Slashdot Mirror
Financial Issues May Force Changes On Games Industry
krou writes "According to comments made at the Edinburgh Interactive conference, operating costs of making games are spiraling upwards, and there has been 'significant disruption' to the games industry's business model. Games are getting much bigger and taking longer to develop, the console market is fragmented, and the cost of licensing intellectual property has gone up. All of this, says Edward Williams from BMO Capital Markets, means that 'For Western publishers, profitability hasn't grown at all in the past few years and that's before we take 2009 into account.' Recent figures suggest game sales have fallen 29% over the last 12 months. While westerners still relied on putting games on DVDs and selling them through retail channels, 'Chinese developers focused primarily on the PC market and used direct download, rather than retail stores, to get games to consumers,' and the lack of console users 'meant developers there did not have to pay royalties to console makers.' Peter Moore of EA Sports said that significant changes will come in the future, particularly in electronic purchasing of games."
Whoever said PC gaming is dead is about to eat crow.
Goddamnit slashdot!!! I had an f'in essay written on this topic and inadvertently clicked on a link, thereby wiping my whole mother F#$*%^! comment out! Can you not save data in forms when I go back like every other webpage out there???
Ugh... FRUSTRATION!!!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I admit that I'm probably in the minority on this, but I haven't been happy about where the game industry has been going in the past decade.
The big budget phenomena has been the very thing that's lowering my enjoyment of games. IMHO, the obsession with graphics, sequels/IP and marketing (all big budget things) has detracted from the biggest part of games: gameplay.
Perhaps this will be an opportunity for the game industry to take a step back and reevaluate their approach to development. I, personally, would very much like to see developers choose a route of detail, gameplay and innovation rather than releasing the same game every other year with improved graphics.
But what do I know, my ideal game is Dwarf Fortress.
there has been 'significant disruption' to the games industry's business model.
Yes and it's called the Wii.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The cost of licensing IPs has gone up? Then stop relying on licensed IPs and start making compelling games that people want to play.
Every year there's a new Tiger Woods/NFL/WWE game, virtually identical to the last offering with a few player updates and token changes to the control system. Sorry, but I prefer actual depth over the latest and greatest graphics and accurate sports team rosters.
A lot of developers could take influence from the greatest pro wrestling game series ever devised. Concentrate on making a fun game and make it customisable enough that the player can change it to accurately represent a given league/company/tv show/movie/comic book (delete as required).
If the games industry switches to a buy online / download model, I want to be able to burn that download to CD for backup. Nothing worse than paying for something and finding N+1 months later when you want to play again, that the download is no longer available and/or the seller has gone bust. For example NetStorm. Greatt game. Good single player campaign. Net play was good too, except the servers eventually died off. Still I do like to play single player from time to time. If I didn't have the CD, I'd be shit out of luck to replay later (yes I know there are online cracked versions now). The point is that if you buy something, people had better be able to burn to CD and install from CD.
It would be nice if economic troubles caused gamers themselves to be more selective about which games they bought. A few years ago when I worked at gamestop, most of the customers (children especially) seemed to buy games based ENTIRELY OFF THE BOXART. "Hey, I have a PS2. Hey, I enjoyed the movie 'fight club". Hey, this box which appears to have been the first game I picked up is Fight club for the PS2. That's GOT to be a good one!" Many people are apparently buying wii games at random, the effect being that most of the games for the wii are barely playable. Developers wouldn't make movie-tie in games if they didn't sell. It would be great if the economic troubles really put a damper on people buying games on impulse without reading a single review to tell if the game was halfway decent, or shovelware.
Then again, I'm pretty sure even if that 29% decrease were entirely due to throwaway games, the industry would still follow the path of least resistance. Maybe they'd just make ONLY worthless games.
While I'm making demands of millions of people who wouldn't change even if they did read this post, it would be nice if gamers were more supportive, or at least more forgiving, of games that try to do new things. A lot of "hardcore" gamers get very entrenched opinions about what a game should and should not be according to genre. It's like if moviegoers complained that a movie wasn't formulaic enough.
An economic crisis such as this one is a wet dream for governments wanting to offer "protection" to all sorts of businesses and have them comply with their ideologies. And games are just another industry in the hands of those who may offer tax cuts or printed money in exchange of new politically correct (and boring) games.
