Game development costs were lower last gen, the summary here already states we're looking at an increase from 10 million dollars per game to 25. Means the average sales have to go up 150% to make up for the increased expenses in order to sustain the industry.
But for computer matching you still have the question of what sets the target config. Do you only count configs that both manufacturers can match equally? Do you count what one can match and the other can not? Do you pick some random goal specs and then see how each manufacturer can fill your requirements? If you pick one manufacturer's stock configs and customize the other's that's not going to be a fair comparison.
It's just a common way for Mac fans to show how the prices of their systems aren't too high, they demand that a PC can only be considered equivalent if it matches every single feature (and if it's just some random rare port) that's in the Mac even when the user doesn't care about it. That way it's easier to claim the prices are fine when the real world situations will not support that claim. And if the numbers don't work even then they'll just claim the Mac is higher quality and the PC will break quickly so the Mac is a better value for the money.
The difference is still fairly small compared to the total cost which would go down massively on a smaller project. Besides, small projects can often use off-the-shelf engines too so that's not a big money saver. A good engine may make content development easier but when you only have maybe 30-40 pieces of content to deal with the time spent on the tools may be greater than the time spent on doing the work by hand.
When you have no better data the graphics are a reasonable first estimate for the total quality because on average a game has an equal amount of effort put into every aspect, usually a game with good graphics (by that I mean well designed and polished, not technologically superior) will also have effort put into the code quality and game design while a game with badly designed graphics will often have its other components similarily badly designed. Super Metroid and Mario 64 weren't bad looking for their time so pointing at them is dishonest, they're just old, not ugly by design.
What you describe is pretty much the arcade market. That's what the Wii is aiming with, arcade-like games. However I don't think people are actually pointing at the arcadyness when they say the Wii has no serious games.
What does mindblowing have to do with it at all? And why is it bad to make a game that you can actually play without a tutorial? Last I checked that was good game design, not boring the player with some forced introduction and instead letting him get to the meat of the game right away, the part he BOUGHT THE GAME FOR. I'd rather have a game that gets going right away than one that requires me to sit through a lengthy lesson on the controls that I could have guessed by myself.
Yet they are making money and the companies who are keeping track of gamers are not. There are too few core gamers and they have too high expectations which means making games for them is a losing proposition.
I prefer at least having a different story rather than the same one with a different font.
Seriously, these games are shovelware, they're terribly short (NBM is supposedly 4x as long as the tutorial), they're designed to exploit their themes (playing as Elvis, a harry potter ripoff, a gingerbread ninja,...) and they were obviously made to produce as many different games to throw on the shelves with a minimum of effort. That a sequel is like the previous game is understandable, that's what a sequel is for but why would one have five differently themed games with exactly the same mechanisms? You could say that's what all popular games are but at least they don't have the same HUD!
Chicken Shoot was a clone riding on the popularity of the Moorhuhn games which started out as a free ad game and later on turned into a regular game series. Nowadays Phaenomedia is still trying to squeeze every last drop out of the franchise despite the fad being long over. I have no idea if their recent products are any good (review aggregators don't list minor games that weren't released in the US) though I think I heard about at least one or two that they are decent.
1. OnLive will have not insignificant operating costs. They've got to keep at least as much cutting edge hardware at hand to satisfy a good usage load. It's worse when you consider peaks, people coming home from their jobs and all simultaneously deciding they want to play a videogame. The hardware must be capable of coping with that peak because people aren't going to keep the service if they end up with a "all capacities are in use, you have been added to the waiting queue" screen when they want to play games. 2. Didn't we have enough idiots promising us that thin clients would be the solution to all our upgrading needs throughout the past few decades? 3. I somehow doubt that everyone will receive an equal share of the subscription fee just for adding a game to the list even if nobody plays it at all. That would just encourage shovelware, trying to maximize your part in the game library with a minimum of effort. Communism cannot be grafted onto capitalism like that. 4. I doubt the subscription fees of OnLive will be sufficient to completely cover all costs for all developers who put games on the system. 5. A big problem for gaming is that there simply aren't enough people who care about it to cover the growing costs. New business models won't magically make money appear from nothing, the only way is to get more customers and that currently fails because of the content, not the price. The people who aren't gaming are not scared away by the price, they are scared away by what they get for that money. They don't want the games that are being made, a lower price or different sales model won't change that.
