Greg Costikyan writes about the Spectre that's Haunting Gaming. If you haven't read it yet, the sum of it is that gaming is going down: the available publishers are becoming fewer, there is less innovation, people are looking for alternative methods of development and distribution, and the whole outlook is generally bleak.
I was just remarking that much of the discussion was the same as we were having 6 years ago when I left, or 10 years ago, or 15 years ago. While Greg is more articulate than I was, he sounds a lot like an email I wrote to Chris Crawford about why I was leaving the games business in 1997.
The distribution channels are getting smaller, and the shelf life available to new products is shortening. The level of innovation is declining because marketing only understands selling the last game with more of something (more levels, more spells, more monsters, more weapons, more....). Developers are desperately looking for new ways they can make product better cheaper, new ways they can sell product, new revenue models, new markets (now it's mobile or direct sales or IGF or N-Gage or MMOs)...
Geez, did I even leave?
Yeah, I did. For personal and professional reasons. Some of the professional reasons are still here: short shelf life; sequelitis; first person shooters; lack of innovation; license fever; bigger and bigger budgets (which means fewer and fewer products); and an increasing dependence on hits. Most if not all of the innovative product done vanishes without a trace, or even worse, get great reviews but crappy sales.
So do I agree with Greg that the games business is heading for h*ll in a handbasket?
Yes and no.
On the yes side: Greg raises good points, and while I can't comment personally on the trend over the past 6 years or so, I'll take his word for what he's seen. The GDC this year certainly offers at least some support for his viewpoint. Many of the "old-timers" I spent time with are out of work, some of them for extended periods. Some are working on deeply derivative product, or have gone inside companies for the first time in their careers. The interest in mobile gaming (including N-Gage) has a certain frenetic and possibly desperate edge to it.
On the no side: There's some definite growth in the business, especially insofar as project management and general discipline goes. Some people, at least, seem to understand that building complex software is building complex software, whether it's games or massive baggage handling systems, and that the cowboy techniques of even 6 years ago are no longer sufficient. The technology is advancing to the point where basic tools are available to almost anyone—rather like desktop publishing in the first few years of the Mac—now it's a matter of sorting the talented from the banal. Games in which people interact with each other instead of the computer are out there, and if nobody's quite sure if they can make money at them, or if there's a mass market for them, at least the games are there and the experiment is proceeding (Dani, are you watching from wherever you are?).
I prefer to think of the games business rather like the movie business during the studio era and today (yes, it's an analogy that's been done to death for years, starting with Trip and EA trying to build long term relationships with developers). There comes a time when building a hit movie is too expensive for anybody but people who have done it before, and nobody wants to spend $100 million today for a movie if they don't think it's going to make that money back. But today anybody can create a feature length movie on a credit card budget. Most of those movies will be crap, of course. But some of them will be made by the next Robert Rodriguez.
I like to think the games business is going the same way.
One encouraging point I heard at GDC was a stepping away from the idea that a $40 game should provide 40 hours of gameplay. I heard people talking about "this game is too short at 7 hours" or "10 hours is enough if the customer is satisfied". This suggests that the community (and hopefully the consumer) is beginning to think in terms of bang for buck in the same way movies do it ($8 for 2 hours is $4/hour, so a $40 game should be good for 10 hours). That opens the door for much smaller creations. Whether publishers will follow suit or not I don't know, but if they don't there are additional distribution channels opening up.
So yeah, I have some of the same concerns I had before I left. But I'm back, and in relatively short order I'm in a niche and making money. We've been here before, and we'll be here again.
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