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EA Says Game Development Budgets Have Peaked

Posted by Soulskill on from the nowhere-to-go-but-down dept.

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.

35 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Bout time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
       

    1. Re:Bout time... by crafty.munchkin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So true, gameplay is far more important than graphics.

      --
      ... wait, what?
    2. Re:Bout time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The Hollywoodization of the games industry has killed it in my opinion. I've seen more quality and had more fun from games coming from companies like Valve and publishers like Paradox in the last 5 years than I have from EA or Activision or any other big name. Hollywood is not the direction that the game industry should be looking for inspiration, it should be a lesson in what NOT to do.

    3. Re:Bout time... by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Informative

      Unfortunately this does seem to be the case in the market the AAA companies are going for. It's getting a little less true overall, though. An "MMO" with hilariously ancient voxel graphics made by one guy has racked up about $1m in sales, because the super-simple, low-overhead, and low-programmer-hassle graphics free him up to do interesting things with the gameplay.

      These do seem to be "alternative" games, though--- I can't imagine the mainstream game-review mags giving such a game a glowing review.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    4. Re:Bout time... by rdwulfe · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually, reality seems to state otherwise, time and again, when people make statements like this.

      While it is not a requirement to pay for a game such as, for example, Dwarf Fortress, it seems that people will quite gladly donate enough money to keep it going, and allow the developer of said game to live entirely off of those donations. In effect, they are paying for that game. Some of them are even paying more for that game than they would be for any other game except for an MMO.

      There is also the fact that people will pay for games with "less than brilliant graphics", since people pay for games like World of Goo to name one example. By far, it did not have state of the art graphics.

      The world of who is out there willing to pay for what is far more grey than black and white. People look for different things when they decide to spend money on a game. The hardcore, "OMG, must haz rendered pores!" gamers are only a small segment of the market. Game studios seem to enjoy forgetting that fact.

    5. Re:Bout time... by Shikaku · · Score: 3, Informative

      http://www.minecraft.net/

      74290 purchases.

      Huurrrrr.

    6. Re:Bout time... by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 4, Informative

      Extremely fun games, raving reviews, appallingly bad graphics.

      Erm... I bought my delightfully GREEN boxed copy of Darwinia partly because it had wonderful visuals (and audio). It's got great graphics. Most definitely not photorealistic, but for some reason 'photorealism' is the only thing that equates to 'good graphics' in many people's minds.

      World of Goo? Lovely smooth bouncily awesome. Machinarium? Gorgeous hand-drawn beauty. And so on.

      --
      Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
    7. Re:Bout time... by Jedi+Alec · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yet a game like eg Torchlight which is hardly state of the art graphics wise got a ton of praise.

      Do I have a top-end graphics card? Yes, I do. But my first and foremost concern with a game is whether it is *fun*. Gameplay is king. Does it tickle my brain, does it make me laugh, does it make me cry, perhaps even pound my head on the keyboard in frustration?

      Graphics look sweet for about 5 minutes and after that you have to deal with their downsides for the remainder of the gameplay.

      Besides, there's more to big budgets than just graphics. EA lined up a whole bunch of celebrities for Mass Effect 2 to do the voicework. Yet another case of "cool for about 3 minutes". Nice for the marketing guys to play around with, but the fact that the ingame character you're talking to was voiced by Martin Sheen ends up adding very little to the actual game in comparison to how much it added to the bill...

      --

      People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
    8. Re:Bout time... by mustPushCart · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The cruel truth about the game development industry is even if you have good graphics, good gameplay, a great storyline and writing, there is still a chance that your game will flop, you will lose your publisher and with that your studio. A hit driven industry is always cruel to some games, none more so than psychonauts

    9. Re:Bout time... by Entropy98 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Have u seen farmville?
       
      "Gamers" arent the only ones who play games.
       
      --
        Free Light Codec Pack

    10. Re:Bout time... by MozzleyOne · · Score: 2, Interesting

      To be honest, most of the gamers in that mindset are moving to the consoles, and I really don't have a problem with that. I have been enjoying the recent round of indy-style games immensely, and hope the trend continue.

      Some of my favourite, non-graphically intense recent games:

      • Alien Swarm
      • World of Goo
      • Braid
      • Osmosis
      • And Yet It Moves
      • Plants Vs. Zombies

      For 3d games, Half-Life 2's Source engine is the sweet spot. From then on, graphics have been good enough, and what makes a game "good" is the gameplay.

      --
      Ayjay on Fedang
    11. Re:Bout time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Really? Hmm, I thought I heard something about some small games called Starcraft II and World of Warcraft. Respectively cost a gazzillion dollars to make and maintain, but doesn't have really fancy graphics. Oh, guess what: It both sells like cupcakes.

