@Strooger:
I've been thinking about something with the video game industry lately. I didn't know where I could bring this up, but I discussed this with my buddy on Skype last night and he just sort of handwaved it as paranoia. So I'm curious how people who are more in depth with how it works think about it.
So basically, for the past couple of years, the creation of video games and the subsequent marketing has skyrocketed in cost. Not only because you have to throw tons of money on massive teams of designers, but also the marketing which cost many, many millions of dollars. AAA games as a result, are constantly pushed to maintain the latest, graphic standard. But because it takes so long to complete them and the cost is so massive, many of them tank in sales, which has caused developers to cut corners in terms of gameplay. Which is a development that no player want, but because of the market, this is the way it's developed.
As a result of this, we've seen the DLC epidemic and unpolished games being released in tons, just to make the profit. Which also, leads to total sales droppings. This further discourages video game developers to experiment and bring new ideas to the table, by instead just releasing tons of sequels in already succesful franchises, as well as to gravedig mercilessly amongst series that are already logically concluded.
So it seems to me like the cost of video games isn't actually meeting the supply and demand chain. We're not willing to cough up 100 dollars for a single game, but our greed for flashier graphics has forced the cost up to that level anyway. And it will only escalate with every passing year.
The only way to seemingly circumvent this, is by releasing old school games, that doesn't cost nearly as much. But there is really no middle class. To release a game with graphics from 2010 is essentially career suicide, so all we have is low-level graphics and superprestine, superhigh level graphics. It almost seems like the market is doomed unless it recreates itself somehow. What do you guys think?
It's really not as black and white as you say. True, the competition for higher end graphics is ultimately increasing the development time and cost of games, but the reason why companies tend to be ok with that is because of the ridiculously high profitability from games that actually perform well. Stuff like the call of duties, FIFA games, etc.
The other element is that not everyone is in the rat race for super intense graphic fidelity. The most successful game released this past April was Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which looks goddamn beautiful, but those are graphics and aesthetics they had down since the Wii U. Ultimately all the labor in that game was presumably mechanical in scope, and considering the success it pays off in spades.
Now, marketing-wise, you'll notice that marketing money tends to be spend the most on games the industry knows will sell well, since the goal is to increase those sales even further while ensuring you aren't completely wasting your money on a dud. So yea, a lot of money is spent on marketing, but a lot of that is done with games that easily make returns. Again, Mario Kart is an amazing example… that game got cross-promotion with target, commercials all over, etc.
Along with this is the fact that even people who are indie and don't have it in them to spend massive amount of money on marketing are following more grassroots approaches. Meet people at conventions, push your game to youtubers and twitch streamers, all stuff that ultimately only has cost in terms of time spent or promises made. In the past it might have also cost them the copy of the game, but now you can just give anyone and everyone a code from steam for no cost at all to get visibility for your game. The real difficulty of the equation is networking and making sure you have the right PR approach.
Now, I do understand why you see DLC as an epidemic and something terrible, but when done right it's actually a sound principle. If you've been working on the game for years and it releases to a solid consumer base, and that consumer base will buy extra content for that game, there's nothing wrong in actually making that and selling it to them. It's an easy business decision. I'd understand the concern more if they were just locking content made during the release build and selling it as DLC, which some companies HAVE done and promptly gotten blasted for it by consumers. But the fact is a lot of companies just aren't doing that, they just simply develop sustainment plans for a game post-release because developers and publishers and everyone now realizes that a game keeps on living even after release, and pending on the length of that tail it makes sense to keep on making profit from it as much as possible by providing consumers content they might want.
Heck, you even have things like Nintendo now having two games in the pipeline with planned sustainment given to consumers for free, those being Splatoon and Arms. Because that just simply attracts consumers to the product: the idea of the game receiving further support and content over time so players can have more and more new experiences from it.
Regarding games coming out buggier, there's a variety of factors at play. The most common one is business people without consideration for developers planning and selling for a release date that's just not viable. So there always comes a crunch time where you have hundreds of bugs in the database, a bunch of people who need to keep on working PAST the release but the company/publisher likely won't want to pay for that, and pressure from the consumer to release in the promise date. Game development has always been unpredictable and this shit has always happened, and the solutions are:
- delay the release, but face potential higher costs due to publisher not wanting to pay, potential scheduling conflict with employees who were expected to move on to different projects afterwards, scheduling conflict with certification (which is expensive and takes a while) as well as manufacturing plants that need the extra months to actually MAKE the discs for mass release, and potential loss of money since the expected release date was most likely chosen as the most sales-friendly date for the title. OH yes, and fans getting pissy and hating you because of not having their content as promised.
