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EA Says Game Development Budgets Have Peaked
Gamasutra reports on comments from Electronic Arts VP David Demartini indicating that the company thinks AAA game development budgets are not going to continue their skyward trend. "If [a developer] happens to make a lot of money based on that budget, great for them. If they come up short and have to cover some of it — y'know, they'll be smarter the next time they do it. That's kind of the approach that we take to it." Certainly this has something to do with a few major economic flops in the games industry lately, such as the cancellation of This Is Vegas after an estimated $50 million had been dumped into the project. Another example is the anemic response to APB, an MMO with a budget rumored to be as high as $100 million. Poor sales and reviews caused developer Realtime Worlds to enter insolvency and lay off a large portion of the development team.
Lots of money does not a good game make...
Bring back innovative fun gameplay and stop pushing graphics!
Crappy games with awesome graphics... Are still crappy games.
I never saw APB advertised, or evenmontiioned anywhere but Steam. If the software had been free, with a brief trial before a subscription stage, or if the software had cost, but the game was free to play, I might have given it a shot. Too many companies, and EA in particular, seem to see MMOs as both magical money machines and silver bullets against piracy. In my mind, MMOs in particular have to prove themselves before a sane humanwould join up, even if they have a reasonable price structure.
I also wanted to give Fallen Earth a chance. Oh, well.
It's possible game budgets have overextended, and I personally would welcome a move towards lower-budget games: these really huge budgets are somewhat stifling for innovation, because there is very little risk you can afford to take with a $50m+ game. If you made ten $5m games out of that money, you could try out some more interesting things, and you'd also have smaller teams that can inherently move a little more nimbly (it's very hard to steer a ship the size of the current AAA dev teams, and changing anything requires heroics).
Nonetheless, I'm not sure one big-budget failure is enough evidence of a turnaround. The film industry has had a few large-budget films that failed so badly they bankrupted studios also, but pundits' predictions that those films marked a peak in film budgets all proved to be wrong.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
EA's executives got some nastygrams from their shareholders about returns not matching expenses. Not a good thing when you're trying to sell something that isn't essential to survival in the middle of an economic depression.
Entertaining PR press release.
So you finally stopped all those pirates that were putting you out of business...
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
Nosire! Of course not. It's probably due to evil software pirates.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Good old EA "If it's not Madden, it's a waste of money and we'll shut it down eventually" Games.
I stopped listening to anything they said years ago.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"EA games is going to invest less in their games. After all, it's the big franchises making EA a fortune with practically no development whatsoever. Just look at Madden!"
Hmmmm, so should we read into these comments?
1. Development budgets have peaked: But advertising budgets will continue to eclipse dev. budgets. (COD4 cost 1/4 to develop compared to the advertising budget.)
2. Game programmers, artists and everyone involved in the production side of games, are, in general underpaid and overworked: Now we'll pay them even less, and renege on bonuses.
3. Get ready for COD15 white-ops, still based on the COD4 engine.
4. The next generation of consoles will be a re-package of an Atari 2600; those games could be done in a week.
6. We'll switch off most of the multi-player servers, when we think you've had 'enough' fun... Or the next game is out...
7. Game distribution company executives bonuses are predicted to reach an all time high.
8. Game distribution company know that they are heading the way of the music industry, this is their last chance to 'milk' the public/industry.
9. Short term view, remember that a AAA game can take two-three years to produce, What happened back then...
As console generation improve, the requirements in terms of graphic quality, and expectation of quality game-play, and solid programming; console games are on par with TV and cinema, these days, sound, visuals, game-play dynamics, expecting the game industry to produce products at this level requires equivalent budgets(TV, cinema and game CG all use the same process, abet optimised).
Consider this, if a AAA game came make more money that a AAA film, why should it not have an equivalent budget.
So what do these distribution companies do?, apart from rip off the public(and shareholders), grind the people that actually create games, into the ground; it's hardly a sustainable model, look at Infinity Ward...
You can only stream data so fast, and hold only so much in RAM, which limits the amount of geometry/textures that can be shown (and thus need to be created) per hour of cinematic gameplay. Unless some revolution in multiplayer modes comes about, multiplayer costs will mostly be for a predictable number of coding hours. As long as people are ok buying $60 action games with 4-12 hour campaigns and some standard multiplayer modes, the costs for that type of game are pretty predictable if it's not a mismanaged project. MMOs are where the costs are really huge, although single-player open world games tend to have highly reused geometry (*cough* Crackdown 2 *cough*) that doesn't cost as much for some reason.
