
is about half right .. the games are definitely too expensive, most retails in the street sell the games at about £40 or higher, you can get bargains on line though, Little Big Planet is just over £10 nowadays (not to mention the only *really* good game imo for the PS3..)
The other part, "too many choices", well, kind of. There are 100s of pretty much identical FPS games with ever so tiny tweaks to set them apart but nothing in the classic styles! I would kill for a side scrolling shoot em up with today's graphics, or some more fun LBPesque platformers!
Maybe I bought the wrong console?
--
free games consoles and games including Playstation 3, XBox 360 and Nintendo Wii!!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Every few years the game industry goes through a big shake up. Companies die, people lose their jobs. Then it starts all over. I worked on games way back in the Sega Genesis cartridge days (yes, I'm that old). When my job disappeared I chose to get out of the game industry entirely. The pay seems ok on the surface, but you work horribly long hours, so you're actually getting ripped off. The games always suck at the beginning. The physics are experimental, the graphics are blocks and circles, the story line is just a twinkle in someone's eye. By the time the game is even half completed you are so sick of playing it you want to scream. I bet the industry hasn't changed since my days in it.
-- Will program for bandwidth
A small/indie game producer can make a decent game with $100K. If the BIG game producer would use 10 times more ($1M) their games should come out 5-10 times better why they use 200 times more money for that task?
more like "beloved son".
I wanted to write software for consoles but found the startup costs too high. I wanted to start by homebrewing some prototypes and then further developing them to get backing. I couldn't get a console SDK etc without jumping through many complicated hoops.
So I targeted the web.
Now I've gone ahead with non-console platforms, gotten financial backing then written those games and made very good money in the process... and had a lot of fun as I go.
Cry me a river.
I read articles like this (well the summary anyway) and I am always left wondering where the money to produce these games comes from. The companies are saying that to break even they need to sell a million copies but they are typically selling 150k so therefore they are making a huge loss on every game. How do they stay in business? The console manufacturers can't be bailing them out as they are making a loss on each piece of hardware so they need to make their money from games sales so who is paying? I can only assume that when a company gets a blockbuster it makes so much money that all these total failures (from a business point of view) are paid for.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
The game industry is falling into the same traps the film and music industries are.
There are a few big name players that control 70+ % of the market share. They pump more and more money into marketing and development rather than actually making good games. They then raise the prices on a product that is inferior than what they used to put out.
When market forces retaliate in the form of people not buying their craptastic overpriced games they then resort to adding DRM that cripples the game and the rights of the users who PURCHASED and OWN the end product which further alienates their customers resulting in a downward spiral. By the way YES I said cripple the game. I have had to download a crack for a game before not because I did not own it but because the DRM make the game unplayable on my computer.
There's a reason I don't play many commercial games anymore. Myself, and people like me, are/were this industry's bread and butter. Piss us off and your industry collapses. That's why were the effing customers.
The solution is 2D games
Seriously.
The obsession with 3D pushes every cost through the roof. 2D artwork (in a lot of cases) is tons cheaper, and can be made to work on very low end machines. Good luck getting crysis to run on a laptop that didn't cost an arm and a leg, but it's very difficult to balls up a 2D game enough for it not to run on an integrated chipset.
The crysis devs even admitted that their main problem was a game that wouldn't run on so many PCs. 2D games not only run everywhere, but they are easier to understand from a control POV to newcomers to gaming.
They also reduce support costs a lot because if you aren't using cutting edge 3D techniques, you are less likely to get incompatibilities and inconsistencies with video card drivers and hardware.
Of course not all genres can work in 2D, but time and time again we see 3D bump-mapped pixel-shaded shinyness applied to games where it just isn't necessary.
Imagine World Of Goo in 3D. Would it be a better game? Of course not, it would be horrid, and would lack the charm and individual art style that makes a game like that so fresh and awesome.
Journalists and gamers need to finally realise that 3D, and high dynamic range lighting are not what makes a game fun. They make it expensive, and they can make it more immersive, but they do not contribute automatically to making a game fun, which is what it's all about.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Cost for the developers is $25m, need to sell 1m units at $50-$60. So, what happens with the other $25-$35? I'm assuming the licensing fees to make a console game are included in the $25m. So that leaves, physical production, logistics, and the retailer cut. Those 3 things really make up 50% of the price tag? Maybe that's something that has to be fixed. A lower price tag often has a positive influence on the number of units sold.
As for OnLive going to change things, who's going to pay for OnLive's hardware, and software licenses? Right, their subscribers. Will OnLive get more relaxed licensing terms than normal customers (i.e. don't require a license for each subscriber)? Probably, but when 1000 people want to play game X at one time you still need 1000 licenses at that time.
I will make sure to spread this information to everyone i know.
I mean really 25 million on a Game. We all know they don't pay the developers crap, so most of that goes to mindless marketing, parties for media types and HYPE HYPE HYPE.
on the other hand we have guys who just downloaded the iphone SDK to see what they could do and in a couple months released a game that cost nothing but those two months of time, with no marketing, no TV ads and no parties, who are making tens of thousands per day selling games for less then $5.
It's quite simple, there is a vast overproduction of games.
People will only buy so many games, and when there's just too many games, eventually some of the producers will have to throw in the towel.
Which is good for the ones that survives, as they have a greater chance of turning a profit again.
Small game companies can make a decent game for a pittance because they have no choice. They either make do with what they have, or they pack up and go home.
Huge game companies spend a lot of money because there is no pressure for frugality. Usually this total lack of moderation takes the form of having hundreds more developers working on a game than they need to. The extra labor goes into go-nowhere projects like the EASTL, an utterly bizarre version of the STL for low-memory consoles, or trying to integrate all of the obscenely expensive middleware that's needed to be advertised on the box.
How much money does your current generation shooter's 3D assets (Including textures) cost to produce? Let's assume it takes a week to produce a high quality 3D humanoid actor, and another month to do motion captures and animations.
Lets break that down now: 1 month + 1 week = 25 work days, give or take. If we are not working overtime (because we are on schedule-- like that ever happens...) for 8 hours a day, which comes to 200 hours for a single employee in that time frame. If we assume that the dev crew has 3 employees assigned to this task, that is 600 work hours invested. If we tabulate this up with 'Crazy California Wages' (at least 20USD/hr), we get something around 12k to pay those 3 employees for 1.25 months, to produce and animate a quality 3D actor... (*ONE* actor)
What happens to this 12k asset after the game is released? It finds itself in a backup queue somewhere, drawing dust, and adding to corporate overhead, because that model and it's animations are 'yesterday's news'. (But dont anyone else DARE copy it!)
An absurdly simple solution to this problem is a creative development commons repository, into which obsoleted, or true public commons assets (Such as textures, models and animations from public sources) are shared between a consortium of interested corporations.
EG, only one partnered company need develop a 1957 Chevrolet classic, and the other partners can use that asset later with a very minimal licensing fee. In return, that company can draw from the wide selection of physique animated, havok physics boobie girl models and textures that will be in there, rather than having to make one themselves.
Such cooperation between vendors would enable high quality content to still be available, but would drastically slash artistic staff overhead.
Similar collaborations for AI behavior, and engine tweaks/modifications could be kept, allowing work to not be replicated many times between the interested parties, and would allow these companies to continue producing innovative plots, and environments, while drastically cutting the overhead costs.