They spend it on something they think will sell, goodness doesn't factor much into that (of course they assume they're properly executing their plan but the rate of failure for that part is probably figured out by now and can be considered a part of the risk-reward equation).
The NPD numbers showed pretty good sales on cross platform titles for the Wii, significantly outperforming the PS3 and about even with the 360 despite usually getting inferior versions. Yes, the Wii doesn't sell twice as many as the 360 as a pure core console would do with the userbase differences but it's also inaccurate to act like nothing ever sells on the Wii. A part of that is that obviously since the expanded market only came on board when they were given new kinds of games they're not going to buy the old kinds of games that failed to attract them the last two generations. The way to succeed is to make a game that these people want, not to blindly do the same thing you've always done and expect it to suddently work when it hasn't worked for over a decade.
One of Midway's teams actually figured out how to sell games on the Wii. The trick was to figure out the new customer and give him what he wants instead of throwing your hands in the air and going "they're non-gamers, they don't want games!" Obviously they wanted games or they wouldn't have bought a gaming system and obviously they didn't want core games or they would have bought a core game system last gen already.
I looked at their game list back when NBM came out for the PC, about half of them are the exact same game with some data changed (you could clearly see the identical HUD and such).
Oh come on, "not a single one" is too generalizing. Golden Eye, Speed Racer (at least on the DS), Bleach DS, Naruto GNT, Riddick and that's before we count the SNES era Disney games.
They don't pay the individual developer employees that much (though some can still make serious money) but they need to employ so many of them that even their low salaries add up to a crapton of money.
Usually the publisher pays all expenses the developer has (or at least gives them their budget) and in return keeps all the money the game makes, if the game makes less than it cost the publisher gets that loss so the break even sales are calculated at their end. I don't think the publisher actually gets to keep much when the game was funded by the dev.
Most likely the 25million do NOT include the per unit license fees, only the fixed costs.
Obviously with some additional things: Customers rarely know what they want, asking them may help but won't always provide a definitive answer. You'll get better data by throwing the customer in front of a prototype and seeing how he reacts to the whole thing. For additional points you could try not helping the customer at all and seeing how he manages to deal with the prototype all by himself because that's a more realistic situation, he won't read the manual anyway. Second, you've got to understand who your customers are. If you just define the people on your forum as your customer base you're subject to a horrible myopia. These represent a tiny subset of the people you already have as customers. The people who matter more are the silent majorities: The customers you have who didn't bother showing up on the internet and, more importantly, the people who are not your customers yet. That second part is especially important, if you just rely on the customers you already have you'll shrink as not all customers will follow you on each step so the pool of existing customers shrinks with every step. You need to bring in new people every time if you want that growth that your shareholders demand.
Also be careful about idea attachment, you or your employees may get very attached to certain ideas and want to keep them in the game even if they fall flat in the customer testing. Don't be afraid to throw your favourite ideas out when they don't work. You are not designing a game for yourself, you are designing it for the customers who may be completely different from you. That may even be one of the hardest things to get into one's mind: You are not representative of the customer.