I imagine with the next generation of consoles that costs will start increasing again, though.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I like big budget games because they can have cool visuals, full spoken dialogue and so on. However once you've hit that point, you have pretty much peaked. There isn't a point in spending money on other things.
In particular I think some games make the mistake of spending money on big name actors. I really don't care, I'd much prefer a good voice actor, and there are many, to having money wasted on an actor because they are a big name.
I also think you are right that smaller titles can be a benefit too, so long as they spend money in the right places. Unfortunately I've seen too many lower budget games that try to be big budget and just end up being bad all over.
Next thing you know it they will jack up the prices of games to help off-set the costs. They will probably wait till mw3 comes out and activision thinks they are so cool and can price their shit for whatever they like then everyone else will follow. Then charge 25 bucks for a 6 map dlc add on....etc etc etc
... MMO's are definitely an area I doubt will ever have a "peak budget" as huge markets like asia and india have serious economies of scale.
Since the advent of games-for-show instead of games-for-fun, I have certain rules for buying games. These will probably explain why huge development budgets are a waste of money and why indie games are increasingly occupying more of my hard drive. It'll also explain specifically why APB died a death, because it was one of the games I looked at in the last few months.
1) No subscription. If I buy a game, I buy it. I don't rent games - never have, never will. I may borrow them from friends. I may have to (at some point) pay in installments to "own" the game, but when I do that's more a financial arrangement than an ongoing subscription. I've never played WoW, or any other MMO, because of this.
2) Demo. I do not play a game that I don't know *exactly* how it plays. I do not pre-order games, either. Some FPS's are vomit-inducing to me because of the motion (for some reason, Duke Nukem 3D was like that, but almost no other game). Some games *don't* let me change the controls to something I can actually get on with, or that works comfortably on my laptop. Some games do not play well despite looking nice (I *cannot* get on with DogFighter because the control system is just so horrendously out-of-tune with how I want the aircraft to move - thus the game is unplayable to me). If you don't offer me a demo, the only other options open to me are: playing a friend's version, playing a pirate version, or not buying the game until it's incredibly cheap and therefore worth the risk.
3) Value. I don't pay for any game that I won't get value back for. Asking £50 for a game is ludicrous unless I get hundreds of hours out of it. They are £6.99 games on my hard drive that have hundreds of hours of gameplay from me - you have to compete with that. For some reason, this seems to operate on a bell-curve... very cheap games are usually shit value, very expensive games are usually shit value, with the peak being at about £10 or so. If your game is too expensive, I *will* wait until it's cheaper - I don't mind playing games that are several years old so long as they work. If it never gets cheaper, it never gets bought.
4) System requirements. If I need a PC greater than the one I have, I won't look at the game. I don't buy PC's to fit the games, I buy games to fit my PC. There is no excuse any more for slow-running games on modern dual-core processors with Gb's of RAM available to them. Dogfighter CRAWLED on my PC and to get it to run smoothly required me to put it into 800x600 with no texture detail - it looked like a version of F29 Retaliator from my DOS days, without the fun, and with broken textures everywhere - and still my PC struggled (in fact, I loaded up F29 Retaliator in DOSBox soon after and had much more enjoyment out of it). If Tom Clancy's HAWX can work fine on my PC without me changing any options, Dogfighter should as well. If you require Windows Vista or 7, that's me done too. There's no reason for that. If you require a particular Service Pack, I will be suspicious and want to play the demo to be sure that you're just fibbing - most games run fine on SP2 even if they demand SP3 for example. If you require gobs of disk space, that's probably the biggest killer because my hard drive space and bandwidth is my most precious commodity.
5) DRM. If I can't play my friend's copy on my computer to see how it runs on my machine, that breaks Rule Number 2 above. If I can't play a legit version or demo on another PC, then I won't pirate it - I just won't buy it. However, if I do decide your game is good enough to make it onto my machine, a good way to kill Rule Number 3 is to reduce its value by making it a hassle to install / uninstall, making it require Internet access even just for "activation", making it unremoveable, limiting my installs artificially, making it impossible to backup to media, etc. Pirate versions and cracks will solve this for games I do buy but if I have to do that, you have a serious customer service problem. It's like me buying a car a
It doesn't matter if the graphics are good enough that you can read the (made up) names on the dog tags of the enemy soldiers through the scope of your sniper rifle. If the gameplay is crap, people wont buy it (at least once genuine reviews start appearing showing how crap the gameplay is rather than paid "fluff pieces")
The fact that demos no longer exist for many titles (on PC anyway) is also hurting things as people cant try games before they buy (and so they pirate the game to see if its any good and once they have pirated it, the incentive to buy disappears)
Although the downside (and why games companies may not be doing demos) is that gamers may download the demo, play it, decide the game is crap and not buy the full game at all.