Looking for a specific make and model of car? Check to see if a partnered affiliate in the consortium has already made one that will fill your needs-- Looking to resolve an issue with AI bots jumping out in the open and shouting "HERE I AM!!" when they should be doing pop-shots behind cover? Check the AI scriptlet repository to see if another AI programmer may have had insight before.
A game title is more than the sum of it's parts, and having a shared resource of stock parts would allow game companies to focus more heavily on game DYNAMICS rather than blowing all their budget on artwork, and technical issues.
However, I won't hold my breath that such an outbreak of common sense will happen any time soon, given the current trend to ever increasing levels of escalating aggression involving tactical IP portfolio warheads.
What did the cold war teach us about standoff stalemates where we have hordes of weapons cached away, "For security"? It leads to economic problems, mismanagement, and bankruptcy.
People never learn do they?
Games like Halo and COD 4 have maxed out the FPS multiplayer market; therefore, making a shiny, new multiplayer shooter probably won't sell, since the kid who's finally gotten that sweet perk won't want to toss all the effort he's put online into the garbage. Games like Bioshock, Half-Life, Portal, Halo 1 and pretty much every Blizzard game ever made, take a gimmick or style of play and weave a compelling, engaging story around it. Game developers need to understand that there is no magical gameplay formula for single player games; there is only the story, and whether the player can get attached enough to the elements that make up the gaming experience. As for multiplayer-only oriented games, don't expect to make much money unless the idea you have blows what's already being played to smithereens. I think we know specifically which games are being mentioned here: Starcraft 2 and Diablo III. Both multiplayer, both coming out, both will make Blizzard a boatload of money.
I mean the good people at Namco said that they need to sell 500k of their games (ps2/xbox/gc/wii) to break even. Now Nintendo is telling us they need 1Mil? Maybe Nintendo's games are costier or maybe they indeed advertised MUCH MUCH more (I mean look at Wiifit and Mario Kart).
Because I don't know about you but I highly doubt Wario Land the shake dimension need 1Mil to break even. Wiimusic, Wiifit or even Mario Galaxy? Yes. Mario Striker, Excite Truck or Endless Ocean? Highly doubt it
Its a Beautiful Life!
What with these continuing and hard economic times and the inevitable of total world economic collapse. And the rising of unemployment, more housing foreclosures, more businesses reducing and even closing, struggles to find jobs where there are only few, more people low on cash and having trouble making ends meet. Even people poor or even homeless.
Regardless if game companies, developers and publishers cut costs, and even produce better, more fun and even make games more affordable, a lot of people cannot afford them. Other things such as basic necessities are more important. Also, people will look and find alternate means.
Myself, I don't buy games anymore. Primarily because: a lot of them are too high priced, either crapppy or mediorce, not my type of game or cup of tea, and beacuse of DRM restrictions and internet server connections required...even on solo and offline games.
There are some alternatives available.
Yes, there are bargain bins and discount shelf racks of games at stores such as Walmart and Target. But, also freeware and shareware games.
Tons of game demos too. And many free online games too. I'm playing the 4th Coming, and looking into both Fallen Earth and Spellborn.
Darkfall looks cool too.
I'm kinda wondering what Fils-Aime bases that number on, especially what expected dev cost and retail price. It seems that many Wii games get made on a sub-million dollar budget so the break-even point got to be pretty low for these. Are we talking about Zelda-esque blockbusters here or indeed every single game? Even with 10 million dollar dev costs breaking even at one million sales seems kinda weird, would mean they get only 10$ per sale and games are supposedly one of the goods with the lowest retailer margins. Pointing at the RIAA situation wouldn't make sense either, the equivalent to a label would be the publisher who made that dev cost investment so the loss/profit numbers are being tallied at their end anyway.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
What I don't understand is capitalism!
When 25 Million dollar games are not turning profits, then either:
1) Pay less to developers and artists
2) Make less expensive games
To me, (1) makes most sense. Isn't that how capitalism supposed to work?
It's an arm for GP and a separate/ondie dsp for phone. You bought into a lie. You a dumb mofo/,/,
Development costs with huge static in-house teams is ridiculously expensive. Those teams have to be salaried not only for the duration of the game - but for the hiatus between projects. Projects have dramatically different staffing requirement throughout game development.
Game sales and revenues are too small to justify the massive spending on fixed teams - unless you have a sure-fire guaranteed hit.
Massively over-indulged first party developers, who take years, require a team of hundreds and produce me-too game experience should not be celebrated. They should be mocked.
Innovative and fun products come from small core teams who can rapidly prototype, change direction in a heartbeat, and are inexpensive enough to be allowed to make mistakes.
Small teams can hire the very best people. And they can run a product without massive management costs, meetings and complex systems.
Small teams can afford to be creative.
So how can a small team create a big game?
Outsourcing.
Use specialist expert vendors to provide engine-tech, art services, audio, testing, writing, pre-vis - and so on. Contractors don't get paid when they deliver crap.
Bought-in services are cheaper, better and don't burn cash during downtime. And if you got burned the last time you outsourced, that's because you did it wrong. Don't go for cheap, go for the best.
C.
Make some more damn games for the Wii. Bigger market, cheaper development... why are the big publishers focusing so hard on the smaller, more costly, 360 and PS3 market? They're cutting their own throats.
And onlive is a farce; I can't believe that anybody on Slashdot believes that company has magical 22nd century technology.
We don't like to compete in a fair competition market and thus request that laws are implemented to stop the Indie market. Only established companies should be able to sell games to consumers and alternatives are bringing down a valuable market, thus they should be labeled terrorist to the Western market and their operations should be stopped. We suggest the US Government employ our proposal published under 'Operation Killjoy.'
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
Gaming, up to this point, has pretty much been a safe haven from the evolving inet, web and media industry turmoil. That is changing right now, as we speak.
I've been doing regular webdev for a living the last 9 years and since 8 months ago I have a gig at a large global player browsergame company with a job I'd never dreamt of getting or even dreamt of being able to do profitably.
The groth rate our company is experiencing now is totally bizar (something like upwards of 350%!) and this phenomenon is part of the equation. I suspect that a lot of the late web users - those who came to private computing soley through and because of the web (like my spouse) just a few years ago and can't help but constantly confuse Google with the internet - are responible for large parts of this trend. They couldn't install a piece of software (or a game for that matter) if their life depended on it, but they can find a website again (if the google results haven't changed ... *sigh*) and log in and continue to play a browsergame. This is where the critical mass is at today and I'm at it's epicenter right now, having howned my PHP, Flash & AS3 skills in the last few years. ... 'Guess for once I got lucky.
Add in FOSS gaming closing in on critical mass and the 3D devpipeline getting cheaper by the day (or being comletely free [beer]) and most inovation coming from modders rather than companies anyway nowadays and you understand that gaming as we know it is a thing of the past. Any company not recognizing that will go the way of the dodo. That's a fact.
My 2 Eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You can't play high-performance games on a thin client over the Web. I can't believe anyone's still talking like it's possible. The sums don't add up.
Squirrel!
If you are going to make a huge expensive game, make it worth buying.
The problem is this, there's a lot of games out there with massive budgets that are simply crap.
I'm not really sure the complaint in the article is exactly. They seem to be effectively complaining that the market doesn't reward games that have had a massive budget but are still crap? Well isn't that just the way business is? if you spend a fortune developing something that no one wants then you fail?
There's a reason we've always had certain studios come back time and time again with new releases - id Software, Blizzard, Square Enix etc. It's because they produce good games people want, even if they do spend a fortune developing them.