Coming up with something new is easy. Coming up with something new that works is harder. A publisher stuck in the blockbuster mindset would see it as a big risk because it could ruin a game completely without any chance to recover. What Iwata described in his GDC keynote was that they do prototyping, tons of it and it's completely unpredictable how long that will take. No wonder that publishers are unwilling to fund that, not knowing when a given project will start turning a profit is going to be pretty nerve wracking for a businessman. Of course if they were willing to accept that uncertainity they'd probably find the process to be more effective at finding cost efficient game designs that then sell millions. Not going to happen, they're probably just going to keep running into the same wall, incapable of properly influencing the variables that determine success or failure. Of course when you invest money into a project that at best will only return 2-3 times what you invested and most likely won't break even that's a bigger risk than throwing smaller amounts of money into projects that have a potential payoff of 20-30 times the investment even if their chance of success is somewhat lower.
That can't be answered without more specifics. Can a well designed small game sell well? Yes, look at the Wii. Will my small game sell well? That depends entirely on what I've made.
Final Fantasy is not an example of reusability, it's being remade pretty much from scratch every time.
Game engines can be reused between dissimilar games to varying degrees of success. They aren't the main cost in development though, the money mostly goes to the data that gets fed to the engine. Levels, characters, etc. That stuff gets more expensive to make as the graphics get better because every detail on every object costs man hours and those cost money.
A simple game would require fewer assets to be implemented and as such cut down on the main cause of costs.
I'm kinda wondering what Fils-Aime bases that number on, especially what expected dev cost and retail price. It seems that many Wii games get made on a sub-million dollar budget so the break-even point got to be pretty low for these. Are we talking about Zelda-esque blockbusters here or indeed every single game? Even with 10 million dollar dev costs breaking even at one million sales seems kinda weird, would mean they get only 10$ per sale and games are supposedly one of the goods with the lowest retailer margins. Pointing at the RIAA situation wouldn't make sense either, the equivalent to a label would be the publisher who made that dev cost investment so the loss/profit numbers are being tallied at their end anyway.
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Game development costs were lower last gen, the summary here already states we're looking at an increase from 10 million dollars per game to 25. Means the average sales have to go up 150% to make up for the increased expenses in order to sustain the industry.
But for computer matching you still have the question of what sets the target config. Do you only count configs that both manufacturers can match equally? Do you count what one can match and the other can not? Do you pick some random goal specs and then see how each manufacturer can fill your requirements? If you pick one manufacturer's stock configs and customize the other's that's not going to be a fair comparison.
It's just a common way for Mac fans to show how the prices of their systems aren't too high, they demand that a PC can only be considered equivalent if it matches every single feature (and if it's just some random rare port) that's in the Mac even when the user doesn't care about it. That way it's easier to claim the prices are fine when the real world situations will not support that claim. And if the numbers don't work even then they'll just claim the Mac is higher quality and the PC will break quickly so the Mac is a better value for the money.
Ghetto as in hard work, bad pay, bad hours.
The difference is still fairly small compared to the total cost which would go down massively on a smaller project. Besides, small projects can often use off-the-shelf engines too so that's not a big money saver. A good engine may make content development easier but when you only have maybe 30-40 pieces of content to deal with the time spent on the tools may be greater than the time spent on doing the work by hand.
When you have no better data the graphics are a reasonable first estimate for the total quality because on average a game has an equal amount of effort put into every aspect, usually a game with good graphics (by that I mean well designed and polished, not technologically superior) will also have effort put into the code quality and game design while a game with badly designed graphics will often have its other components similarily badly designed. Super Metroid and Mario 64 weren't bad looking for their time so pointing at them is dishonest, they're just old, not ugly by design.
What you describe is pretty much the arcade market. That's what the Wii is aiming with, arcade-like games. However I don't think people are actually pointing at the arcadyness when they say the Wii has no serious games.
What does mindblowing have to do with it at all? And why is it bad to make a game that you can actually play without a tutorial? Last I checked that was good game design, not boring the player with some forced introduction and instead letting him get to the meat of the game right away, the part he BOUGHT THE GAME FOR. I'd rather have a game that gets going right away than one that requires me to sit through a lengthy lesson on the controls that I could have guessed by myself.