100 millions where invested in the company.
the company has produced 1 mmo and about 60% of another one.
so you can say about 60M where invested in it.
now you can buy RTW for 4M, and get 1 MMO and half. *hint*hint*hint*
-Woof woof woof!
Of course it's peaked.. they've learned they can saturate TV and Radio, and other media, with a slew of ads for their products... They can't very well push thier stuff MORE then they are, so they've reached the top.
Maybe if they took some of that Prime Time ad-slot money and put it back into making a decent game, they'd get a better return?.. ok.. probably not..
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
1. is your game sh1t? if yes goto 2. if no goto 5
2. improve graphics. is your game still sh1t? if yes goto 3. if no goto 5.
3. improve graphics. is your game still sh1t? if yes goto 4. if no goto 5.
4. improve graphics. is your game still sh1t? if yes, go gold, blame piracy, goto1.
5. consult a publisher to make it sh1t and goto 2.
Personally, I think it's all down to piracy anyway. I was about to write the most awesome game imaginable but before I could write a line of code it was leaked on the net and I was losing an estimated 500bn USD/day from 200 trillion downloads. Nobody can make the most awesome game imaginable in these conditions. ban the internet... and stuff.
They run commercials at the cinema. Which is a good enough reason for me to not buy their games.
I'm not buying an EA game until it's fun, worth the price they're asking for and they stop using that fu**ing Cider piece of crap to port their Windows games to the Mac. Unless they bundle their games with a free 8-cores Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM, because that's what Cider requires to run properly.
The CEO and top management should get less $$$ (try like $75,000USD/year instead of $750,000USD/year) so the coders can get a reasonable salary.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
- APB cost over $100m in investment capital. That's a warning sign right there.
- APB has been in development for five years. No-one I know had heard of it until it popped up on Steam pre-orders.
- APB gets bad reviews on user sites.
- APB *didn't* get bad reviews in magazines, etc. because of a review embargo (until a week AFTER release) that stopped people publishing reviews - this arguably killed the game's publicity.
- APB changed over 5 years from being originally planned for the XBox and ending up being announced as a PC-only title.
- The APB studios seemingly have not-much-else in the pipeline at all. APB was their sole "saviour" really, and $100m of risk is a hell of a situation to start from with an MMO that basically relies on lots of people playing it a lot and liking it for a long time.
- APB is quite expensive compared to other MMO's, probably to compensate for the HUGE deficit and to keep lots of servers running 24/7.
- APB is very different in terms of genre, content, etc. to other MMO's.
- APB's parent company went into administration SIX WEEKS after release - they must have known that it needed to bring in millions within the first few weeks or the company would die like it did - they must have known that WAY BEFORE release, probably before the beta even started. They must also have known that it was a bit shit, given that they'd been running beta's for nearly a year.
Basically, 200 people lost their jobs because someone spent too much on something so enormously risky that they were betting on paying back millions of dollars in a matter of weeks on an untested concept on something that had been in development for five years, beta for a year and still couldn't get good reviews (or even ANY official reviews from professional sources), had been delayed and delayed, had priced itself too high, etc.etc.etc.
It was a classic bad investment, with bad management. Some games programmers operate like this in perpetuity - form company, make popular game, get investment, spend it all, declare company bankrupt, sack everyone, move over to a new company and hire the now-out-of-work "good" staff again (probably on worse contracts), rinse and repeat.
APB and Realtime Worlds have *nothing* to do with the games industry being weak, with games budgets getting too high or anything else. It was just stupidity.
So the game companies are beginning to realize that, although they are a game company and hire a lot of young guys who get into programming because they took some video game design courses, they still have be a functioning business to survive...interesting!
I tell my kids that video game development is a good entry into software development because the two should be indistinguishable. Writing code for WoW shouldn't really be much different than writing code for Microsoft Office. The problem I've noticed is people that choose video game development don't think they are in the business of making software and thus don't follow the established business rules that work for any type of software.
I suspect the real problem here is that game companys listen to their customers to much. Or rather they listen to them in the wrong way.
If you ask a gamer whether they like the graphics better on a moder 3-d shooter or an 8-bit 2-d shooter it's ubnlikely you'll get votes for the 2-d shooter. Similarly if you ask someone what kind of games they find fun they will only list games that curently exist.
If that is the the basis for how you design your games you'll always make a higher graphics quality version of something that already exists.
