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.
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 (!)
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
... 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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
>>>If I wasn't sure you were a fanboy before, now it is obvious. What in the world are you replying to?
(1) As I stated before, I'm not a fanboy. Since the 1970s I have owned Ataris, Commodores, Nintendos, Amigas, Segas, Sonys, Colecos, and so on. I have no particular love for any one console, and I don't understand these fanboys that inhabit the net. They strike me as weird - who cares which console is best or whatever? I simply enjoy gaming, and could care less what piece of hardware I'm using. ----- (2) Since you're apparently slow on comprehension, I will repost my message and clarify "what I'm replying to".
>>>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 find it hard to believe Nintendo has 20 years of producing outstanding games (1985-2005), and now has suddenly "lost" the ability to appeal to gamers. i.e. I don't agree with the poor reputation a lot of gamers feel towards Nintendo. Not at all.
>>>The gamecube worldwide was third. Just deal with it.
No. YOU need to grow up and learn to look at the math, instead of jumping to false conclusions. The Cube sold approximately 22 million and the Xbox sold about 23 million. The statistics have an error rate of +/- 2 million, which means the Cube might have sold as many as 24 while the Box might only be 21, due to miscounts on the sales. QED as I stated, "the Cube and Xbox are in a statistical tie for second place". ----- When you get into college and take Stat/Probability 101, you'll better understand. It's equivalent to an election year poll showing McCain is leading Obama 47% to 46% but with an error of +/-2%, and therefore a statistical dead heat.
>>>And like the GP was saying, non-gamers, almost by definition, don't buy a lot of games.
The statistics show otherwise. The statistics shows the Wii has an attach rate equal to the PS3 and Xbox 360, and therefore the supposed "Wii nongamers" are buying just as many games as the "gamers" on the other consoles. QED your statement is false.
Now if you want to start-over, and this time refrain from insults like "fanboy" or "stupid" or whatever, we can have a mature conversation about sales/stats. ----- Or I could just flame you. I've been on the internet for almost 22 years now - I can flame trolls with one arm and code in C with the other arm, and barely break a sweat. ;-)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Your breakdown isn't close to realistic. I could understand your mod-up if it was tagged "+5 funny".