I don't see how it's a crisis that market forces affect the games industry like they affect everyone else exactly? What are they saying? That we should have to be more open to funding shite we don't actually want?
Expanding on your point - the key is to make games fun and that people want, whether it's a high budget or low budget production. What consumers wont tolerate are games that aren't fun even if companies have spent $25 million on them - that's their problem. Huge, expensive games are still perfectly valid and I'd certainly be sad if we didn't get anymore Call of Dutys, Gears of Wars, Half-Lifes and that sort of thing, but they still require the fun factor than smaller games require too.
Well, there is one problem there: everybody also competes with older games at bargain bin prices.
There was a time when that was a lot less of a problem, since Doom II looked like crap compared to Quake (and games based on the Quake engine), and then when you had Quake II games the old Quake I started to look like crap by comparison. Nowadays improvements are a lot more incremental. I've even played some ~10 year old games recently and while you can tell a difference, they're not exactly visually offensive either.
Gameplay has also been OK for quite a while now. It's been a long time since we had too little RAM for anything too complex, so you can go quite a bit back in time with your gaming before you run into problems.
Basically what I'm saying is this:
A) I could buy a new cutesy mini-game for casual players for 20 bucks or so. Like, say, Build-A-Lot, which I actually bought recently. Except it feels like there's a whole game missing around it. The complexity and difficulty are about right for one of the dozens of minigames in a $60 RPG, so I don't think I got much of a bargain with it.
B) I could get Fallout I, Fallout II _and_ Fallout Tactics on a DVD for around the same price. Seriously.
C) I could get a 1 to 3 year old game for the same price. E.g., The Sims 2 costs about that much by now, and it's actually a better value for casual gamers. (Though if you're a l33t FPS-er, you might not necessarily like it.) E.g., Settlers 6 is actually almost half that by now. E.g., Warcraft III including the expansion pack is also about 20 bucks by now. Slightly more money gets you Civ IV with all expansion packs. Etc.
So I think there's a finite niche for simple cutesy games.
Of course, that might not apply if you can come up with a radically new game concept that everyone just has to play. But that's a bit harder than it sounds. Designers which managed to come up with a whole new concept are very few and far in between, and even they rarely manage to repeat that. It's hardly a model for staying in business for the rest of your life, is it?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
From a purely economic perspective, where you can't sell enough units, and you don't make enough money to cover costs, you need to lower the price to drive sales and restore consumer confidence.
You see, there is a strange effect, I call the island of pricing stability.
On a graph of price vs units sold there is a sweet spot that extracts maximum net profit. Basic stuff. But to bolster the bottom line businesses often hike their prices in small increments. Short term this produces a bump to your bottom line as consumers tolerate the price rise, at least initially, which gets some smart guy who suggested it a bonus. Longer term sales take a hit as consumers make other choices, loose interest or merely spend less. Time wears on and your prices creep, overall you begin to loose gross revenue. It's not immediately obvious what is going on, it doesn't show up on short term graphs shown to the brass, nor obvious how to take corrective action (roll back that price change, cut costs, fast). Naturally everything from market forces to competition to alignment of the planets is blamed instead of potentially bad business decisions.
After a number of price increments, where the profits just seem to keep coming in and nothing is really going wrong, what you eventually reach is a island of stability in pricing. Even far above the sweet spot this is often a nicely profitable model, even if sales decline a little, cutting costs drives revenue back to the bottom line. It is even somewhat sustainable mid term provided reasonable scarcity is maintained, competition doesn't get the lead and demand holds out.
But there is one problem with this model. It's bollocks. This pricing island of stability is right on the edge of a steep slippery slope ready to be pushed off by competition or the slightest breeze of change from the market. Raise your prices further, for example, to try and raise funds for your lower than predicted bottom line, you can watch sales take a nose dive. In the overall picture, you just priced yourselves out of the market.
Now if you ever were looking for an example of the proverbial epic fail. How about a price rise when your sales are already failing in a struggling market with weary consumers that's hardly profitable for anyone anymore?
In the middle of a recession also? Surely this is madness.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Stop making call of duties. They're all pretty much the same with a slightly better engine and some new maps. And it seems that studios often put a lot of time into single players (like 15 or 20 maps + scripting + AI), and only like 6 multiplayer maps. You only play single player once. You play multiplayer again and again. Sure some parts of the maps/textures are used for both, but it still seems the effort is disproportionate.
they keep charging all that money for games, kids typicaly can't afford that, especially at this point in time..... If they lowered the games more to the point where kids could buy them as impulse items, they're multiply their sales by 1000 or more. I used to buy games myself for a mere 10 games it was around $800 dollars, of course kids cant afford to pay that, those prices are fucking ridiculous.... Lower the price radically and you'll find you'll actually make more money.....
... their markets.
Sometimes I have to wonder who is running the show at these companies, Soul calibur 2 for the gamecube for instance sold over ~700K copies, and yet when soul calibur 3 arrived it never arrived on the cube despite the previous one almost breaking a million, and SC2 was cross platform and it certainly did break more then a million in sales, yet they stiffed over 700K fans on the GC with sequels.
This kind of bullshit is why game companies are where they are, there are paying audiences for their games, but then some clueless higher up decides "meh not worth it". The truth is the people running these businesses are fucking clueless about gaming, they've lost touch with the ir customers, and think it's all about making it more like the movies, which is just bullshit.
I'm not the only tired of the endless FMV in place of gameplay (Metal gear solid 4, I'm looking at you!)
You're not making a movie, you're making a game. Many development houses don't seem to get this. Sure gaming has a lot to learn from techniques from the movie industry, but it is NOT the movie industry, a couple of the games that got this right:
God of war and it's sequel, and Call of duty 4 Modern warfare, both excellent games who's developers seem to understand - don't make your game into a movie, take the best elements of movies and adapt them for the game
Unless he went to school in America.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most of what you say is true. We mainly play Wii sports. On the weekend we found the Mii creation tool and my son had a great time building funny looking Miis. That was a lot of fun. The day after we got the Wii I started looking out for something like second life. Say what you will, I know it doesn't have a good reputation with gamers. I bought a cheap flight sim game because it looked like it had some good simulation in it. But I got bored trying to get past the game play and gave up.
I think an MMO would do very well if the avatar system was used properly. Maybe it will come eventually.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Why don't the big game companies stop producing rubbish licensed titles then?
Just goto any EB games and look at the discount bin. Nothing but last years sports games and licensed rubbishola titles.
Please please please, if you want to save money, stop licensing things that you can't afford to develop a good game for. Simpsons was good, but too short, but I'd love to see another simpsons game. I'd also love to see another Super Mario or Paper Mario game. But aside from those, there are so many bad games. Sega needs to cut their sonic games down, they release one every year but each is so much poorer that the previous one, that I can't justify buying them after the two duds that came after Sonic Adventure 2. Hell sonic Adventure 2 I felt kinda ripped off with.
But geez, save the licensed games for the NDS. If you want to release a game that has a smaller budget, release it for the NDS and skip all the other platforms. It pisses me off so much to see Harry Potter and current movie out on every console that it makes me wonder what they would have done had they only made it for one console to begin with.
Here's the deal game world...
Pick one, and pick one only: ... nah don't bother with the PSP.
1. Develop for the NDS
2. Develop for the Wii
3. Develop for the PS3/XBOX360
4. Develop
I'm not sure if anyone else followed the pattern, but that's the order of popularity. The first two of those make money.