Yet they are making money and the companies who are keeping track of gamers are not. There are too few core gamers and they have too high expectations which means making games for them is a losing proposition.
I prefer at least having a different story rather than the same one with a different font.
Seriously, these games are shovelware, they're terribly short (NBM is supposedly 4x as long as the tutorial), they're designed to exploit their themes (playing as Elvis, a harry potter ripoff, a gingerbread ninja, ...) and they were obviously made to produce as many different games to throw on the shelves with a minimum of effort. That a sequel is like the previous game is understandable, that's what a sequel is for but why would one have five differently themed games with exactly the same mechanisms? You could say that's what all popular games are but at least they don't have the same HUD!
Counterpoint: Fifa, Madden, Call of Duty. Millions of sales, zero effort.
Yet EA racked up losses (sales were stagnating while costs were rising) while Nintendo made tons of profit on new ideas like Wii Sports and Wii Fit.
Chicken Shoot was a clone riding on the popularity of the Moorhuhn games which started out as a free ad game and later on turned into a regular game series. Nowadays Phaenomedia is still trying to squeeze every last drop out of the franchise despite the fad being long over. I have no idea if their recent products are any good (review aggregators don't list minor games that weren't released in the US) though I think I heard about at least one or two that they are decent.
1. OnLive will have not insignificant operating costs. They've got to keep at least as much cutting edge hardware at hand to satisfy a good usage load. It's worse when you consider peaks, people coming home from their jobs and all simultaneously deciding they want to play a videogame. The hardware must be capable of coping with that peak because people aren't going to keep the service if they end up with a "all capacities are in use, you have been added to the waiting queue" screen when they want to play games.
2. Didn't we have enough idiots promising us that thin clients would be the solution to all our upgrading needs throughout the past few decades?
3. I somehow doubt that everyone will receive an equal share of the subscription fee just for adding a game to the list even if nobody plays it at all. That would just encourage shovelware, trying to maximize your part in the game library with a minimum of effort. Communism cannot be grafted onto capitalism like that.
4. I doubt the subscription fees of OnLive will be sufficient to completely cover all costs for all developers who put games on the system.
5. A big problem for gaming is that there simply aren't enough people who care about it to cover the growing costs. New business models won't magically make money appear from nothing, the only way is to get more customers and that currently fails because of the content, not the price. The people who aren't gaming are not scared away by the price, they are scared away by what they get for that money. They don't want the games that are being made, a lower price or different sales model won't change that.
They spend it on something they think will sell, goodness doesn't factor much into that (of course they assume they're properly executing their plan but the rate of failure for that part is probably figured out by now and can be considered a part of the risk-reward equation).
But are all those hundreds of hours as much fun as the 20-30 of CT? Or as much as the 30 minutes of Sonic The Hedgehog?
The NPD numbers showed pretty good sales on cross platform titles for the Wii, significantly outperforming the PS3 and about even with the 360 despite usually getting inferior versions. Yes, the Wii doesn't sell twice as many as the 360 as a pure core console would do with the userbase differences but it's also inaccurate to act like nothing ever sells on the Wii. A part of that is that obviously since the expanded market only came on board when they were given new kinds of games they're not going to buy the old kinds of games that failed to attract them the last two generations. The way to succeed is to make a game that these people want, not to blindly do the same thing you've always done and expect it to suddently work when it hasn't worked for over a decade.
One of Midway's teams actually figured out how to sell games on the Wii. The trick was to figure out the new customer and give him what he wants instead of throwing your hands in the air and going "they're non-gamers, they don't want games!" Obviously they wanted games or they wouldn't have bought a gaming system and obviously they didn't want core games or they would have bought a core game system last gen already.
I looked at their game list back when NBM came out for the PC, about half of them are the exact same game with some data changed (you could clearly see the identical HUD and such).
Oh come on, "not a single one" is too generalizing. Golden Eye, Speed Racer (at least on the DS), Bleach DS, Naruto GNT, Riddick and that's before we count the SNES era Disney games.