The last financial crisis killed Loki Games even though they were on track with their financial plans.
In the past games were made with much less developers and a much smaller budget, and yet I found them just as fun to play.
This is the natural way it's supposed to happen.
Graphics
When SNES came out, the fact that it looked so much better than the NES added to the enjoyment. Now graphics are at a point where we can move characters around in something akin to what we'd see in a CG movie. We've hit a peek where cartoonish graphics can't really get much better.
Expansiveness
Next we have huge sandbox games. Again we've hit a peek, where the worlds are so expansive that by the time you've explored everything you're either addicted (like an MMO), or you've spent so much time doing the same things that the gameplay becomes repetitive.
Complexity
Then we've got games that take months to learn all the possible moves and combos.
Flair is no longer as important
So the old adage of more is better is no longer valid with video games. We've hit a peek in many areas where more is simply not necessary. Now we can focus specifically on what makes something "fun" besides the flair.
This is why the Wii is so popular. And as technology keeps getting better, it becomes easier and easier for independent developers to produce graphics, game play, and complexity that are passable, so that audiences will just focus on if it's fun or not.
Of course big game companies may soon be in trouble. A lot of their main commodities (graphics, expansiveness, complexity) are getting easier and easier to reproduce to an appropriate level. This makes what they produce less valuable. It's progress.
I really hope they don't stop selling games in brick&mortar stores. I have a limited download limit (25GB) and I can't afford to up that limit at the moment. So if I want a game and the only way to get it is to download a 5 or 8GB file, it won't be worth my trouble.
I'm buying more games than I've bought in ages at the moment, but 'the industry' may not like the reasons I'm doing so. My two primary platforms are iPhone and Wii, in that order. iPhones games are anywhere from 59p to an eye-watering £2.99, the Wii has Gamecube games available which I can get for £1.99 second-hand.
That's about what these are worth to me. Looking at games appearing for £29.99, even £49.99 etc....I'm just not interested. The only games I've bought within the last year or so at full price have been Guitar Hero III (thinking about it, must be more than a year now) and err...err...hmm. Actually that's it. Oh yes, World of Goo which was already a download and relatively cheap. One glaring exception would be Wii Fit, depending on whether you want to count that as a pure game or not.
It's really a question of pricing for me. I don't care about licensed IP, I only marginally care about having the latest greatest graphics....it's just that games started costing a huge chunk of cash and I'm simply uninterested at that level. It's not that I can't afford it either, it's that I simply don't think it's worth it and would rather put the money towards a day out, or more bits for the bike, or something other than gaming.
Bring down the cost, get more buyers. If it's not profitable for you to bring the cost of your current model down, then change the model.
Cheers,
Ian
There is a lot of senseless cost in making many games today. Paying famous celebrities insane sums of money for voice overs, the bean bag chair mentality, the never ending focus on improving on graphics instead of just making good gameplay and so forth. Plus publishers and distribution costs. Game costs are rivaling the bloated costs of making movies these days.
Somewhat off topic but think about this. How can District 9 which is such a great movie with some of the best unique effects Ive seen in a recent Sci Fi movie cost 30 Million and yet Transformers 2 cost $228 million, GI Joe Movie $170 million etc. All icing and no cake.
I do not agree that evolution of games must mean that they're more expensive to make. Maybe I am not one of the majority but big, long, high-budget games based on some movie IP is not what I am after. I am soon 30 and have a job, I love small and fun games that I can play for a few hours or so without having anxiety for not being able to play for a week. It seems like this market is growing and I sure buy 3-4 casual-gamer games than one high-budget game that I am going to get tired of before I am able to finish it. I think studios that can find a good balance between such releases will be successful.
Why can't anyone be satisfied with a flat profit of several billion dollars a year every year for 10 years?
Someone explain capitalism to me. If I ran my own business and I made 1 million dollars last year, and only $900,000 this year....well I just pocketed $900,000.
If a big company does the same, they go bankrupt.
Explain.
The dreadful sequelitis has messed up the whole industry.
You see while Doom / C&C and whatever game here were indeed groundbreaking and innovative, Doom 25 / C&C MCXIII and Sims 2014 isn't.