Next pick one only:
1. Develop a RPG or Adventure game
2. Develop a sports game or simulation
3. Develop a realtime stategy or FPS
4. Develop a non-canon fighting/party game
The first one is a huge development investment, but sells a lot more (or so I hear), and has replay value.
The second one has a huge development investment, and has no replay value after the player has spent over 100hrs on it.
The third has a lot of prebuilt game engines out there that all you need to do is create models and artwork, and write some story into it. So less development cost, and better to stick as a license game if you can swing it. Multiplayer is where it's at.
The fourth is the best choice for licensed games because nobody is looking for a story and just wants to play with their friends.
And finally do only one:
1. Pick a popular license at a huge cost, with a built in popularity, at the risk of diluting the license, or your companies credibility if it sucks. Bad for "based on the hit movie" types. Because everyone already saw the movie. Works okay for insanely popular tv series.
2. Develop a game that holds it's own first, and if that game works out, then see if there is a license to develop from it.
3. Compromise and develop a game that you can use licensed characters, music and art, but the game itself is not dependent upon licensed material if it could later be revoked.
I recommend the third option (Soul Calibur, Dance Dance Revolution, Smash Bros Brawl), as the game works without the licensed characters, music or art.
The second option is your resident evil and tomb raider type of games, where the game's popularity can result in a decent movie, that in turn gets more game sales. Not bad, but not good if the guy who does the movie is a total moron.
The first option however is what everyone seems to do. License some popular thing, eg batman, spiderman, and then run it into the ground with whatever can be done on a limited budget. STOP DOING THIS! You're only going to sell just enough for the pirates to get copies out the door.
Games that people like, they will buy... unless they are in the mainland china.
Most importantly. Make the game available by direct download instead of waiting for the pirates to put it online. The anime licensees are just now discovering this in the last year, and Valve/Steam knows this. Even Apple knows this. The first reason people pirate is because they don't have time to go find whatever popular game is on release day, let alone week. The second reason is that they don't want to pay for rubbish. The third reason is they just don't want to pay.
The fourth reason, is that people are idiots that don't know what they are doing is wrong. UK/EU/AU people pirate because they can't get the damned game on release day.
Even assuming the bandwidth and latency issues with OnLive can be magically wished away...
As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud.
You're mixing up the end-user hardware require to play the game with the cost of developing it. The primary cost of developing a game is NOT the cost of buying the developers enough Playstations to test on.
Suppose you develop something like -- ooh, I don't know, a computer -- for which there's a world market of only four examples. You have to add a quarter of the development cost to the price of each machine. Suppose you develop something like -- ooh, I don't know, let's say a games console -- of which you expect to sell a million examples. Then you need to add a millionth of the development cost to the price of each machine. But in either case there are a finite number of machines, because the machines actually have to be made, and the factories in which they are made have only so much capacity. And in any case, there's a real cost to building, packaging and shipping each machine.
But take a software product, say a game, delivered as an Internet download. There is no cost of reproduction (or at least there is, but it's trivial). So your pricing does not have to reflect how many of the damn things you can actually build. If you spend (say) $10,000,000 developing it and another $10,000,000 marketing it, then the question is, are you more likely to sell:
To some extent it depends on the genre and on the technical demands of the game. There probably aren't 20,000,000 people world wide with state-of-the-art gaming rigs and and a taste for zombie horror, so if that's what you've produced option 1 is right out.
But as the cost goes up, so does the piracy. It's not worth pirating a $1 game (provided the purchase interface is slick enough that actually buying the games is not a hassle). Not that many people are going to pirate a $5 game. For anyone who has a computer powerful enough to run a modern game, $5 is discretionary spending.
But $80 is a lot bigger bite out of someone's budget. So more people pirate. And if the demand for your game is 2 million units, is it really better to sell 250,000 at $80 and have 1.75 million copies pirated, or to sell 1 million at $20 and have a million pirated? or even to sell two million at $10 and have none pirated?
Yes, of course it doesn't work as straightforwardly as that. But my strong impression, as someone who is working up a business plan to develop a game, is that you've more chance of a profit selling more copies at a lower price than fewer at a higher.
And, of course, anyone who actually spends $10,000,000 developing a game in the current climate is this: mad.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
How would "moving to the cloud" (assuming it works) reduce the $25 million development costs?
No sig today...
I liked games for the previous generation, I liked $500,000 games, hell i liked games made for 10p written in someone's bedroom for the zx spectrum. I think the movie industry analogy can play in here, Stop making 100 million dollar block busters that are supposed to appeal to everyone but ultimately make everyone not care, just remove the controlled explosions, the CGI and the stupidly expensive actors that bring nothing and go back to your roots, diversify and find a new audience. Making something smaller that a small group of people will love and defiantly buy is a much sounder plan than making something huge and hoping that magically it will appeal to everyone (because it damn well better, it cost you 25 million dollars!)
The reason these games cost a mint is that game developers work with the frameworks from hell. I'm convinced this can't just be explained by incompetence. In the end I believe the dev tools, and not just in the games industry, are made difficult to use so that people can keep charging a mint for their labour. After all it takes a genius to understand this stuff.
What we need is gaming frameworks that let you focus on the artwork etc. Core development of stuff like physics shouldn't be redone again and again with increasingly complicated frameworks that don't interoperate. Provide a simple to use physics engine. Likewise for 3D rendering. Likewise for audio. The challenge is to do this yet allow enough flexibility to create varied games that don't all look and feel exactly the same. Unfortunately I've only seen a handful of frameworks that meet these kinds of requirements and they are old and tend to compromise too much on the flexibility so focus on the "anyone can write a game" newbie market.
Then there's the tools for the artwork. Anyone not in the industry tried to use a 3D modeller lately, and import their model into a game? It shouldn't take weeks to create a simple model. What's even more ridiculous is that you have to do stuff like unwrap the texture and paint that separately (I understand the latest versions of Photoshop allow you to paint directly on some of the common 3d models but I don't have much experience with this and it shouldn't be a new expensive feature).
Big games are dying. That doesn't mean they all have to turn to crap. Take a look at some of the "amateur" content out there that's been made with the existing toolset and I'd say you've got good incentive to create easier frameworks and better tools.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Good. How did we ever get in to the situation where game companies can jack up average prices $20 with each new generation? There is a reason I stopped buying games after they passed the $30-40 mark. That is just too much for someone like me. Why should I feel sorry for people like EA and their identical annual franchises?
I believe that the article is being alarmist, as there are many games that have sold more than 150,000 copies. Titles that sold more are Knights of the Old Republic, Sims, COD 4, most of the Final Fantasy games, Mario Kart, Smash Bros Brawl, etc. Halo 3 made $170,000,000 on the first day alone and WoW has sold millions of copies of Wrath of the Lich King. I think that this article is typical of mass media's misunderstanding of the world of technology.
Maybe games have gotten so good that no one needs to buy anymore?
My PC addiction for some years now has been Call of Duty. I have been playing since the first CoD came out. I have purchased each upgrade as it came out (except for CoD 3, which was not available for the PC). It is the only game I play. I have been playing them for years. I have no time nor desire to play any other game as it satisfies all my gaming desires for a 1st person shooter.
Every once in a rare while I will fire up Silent Hunter III, though not so much anymore as the Grey Wolves expansion has gotten so detailed my computer will no longer run it reliably.