They don't pay the individual developer employees that much (though some can still make serious money) but they need to employ so many of them that even their low salaries add up to a crapton of money.
Usually the publisher pays all expenses the developer has (or at least gives them their budget) and in return keeps all the money the game makes, if the game makes less than it cost the publisher gets that loss so the break even sales are calculated at their end. I don't think the publisher actually gets to keep much when the game was funded by the dev.
Most likely the 25million do NOT include the per unit license fees, only the fixed costs.
I'll go with a different focus here:
Do what the customer wants!
Obviously with some additional things: Customers rarely know what they want, asking them may help but won't always provide a definitive answer. You'll get better data by throwing the customer in front of a prototype and seeing how he reacts to the whole thing. For additional points you could try not helping the customer at all and seeing how he manages to deal with the prototype all by himself because that's a more realistic situation, he won't read the manual anyway. Second, you've got to understand who your customers are. If you just define the people on your forum as your customer base you're subject to a horrible myopia. These represent a tiny subset of the people you already have as customers. The people who matter more are the silent majorities: The customers you have who didn't bother showing up on the internet and, more importantly, the people who are not your customers yet. That second part is especially important, if you just rely on the customers you already have you'll shrink as not all customers will follow you on each step so the pool of existing customers shrinks with every step. You need to bring in new people every time if you want that growth that your shareholders demand.
Also be careful about idea attachment, you or your employees may get very attached to certain ideas and want to keep them in the game even if they fall flat in the customer testing. Don't be afraid to throw your favourite ideas out when they don't work. You are not designing a game for yourself, you are designing it for the customers who may be completely different from you. That may even be one of the hardest things to get into one's mind: You are not representative of the customer.
Coming up with something new is easy. Coming up with something new that works is harder. A publisher stuck in the blockbuster mindset would see it as a big risk because it could ruin a game completely without any chance to recover. What Iwata described in his GDC keynote was that they do prototyping, tons of it and it's completely unpredictable how long that will take. No wonder that publishers are unwilling to fund that, not knowing when a given project will start turning a profit is going to be pretty nerve wracking for a businessman. Of course if they were willing to accept that uncertainity they'd probably find the process to be more effective at finding cost efficient game designs that then sell millions. Not going to happen, they're probably just going to keep running into the same wall, incapable of properly influencing the variables that determine success or failure. Of course when you invest money into a project that at best will only return 2-3 times what you invested and most likely won't break even that's a bigger risk than throwing smaller amounts of money into projects that have a potential payoff of 20-30 times the investment even if their chance of success is somewhat lower.
That can't be answered without more specifics. Can a well designed small game sell well? Yes, look at the Wii. Will my small game sell well? That depends entirely on what I've made.
Final Fantasy is not an example of reusability, it's being remade pretty much from scratch every time.
Game engines can be reused between dissimilar games to varying degrees of success. They aren't the main cost in development though, the money mostly goes to the data that gets fed to the engine. Levels, characters, etc. That stuff gets more expensive to make as the graphics get better because every detail on every object costs man hours and those cost money.
A simple game would require fewer assets to be implemented and as such cut down on the main cause of costs.
Ninjabread Man was a port of a PS2 title that was probably blocked from a US relase by SCEA. It was released in Europe (on the PC as well).
I'm kinda wondering what Fils-Aime bases that number on, especially what expected dev cost and retail price. It seems that many Wii games get made on a sub-million dollar budget so the break-even point got to be pretty low for these. Are we talking about Zelda-esque blockbusters here or indeed every single game? Even with 10 million dollar dev costs breaking even at one million sales seems kinda weird, would mean they get only 10$ per sale and games are supposedly one of the goods with the lowest retailer margins. Pointing at the RIAA situation wouldn't make sense either, the equivalent to a label would be the publisher who made that dev cost investment so the loss/profit numbers are being tallied at their end anyway.