Sorry, treating a initially good idea solely as a cash-cow and milk it for all it's worth is not a feasible business model in the long term.
This has killed many game companies and will still kill them in the future.
The second problem is the utter lack of story telling these days. The most telling sign for this is the downfall of the graphics adventure genre. There are some exceptions, but in general the state there is terrible.
Best example is World of Warcraft which rakes in over 100 million revenue per month but still the developer think they can get away with a retarder story a 3rd grader would make up. And add this collecting 10 bear asses. Over and over and over again. (Mind the invention of the assless bear in this setting).
While the crappy story telling is counteracted in games like WoW by the social interaction and competitives challenges, this will kill most offline games in the long term. That's why this achievement stuff has been added to the xbox - to add a competitive challenge to overcome the shortcoming of ass-brained game stories.
Physical media isn't the problem. He would like people to think that so they can force people into download only media where they can kill the used games market and even kill off old popular titles if they wanted. The problem is that the business model for gaming is shit. No one makes profit on the hardware (except Nintendo as they always have) so when MS & Sony ramp up the cost of their hardware to out do each other they have to pass that cost on via licences which will drive prices up. That's why we've gone from $50 to $60 in this generation.
Because 3rd parties need to pay out to develop they need to make sure they make money and they do that by no being very imaginative or experimental so we get a lot of the same old shit but with new graphics. So it's harder for a title to stand out from the crowd and make money.
They need to build profits into the hardware to alleviate some of the pressure on software costs and they need to make games that will appeal to more than teenage males.
The cost of the hardware has to go up either way. If they go with a download only model and stick companies with only selling the hardware they will want a profit. As it is now they make no profit or even a slight loss just sell the thing. This is why retailers have to rely on used games so much. Publishers are giving retailers nothing decent to work with. So that means the price has to go up or you get stuck only being able to buy hardware from the manufacturer directly.
We could let shops mange their own digital sales to account of the shitty way hardware is sold but I don't see the likes of MS giving up control to let places like Best Buy or Wal-Mart mange their software.
Didn't Sins of a Solar Empire have a budget of just $1 million? Didn't the game sell more than 500,000 units? Wasn't it a good game? Maybe other developers should follow their lead, and for the record not every game has to be ported to all 3 consoles to make money.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Like calling for a meeting in a room with no chairs, the Slashdot forms discourage lengthy messages, which, after you've read enough "essays" on Slashdot, you recognize is a Good Thing.
They say costs are going up. Should they, then, not be doing what every industry in the world is doing? i.e. throwing the dirty work to cheap coders sitting back in China and India and Pakistan?
Life is too good to waste... Read!
Well I am not buying games that need some fancy online activation.
Start treating me (aka customer) with the respect I deserve and not like a criminal.
Start making games that are fun to play and not the 512th reincarnation of an old concept.
Start making games that have useable controls on the PC, and not just some lame console conversion.
Stop charging 50EUR for a game with bugs, which needs 2 patches before beeing playable and which is over in 8 hours.
Stop blaming pirates for your losses. If you don't like the current market, change it. Don't fight to keep the Status Quo.
Stop forcing me to watch thos stupid intro movies, add a decent in-game tutorial, quicksave goes on f6, ...
And the disparity in the growth rates of their economies.
Maybe it is time for those people who have no ability to come up with anything new to come up with their own intellectual property, instead of just making games based on movies and books. Seriously, a good game is a good game, and I am sick of how few original ideas and stories show up in the game industry.
If license fees are too expensive, come up with your own original works that share the same vibe as what you are looking to make, and if you make it solid, people will play. Gamers are STARVED for games that are new, and not just a clone of an existing game, or a 6 hour game based on a movie.
The console world also should NOT be the center of the game universe. A really really huge game that is PC-only right now can be released for the next generation consoles if those can handle it. Drop support for Intel graphics if they can't handle the demands, and in under five years, Intel will either get their act together on the graphics front, or players will start to demand that computers come with a real graphics chip in them that CAN handle it.
If you put out a computer game though (be it Windows, Linux, Mac, whatever), you generally don't have to pay royalties to any company just to publish your game.