But almost exclusively, I play Call of Duty. The game is so good, and so fun (I play online against other players), and so challenging, that I feel no need to buy a new game for entertainment. I keep buying the CoD upgrades mostly to see how much more realistic the graphics have gotten.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Ran out of chars...
Anyway, Valve has been running pricing experiments on its Steam platform and have come up with some surprising numbers. A limited-time price drop of Left 4 Dead resulted in a 3000% increase in sales income. How can any sane developer/publisher ignore the kind of numbers he shows us? The article cites many more examples, with hard to ignore results.
http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/Live-Blog-DICE-2009-Keynote---Gabe-Newell-Valve-Software.html
If it costs $100 million to make the first game on a console, then it should cost less than half of that to make the second and even less to make the third. Publishers should look at themselves as manufacturers. If they take the time to produce a good factory, including tools and entire game engines, then they can reuse mechanics from their initial development to speed-up and reduce costs each time they develop a game.
For that matter, I bet there is still good money is producing game engines and then licensing. Wasn't Id following this model for a while? I thought they made Doom 3 as a demonstration of a game engine they planned to license like crazy. Licensing a code base that handles the physics, graphics, controls, and would mechanics must be cheaper than crafting one from scratch each game.
I think the $100 million production cost is too high for some games that are routinely block busters. Considering that each new Madden football game is marketed based on one or two little tweaks to game play, they must be reusing most of the code from the previous game.
If you're a developer for the Wii, you're probably doing okay. After all, for every buck Microsoft lost on the XBox360, Nintendo made a buck in pure profit.
Since the Wii is outselling both the XBox360 and the PS3 by a wide margin, and they're getting some more juice with the new DSi, if you have to develop, develop for the largest console market. And since the graphics are only SD, you don't have the same worries as the othe platforms and the PC have ... so you can concentrate more of your budget on actual GAMEPLAY.
Nintendo got that right. While most of the games for the other 2 consoles are just retreaded FPSs, and the PC continues to be a combo of shovelware and $GAME_NAME_$YYYY, Nintendo has grown the market tremendously, and the motion sensors on the wireless controllers really make gameplay much better than just moving joysticks and pressing buttons. For example, bowling and tennis on any other platform sucks. On the Wii, you can get tennis elbow. No couch potato for me and my Mii, thanks to the Wii :-)
Oh boo-hoo, we can't enough money, wah-wah-wah!
Sorry, if your product is good with a semi-original theme and available on most platforms ( thinking stuff like Fallout 3, LEGO film-tie ins ), then we'll buy them, else you trying to foist the latest GTA episode with the same, junp-in-car, shoot-hooker, deal-drugs, for the 15th time, then no we are not going to fork out another 45 quid for something very similar to last years episode.
I play retro stuff most of the time, cheap to buy are 2nd-hand sales and the odd download for the really rare stuff, the only games I bought recently were LEGO Star Wars II and Fallout 3. They weren't amazingly original but had a certain twist that I really enjoyed, but I am sick and tired for seeing the same of tosh release all over again each time a new console hits the market.
Sorry but the games industry is getting just like the music biz, there are some real gems out there, real talent, but most of it is rahashed chart shite!
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
Wiis are not sitting in cupboards unused after "non-gamers" bought them. The non-gamers play Wii Fit, Wii Sports and Wii Music all the time because these games are so much fun. They are not throwaway games, they can entertain for months and months. Nintendo's problem (or rather the problem of other game creators trying to sell Wii titles) is that the bundled games are far too good.
"Hardcore gamers" might disagree, but don't complain, you have your own market with your own problems, as TFA points out :)
I guess it starts getting like Linux. Just stop playing commercial games. Play only Open Source games and the whole problem dissappears. LEt tehm figure it out. Looks like too much is spent on marketing. That s the great thing about Open Source, we can conentrate on the product. The reason that the Open Source games can't take off is the marketing barrier. The hosting opportunities will create great business in an OS commumnity.
There are literally 50 million Wii consoles out there. Xbox 360 follows at almost 28 million with Playstation 3 at over 21 million. That's nearly 100 million consoles.
To make a profit, a title needs to sell to about 1% of owners (discounting those with multiple consoles.) If they're selling a couple hundred thousand copies, they're selling to a fraction of a percent of their potential market.
How much does high price have to do with this? At $60, I make damn sure I want a game before I buy it. At $20 it would be an easier decision. I think that raising prices is the wrong way to go. At $80 or $100 (where do they go from $60?) I probably wouldn't buy any but the absolute best game. Picking out something because I think I might like it would be out of the question.
One thing game studios should be doing more of is better leveraging of their work. They should build a software platform that they can use for multiple games. My impression is a lot of the work that goes into a game is of the one and done variety and never gets recycled for another game (except on occassion for sequels if a product does well enough to warrant one). If you don't build long term reusable assets, you are perpetually in a situation where you are trying to recover sunk costs from a single product. Companies that build "engines" (which could be a 3D engine, a RTS engine, a MMORPG engine, etc.) that can be used multiple times will do substantially better in the long haul, even if their games have to sell for a bit less due to being less innovative for having reused programming.
If you see the logs of game devs, most work is thrown out. It takes them 3 or 4 iterations to finally achieve the desired result.
And it's not that so many iterations are required to achieve a result. The iterations are the result of the "relaxed" game dev culture which allows the game designers, artists, modelers, programmers etc to 'experiment', i.e. to spend their time playing with stuff just because they can.
Hi, I work on a so called AAA game initially budgeted around 20m$. I'm reading ./ because I hate my job (love the money though). Basically I spend monday to friday, sometimes saturday, entirely trying to accomplish impossible project milestones, no personal life whatsoever. That's our only goal really. No one gives a flying f**ck about anything else because we are tired enough and only thinking on going back home. Do you want to work with the "best"? really? think twice.
There is an inspiring line from Steve Jobs "not fucking good enough, I didn't say wow! yet". What we have here is quite the opposite. No wonder this is really just another FPS with a licensed engine.
...makers are sometimes unable to charge enough to cover the cost of producing titles.
well thats an economically ingorant statement. prices are set by through supply and demand and are driven by the consumer. the quoted sentence is analogous to saying "company X is not able to charge enough to cover the cost of producing space shuttles (for wide consumer use)" which of course is ridiculous. space shuttles are too expensive to produce to be purchased widely on the market.
Try making better games & hardware I have been playing video games since pong in the 1970's and historically most games are lousy with a pretty picture on the box. Spending hundreds on video cards for computers and thousands for complete systems is equally asinine. I have the current generation of consoles & to tell the truth after my XBOX 360 red ringed and died and was warranty replaced by an older unit with the fans cranked up to full speed weather there was a game playing or not I have become disgusted with the whole scene. Ah yes lets call India and get jerked around by some thick accented sorry excuse for tech support I just love that. Thanks Microshaft! Lets pay close to $60.00 per title for last generations graphics & programming on this generations consoles. Oh and lets be original and redo the FPS to death. Where are the engaging story lines and where is the fun? So far my Sony PS3 works good even so I am awaiting another disappointing system burn out. Overall I have to say the hardware is too expensive and so are the games for the quality we are receiving. Uh yeah Here you go please take close to $1,000.00 of my hard earned money, just so I can have an aggravating painful experience, you know the opposite of the kind experience I was trying to achieve by buying the console and cables and games and etc.... Puhlease spare me. Looks like the people are voting with their wallets and that is a good thing! So in closing my message is this; straighten up or go out of business people will find an alternative to overpriced crap! Entertainment is what it is all about. In the immortal words of the Little old Wendy's Lady. Where's the beef ?? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug75diEyiA0
...or the economy is bad right now.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
As much as I miss palette swaps, I don't think it's the thing that'll save the industry. It's pretty disheartening to have paid upwards of $70 for a game and then keep running into the same models that you saw on level one, which were strikingly similar to some that you saw in the last $70 game you bought.