On the other hand, if you don't bother asking people about the technical details and instead ask them "what would you like a game to be about?", you'll get a much more interesting range of answers, and can then pick one or a combination of them and build a game with gameplay features and graphics that fit the concept.
As Henry Ford once said "If I asked my customers what they wanted they'd have said a faster horse".
1) No subscription.
Your reasoning makes sense, but this how most MMOs are financed. No problem if you don't want to pay a subscription - I don't, either - but there's not really an alternative if the game is going to make money. Yes, there are some "free to play" MMOs, but practically speaking they cost, as well, since if you want to do anything of value in the game it will require purchases.
2) Demo.
I understand your reasoning, but you need to understand that demos, for the most part, don't return much value to the time put in to making them. If there is a demo, the company is going to get out the bare minimum just to give you a glimpse of the game potential. That's really all you should expect. Don't expect it to be optimized, don't expect it to be customizable, and don't expect it to stay current with whatever the current version of the game is. There's just no profit incentive in it for the developer. Look at demos like you look at movie trailers: simple, short, and the bare minimum necessary to market the film.
3) Value.
Your points are valid, so long as you understand this will be subjective. For example, if I have an AMAZING experience with a game which only lasts 6 hours, is that not more value than having a mediocre experience with a game that lasts for dozens? I say yes, others will say no, and the conflicting perspectives will make it very difficult for a developer to find a one size fits all standard to this. Another comparison may be valid here: a movie ticket costs around $10, and a movie lasts around 2 hours. So, extrapolating that, if a game costs $50 yet provides 10 hours of gameplay, it could be worth it. Again, subjective.
4) System requirements.
This is just silly. New games are going to require more power. Or do you also complain that you can't play 360/PS3 games on your Xbox/PS2? There is some validity in complaining that many games are horribly unoptimized and can barely run on even the best of systems - I'm looking at you Crysis - but you just have to accept that as technology progresses, so will game requirements. And it's unrealistic to make comparisons between games, since you don't know what's going on behind the scenes with the code. Simply saying "FPS #2234 runs just fine, why doesn't FPS #4887?!?" is a specious position to take.
Windows XP is a decade old, it's time to upgrade. I'm sorry if that's not acceptable to you, but technology's not going to wait just because you think your system is "good enough". Also, as far as service pack requirements go, often that requirement is there because differences within an operating system between service packs are substantial enough to make it far simpler, and cheaper, for a developer to only support the latest version. This goes for the games, too. If a patch is available, and you refuse to get it, don't expect much support from the developer if something doesn't work right.
5) DRM.
This one I think we all can agree with. DRM will always be cracked, and only hurts the paying customer. Any developer with respect for their customers will either not include DRM, or at least use some form that gives back added value to the customer - such as Steam. I've never bought Crysis for this reason, even on the recent dirt cheap sales. When I buy a game, I expect to own that copy. Telling me I can only install 5 times, with no guarantee of being able to activate in the future, and you've lost my purchase.
6) Playing nice.
Although, again, you make some good points, I think you're expecting too much. Each executable is going to require a firewall exemption. The Half-Life series, for example, is like this because each game is a different executable. The fact that they are named the same is irrelevant. Also, while I wish there was an easy standard for developers to keep their settings and saved games in one location, differences between systems make this difficult. The latest versions of
until just now in this slashdot article.
Pretty poor advertising for a $100M game.
An MMO is not impossible on a console. Dreamcast had Phantasy Star Online after all.
Though for the most part that was a fighting game that's areas were hard coded on disk. As mentioned in the subject line the PS3 will be getting Final Fantasy XIV which is an MMO. The PS3 can support all types of MMOs where Xbox360 is pretty much limited to a Phantasy Star Online type game that are very static. The Xbox360 limitation comes from Microsoft restrictions on what they allow on their console. One, which I believe is still in place, is that you cannot create a game that requires you to have a hard drive as the old core bundles did not have hard drives. Though if you have a digital only game then I believe a hard drive is required to install it. They also have/used to have restrictions on how big your digital distributions are.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Rank and file employees are now expected to work more unpaid overtime to "deliver more value" for the share holders.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I am also continually mystified by the refusal of developers to port even a single MMO to a console
Though you added conditions after that line like "MODERN" and it came out on a console a year before going PC, we see your point painfully... let Wikipedia grant you some joy:
Final Fantasy series is mainstream, and installment # XI is only two behind the current XIII, or one PS{digit} console behind. Technically, XBOX 360 fulfills being a MODERN console for it, but then the game itself is 2 years older than WoW, so never believe you've seen everything :)
Upon glancing the Development section of the wiki, I saw hints of "other" multi-environment MMO's, but no names.