But if you go PC, your game generally becomes single-player unless it targets the college demographic, which can afford a separate gaming-class PC for each player. Very few major-label PC games take into account the case of one PC, one 32" monitor, and four USB gamepads; most 4-player party games are either single-console exclusives or multiplatform in the sense of "both country and western".
Then stop relying on licensed IPs and start making compelling games that people want to play.
What would Guitar Hero have been without songs that people recognize?
I'm not arguing that PC gaming is dead. But, while the console market may be more fragmented than it used to be... it's still.. 3 consoles vs... how many potential computer configurations? Yea, I think I'll develop for consoles.
- A professional video game programmer
With a cap that low [25 GB per month] you're a rarity in the market
In areas of the United States not serviced by cable or DSL, the cap is even lower. MiFi service from Verizon and Sprint, which runs over their 3G networks, has a cap of 5 GB per month. Satellite Internet from companies like WildBlue typically has a cap below 10 GB per month as well.
The only games I've bought within the last year or so at full price have been Guitar Hero III [...] I don't care about licensed IP
Would you have paid full price for a copy of a Guitar Hero game if it didn't have any songs that you recognized? Some people would; I know I bought a copy of Dance Dance Revolution Konamix for the original PlayStation to get away from the crappy licenses that characterized DDR at the time. But a lot of people buy Guitar Hero games for the set list.
I've been doing a similar sort thing with the PS3, when inFamous came out it was £49.99 in the shops. Its only been a few months but the games £26.99 now and if you get it second hand I paid £17.
Both times I tried this, it failed. I bought PS2 games from the bargain bin, and the day I took off the shrinkwrap, put the disc in my PS2, and go online, I found that Sony had already pulled the plug on online play: "DNAS Error -103: This software title is not in service."
Anyone remember the old x-wing and tie-fighter games? What did these games have? Relative long gameplay, you couldn't finish those games in a weekend. And then when you were done, there were TWO expansions for both games, released at a small price that offered another few days of gameplay.
Compare that to Kotor and Kotor2. You can't of course compare gameplay of an RPG with a space-sim but you can compare the expansions. Or rather the lack of them. Had Kotor2 been produced as an expansion right from the start and not been shuffled out of house AFTER lucasarts realized that a sequel might make some extra money (gosh, a SW rpg might be a success, who would have thought).
If games were tv, then they would produce a pilot to test the audience, tear down the set, kill the actors and de-invent the camera. If the pilot happens to be liked, they start filming. One episode at the time. But no more pussy-footing about. They don't just tear down the set but nuke the state. Kill the actors entire lineage through time-travel and get god himself to remove light from the universe.
What exactly is taking so long with Mass Effect 2? They seems to be adding a lot of stuff (yet more planet surveying, my favorite part of the game) but the delay really shouldn't be necessary to tell a story. The series really should have ended now OR at LEAST we should have had a few expansions produced for some quick cash and extra gameplay.
Games really just don't to be produced sensibly.
Of cours the tech has to advance, but it doesn't have to happen for every game.
Tell me this, if a producer had simple done Planescape: Torment 2 with absolutely no advances to the engine, just purely another story, would you have bought it? I think the answer is yes.
So why do companies produce so few "expansions" and so many year long sequels that look fantastic but are the equivelant of making a television series with episodes 2-3 years apart.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The only way to kill PC gaming is to kill the PC.
Or to popularize genres that deployed PCs still can't handle, such as party games where four players share one big screen, or music games that depend on extremely low audio latency by PC standards (under 17 ms).
I'm in South Africa. The extremely high cost of bandwidth means you essentially pay double price if you download a game( the price of the game plus the price of downloading it) . So unless I can buy the game and download it somewhere for free, I simply won't buy it.
I think the answer is simple. Increase the value of the games and I will buy more games. Otherwise I'll keep playing the games I have. I think this will simply mean that less games that suck will be made.Also, keep in mind not everyone can afford pc's with high-end spec's. Market new games that work on older machines.
but some games are better without the spilt screen mp
One thing I've noticed is intentional flawed technology especially on the pc platform.
Numerous drivers for different cards with different bugs. A developer has to buy dozens of flawed video cards. Not to mention computer companies changing the bus standards every other year.
All the new raster standards require the developer to hand write custom shaders etc. Even the latest standard in openGL is even more heavily skewed towards the software developer of the game and not the driver writer.