Although, it has worked swimmingly for blizz and WoW.
--- Do you believe in the day?
I think it was Sega who tried something similar to the whole cloud computing thing some years ago when they offered their unlimited Sega gaming channel for X dollars per month (transmitted via cable TV lines, like broadband cable today.) You could play any and all the games you wanted, for as long as you wanted, for a flat fee. Still doesn't help the fact that if the game sucks, no one will want to pay to play. :-\
150,000 sales X $50 unit price = $7.5 M gross revenue.
Let's be liberal, and cut a whopping 65% out for overhead like retailer profit, marketing, and distribution costs.
That leaves $2.62 M.
For that kind of money, you can salary a staff of 20 employees for two years at $50,000, with more than half a million dollars to spare. That should be more than enough talent to put out a product that will move 150,000 units.
Gameplay > (Expensive) Graphics
Gameplay > (Expensive) Movie License
Sure, you'll sell the big Spiderman name or pretty graphics to a handful of ignorant parents, but in the end your game will succeed or fail based on the quality of its gameplay.
When you've mastered the gameplay, and you can majestically combine graphics and movie license, then you have a truly stellar game. See: GoldenEye 007.
But you can't neglect the gameplay for any reason, or else you end up with titles like Superman 64.
The day after we got the Wii I started looking out for something like second life.
Two years later, Animal Crossing 3 is probably the closest thing.
The only thing I ever play on my GBA or DS are emulators for other consoles.
Which is why Nintendo was so smart in getting money-printing Virtual Console titles into its Wii Shop Channel fast.
have "interests." Or at least, companies can't act on them. Companies are made of individuals, and those individuals (amongst them management) have interests and *can* act on them.
Individual interests do not always meet with company interests, for example, when someone can choose do either (a) act in a completely self-serving manner to maximize bonuses and income for as long as possible, or (b) act with the best interests of the company at heart, even if sometimes this means taking less money or having to do more work for it, most of the time people choose (a).
That's basically the source of our entire "economic collapse" right now; the marketoids assume that corporations act in a self interested manner, making the mistake of believing that corporations are individuals with a consciousness that can act. They aren't and they can't. The *individuals* inside them *did* act in a perfectly self-interested manner. But that doesn't get us what's best for the economy, that gets us what's best for those individuals.
Same thing in the game dev world, and indeed, across most of capitalism. Why people continue to think that the people at the top *won't* act in a self interested manner is the thing that's beyond me.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It's amazing how someone can say so much and yet get so much wrong.
The Wii market isn't actually as big as it appears. In reality, it's quite possibly smaller than the 360 and PS3 markets.
Wrong. Your desperate fanboy mewlings fail to take into account any semblance of reality, as I will explain below.
Nintendo did a great job of selling the Wii to non-gamers. They've got a huge installed base out there now and should, in theory, have the kind of market dominance that the PS2 enjoyed last time around.
Actually, they shouldn't. Neither their installed base nor their market share is the same as the PS2's at any point in its lifetime. While the 360 and PS3 continue to founder and fail, they have managed to keep enough of the marketshare that the Wii doesn't even have 50%, while the PS2 had well over 65% of the market by the end.
There is no reason for the Wii to have PS2-like market dominance when it hasn't even crossed the 50% psychological barrier. This can all be explained without resorting to your childish stereotyping.
See, the flip side of selling consoles to non-gamers is that they are... well... non-gamers.
New gamers, non non-gamers.
If you look at the weekly games sales charts, the only Wii games that really make an impact are Wii Sports, Wii Fit and, to a lesser degree, Mario Kart Wii. All games that are bundled with the Wii console in the most common packages.
Not true, actually. There are many games which have made significant impact without being bundled. In fact, even in regions where Wii Sports isn't bundled, it is still selling extremely well.
People who actually buy games, as opposed to non-gamers who pick up a Wii and embittered slashdot posters nostalgic for the 80s, do actually tend to make HD graphics and high production values a factor in their purchase.
...and they drive the market into the ground in the process, because they're caring about mere marketing Kool-Aid rather than things that actually matter. The cost of making a game has risen so much that it's barely even possible to make a profit on a console-exclusive anymore, because of all the marketing fluff you have to bolt on to sell to the fratcore.
Your best chance to sell a game with the Wii is at the point of sale with the console itself. Once this has passed, a large majority of the consoles will sit in a cupboard unused.
Patently false. This is more invalid stereotyping.
It's pretty much a three way race in terms of actual games sales (and there are signs that the Wii is really struggling here).
And there it is: the "Non-hardcore games aren't real games" slur. Your attitude and the people who carry it have been poisoning this industry for ten years, and the crash has finally come. Go back to the margins where you belong, because your demographic has proven itself unworthy of its dominance.
If you develop for the Wii as your main platform, you're also, by tying yourself into its control system, ensuring that you'll need significant changes to port your games over to other systems, widening the target audience.
The target audience doesn't need to be any wider when it's already everyone. Sure, you'll lose some creepy adolescent males who strive to define themselves by driving others away, but who cares? You've got everyone else; you don't need that tiny sliver of the market.
On the other hand, develop for the 360, PS3 or PC and it's not that hard to get your game onto the other two out of those 3 platforms.
...which you pretty much have to do to make any money, because none of these markets is big enough anymore to sustain third parties on its own.
The writing has been on the wall for some time now with regard to physical distribution of games. This has been proven time and again with services like Valve's Steam, Stardock's Central/Impulse, and XBox 360 Live Arcade. This has been one area where the US game studios and Microsoft are ahead of the Japanese console makers (having gotten into the market first, especially Valve with their Steam platform). With the cost of physical retail rising and retailers like Walmart demanding price cuts, which further squeeze margins, and even putting their nose into the content of the game itself (i.e. cutt this or your game won't be sold in our stores), is it any wonder that game publishers are pushing online distribution?
All the more reason to make games that don't suck. People will be even more picky than usual.
It *IS* the Hollywood blockbuster syndrome.
Watch "The Producers", learn from it. You can make more money from a flop than a blockbuster.
The old scams are old because they work the best.
As the first of many people to suggest "Just make better and cheaper games, duh!" i'd just like to respond to you to point out the idea is only a viable solution if we, the consumers, do our part of the bargain and actually _buy_ the better, more innovative games. Capcom released Zack & Wiki, a foray into reviving the adventure genre that got great reviews, but only saw mediocre sales for it. Meanwhile people keep buying the latest version of Mega Man Whatever. What kind of lesson are they supposed to draw from that?
World of Goo is innovative, cheap, and critically acclaimed. 2D Boy, the creators, claim that network traffic shows the majority of the copies of the game being played online aren't legitimate. (Cue discussion about whether their data is reliable, whether pirated copies are lost sales, etc =P)
Valkyria Chronicles, a tactical RPG, is also getting great reviews, but last i heard it was getting really bad sales figures, even for something on the PS3.
