The state of game development (financials)

[civvver]

What do you guys think about current state of game development and developers and their financial positions? I mean I read all sorts of somewhat conflicting info. Here's a puppy games blog on how they basically lost money on every game:

http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1369

In case you aren't familiar with puppy games, they're an independent studio of 4 people who have made about 4 arcade style titles over the past 8 years. They have not been on steam that whole time, maybe only 18 months. Some things about that blog that strike me as odd, first that their games take so freaking long to develop. The developers explained that they hand make all the sprites. That just seems... inefficient? Stubbornly perfectionist? Second they just made it on steam and only sell on pcs. I do not know what's involved with getting on say xbox live or steam or making mobile games. But their games seem like a really good fit for xbox live, I just think they didn't bother with xna or whatever the platform is for that so they're kind of stuck in pc world now. Anyway I'm not surprised their games have sold so little. From the sound of it Ultratron has sold less that 50k copies. I guess that's what happens when you make niche games on one platform.

Contrast that with another deceptively simple game in Faster than light. I believe this game took two guys about two years to make, although they used kickstarter to get funding for the final polish. But still FTL is a huge success and not a harder game to make than puppy's titles, just a concept that attracts a bigger audience (and I think it's a better game).

Another big indie title that's done well is Banished. I believe one guy took three years to make it but it has sold a ton of copies and for a pretty high base price of $20 on steam. I realize that both those last two might be the exceptions to the rule, but it seems like if you execute a good concept your game is going to be alright, vs just making another platformer no one wants.

But then again you have even triple A developers writing stuff like this:

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ju...elopment-unhealthy-unprofitable/1100-6417519/

Looks like even the big boys games are not selling well enough to justify the amount of development time. It seems like the main culprit is the tech. Everything now is so polished it must take forever to make all the 3d models and graphics now. But then you have some hits like GTA5 which gross over a billion dollars so someone is going to keep making these.

I guess my question is, where do you see all this going? The availability of cheap games has caused the market to explode in offerings for very little price. Seems like a simple supply and demand issue. Tons of tech savvy young people from all over the world keep making games. There's practically no barrier to entry to trying to make a game, all you need is a computer and a little know how. Your game might suck but there's nothing to stop you from trying unlike becoming an engineer or a doctor or starting any brick and mortar business.

And what's going to happen to these triple A stuidos if they can't make money? Will we see less releases in the future?

 

[Quintillus]

The availability of cheap games has caused the market to explode in offerings for very little price.

I think this is a big change in the past 5 years or so. In some ways, it's a good thing - the barrier to entry for making distributed games (as opposed to ones just for yourself and close friends) has gone down compared to the '90s and '00s, and it's possible to buy more games because they cost less. It also has lead to some big success stories - Minecraft, Banished, etc.

But there's been huge downward price pressure. And it's not just inexpensive games, but sales. Look all over the Internet and you'll find people asking "Why pay $50 for a new game when it'll probably be half off on the Steam Christmas Sale and 75% off in next year's Summer Sale?" People have figured out that heavy discounts are common, and have bought enough inexpensive games that they haven't run out of things to play and can wait for prices to fall for new games. True, occasionally there's that one game you've been dying to play and you might buy new or at a less substantial discount, but that's becoming less common.

So I think what we're seeing is (a) it's easier to get published, allowing greater supply, (b) digital distribution, while reducing physical costs, has also encouraged heavy discounts, threatening revenue, and (c) the number of people playing games has only grown so much, not necessarily more than the supply.

Another factor could be marketing, or lack thereof. This is the inherent challenge of a niche - your potential audience has to find out about you. IMO there isn't necessarily a solution to this yet. How do you find out about new games to play? Maybe Steam promotions (but those tend to be focused on the bigger games, and don't include non-Steam games), maybe word of mouth (but that only helps for games your friends already know about), maybe reading about it at places such as Polygon (but many of those cater to the general gamer audience, however good the writing is). Unless you have some really well-connected friends with very similar tastes to yours, it's hard to know what games you'd really like that you are missing out on. And it's compounded by many games not having trials. Put another way, there's no equivalent of Pandora for games, in terms of discovering new content.

I do wonder whether the current model is sustainable, and my suspicion is it isn't given the current supply. You'll always have hit AAA games, you'll always have successful indie developers, and you'll always have developers with a loyal core following that can sustain them as long as they don't mess up too badly. But the in-betweens - the less publicized AAA games without a core following and unproven indies - will probably run into trouble with the current model.

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As a developer, the time quoted doesn't seem entirely unreasonable if a high degree of polish is desired. I'm not personally familiar with Puppy Games, but that's in general. For the most part, it isn't possible to create a high-quality game that stands out from the crowd in a couple months. It's possible, you just have to have an idea that is exciting, doesn't require excessively complex code, and doesn't require excessively complex graphics. And not a whole lot of games fall into that category.

As for cross-platform and XBox and all, the feasibility of that can vary a great deal. One factor is simply getting approval for the platform. If you develop an XBox port and can't get approval from Microsoft for the main market (as opposed to the Arcade one, which I hear is not a good target if you wish to make money), you just wasted a lot of time. Sony, with the PS3 at least, is easier to get on from what I hear. But it's still a time investment. And that's not insignificant. If the developers aren't already familiar with the platform, that's something else they have to learn and build their skills up at, which takes time. And if their first game didn't make money, they probably are going to go forward with their second idea before they're broke rather than learn how to port it to another platform and hope it does well there. You do see some ports - Papers, Please is coming to PS4 and PSVita (IIRC not XBox due to the approval process). But many of these were successful and then ported to expand the audience for an already-profitable game.