What does this accomplish? It makes developing games more expensive. It drives the smaller companies out. But now its starting to bite the big boys.
But as the credit collapse becomes more severe I expect less AAA games to be developed and more market consolidation. Existing games might drop in price but at the expense of less future game development and the developer market shrinks. The software tools market aimed at developers will shrink and consolidate too.
Game quality and originality will decrease as consumers ( especially mobile consumers ) pay less for games.
Open source games will suffer to from the credit collapse. There will be less loans through education to subsidize programming time. There will be less donations from large corporations to subsidize programming time. At the end of the day, someone needs to pay for electricity and food.
Not to mention consumers getting their credit limits cut and having to purchase necessities.
Just my two cents...
Everyone knows that no matter how much the game costs to develop, the reproduction costs are practically nothing. I will not pay $50 for a piece of software infected with DRM malware. The publishers treat us gamers with hostility by incorporating such malware, so its high time we treat them with hostility by spreading the word and avoiding their products.
On the other hand, its not like I'm going to run out of games to play. I still enjoy games from ten+ years ago. The industry needs my business... I do not need them.
but some games are better without the spilt screen mp
I was talking about the games that aren't. For example, in the game Super Smash Bros. Brawl, what advantage would there be to give each of the four players in a match a separate Wii console and a separate copy of the game?
Not to mention with digital distribution you can reduce or completely eliminate distribution costs.
But then the publisher would have to drastically cut the price of a game in order to retain customers who would have to pay significantly more per month to upgrade from their current Internet access plan to a plan with a higher monthly transfer cap. It might be cheaper just to press copies of the game on DVD-ROM and mail them to such customers.
in many cases, people can make similar games for Flash or some other medium.
Please clarify:
...they're interested in gross profit. The problem with PC games is you have a shorter window in which to make a profit before piracy takes hold. If you don't believe that initial sales will be high enough, you either don't release a PC version or you delay it. It's about risk management. There is still a market for PG games, the games you see being released are the games that are expected to have strong initial sales (or that have some other mechanism to thwart piracy (be it DRM, online accounts or what have you)).
Wii Fit cannot be done without the balance board
No, but if one believes Microsoft's hype, Fit 360 can be done with Natal.
(there are other fitness games but AFAIK they all come with at least one peripherial to get more data about your body movements)
The peripherals that come with EA Sports Active are not electronic. They're a resistance band (available at any Dick's Sporting Goods) and leg strap to hold a Nunchuk accessory (can be MacGyvered up).
I don't like first person shooters, I don't play sports games (though SimGolf and Baseball Mogul are the shit) and I don't own a console and I don't play MMO's.
While going through some boxes the other day I found all of my old Sierra and LucasFilm games. Monkey Island, Full Throttle, The Dig...those were fun. They're fun because there's an actual story with good characters, interesting locations and good puzzles.
Civilization, SimCity, etc are fun because there's no limit to what you can do. There's no pre-determined path to follow. If I want to build a majestic, economically sound city then giggle while I destroy it with a flying eyeball that spits lasers I can.
I recently bought X-Plane because of the deal they were running due to Flight Simulator getting cancelled. Its not nearly as polished as Flight Sim but its got freaking Mars and its possible to actually get out of Earth's orbit. I dutifully purchased the Inside Passage and some other planes. I did this because its fun and again there's no linear path to follow.
Bring back "FUN" and people (especially old farts like me that have plenty of disposable income) will buy it.
Meh, free market actually is solving this, through 4G and WiMax wireless. For $80/month from Sprint you can get unlimited phones, text, internet, and PC internet (real unlimited bandwidth). If you think you just need it for travels here and there, you can get a 5GB plan.
CLEAR wireless doing the same thing, also WiMax. WiMax deployment cost simply involves lasso'ing yet another antennae to already erected cell wireless towers. No last mile problems.
Nobody ever said the Free Market always solved all problems first.
But I'm confident with multiple wireless carriers entering the scene, our solution will be better than what would have come about if our government [even more] got involved. Remember-- just because it worked somewhere else, DOESN'T mean it'll work here. Our legislature is different, the people are different, and seem far more readily disposed to slinging money at the problem (the Healthcare plan) than actually making a solution that works.
inFamous is a single player title, not multiplayer. Apples and Oranges.