The reason companies keep remaking old games with prettier graphics and releasing yet another FPS is because that's what people keep buying, despite there being plenty of better alternatives out there. I wonder if all the people complaining about the lack of quality in the games industry ever bother doing a bare minimum of research to actually find out what the alternatives are.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
If the App Store has taught us anything, its that lowering the price to get more sells works. And since software (even games on Physical media) are nearly free to make replicate copies lowering the price to raise sells is a viable option. Unlike in cars....
Think Deeply.
The business model of consoles have always been ridiculous. It is understandable in 70s-80s that everyone was doing custom hardware and there were few compilers. Today all gaming hardware is more or less the same, with difference in details(instuction sets, bus architecture etc.). Practically, all titles can be easily ported to all consoles with little effort. The problem is, the megacorps are obsessed with controlling everything about their consoles, forcing titles to be exclusive to them. I see no real difference between a 360 and a PS3, even Wii(ok, less horsepower and different controller). Having monopoly over titles, interfaces etc just makes companies duplicate work done by others, causing a stupid overhead. The dominant business model has to be changed somehow, but no one is willing to take initiative, of course. After all, capitalism is everyone is trying to take more than the others, instead of benefiting everyone.
This is all terribly ironic to me. Aren't these the same people who proudly proclaimed that 'PC gaming was dead!'? They were right, to a degree. The 'big name title bought off the store shelf' market is rapidly shrinking for the PC. However, PC gaming as a whole; either through Valve, other online distribution models, MMO's or what have you; is bigger than ever.
The direction that the 'conventional' gaming buisness models are keeling in the current times are reminiscent of the early 80's right before the great Atari crash. The bargain bin will again be the death of (the majority of) the 'big hit' gaming industry. Other media industries show us that companies are reluctant to change away from previous buisness models that were, at one time, hugely profitable.
The good news is that there will always be people there to fill the gap, and some of them will innovate new directions for our gaming media.
I'm skeptical about OnLive and the entire 'cloud gaming' concept, but I can't say yet that it's doomed to failure. It may work. Alternatively, if Valve released it's sales figures for steam, people might actually see how profitiable the online distribution of games through steam-like services can actually be. Valve may actually be wise by not releasing it's sales figures, for fear of 'bigger' companies trying to compete with steam on the market, rather than simply using steam like they are doing so now.
Steam is not perfect, and I can't say it will be the industry leader for online digital distribution in the coming age (like I hope it will be). However Valve has dedicated itself to improving it's products continually rather than resting on it's laurels. Besides, even if Valve fails, another company will take it's place.
There will always be greedy people who 'don't get it' there to feed us shovelware, and there will always be innovators who genuinely care about their audience.
I suspect that future consoles would benifit greatly from a 'Steam' styled buisness model, and that console manufacturers are only just starting to get on board with offerings such as XBL and PSN. They will either adapt, or they will be bypassed by somone else.
I've been playing computer games for over 30 years. The point is this...game companies focus more on the $$, than the game itself, in many cases. Some reasons these companies fail have already been stated. Honestly, they restrict themselves with incredible deadlines in order to save money. After all, they are running a business. Yet, they tend to miss the point. Blizzard is one of the very few companies I know of that actually bump a deadline in order to "get it right." No, I'm not saying their games are perfect or error free, but the imperfections and errors tend to be fairly minor. This gets to my main point, which is that almost all game companies, including EA, SquareEnix, Ubisoft and many others choose to put out games that are just plain aweful. They either don't run well, have horrid controls or, perhaps, look good, but aren't even fun. The bigger companies, like the ones I just mentioned should know better and do better. There isn't any excuse for it. If you're putting out many titles at once, but run like junk, etc., then consider paring down to just one or two really good projects (like Blizzard, for example). I've seen the, "let's create a bunch of half-done games and push them out really fast, flood the market with our games, market really hard, charge as much as we can and see what sticks" approach over the years. It's simply not excusable to charge more for the many bad products out there. I'm not sympathetic to see the games industry suffer, as I've spent way too much on games over 30 years that either didn't work, didn't work well, weren't well supported, or weren't as advertised. In the immortal words of a very wise man (Flav-O-Flav), "Don't believe the hype!"
Even better, why not just make games text-based? That would cut development costs even further!
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
My big problem is that most games go for prettiness over content, i felt this way about crysis (mirrors edge/final fantasy 10+ and many more). Crysis was beautiful to look at but at the same time it was just too tedious. If you ignore the graphics you had a standard shooter with average ai and nothing to set it apart from other (better) fps games. Cranking up the graphics/physics doesn't help a game, just look at World of Goo. World of Goo is a simple game with basic 2d graphics, a very humorous story and more addictiveness that heroin. Check out the demo here http://2dboy.com/games.php . Sure it's more a casual gamer thing but shouldn't developers be catering to the audience instead of forcing more repetative crap at us and then whining that it doesn't sell?
If more companies tried to make games that cost a little less (both to make and sell) but added some innovation they would do so much better, Portal is a prime example, they used an existing game engine to make a game that (for me) was better than anything else released that year.
I guess what im trying to say is i am bored of seeing the same games with new names or an increment stuck to the end of the title, why would i want to buy a new shiny fps game when i can get a good fps made 2 years ago for half the cost and has been patched so it actually works the way it should (or close to). Ive just realised that all the above can be said with a much simpler statement,
Street Fighter 2 on the snes > Street Fighter 4 on the xbox360
It should be noted that most of the FF titles were produced by different companies.
let just take what they said above as right: they need $10 million (previous console version) and usually sell 150,000 copies.
well 150,000x59.99=$8,998,500
so that's 9 million of the "first line suckers" then I'm sure you can dig up another few million as you decrease the price to something more sane. so that was easy.
Now they need $25 million, I guess somehow Dakitana 2 was that much better, Now let's see the time frame.
(using XBOX) released in 2001 discontinued in 2006
(using XBOX360) released in 2005 , still going.
now we are talking an increase in cost of over 2.5 times, in a time frame of around 10 years.
Fellow Slashers, This is some BS if I ever smelled it. What other industry do you know of that is basically an oligopoly, and the price of the goods they produce has INCREASED over the life of the long run, and their cost to manufacture has "Somehow" Increased over the same time?
Right-o chaps, I'm glad everyone in California drives Bentleys to go to work and sit in a cubical and code a game all day while doing a Nerf assault on the next guy, but don't whine that it costs to much, you just have no idea how to control spending just like the rest of the bloody market and your bubble is about to pop. (or is in the process)
At the recent Game Developers Choice awards, small-team, relatively low-budget titles actually did really well, and not just in the indie categories. World of Goo cost about $10,000 (!!) to develop. LittleBigPlanet's development costs don't seem to be public, but they were probably under $1m, maybe $2m at most. Braid cost about $200k.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Part of the problem is that a lot of the money really is spent on the "shine it up a bit"--- a typical 3d game has a ton of art assets and custom AI scripting in it. Of course, people do sometimes try something radically different, but these games are mostly notable for being interesting failures, not commercial successes, so companies are wary of trying them.
Two of the more notable examples are Black & White and Spore, both of which went heavily in for radically new tech, rather than just spruced up graphics, and both of which had some interesting results, but neither of which made money for their companies.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Instant fix to the sales problem. Titties. Loads & loads of titties.
My other sig is a knife wound.
I am a game developer and i see this happening all over the place. games are going for flashy effects and the "fun" is taking a back seat. and as a gamer I feel that this is wrong. I don't want graphics i want fun, just like everyone who reads this site. but the fact of the matter is most of the people who buy games look at the box or the trailer and all they look for are flashy effects. no flashy effects and they wont buy it.
