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Game Industry Fights Rising Development Costs
An anonymous reader writes "Video game development budgets have been rising for years, and the recent launch of a new generation of consoles has only made it worse. Developers of AAA titles are now fighting to keep costs manageable while providing the technological advances gamers have come to expect. Just a few years ago, budgets ranging above $100 million were considered absurd, but now Activision is committing $500 million to a new IP from the studio that created Halo. Alan Roberts, technical director for Playground Games, says development teams keep expanding: 'Our in-house development team is roughly 20 per cent bigger than it was on last-gen, but we're doing even more with outsourcers this time in order to create content to the level of detail required by new generation games.' He adds that one way studios are trying to defray costs is to put more effort into building great tools for content creators."
real money.
Now they'll finally have enough money to hire decent writers!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
A turd rendered with 800 billion polygons is still a turd.
Ridiculous summary with regards to the $500 million dollar figure. It includes the development AND MARKETING budgets!
How about fighting them by making fewer and better games?
And by better I mean fun.
It seems a lot of the budgets goes into more shiny graphics, not necessarily into more sophisticated game play. Perhaps it is time to try something new, such as procedural generation of more game assets.
A good example would be Limit Theory, a space game currently in development where only the user interface is designed the traditional way. Ship models and asteroids are created by procedural generation. Here is the latest development update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2albJYS-wI
Still looks a bit blocky, but considering the game had a $50.000 dollar goal on Kickstarter and the developer feels more than comfortable with the $187,865 that were pledged, the value for money is going to be impressive.
A slightly larger team with a budget of perhaps a few million should be able to do amazing things with that approach. Assuming the team members are as talented as Josh Parnell ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
Superior graphics, AI, and audio. Don't make a kick-ass game. IMO, the greatest video game of all time is Star Control 2 (1993)
How about stop coding on the cheap, release the game when it is ready, and release a "release-quality" version. Not an early beta. Not a late beta. Not a "preview". A quality version.
Want to make money? Focus on the long tail. Not POS DLC, but true expansions. Look at NWN 1 for how to do it right.
Want terrain left and right? We have had procedure generation for ages... and Everquest: Next is based around that. I had a prototype of it for a MMO with unlimited territory to explore back in the '90s. I'm sure a million dollar game company can do better with 20 years of technology than what two people coded out of their basement.
This is just stupid. The entire Triple A over spending is about putting in intrusive DRM that makes me not want to touch their games. I'm find with traditional DRM since the old school NES Cartridge is DRM, but not this Project 5 Dollar theft, and not this Always Online nonsense. The only reason the Indie's are getting any success is because these big companies are trying to eat themselves out of house and home. Just give me my periodic RPG's and I'll be happy. As it stands I'm starving for content that just isn't coming.
I-Novae studios are doing something similar, AFAIK with a bit more budget and limited to terrain generation:
https://www.inovaestudios.com/Technology
This may be a better example of what a large game studio might go for. Overall a bit more conventional than Limit Theory, and needing more manpower, but still a big win in not having to model the terrain by hand.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Or just some financial accounting trick/fraud to lessen or completely avoid taxes through some "outsourcing" tax haven parent company with "very expensive services" like many other multinational companies love to do.
You know how you keep costs down and innovation up?
Build your 3D game mechanics with no textures, no sound, no dialogue, no content of any kind. Just use primitives for actors and procedurally generate everything else using colors and triangles/polys/meshes only.
Then prove out all the temporal and spatial interactions between objects, using real world latency. Balance gameplay for dynamic fun and challenge, allow customized and dynamic risk and reward. Permit customization of every action variable to be part of the iterative temporal goals of the player (customer).
THEN, AFTER all that? Add content, textures, and audio.
Voila. You only add the expensive employees at the END of the dev cycle, not the start.
The best part about Minecraft's success is that in this period of neverending one-upmanship of glitz and glam in video games, Notch delivers a great game on practically gameplay alone.
Of course, there are plenty of other indie successes out there (Torchlight I/II), but Minecraft's target demographics is archetypal for gamers while it is the third most successful game in the world (the top two target a wider range of demographics).
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Wages rise, everything is getting more expensive. For some reason, the whole world expects games not to get more expensive even though it's long overdue that they do.
Who invented this AAA label, and what the fuck does it even mean? ASSHOLE-ASSHOLE-ASSHOLE?
We need MS Visual Studio Game Developer Edition...what c# and visual basic .net did for application development, a professional game development Language for visual studio and MS will rule for the next 20 years!
