Effects of Finances on Video Game Development

So I've heard that a lot of studios have been getting killed off because of a lack of finances. Have those studios made good games regardless of their financial states? At least they would have gone out strong instead of going out weak.

Heck, that's what Square thought they would do with Final Fantasy back then.

Sadly a lot of game companies are shut down even if they made a good product, but it didn't sell or score well. A good example would be Pandemic studios final title, the Sabotuer. Critics gave it decent ratings and those who played it generally liked it, but it didn't sell well enough and thus Pandemic was shut down.

Publishers are blind to the long-term and terrified of losing the tens of millions of dollars they invest into each game. If a product doesn't make back its investment within six weeks, they deem it a failure. If it doesn't get a minimum Metacritic rating, they deem it a failure and withhold bonuses.

As long as EA, Activision, and Ubisoft retain this backward bureaucratic mess of a business model, the game industry's high-profile face will continue to homogenize and stagnate.

The industry's also created unrealistic expectations for long term development, in terms of graphical fidelity and market return/turnover. I don't know what they're long term goal here is, but it looks like they're planning on pushing the ceiling higher and higher while running all good ideas into the ground in search of a repeatable formula.

Hence all the sequels, and the sudden investment in AAA games with stealth options.

Failing that, they'll just cut back to a period of experimentation that we saw about six years ago, and we'll be seeing a lot of new I Ps pushed to be sequel material.

There was a really good article on Not Enough Shaders about this a while ago.

It is getting extremely expensive to put out a game with all of the art assets and such. And frankly, with the size of the games, the cost of testing and advertising is enough that I can't really blame a publisher for deep-sixing a game that looks dicey. Skimp on testing and it gets smashed for "putting out an obvious beta". Skimp on advertising and no one buys it. Somewhere in there, one has to acknowledge the sunk cost fallacy and just let go.

It's hard to have "small" game studios when it costs tens of millions of dollars to develop a AAA game and as much to market it.

If you try to rely on your own capital, then you're one under-performing game away from bankruptcy. If you try to rely on publisher funding, then your business is at their mercy.

In order to safely operate as an independent developer making AAA games you either need to be an industry darling that knocks it out of the park every time or be big enough to absorb tens of millions in loss when something goes bad.

There's also the fact that making the games to be more "cinematic" ramps up the cost hard, with VA cost, animaton cost and all that...if the games are less of that and actually put money into relevent areas the cost will be much cheaper, and the dialogues and texts can be longer and more expansive...

Still, making AAA games without those is practically impossible given current consumption trends...a more mid-tier games and such can though...Sins Of A Solar Empire was made only under $1 million, for example...

edited 13th Dec '12 7:21:57 AM by onyhow

I heard that people were saying that development costs in the Sixth Generation were getting too high, too. Is it a bigger problem now than it was back then?

PC game development somehow costs a lot less than console or console-first development. While we hear of the likes of EA, Activision and some Japanese household names staggering under the weight of their development costs, companies in Europe, Russia, China, Korea and elsewhere are managing to produce equally stunning titles on comparatively shoestring budgets without tapping into the 'essential' US and Japanese markets much if at all.

Does much of that cost come from promotion?

http://www.notenoughshaders.com/2012/07/02/the-rise-of-costs-the-fall-of-gaming/

Said article.

Gaming is becoming too bloated.

Whether this has to do with rising technology costs, poor management, higher advertisement, or all of the above, is beyond me though.

Mostly the latter two, but a bit of the first one as well. Indie developers have no issues making great games using pocket change, but the hardcore market demands incredible graphics, which costs a lot. And remember the financial debacle that was Kingdoms Of Amalur Reckoning, or how EA is demanding some ridiculously high sales quota for Dead Space 3 or they're cancelling the franchise?

The Market (us) needs to take a good long look at the state of the world, and grow up. "Realistic" or high-end graphics spoil us and are more than we need in the first place. Ten years ago we were still fine with sprites grafted onto polygons. Now everything's gotta look ultra-real and ten years is way way too quick to be making that jump. Especially when the various First and Second world economies are staggering under the weight of recession.

Downgrade the graphics and you can downgrade the technology involved. Cut two parts out of the costs. Plus you can spend more room on substance instead of appearance.

edited 1st Jan '13 12:52:45 PM by Journeyman

I might be quite ignorant in that aspect, so sorry if anything here is bull, but I think the best way out for enhancing technology of a game without increasing costs would be to just be smart. For example, while certain developers struggle to include 1000 enemies in the screen at once, Square-Enix fits 1000 Heartless, in a PS 2. While it's just a trick involving using sprites for enemies far away, it works wonderfully and differentiating them in the middle of the battle is pretty much impossible, or at least it was for me. Another example would be Super Mario Galaxy, whose graphics are not so far from its 7th-gen competitors in a console whose games mostly look like Gamecube titles.

edited 1st Jan '13 5:42:00 PM by NEO

Graphics are the easiest thing to advertise, both in ads and in store Attract Modes. Games with massive amounts of depth but comparatively minimalist graphics (and other aesthetic/sensory elements) will only appeal to gamers dedicated enough to browse websites or leaf through long articles with walls and walls of text or maybe even graphs and tables. Depth is difficult to present in a manner that encourages an impulse buy while big explosions and cool weapons or vehicles can easily wow a non-gamer, even to the point of getting them to shell out for a whole system to run that one game.

Incredibly detailed 2d art may seem like an answer to the challenges of the visual demands but truly outstanding 2d art takes just as much if not more talent and man-hours than the best 3d, and all that may need just as much of a budget unless such high caliber staff are willing to work on pay better suited to a sweatshop or a charity compared to what they could be getting at a richer dev house.

I guess it all boils down to the question of what a game must emphasize to snag buyers who don't know what they're looking for in a game or who aren't looking for anything in particular.

Yeah, the problem isn't going to be fixed. The REAL solution is for EVERY LAST COMPANY to downgrade for a while. Not happening. Crytek makes itself work based mostly on graphics, Creative Assembly's been backing itself down that corner, most others are stumbling down the road toward high end graphics as well.

Yet, you do get indie devs able to go with depth instead of high graphics.

If we advertise the newest build of the core Dwarf Fortress version and the newest Co D on identical HD televisions placed side-by-side in the front of the same game store, which ad is likely to move more copies?

If the entire industry decides to downgrade now people will simply revert to buying the best looking or visceral games available right before the paradigm shift while the global gaming scene changes from an industry to an enthusiast's circle.

'course, there are a whole lot of people who would have no problem with that. Me included.

When The Old Republic was being developed, they talked about this. Not only do hyper-realistic graphics cost a lot to design and run, but it has the side effect of making every game look the same. That's why they decided to go for a more stylized art; it made them visually distinct.

For example, compare these◊ two◊ pictures. The first one, you can identify the game on sight ^note  And because it has the name in the image name, but that's beside the point . I've played the latter game, and I still didn't recognize it at first.

CGI in movies is the same way too. Really, all visual media needs to take a step back from realism and stick to stylistic work for a while. Or else "Reality" TV, in the case of TV shows. Ya tech up too quickly, and there'll be backlash when the tech explosion slows down. Which, with Recessions, is the norm.

edited 1st Jan '13 8:00:18 PM by Journeyman

Thing is, even back in The Golden Age Of Video Games, people were trying to make games look as realistic as possible with the tech. Developers have only been following that progression in every generation.

A bad evolution from the start is STILL a bad evolution. You don't want games to look realistic, you want them to look memorable. Which realism isn't, as was pointed out earlier.

Realistic graphics aren't inherently good, but they aren't inherently bad either. Let's not trade one form of over-saturation for another, shall we?

I think there's not much need to increase realism any further, if there's to be more powerful hardware, it should be used to increase rendering capacity and framerates, not to further increase detail... Think about how many titles still run at 30FPS and have frequent popups.

Also, many 6th-gen games are already pretty enough in HD.

edited 3rd Jan '13 7:15:34 AM by NEO

I'm not. I'd prefer they mix the two. Some realism but stylized to be unique. Downgrade the Realism to the point where the hardware can be devoted to storing story-space and game mechanics.