      So your premise is flawed and is caused by the paradigm that indeed 'all' gamers want realistic graphics. Which is clearly not the case.

    12. Re:Bout time... by MadKeithV · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As in music, why should the goal be something as ridiculously unattainable as a "top ten hit" if you can make a decent living for yourself for far less?

    13. Re:Bout time... by MadKeithV · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yet a game like eg Torchlight which is hardly state of the art graphics wise got a ton of praise.

      Parent did not say "state of the art" graphics, he (or she) said "brilliant" graphics. There is a difference - brilliant graphics need not be extremely hard on the GFX card or take enormous amounts of effort and budget to produce - one artist with a great visual style can do a lot for the graphical appeal of a game.

    14. Re:Bout time... by odies · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You talk like there's no alternatives. Go search for some of the indie or freeware games, some of them are quite impressive. A lot of times they're also how games would be without big budgets. You don't really need to play big budget AAA games, but you want to, don't you?

      I think it's only good we have a lot of choices, something for everybody.

    15. Re:Bout time... by kurokame · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Gamers will not play a game with anything less than brilliant graphics.

      Nintendo would probably beg to differ with you, but they're too busy rolling in piles of cash.

      A game can be visually compelling without being photorealistic or whatever, it's just that photorealism is easier to buy than creativity. In most cases, this leads to rather predictable decisions by game producers, especially given that they're waging rather large up-front budgets against possible payoffs several years down the road.

      The truly tragic part here is that making the product visually compelling through artistic means rather than through uber-high polygon counts will be compelling more or less forever, while the high polygon count game will necessarily be using technology that is several years old by the time it gets to market. It's a losing game which only works at all because you're competing against other companies with the same problems which are making the same mistakes.

      So it's not really that gamers won't accept anything else. Yeah, it does have its uses as a selling point. But it's more about market dynamics than gamer preferences.

    16. Re:Bout time... by MadKeithV · · Score: 2

      Give us a break - reading the whole post is nearly as inconceivable as RTFA. You gotta say it all in the first line.

    17. Re:Bout time... by imakemusic · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The other thing that can make or break any piece of visual media is the music - a good composer can make your emotions dance to his tune.

      Part of that is timing and when a game changes pace depending on what you are doing the music has to change to fit. Which makes this a job not just for the composer but also for whoever programs the music system. Two minutes of dramatic chase music is just annoying when you finish the chase after one minute...

      --
      Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
    18. Re:Bout time... by GrumblyStuff · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They are pissed off with playing Mario for the billionth time.

      You might be right if it was Mario 2010 (now with updated stats and rosters!) but Nintendo does do a good job make them different but still fun. It does seem like they're jumping more and more into similar sequels though. I guess the same could be said of Super Mario Bros 1, 2, & 3 but the upgrades between them as well as the differences more than made up for the platforming, brick breaking, and goomba bopping.

    19. Re:Bout time... by ekwhite · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The Hollywoodization of the games industry has killed it in my opinion. Killed it in what sense? I would rather be a gamer in the current generation than in any previous one. Some of the stuff that was released during the 8-bit and 16-bit days was just awful.

      Just as some of the stuff released now is awful. Some of the things released back then were classics, also, just as some of the things released now are classics. Just as in Hollywood, you can produce big budget crap, or great films on a low budget.

    20. Re:Bout time... by twoallbeefpatties · · Score: 2, Insightful

      However, that's the direction that a lot of consumers look in. To many people, budgets = quality. If there's a movie put up by some tiny studio that didn't have any advertisements or famous actors, then you're not going to get many people out to see it. If there's a game put out that doesn't have state-of-the-art graphics and a flashy cover, then only so many gamers are going to end up having their moms pick it up for them at Gamestop.

      This is the direction that movies have gone it, it's the direction the TV has gone in, it's the direction that music has gone in, because in the end, that's where the money is. It might be better to say - don't spend large budgets on games that aren't going to have a large general audience (a la APB).

      --
      Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
    21. Re:Bout time... by socrplayr813 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So true about the voices. Sometimes it's cool to see known celebrities do voices in games (I thought Leonard Nimoy in Civ4 was a nice touch), but the best voice acting I've heard in games has always been some random nobody who was chosen to fit their character. More often than not, I think big celebrities are shoehorned into a part for their name, without regard for how they fit into the game.

      --
      The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
    22. Re:Bout time... by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I know people say "Gameplay is more important than graphics" and I agree with them - lets get that straightened out, but lets clarify exactly why it seems to be that so much money gets dumped into graphics.

      Before you can even start much of anything else for your game, you need an engine to run it in. You can either dump a ton of money into licensing one, or you can dump a ton of money into building one from scratch. The latter is of course going to take more time - and the former is taking from people who basically program JUST the physics and graphics, in fact, its in their best interest to have the most aesthetically pleasing engine out there.