I have worked in the game industry since the late 90's. This is a smokescreen. It is, internally, a well-understood principle that your games needs a minimum of $70k today for marketing *alone*.
That does not include development at any level.
Beyond that, I am confident in saying that *at least* 50% of actual development costs are wasted due to poor management, marketing-driven-design, and a general lack of focus.
When the game industry decided to raise the retail cost of their games to $60, (with the reason of increased development costs) at that time it was already a sham.
Now that this article has come out on their struggles against the costs of development, I want to make one thing clear to everyone who has the chance to read this:
1) When a development studio goes out of business due to lack of funds, it is, every time, due to poor management and internal irresponsibility with funding.
2) The claim of rising development costs is nothing more than greedy stake-holders crying for more profit.
3) It does not cost that much to develop games today, as aside from marketing/advertising, it costs less than a million dollars to develop even the most technically challenging project today.
I had a lot more to say, but I'm too angry now. And that I won't post non-anonymously, I can't really provide anything more than this comment and my anger.
Games are about interactive gameplay, not hi-def graphics.
Good games challenge the player with interesting choices, and do not attempt to cover up a void of interesting choices with reams of meaningless dialog in very pretty non-interactive cutscenes and the like.
It costs more now to do stuff than it did before? How curious...
~Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
The studios might save a few dollars. Making these has got to comprise a double-digit percentage of development costs because games are filled with them nowadays.
I play a game to play the game, not watch countless movie-clips.
Some games today have so many cutscenes that it seems the gameplay was added just to show off the 'fab' cutscenes.
There's a huge waste of time and money imo. No friend I've gamed with ever really gave a flying frack about fully voice acted dialogs. Though I only beta tested, since I didn't like the game, Elder Scrolls online for example -- there was SO much pointless voice acting, with well-known to famous actors (like John Cleese). How much money did they spend on that? Most people just click through thinking 'yeah... yeah... give me the #$%! quest already'. They apparently spent a small fortune developing it, and after all that, I'd still just rather play Oblivion or Skyrim.
I also think many game companies have become obsessed with 'oh shiney!' tech and forget about basic stuff, like a good, even [gasp] original storyline -- instead of the cliched, overused, derivative crap that seems to make up 90% of the titles. I've been playing a lot more games from smaller studios, that seems to be where the real innovation in game design is imo. And no, I don't mean the tech, I mean the story, the interfaces, the character concepts, etc.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Somehow they have convinced themselves that advertising dollars is part of development costs.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Now they'll finally have enough money to hire decent writers!
BattleField 4 (BF4)... (a sore spot)
Origin and Dice had the money, then dropped the ball in so many ways, that many are quitting BF4 or going back to BF3. Between the connection issues, bad color, unbelievable issues on a patch; things that would work prior don't anymore. It's become: christ! what the hell are up going to break this time.
Acquiring the name of BrokenField, even BattleField Friends is taking pot shots at the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... you can also read the discontent in the comments to the video.
You can even give them them money in advanced as did thousands of BF3 players did for BF4, and they still release crap. Not many now will allow Origin the luxury of getting much money at all prior to another game release. Many will watch it on Twitch,TV what ever the game and then make up their minds to send Origin money or not.
Money works but you also need good programmers, and to beta test a patch; something Dice seems to bypass in the name of speed to get the patch out, how much time does one need to test it at least once on a computer across the street.
You can see this in a macroculture on Reddit
(BF3 Group) http://www.reddit.com/r/battle... - I'm back to BF3, BF4 sucked/wasn't any fun/too many bugs. BF3 is a much better game.
(BF4 Group) http://www.reddit.com/r/battle... -I'm getting tired of this crap and giving up on BF4, or I quit! it's back to BF3 for me.
So many definitions for macroculture, I'm using this one http://www.ask.com/answers/307...
Canceling pre-rendered and absolutely unrelated to actual gameplay trailers with bullshit that you can never actually do in-game - that would cut costs at no loss
This is how the mega companies think and why they ruin games.... Let's throw a ton of money at people and give them a short deadline... whatever they don't finish well make it add on packs lol. This is the reason indie games are on the rise, you think they would learn to save money and make a good game. It doesn't take 500mil to make a good game.. The more they spend the more they nickel and dime us to death...
Absolutely all of this comes from ever more complex art asset creation, which is now able to get into the realm of Hollywood CG, except of course a game is usually expected to be longer than a movie. Which begs the question of many of these developers "is it worth it?" Detailed facial motion capture, recreating every surface material in a game down to tiny little flakes in carbon fiber or grains of sand on a beach.