Portability also depends on what you started developing with. If you started with XNA or whatever works easily cross-platform for PC and XBox 360, great, you've got two. But you might not have an easy way to get it to PS3 or PS4. On the other hand, if you started with a basis that was friendly for both Windows and Mac, it might still require a substantial rewrite to get it to XBox One, which could be spent on a new game. Some engines are starting to target both major consoles as well as Mac, Windows, and Linux (Unreal Engine 4, for example), but those tend to be the latest versions. And they may not be the ideal platform for any game (or, indeed, even if a good choice they may not be a good fit for the developers' existing knowledge).

And even if you do get cross-platform down well, there's still the issues of marketing, visibility, and connecting with your audience (if one does indeed exist). There are certainly cases where it could help individual developers, but it doesn't inherently get around the other issues with supply (which it would increase), demand (which it would increase for that game, but not very much if any overall), and pricing.

 

[civvver]

It all seems quite discouraging for anyone looking to start writing their own games. You work your butt off for very little payoff in the end, though I suppose for most of those people creating something of their own is the payoff.

I hope we don't see more studios close down. Like SPAZ. Will there be a sequel or another game by those guys? Don't know. Even big companies like THQ can close, and now what happens to Darksiders? They company that bought the rights said they will keep it going but the time between the first two was two years, and it's been two years from the last one but we're definitely not getting Darksiders 3 this year. Might be a four year gap if ever.

So I guess it sucks if your particular game doesn't get made. I am still waiting for a real sequel to mechwarrior 4/mercs, not that online garbage. Might never happen. But I guess it's good having a ton of other cheap alternatives available.

 

[warpus]

Some things about that blog that strike me as odd, first that their games take so freaking long to develop.

Software development takes a lot of time.. Most people severely underestimate how long such a thing might take, including the developers themselves.

When my boss asks me for an estimate for a new project, I usually pad it with a sizeable error margin, sometimes as high as 100%.. or higher. I've been stuck on a single stupid bug for days.. weeks.. before. Software development ain't easy.

 

[civvver]

I completely understand that but the reason I think their games take so long is they "hand draw" all the graphics and don't reuse them. Like every single pixel I think they hand draw on the computer. That seems extremely labor intensive, like hand animating a cartoon when there are computer tools to aid you now.

Another interesting article on a hit game:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...chieved-profitability-by-the-end-of-last-year

Tomb Raider, sold 6.5 million copies to date and still not living up to projections. I guess it's a success now but not as big of one as Square Enix hoped, prompting them to sign an exclusive rights deal with microsoft for the next one. Next tomb raider will release as xbox only to start.

Again just more evidence of how games are becoming almost cost prohibitive to develop.

 

[Quintillus]

Software development takes a lot of time.. Most people severely underestimate how long such a thing might take, including the developers themselves.

When my boss asks me for an estimate for a new project, I usually pad it with a sizeable error margin, sometimes as high as 100%.. or higher. I've been stuck on a single stupid bug for days.. weeks.. before. Software development ain't easy.

Very much true. The last place I worked, a software company, had a mantra of "expectations equals reality". And they did it quite well in terms of setting expectations to the customer correctly and not saying they could do something just because it was what the customer wanted to hear if it wasn't realistic. But in terms of development, they still always overestimated how much could be done in each development phase. So you could count on the last 2-3 weeks of each 3-4 month phase having days where you'd be asked to work late to try to catch up to the expectations. The first time I encountered it I thought it was a one-off thing, but it soon became clear it was every time. People like to be optimistic, and that can be a bad thing when it comes time to estimate how long something will take.

And from what I hear, a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, as well as a lot of game companies, are much worse in terms of timetables and how much they think they can get done in a set period of time. At my internship in college, I met a guy who used to work at EA, which at the beginning was great because he'd always wanted to work in game development. But they were always overly optimistic, there was always crunch time and extra hours at the end (and significantly more than at my previous position), and eventually he burnt out and took a position at the insurance company where he works now, because he knew that while less glamorous, he could rely on having a reasonable amount of time off and rarely having to work extra hours.

Another aspect that's interesting to me is how a lot of the cost increase for games has to do with increased or higher-fidelity artwork. I'd be curious to see a breakdown of the costs for Tomb Raider and its predecessors based on art/AI/network/story writing/sound/etc. and see how much that has changed over time. I doubt many companies would be willing to share that publicly, if they even have the data themselves, but it would be interesting.

 

[civvver]

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ca...8-10-times-more-work-to-develop/1100-6417090/

Capcom says their next gen games take 8 times as long to develop, but I believe that's cus they are writing a new engine. This length should drop significantly once it's all ironed out.

However the sophisticated graphics and models add a ton of development time. Look at the credits on any new game, there's like 5-10 programmers and 30-50 artists plus additional sound guys. I'm playing through the new tomb raider and there's a new hair effect. It's cool but I actually turn it off cus it drops my fps from 60 to around 40. But how much time did they spent adding that effect? Who knows maybe it's just a gpu option and easy but all that additional detail takes tons of time. Gone are the days of a few sprites and sound effects like a master of orion. Credits on that game are like four people, a sound guy, a graphics guy, a programmer, a designer.