The Battle For the Game Industry's Soul

An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times has a story about the imminent release of Battlefield 4 on 29 October, as it's one of the most highly-anticipated video games of the year. The most interesting part of the article is where it highlights what a mammoth undertaking such 'AAA' games have become. There are hundreds upon hundreds of people working full time on it, and hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in its development. These number have been rising and rising over the years; how big do they get before it becomes completely unfeasible to top your last game? The article also points out that the PC platform is beginning to wane in popularity. Nobody's quite sure yet whether it'll level out or go into serious decline, but you can bet development studios are watching closely. With bigger and bigger stakes, how long before they decide it's not worth the risk? Even consoles aren't safe: 'Electronic Arts is nevertheless trying to extend franchises like Battlefield to devices, because it must. But at the same time, it has to grapple with the threats undermining traditional gaming. Though the classic consoles are getting reboots this fall, there is no guarantee that new models will permanently revive the format's fortunes.' And of course, the question must be asked: do we even want the 'AAA' games to stick around?"

Comments

THE DEATH OF PC GAMING

[nicolastheadept]

Since 1898

Re:THE DEATH OF PC GAMING

[hairyfeet]

Sigh...correlation does NOT equal causation folks. PC sales are NOT down because of tablets, its because PCs have become insanely overpowered and therefor you don't need to replace every couple of years like during the bubble that was the MHz war.

Take myself as an example, LOVE hardcore PC shooters, practically the games that built the PC gaming business. I used to build a new PC every 2 years like clockwork and gave it a major upgrade at the 1 year mark, now? My AMD Hexacore is pushing the 5 year mark with nothing more than a GPU upgrade. I mean why should i buy a new one, when the one I got plays every game I want to play at over 30 FPS without fail? Its got 8GB of RAM, 3TB of space, I might add a caching SSD for my BDay but other than that there really isn't much more I can do that will really affect gameplay.

And THAT is why PC sales are down, its because even the low end gamers have insane amounts of cycles to spare. Hell my youngest has an AMD triple we unlocked to a quad and an HD7750 and he plays every game he wants to play at over 30FPS and his system cost less than $400! Even the low end systems are just so insanely overpowered its not even funny and with the XBone and PS4 going with a netbook chip? Really doubt we are gonna be needing octocore PCs to game any time soon.

As for TFA...how about making games that don't suck? How about that? Make smaller games that target a market instead of some crazy costing AAA title that you have to make as generic as possible to have "broad appeal" which is pretty much a codeword for "boring generic crap". Look at Payday the Heist, they listened to those that bought the first one, gave them what they asked for, they made a profit before the game even came out just on preorders. Make something special? Folks WILL buy. Make generic "Call Of Honor: Halo of Killzone Edition" and watch the numbers suck. It really IS as simple as that.

Film Industry

[brunes69]

" There are hundreds upon hundreds of people working full time on it, and hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in its development. "

How many people do you think it took to make The Avengers? How many millions?

The video game industry is starting to mirror the film industry, with studio houses having one or two giant blockbusters every month, and using profits from those to fund the smaller "filler" films. And then, you have the even smaller, independant type films, such as what ends up at Sundance or TIFF.

Re:Film Industry

[jnmontario]

My major beef with your ?defense?commentary? of the game industry is that I hear it constantly and it becomes a self-serving bias for execs. The more we accept "Hollywood-model" games and buy the next "$380B in development Rock'emSock'em XVII", or whatever, the more industry types that didn't come from a game-dev background feel like they should not innovate and make new games, but rather pour good money after bad with blockbuster prequel/sequel games. I guess what I'm trying to say is that MBA's sniffing after money appear to have transitioned from the film business to the game business and I think that's REALLY bad for the future of gaming.

Re:Film Industry

[brunes69]

Well and now you point to the big difference between the industries. See, in the film industry, a RDJ or a Wheadon can make $30 million in 6 months on a blockbuster, and then spend the next 6 months working on smaller pictures, and even an indie or two, because they have money to do it with. Look at films like "Much Ado About Nothing" - an Amazing film, filled with A-list talent, received rave reviews at TIFF - yet, that movie is not going to make any money at all and I expect most of the actors were paid very little for their time. Which is fine, because no one who worked on it expected a giant payday. They did it because of the love of the craft.

  The game industry does not work like this because "the talent" does not get a big enough share of the profit - when was the last time you heard of a head creative or a head developer making 20 million on a game - it doesn't happen. If it did, then they would probably be financing more side projects, again for the love of the craft, and because it keeps them "fresh" as actors and directors.