My answer, that I've been trying to get other developers to listen too, is a resounding "no, it's not worth it". With ever smarter ways to do things from graphics programmers (making the shiny execute in a millisecond or less!) and ever more power, there's far easier ways to improve the look of the game without spending more on asset creation that players are unlikely to notice most of the time. But most of my fellow developers, and more specifically the artists (I can do more? then of course I'll do more!) and their bosses (if every part of our game doesn't look better than last time then what's then... undefined terrible things will happen!) have a pretty stolid mindset.
It's going to take a number of high profile failures, and developers that actually enjoy building and shipping games rather than working for 4+ years on the same one, for things to turn around. Until then, so long as someone can earn success by apparently spending ever more money, I fear ever more money will just be spent.
personal computers, and by extension video games, have been around for almost four decades now. that is a lot of time for people to come up with games that do not require powerful computers, such as civilization, xcom, or pacman. the new xbox one games could not run on affordable hardware 10 years ago. since these games were only technicially possible in the last few years, these games are now new, and thus not played before. people will get tired of them, just like people got tired of the nintendo wii.
As for the future, i look foward to VR Dungeon Keeper.
It is however a strong indication of misplacement of priorities.
If you overspend on great marketing but produce a turd of a game, it will still fail. Case in point- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (video game).
OTOH if you produce a great game but spend minimally on marketing, it can still succeed through word of mouth, etc. Case in point- Minecraft.
I rather doubt that any game falling into the category of "greatest game ever" or even a great game will fail without paid marketing so long as its accessible to players. Gamers tend to be quite vocal in sharing about games they're in love with.
that you actually need the developers to make something to sell.
The problem is that the industry is spending the money on wrong things - massive marketing, shiny graphics, motion capture for animation ... Unfortunately, most of that is extremely expensive and laborious. I really don't need my next stupid shooter game to have motion captured animations of every monster done by AAA Hollywood mocap specialists at several thousands of $/hour.
And as the "next gen" has to be bigger, better, shinier than the "last gen", the costs spiral out of control. Another consequence of this blockbuster mentality is that only few innovative "AAA" games get made, because nobody wants to take risks with such budgets - but how many times can you redo Doom?
It is possible to make and release games cheaper, even big titles (just look at the Witcher series). The companies and publishers need to start to work smarter, not just pour more money at the problem. However, when the most complex AI in games are finite state machines and motion capture is considered as "AI" (true quote from one major studio exec), every bit of content is hand modelled, textured and baked instead of some sort of automation or more clever game design, when the "next gen" game innovation stops with rendering more nose hair and dirty pores (or bigger boobs) of the main protagonist than the "last gen", then I am really sceptical ...
Oh and cut out the middle men and stop reinventing the wheel for the sake of greed (Origin by EA anyone?). You will cut your expenses by a factor of 2 right there.
That much is true, especially if you already have a fan base. The downside comes when you try to sell the next game after delivering something that barely deserves to be called a game, let alone a good one.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I liked that video update a lot, thanks for posting. Great 3D visuals, looks very promising indeed.
Unfortunately the 2D GUI is dreadful, and the fact that it's still in development is no excuse because it's the GUI design concept which is dreadful rather than merely its current state of implementation.
GUIs are very subjective, and the only good GUI is one which each user can configure to look like anything they want. Josh may be talented, but any fixed GUI that he produces will be satisfactory only for himself and for a small subset of players, while everyone else will dislike it in varying degrees. I don't think that he understands this.
The proper way to create 2D GUIs that satisfy everyone is to place all the GUI actions in an API, and separately create a layout framework in which arbitrary widgets can be placed anywhere under user config control. Those widgets would then be linked to API actions by the user in whichever way they personally want. No hardwired layout, and no hardwired assignment of graphic elements to API actions.
Such a configuration of GUI layout, widgets and API action assignments should then be storable as "config presets", and the game supplied with an initial default set of such presets with sensible names. Josh's preferences should merely be captured in a preset, not hardwired for all players.
Unfortunately, Limit Theory isn't heading that way.
So you admit that you need developers then. Just because you try to hide them by placing them somewhere else, doesn't mean they don't exist. You muse be in marketing. When caught lying, you just double down on the BS hoping that you can get away with it.
ET wasn't nearly as bad as everyone said. Judged by the standards of the time it was just mediocre. Its failure had more to do with a major recession in America than anything else. Minecraft was an untapped market (builder games). It didn't occur to anyone that there was a large number of people that wanted a Lego Simulator. It's an entirely different type of 'gameplay' and when it was pitched to people in the industry they just figured it would be a failure.
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