- Realize that most games don't exist in physical format anymore, or simply don't need to. So you deal with the most critical bugs you are able to and keep the same release date, with the intent to do day 1 patches or work on bugs with a smaller sustainment crew during and post-release.
Economically speaking, that second part means a lot of people save millions, and the sad sad fact of life is that the consumers who buy the game on the first day and are pissed about the poor quality are the same people who would have fucking crucified you if you HADN'T released the game on time due to bugs. Naturally, there have been hilariously terrible cases where the game is released in a state that actively interferes with gameplay, and that's just something that's going to happen either due to poor QA or use of production time or a million other things. But while that does hit games pretty hard, there's always the potential that the games do well nevertheless simply due to being a high-profile title with a popular name everyone will be talking about and consumers being consumers.
You mention the only way to circumvent is to release old-school games and there's a lot of assumptions I just don't agree with here. It's very possible to release good titles that look well and play well with minimal use of high-end HD graphics and all that nonsense. Consider again the entire Nintendo approach. They have never had the same performance hardware-wise as Microsoft or Sony, but their titles have continuously looked pretty enough for what they mean to do. Stuff like Rhythm Heaven is cartoony and 2D, but works fantastically for the scope of the game. It doesn't have to be a rat race for the best of the best graphics. It's ultimately really just about making solid game design decisions and selecting an art design that matches that. Splatoon is a fantastic case for this. In a dying console, a NEW IP, a brand new idea, did well because the mechanics were fun and the art design was enjoyable. As a result, people ate that shit up all over the place, and now it's an established IP that gets to keep going. It never did or try to look as good as all the shooters out there in the market, but it still hit consumer desire due to looking polished and fun.
And ultimately, yea, the cost of making games is really high. It's a really uncertain industry and it's not something you go into to make money. Every now and then someone goes bankrupt. So let's consider... why then are so many people jumping into it? Why do we have so many game companies around fighting to make it?
It's because the demand is there more than before. We have a relatively young video game industry that's making billions and billions. Anytime a great title or console gets released, it doesn't eat up the competition, but boosts it, because the thing with games is that playing good games makes you consider playing more good games. Not to mention that while high-end game production is still a bitch and a half, the reality is that it's still easier now to make games than it has ever been. Lots of free to use software. Lots of platforms to push your game to, not just steam which millions of people have, but also stuff like mobile markets and VR/AR, which is still new.
So no, I don't think the high-end graphics push is what's killing games. As long as a game is fun and looks well enough for what it is, people will play it and enjoy it. Microsoft and Sony love to be in that high-end graphics piss contest, and a lot of companies really focus themselves on being the most realistic out there, but for every one of those you have tens of others out there focusing on mechanics and fun and doing well because of it. For every Forza, you have stuff like rocket league.
I do agree with you, however, that the game industry needs to readjust how it operates at some point, just in different ways. The way I see it, what would be optimal is if high-end publishers and developers established lower-end indie brands to their companies, kinda like how high profile movie studios have smaller, more indie branches that invest in stuff like foreign titles and independent movies. Reason for this is that fans will continue to demand high end games that are more of the same, but getting stuck in that rut is bad for the title's growth and bad for the company in terms of industry context. The industry is constantly changing and readjusting, and it would help significantly if each company had more creative-focused small studios that could be constantly looking at the indie market and developing less mainstream design while ensuring this sort of work gets economical support. And then have the really good ideas potentially get absorbed into higher profile titles as well, or maybe pushed as triple AAA games instead if the promise is high, that way you do have new ideas circulating into that market.
Other reason is that while the indie scene is great at the moment, it's reaching a point where there's too much competition and the market gets saturated. By having big wigs in the industry sponsor more promising design and talent, it would help curate a lot of that content, and it helps good indies deal with visibility issues. It also helps siphon up and coming indies towards proper, established studios and not getting preyed on by bullshit publishers or scams.
I'd also love to see game journalism grow more, away from the whole "bro" and buzzfeed vibe of IGN/Gamespot and Polygon/Kotaku, and more into actual proper journalism and critique. YouTube itself has given rise to a lot of really good game critique, but it bothers me how so many of them are still treated foremost as "comedians", and even have to act as such. Ideally I'd love for game critique to be more founded in critique and less in entertainment. Still, there are people out there who excel at this... that one guy who did a 2 hour video of breath of the wild comes to mind, and more of that would help grow more communities of gamers demanding good design and show developers our desire for polish in mechanics and systems, not so much in just how things look and how much does it resemble a movie.
Oh man, and then there's mobile games being extremely successful and... shit, I'll stop there though, there's just a lot going on with games.