This is what really needs to be solved. It is not about changing the industry, it is about changing the compensation model. When people work 60+ hour weeks for a month or two to get BattleField 4 out on time, they should be getting a bigger piece of the pie than just their salary. There should be profit sharing involved. And key people - like the lead developers and lead creatives - should get a big enough share of that profit to motivate them and entice them to use it on other projects to keep them fresh.

Re:Film Industry

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

This is actually wierdly ontopic. There is a powerful analogy between modern touchscreen development and modern games. Touchscreens and games have bother become ever flashier, commiditised, and mass marketed, and yet when I use either, I find I get less done, and ultimately less enjoyment out of the whole process than I did with traditional computers and old school games.#

Re:Film Industry

[Pluvius]

A better comparison is not with the Hollywood model of today, but with the model that existed in the early days of cinema--studios "owned" actors, directors, etc. under contract so that they could only make pictures for that studio. This made a lot of money for the studios but everyone else got peanuts and had their creativity stifled, a natural oligopoly arose, and mediocrity ruled the day. The system eventually was broken up by the Supreme Court under antitrust law and the studios felt extreme competitive pressure from television, leading to the freelance system we have now where studios compete to get the best stars by sharing profit, granting creative ownership, and so forth. We wouldn't necessarily need another Supreme Court ruling or another entertainment medium to fix the video-game industry, but doing so would probably still require some sort of collective action (e.g. a general strike by top game designers and writers).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_system

Rob

And they're all shit

[Joining Yet Again]

The creativity which went into Monkey Island, The Longest Journey or Grim Fandango, or even Curses and Zork Zero, leave me bored when I confront what is merely a technical exercise. I haven't enjoyed an FPS since Thief.

I remember watching Titanic when it first came out. It was a watershed: after this, films would not be defined by art, but by geekery. And everyone can apply an engineering technique, really.

I hope BF4 is better than Battlefield 3

[dryriver]

Battlefield 3 was no fun to play. It was a real system hog, had unacceptably long map load times, had an external HTML-based server browser that sucked, and the gameplay pretty much consisted of you entering the game, and being mowed down by a higher ranking player with more unlocked gadgets in the first 20 seconds. Battlefield 2 was a lot of fun. Battlefield 2142 was also great (Scifi-themed) fun. Battlefield 3 sucked bad in terms of simple things like "overall enjoyment" and "fun gameplay". As for Battlefield 4, I personally have little hope that EA has learned anything from Battlefield 3's gameplay problems. I'm guessing that it will suck on the gameplay side like BF3 did, but that it will have prettier graphics (which of course will require a bang-up-to-date PC or laptop to enjoy properly). My 2 Cents...ü

Paradigm Shift

[cosm]

I booted up a few of my fairly recent FPS purchases last night for PC just to get a sense of where the community is at. CS:S, BF2, BF3, BFBC2, TF2, Q3A, CoD (x), L4D(1-2), etc all still strong. The thing about it is, there are so many decade old shooters that just wont die. I can still play CS 1.6 and will prefer it to any new Call of Duty. But why? Is it a comfort thing? Nostalgia for a past era? Simplicity? Muscle memory? Surely some of that.

The new games are still fun, but they feel 'tinny', or less substantive than I'd come to expect for millions of ducats dumped in to a piece of software. With many modern shooters, I feel like they are evolving into a caricature of what a decent shooter would be.

Also, I think as the PC gaming generation gets older fewer newbies (In all due respect of course!) back-fill our ranks. I hope I'm wrong. Anybody got stats on our rate of attrition? LMGTFY yada yada ..

Gaming as a whole...

[blahplusplus]

... is sucking because the industry is obsessed with creating movies, not games.

Star Citizen

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud Imperium's opus-in-progress broke $23 million in crowdfunding this week: AAA independent production and PC-focused development. Works like this are injecting a renaissance of fresh air into the stale industry dominated by bug-dollar myopic publishers.

Games in the nineties were innovative because the creative developers were calling the shots; garage operations flourished. Crowdfunding is making that model viable again with modern production values and PC gamers are in for a hell of a ride over the next decade.

Long live disintermediation!

Re:PC Games waning death spiral

[LandDolphin]

I think he's right. People don't add up the $2 charges to a grand total. It isn't just these games, it's convenience stores, Starbucks, etc. People don't realize that the $2 Candy Bar after work costs them ~$500 a year or that the Starbucks in the morning costs them ~$150 a month.