      Next, you've got 2 big core parts: mechanics and design. The mechanics is usually the hard, tricky to understand bit because not everyone likes looking at code, and debugging something running in an engine is not exactly like event driven command prompt. You have to apply some serious logical thinking in order to transpose how you want a certain gameplay element into something the player executes, and in cases where you want to be innovative: There is no prior existing code (just ask how many devs on here copy and paste code. No wheel to reinvent with games).

      Now I'm not trying to belittle the design stage. It takes a special kind of person to pull off the high quality concept art that you see for a lot of games. I value these people more than I value the actual modellers, and in case you're wondering why, I'm going to tell you. Modelling itself is not something difficult to learn. I had about 1 modules worth of Maya way back when I was in High school, and I've just recently taken online Youtube tutorials in Blender. Essentially everything required to make a game work; I've learned in a few hours. But seeing how a new game will require all new models: This is a bulk of the workload. This is also what most game dev programs at colleges will focus a good part of the program on. So when you get 100 graduates, and EA is pumping out a new game, they want to get all this modelling and texturing done, so they hire these people and put them in the monkey position of creating all the new models that will be required. (First years to trees and blades of grass! How fun!)

      In summary, there are far more people willing to get into character design and modelling for a game, because what they do is far more tangible when their component is completed. So when the big shops are working on something, their team of a dozen coders will spend a year working out the code to make the game run exactly how they want it. Then it'll take the design team of 99 modellers and texturers the same amount of time to get their part done, but because there are so many of them, they can get a lot of work done.

      PS - The other part I forgot to include is Animation for the models, which is another time consuming but not particularily difficult thing to learn, its actually very similar to using Flash.

    23. Re:Bout time... by devent · · Score: 2, Informative

      I didn't know, because I turned JavaScript off by default. NoScript plugin for Firefox.

      --
      http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
  2. APB, Fallen Earth... by Beardydog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:APB, Fallen Earth... by elrous0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I am also continually mystified by the refusal of developers to port even a single MMO to a console. Every developer is spending a fortune to make the PC-only WoW-killer and losing their shirts when it inevitably either fails or flounders. Meanwhile, not a single modern MMO has been developed for a console (and modern consoles have more than adequate hardware to handle it). Considering how many console-only or console-primary gamers that are out there, that seems like a downright bizarre oversight. Everyone is treading the same well-worn path as everyone else and ignoring the one blindingly obvious path that no one has ever went down.

      I know a lot of people say that MMO's are somehow impossible to do on a console. But I remember when people used to say that about FPS's and RTS's too.

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  3. possible, and I hope so by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:possible, and I hope so by hedwards · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They probably have, in order to break even a game with a budget of $50m would have to sell 1m copies at $50 a piece and keep every bit of that change to pay off the costs, as in probably not paying the IRS. Which is a risky move to say the least. A better move would probably be to cut the budget to a more reasonable figure and then either lower the asking price or accept a smaller number of purchases initially.

    2. Re:possible, and I hope so by Jedi+Alec · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Bear in mind there's also money flowing the other way...you don't think the studio's put in those big nvidia logo's and other advertising just because they felt like it, right? ;-)

      --

      People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
  4. It couldn't be by CaptainZapp · · Score: 2, Insightful
    the fact that Steam (not their fault, thy're a reseller here) charged 50 Euro for APB, which gives you the privilege to pay a recurring subscription fee on top of that?

    Nosire! Of course not. It's probably due to evil software pirates.

    --
    ich bin der musikant

    mit taschenrechner in der hand

    kraftwerk

    1. Re:It couldn't be by Lonewolf666 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, that appears a bit greedy.
      For games with a recurring subscription fee, it seems smarter to make getting in cheap. Like CCP did with EVE Online:
      IIRC purchasing the game was 20 Euros, including the first month. Not too bad. So I got in, found I liked the game and stayed (and payed) for a few years.

      There is also a growing trend of "free to play" MMOs, where you only pay for in-game advantages like faster leveling or special items. That is an even more consequent version of making the entry threshold low.

      --
      C - the footgun of programming languages
  5. My rules for buying games by ledow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  6. Game Development by stewbacca · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Too much comunication by The+Living+Fractal · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I agree with most of your post except the beginning. This is certainly a real problem, and it definitely affects many games' development, but it's not the only real problem. In one sense it comes down to simple statistics: Half of all games made are worse than average. That doesn't seem to be concomitant with development cost either. In fact they don't appear to be related at all. Somehow extremely bad games are still getting funded for millions of dollars and only then, after the money is spent, do the developers realize that during all this time they forget to actually make it fun.

    --
    I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
  8. No it isn't there yet by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.