The state of the art I've seen is Yamaha's Vocaloid. However it only really can handle singing (for various reasons that's easier than speaking) and it still isn't great. Also it takes a lot of programming (in the MIDI sense, not the C++ sense) to make it sound right. Well that means having a skilled individual spend a lot of time which costs money and so on.
I believe in gameplay before graphics, buuuuut....... These days I seem to get the most enjoyment out of games that are basically telling a story and I'm just button-mashing my way through the pretty scenery. Take Gears of War 2 for example. That game had me IN AWE of the scenery. It was a joy to make my way through the levels. :-D Batman Arkham Asylum, similar experience (but then the play mechanics arent too bad either). Dante's Inferno, again, awesome level art... OK so I won't be playing these games again, ever, but I did enjoy the journey thanks to the visuals + story + some of the gameplay.
It reminds me of casual games... casual gamers play "click this, then that" games because they just like something to do with shiny, colorful graphics, and me, former "hardcore" gamer, like clicking through more elaborate "shiny, realistic" graphics. Same shit, different pile (one of them millions of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands)
I don't consider buying a game unless it can make use of my graphics.
I want an aesthetic experience in my games as well as configurability and good game play.
Games aren't that important for me that I'll buy them at all, if they don't interest me. That includes something that will interest my eyes and my mind and my sense of control. It also is a big "MINUS" score, for me, if the primary character can't be an attractive and strong female. Ugly, weak or secondary...major detraction -- makes it hard for me to get into (I just don't identify as well with male-gendered characters, but that might have something to do with the rather rigid sex-role social upbringing I grew up with in the US as well as my biological sex).
I'm may not be a typical consumer though, but I'd love to find a game that would interest me and challenge my current graphics/'physics' setup, with dual-Nividia 295 cards that, themselves, are dual GPU cards (so, basically 4 GPU's). I needed the 2nd card for another screen, but I only
game (or only want to be gaming) on my primary, 2560x1600 Dell30WFP (_Excellent_ Color rendition & stability, BTW), monitor. My other monitors are for other things (tablet, video).
I even asked if NVIDIA if they had anything that would demonstrate the abilities of my SLI-card setup when I got the 2nd monitor. They had Nada. Zilch. Pretty pathetic marketing if you ask me.
At least the Fry's game-rep was able to turn me on to Oblivion when I asked him for something to exercise my video card from 5 years ago or so. Since then haven't had a game as satisfactory as that on game play and user-customization. I still think of going back and trying it again with my current system, but the idea of rebuilding characters (I don't think I have the old save files), is awfully daunting.
I really wish they'd do a graphics update for that game...I'd pay $30 bucks for that alone, even with no new story content -- just to replay it in a High Def-mode with 3D graphics (not 3D needing glasses, bug something better than the 'fairly good' "image-map-on-3d-surface" tech that they used -- which was a good simulation of 3D at the time. The more 'immersive' the graphics are, the better -- the more like a real-life movie they are, the better, I don't have an issue of an artificial life-form looked 'too real' (an excuse I've heard for why some designers have fallen short of realism -- because it looks too 'eerie': if it looks real, why would it be eerie? LAME!)
Graphics were good with both versions of "Mass Effect", Game play was fine, though I resented the sexism of the 2nd game that excluded the similar-sex relationship that the first one offered, but took solace in the arms of various 'opposite-sexed' aliens as limited as those options were. Still thought it a cop-out for MS to not allow more variations consistent with reality).
Some games like the latest Star Wars offering (SW Unleashed - ultimate small sith edition) wouldn't work on my main monitor, so are a fail from the start: 1920x1200 ?!? Give me a break, obviously an up-scaled console version (I so, generally, hate those, _especially_ ones that are obvious upscales but don't even work with an XBOX controller (Tomb Raider) ?!? That's a big FAIL). Sure, if it was NEVER on a console, then not working with a game controller is understandable .. keyboard needed, but for those that were developed first on consoles -- to not have *some* mode where a controller can be used is just plain laziness).
Other games that looked interesting (Assassin's Creed II, FAIL'd due to DRM requirements). Note that Mass Effect II and even Dragon Age (which, was weak, graphics and story wise, for me so though I tried it, I never really got into it) had online requirements for extra features and such, which I *eventually* got to work, through my, then, byzantine triple firewall (on 3 separate machine/3 different architectures), through which nothing worked except well-mannered proxied applications. However, AC-II would have r