Everyone is saying "put out a good game for good sales", that sounds all well and good but what is a "good" game? i bet if you asked 100 random people you would get 20 different opinions, and "Hardcore" gamers would only call 1 or 2 of them "good". this being said, if i was in charge of a company i would want to make money, that is the nature of business. The best way to make money is to spend as little money as possible and sell that product to as many people as possible. and the sad truth is "hardcore" gamers are not the largest market. people who play madden and tony hawk are.
This results in "hardcore" gamers getting pissed off because they cant get more then a handful of good games a year. As a "Hardcore" gamer myself I feel the pain. My solution? keep an eye out for "winners" and play them till another comes along.
Best of luck everyone!
TFS:
Developers would like to raise prices to cover development costs, but Mike McGarvey, former chief executive of Eidos and now an executive with OnLive, says that consumers have been looking at console games and saying, 'This is too expensive and there are too many choices.'
I'm not normally your free market type of guy, but this seems to be precisely the kind of thing that is solved by the market itself. So people do not want to buy expensive games because there are "too many choices", and consequently developers do not want to create more games. So number of game releases will decline eventually - the more serious the problem, the faster - and the "too many choices" argument won't be applicable anymore.
The key phrase there is "limited-time." When you say it's for a limited time, people will think that a sale is going on and will purchase that game because they think they're getting a deal. If every game drops to that same price, say $20, and it's not for a limited time, then the consumer will think that the value of the product is $20 and will not go out in droves to purchase it until there's another sale which brings the cost down to $10 for a limited time. What Valve's experiment only showed is that many people will purchase a game for $20 that they think it worth $50 - and that's not new information.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Your breakdown isn't close to realistic. I could understand your mod-up if it was tagged "+5 funny".
The 3000% figure has been talked about a lot, but I don't think it's all that persuasive. First of all, as far as I can tell, the 3000% increase is not an increase of 3000% in total sales. It's a 3000% increase in sales compared to the days or weeks preceding it (on a "per-day" sales basis). For example, if Left 4 Dead sold 1000 copies a day for the first three months, then dropped to 100 sales per day after that. The 3000% increase would be sales of 3000 copies over a single day. And if you go back and look at my example numbers, 3000 copies is only about 3% of the total copies sold.
So, the 3000% increase figure isn't that impressive - except for the fact that it shows the sales of a game experiencing lagging sales after release can be temporarily spiked. It certainly doesn't point to pricing games lower in general.
At $25 million it should be pretty easy to figure out that my kids don't need (and I won't buy) a wii
game every time a new kids animation movie gets released.
Seriously, do we really need console games for: Wall-E, Ice Age, Kung Fu Panda and Bee Movie?
As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud.
How does deploying on OnLive versus deploying on XBox 360 significantly affect the cost of development? Sure, console dev kits cost more than a PC, but it's a tiny fraction of the the $25M spent on the big-budget games that are discussed in this article. Developing a AAA game that happens to run via a thin client is about as costly as one that runs on a thick client.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
I see your point, which is a good one. If you check out the article again Valve says they sold more copies of L4D that weekend than they did at launch, and it's probably a safe bet that launch would normally get the bulk of buyer interest. I still say this is simply a case of supply and demand. If your stuff ain't selling, you're probably asking too much for it. Same reason Frank's used car sits on the side of the road for months, when Fred's car sold in a week. They're both fine cars, but Fred asked for a realistic amount of money.
If I have $50 to spend, I may or may not buy your $50 game, even if it looks good. If I see two $25 games that both look good, chances are better that I'll buy one, or both. I'm still spending the same amount of money, so someone's still getting it from me. But I'm more likely to feel I'm getting better value for my money in the second scenario, and be less likely to be worried about spending that money. If you really don't want that money, hey, good for you.
Well, I'm not saying that gameplay is perfect.
But let's agree on this, then, because it seems to me like you're saying the same thing: if you go back in time for up to 10 years or so, you won't see a huge drop in gameplay quality. Taking the present point as the "OK" point (not "perfect", mind you), going up to 10 years or so in the past... gets you just as "OK" gameplay in most games.
Well, maybe even "OK" paints the wrong image. Basically what I'm trying to say is: if you could tolerate playing a brand-spanking-new 2009-release game, you could probably tolerate a 2005 release just as well. It won't be any worse, gameplay-wioe. And if you can't stomach the former, then you're not in the market for games, anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
Basically there is already somewhat less incentive to buy a brand new game when you can get a 1 to 3 year old game for a third of the price. Except if you already played all that could interest you from the past years, of course.
And I think that just going simpler and lower budget is... a tricky proposition. It can probably be pulled off, but it's not easy and certainly not by many. For most companies that would result in a game that isn't just sub-par compared to everyone else's games from this year, but also sub-par compared to existing 5 year old games.
To reuse that Build-A-Lot example, by itself "OK, I'm getting 5% of the game for 33% of the price of another new game" would maybe be more palatable by itself. Yeah, I'm a savvy consumer like that. I maximize TCO and minimize ROI ;) But it becomes a lot harder to rationalize when it becomes "OK, I'm getting 5% of a 5 year old game, and it actually costs more than that 5 year old game." That's the point where I have to look at the damned thing and ask myself what was I smoking when I bought it.
I mean, ok, in Build-A-Lot I can build houses along a road... and that's it. Period. But then for a _quarter_ of its price I could get Tropico, which has building houses, and an AI, and an economy, and more replay value, etc. Or I could get SimCity IV. Etc.
What's my motivation to buy the simpler low-budget new game, instead of something that costs less and offers more?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And no, I obviously wouldn't accept game which doesn't allow me to start game from the save two/more times.
So I take it you don't play roguelikes. Nor do you play Diablo 2 hardcore, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, or any other game that has consequences for the player's actions. Nor do you play Animal Crossing games, or at least you see the mole a lot.
The answer is crowd-sourcing.
1) Drop input costs to near zero by giving average casual game-player (5 year old to granny) easy Web 2.0 flash game-design api.
2) ???
3) Profit
Pong extreme is a remake of the classic pong game plus new added features. Exploding shot shells, Portable black holes, Laser trip mines and a new Star wars lightsaber mod.
MMORPG pong due this christmas.
RTS PONG due next summer.
Did it ever occur to these companies that spending huge stacks of cash for a mediocre game is absolutely insane? I am actually glad for smaller, more fun, DLC games because it will force big game publishers to rethink, and shrink, their games and game budgets to reasonable levels. In turn, those games will have more direction and less frivolity.
I remember just before the release of the ps3, an article about this small team of friends working on their own game, the game from what i could tell looked allot like oblivion, (first person adventure) graphically i was amazed. the game was just being made by the 3 friends, the article went to say how games can be produced without investing a fortune and they can keep up in every way with big budget games. With that said i think the problem is the 25 mill $$ it takes to produce a game, isn't going into game production, more so into bigwigs pockets as pay. I do not agree that games should be dulled down graphically, that is allot of the enjoyment for me, games such as Gears of war, Halo, fallout, graphically astound me and are some of my favorite games, they are well thought out, good cinematics, and the gameplay is fun, i would say moreso than previous generation games In short get rid of the mr 7 digit yearly pay, hire someone for 1/3 of the salary, put the other 2/3 into the people who actually make the games what they are, artists/programmers/writers