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."
Many people are apparently buying wii games at random, the effect being that most of the games for the wii are barely playable.
The data actually shows that sales are MORE concentrated on the Wii, most sales go to an even smaller number of games than usual (80% sales on 14% games, the usual values are 80-20). The few shovelware titles that managed breakthroughs did so because they did something people really wanted. AFAIK the sales of the shovelware are mostly really low and the market for it is so oversaturated (the developer of Carnival Games, a million-selling minigame collection said they wouldn't stand a chance in today's Wii market... yet they kept throwing money at more shovelware) that I wouldn't be surprised if they failed to sell enough to break even despite their low dev costs.
The whole situation has made third parties run around like headless chickens, only able to clone what others succeeded with and not realizing that they could at least clone games from other consoles instead of only what was released on the Wii. As it is they keep cloning a very small pool of games with no understanding of why the original game worked in first place and then act surprised as the result bombs. EA's Peter Moore seemed to have a recent realization of how to sell Wii games, namely thinking about what the customer demands from a game of that type and then dealing with those demands instead of just taking an existing formula (that was probably developed with those customer demands even if it was by accident and so long ago that noone remembers what exactly happened). Maybe it was triggered by Wii Fit where everybody could immediately understand why a customer would buy Wii Fit: Because they wanted to lose weight! By knowing the customer demands they were able to make their own fitness games that worked. If you don't understand WHY something was done you probably won't be successful at copying it.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
One glaring exception would be Wii Fit, depending on whether you want to count that as a pure game or not.
I think it's an important one. Wii Fit isn't just a game that manages to sell stupidly well without pricedrops a long time after its release and even sells consoles too, it's also a game that would be impossible to make online-only because of the balance board. As much as game publishers seem to love the idea of something like OnLive where you basically subscribe to a gaming broadcast Wii Fit would be a killer app against it. Peripherials can't be downloaded and Wii Fit cannot be done without the balance board (there are other fitness games but AFAIK they all come with at least one peripherial to get more data about your body movements). OnLive's promise of playing all games without upgrades is made impossible by games like Wii Fit.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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
But it still remains hard for independent developers to meet the minimum bar that Nintendo and Sony have set. For one thing, Nintendo is still openly hostile to a developer preparing its first title: