Vanity Videogame Development

Vanity Publishing is when a person pays a publisher to print his or her work. Most works submitted to these companies aren't usually even good.

In videogames we have shovelware. Games are churned out by the dozens known more for quantity than quality.

I'm surprised that despite the vast quantity of shovelware, not one piece of shovelware was a commission paid by someone with too much money.

Okay I know there was the Shaq Fu game. Heck Shaq Fu, Def Jam, and those 50 Cent games is the reason I'm making this thread.^* Yes I am also aware that those games are in the class of licensed games.

People pay to get a book with their name on it, people pay to star in their own music video, so how come people don't pay a game developer to get an entire videogame starring themselves or just pitching an idea, write a check, and have the disk containing their personalized game delivered in the mail?

edited 26th May '14 10:34:32 PM by Worlder

Sorry for this Bump.

Because the video game thing is much more expensive. Vanity publishing a book is a few hundred dollars. The music video thing can be a few thousand depending on how much is in it. A video game costs millions.

Well I'm not asking AAA level games.

Surely some games could be made with a cost not exceeding 2,000 US dollars.

I'm honestly not sure that you'd likely get much for that.

A small indie team of one or two people, for a month or two, perhaps—if that much—and I doubt that you'd likely get much of a game out of that.

8,000 dollars?

Well perhaps when there is a way for developers to squeeze more out of each dollar spent, then maybe we might see some companies accepting commissions for a game so long as one provide the requirements and can cover all the costs.

edited 28th May '14 9:14:37 AM by Worlder

As to companies accepting commissions, bear in mind that there is, I believe, no shortage of ideas: companies that aren't being paid reasonably well to make someone else's IP may well be working on their own.

Small indie groups that are just starting out might be attracted to the idea if they're paid on a monthly basis, as they may have limited resources and not be as attractive to publishers and the like looking to farm out work.

As to the amount, I don't know how far a dollar goes (I'm not American), so it's tricky for me to reason about values presented in American Dollars.

However, what would you consider to be a reasonable monthly income for a single person? Take that, multiply it by three (one programmer, one artist, one sound-and-music person—some teams may get by with fewer, but that's a pretty small team, I feel)—that gives you the monthly cost for developing the game (in all fairness, I would expect it to be higher in order to account for overhead—electricity, rent, etc., but let's keep this simple for the sake of argument).

Now, a game that is very, very simple, very short, developed for a single platform and with little to no story might be done in about two to three months—take the monthly cost above and multiply by, say, two. That's a very low price for a very simple game.

A more complex game might take significantly longer—for example, even six months is a pretty short development time.

One thing that was just suggested to me and which might work is a Mad-libs approach: the developer creates a game into which they can insert names and faces (changing nothing else), and thus create a basic personalised game at reasonably low cost.