@Sakonosolo:
I don't think graphics are entirely to blame. Video game companies are also now made up of people who are fresh out of college amateurs and a lot of people who don't even like video games, it's just a job to them. This is partially, but not entirely, to blame for why lots of games have hundreds of people working on them, which is bloating cost. Of course games are just getting more expensive but these things aren't helping anything. The desire to make movie-like games also requires heavy voice acting (occasionally celebrity voice acting, which is incredibly expensive) and motion capture which also adds to the bloat and also to the feeling of games being less of video games.
Eh, no, I don't agree with this at all.
It's not like you can be an out of college amateur and just get a job in the game industry. For that to happen, you have to be applying to things like QA/testing, which are normally the opposite of glamorous or influential positions, and then to be stupidly underpaid and economically insecure jobs. So basically, you spend months/years at a low-paying, unsafe job and maybe if you have promise, you can go up from there, also assuming people like you and you make good contacts. But even then, you won't be moving up to positions of high cost or impact, probably one of many engineers or producers or w.e. else.
Other alternatives for someone to go into the industry from college would be in assets or audio or stuff like that. But then for those, you actually will need a solid portfolio and for the game to actually want your specific skill set for assets in their game. And EVEN THEN, say you get hired as an artist in-house, chances are you'll spend weeks designing shit like bushes and trees, not at all something truly high profile. EVEN THEN, with that in mind, a lot of artists nowadays aren't even in-house, because it's impractical to have artists sitting there getting paid when you only need them at specific points in development, so instead you just freelance artists whenever possible. Which means you are someone trying to make it out there as a freelance artist, which is also hard as shit. As for audio, that stuff is also out-of-house, so once again you won't be having high-impact on the outcome of the game since a bad decision just means the company loses money but the client can still just get someone else to fix it, or find some other shortcut.
As for out of industry people, it depends tremendously on what they go into. There's a lot of people who are good at production or management or PR or marketing that, guess what, are still really fucking good at it in the game industry, because they simply are just good at that. But even if they aren't, there ARE STILL a lot of people competing for these jobs, A LOT of these people having experience from within the industry. So it's not like HR departments are gonna be all "yea, you have no idea what you're doing, unlike the fifty other people we interview, but w.e., we'll hire you." And hey, if they do, then we know where the problem is: stupid recruiting.
Now, for high-end movie production, fuck yea that's super costly, but again, that's a cost that producers choose to make with the knowledge that doing so will either assist success or not eat into the costs of anything else. And for the most part, the people hired are people who have experience with voice acting, not so much just celebrities. Even if the game is a tie-in to a movie or show, it's often cheaper to just get someone who sounds like the actor. Sound-alikes as a whole are super common in voice acting, and a lot of people are recruited with questions like "so how much like x person can you sound?". The case of a game crashing because it wanted to include voice AND chose an expensive celebrity are probably extremely non-representative of the industry's missteps, and if something like that were to happen I'd be more quick to judge that as a poor production decision made higher up the command chain and less as something that's a symptom of the industry.
Oh yea, and did you know motion capture is getting cheaper? A lot of the people who make that technology are aware of its promise in even indie game markets and are beginning to market things for them (for example). If done right and prepared and planned for properly, you can wind up saving a lot of money on really high-end animation instead of hiring costly animation that will require salaried employees for months. I don't know the details, but I'm sure the appeal of mocap is that it's much faster to get solid transitioning and motion for both face and body animations than it is to have people working on it from scratch, even with really good animators. If the appeal wasn't there, after all, we wouldn't have as much of it beginning to seep into the industry.
@RoboBlue:
I don't think the market is doomed, but the developers who rely on AAA games probably are. There's been a huge increase in successful indie developers over the last few years, and honesly I won't be sad at all if Capcom, EA and Konami all go bankrupt.
Even with successful titles under their belt, indies aren't guaranteed to be able to stick around as solidly as these other companies. I truly and honestly do not see Capcom going under just by virtue of how capable they are of using their properties to do well, and them having something like Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom means to me that however dire the situation, they have a nice foothold. Same for EA: they have shitty ass practices, but their portfolio is very strong. As long as they manage cost well, a lot of what they are capable of releasing will cover their ass for a while.
Konami is a weirder case as a whole and I know they are less into using their properties than people want them to be. But if they are beginning to do pachinko, it's for a reason: that's a market that does really well money-wise. So hey, if that keeps them afloat, good for them, though I hope that if they keep on doing that just to stay afloat then at least they still do something for their properties once in a while. Super Bomberman R was a step in the right direction.