There's still plenty of PS2 games with internet play still up, you just chose the wrong games. Try the original SOCOM (2002) or EQOA (2003).
Seriously.
I've nearly bagged on modern gaming. Every so often, there is a great title and I'll play, but usually I don't.
http://www.classicvgm.com/
That's a new (small) magazine that will be covering the retro / homebrew / indie scene. Atari 2600 has seen a ton of releases since about '95, many of them written in full view online and self-published with great art and manuals and such. Several people even do boxes. That's my favorite scene, just because it's simple and fun.
Sega Genesis, NES, of course Dreamcast, ColecoVision and others are seeing new games produced. Most of these rival or even exceed the commercial quality efforts of the time.
Also up and coming is retro gaming type games on micros. The Propeller has seen a few great ports and some original titles. You can play those for $30 or so and an evening soldering, or buy one of several boards that can run the games easily enough. That chip has NES - Genesis quality graphics built in --with multi-display capability and VGA / NTSC / PAL outputs no less!
Blogging because I can...
Many companies lose a lot of money while developing a game in experimenting with various sides of the game. Besides Duke Nukem Forever, there is the example of Half Life 2, which took Valve 5 years to release from HL1 simply because they rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt their game...sometimes with a new engine, sometimes with new graphics etc.
A game does not need to be perfect, it needs to be nice and fun, above all. The gameplay is usually an afterthought in many modern games.
It'll grow, it'll shrink, it might even be considered marginal someday, but it will never ever be dead.
Homebrew on consoles is "marginal". If PC gaming ever gets that small, it'll be "dead" to the press.
games on the PC are cheaper especially for the Mom and Dad's of the world
That's true in single player. But if Dad, two kids, and their play date are gamers, you need four PCs and four copies of the PC game, but you need only one console, three extra controllers, and one copy of the console game. Compare their prices.
You claimed PC games can only do singleplayer unless you buy a whole LAN's worth of machines. that's patently false as PCs can do online multiplayer.
So if little Abigail and little Chester live together, and they want to play together, should I send Chester to his friend's house just so that he can play with Abigail?
1) Offer 'LAN' licences allowing perhaps 4-8 seats. You only need one copy of the game, but several other PCs can have a altered client copy that shares the licence temporarily as long as the PCs are on the same lan.
2) The big guys need to open up their game engines along with easy toolkits and scripting engines to allow smaller indie developers to make games with big title tech, but with much less labour hours for a given level of product complexity and time to release. 3a) Open Source! Make easy flexible moddable open source game engines, then draw from the strength of the modding community to crowdsource content. (worked for operating systems, how are games different?)
3b) Stay proprietary, but make games very cheap, like the iPhone App Store. Have something like Steam, but bring the price right down. This must be done, because iPhone/Android games sell like crazy compared to out of a box variety. It's a the new business model.
In the 80s and in the 90s even some big titles were coded by not more bunch of guys in a garage. Games now take 2-3-400 programmers and artists, years to complete. So whats the problem? Quite simply, alot of duplicated effort, and existing programming tools have not scaled terribly well. Per developers labour hour, not much more end product complexity can be achieved. Thus you need 100x the number of programmers for a 'big title' today with about the same length of single player play as something from 1993.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
tl;dr. Just say "long bad"!
I've found that most games are missing out in terms of either polish, patching (which on consoles means better pre-release testing because there is no patching) and usability.
Let's take a quick consideration of my wii games.
A lot of those issues are easy to fix, in that the hard part isn't knowing what to do instead but knowing that you should be doing something else. A system for patching and patches that improve the game implementation quality would be great.
I know this won't happen, but letting people who care fix these things would be great too. I know I'd be fixing some of the issues with GH3 if no one else would.
*grumble*
What would Guitar Hero have been without songs that people recognize?
What drove me to buy Guitar Hero was playing it and playing through songs I didn't know (but by bands I know) and learning that this button-mashing thing is kinda' fun. I did know 5 of the ~70 songs when I bought GH3, and a lot of the bands, but I've come to like more songs by playing the game than I knew already.
So... maybe the answer is a cheaper but just as fun game?
[Or do people play it differently than I do?]