This is probably an obvious point to quite a few of us, but is completely lost to those people in the game design and publishing that just see dollar signs:
It was my belief, and still is, that it is entirely possible to make smaller, less bloated titles that appeal less to the mass market and more to market niches that are underserved to date, which are easier to design and develop for when you aren’t married to a $50 million+ budget.
I’m getting a feeling that some designers and game enthusiasts are giving the collective middle finger to those who just think games are about making the next WoW, which to them, translates to early retirement for those who can pull it off. The more I absorb that thought, the more I think we’re seeing a trend to get back to the basics of game design.This, of course, goes beyond obtaining the next golden egg laying goose. The ironic thing about this is that those who are going back to the basics and flipping that collective middle finger are discovering that they meet that golden goose along the way. And?.she?s giving out cookies. This usually leaves the ones in suits scratching their heads because they weren’t paying attention to anything that didn’t smell like the next WoW.
Personally, I think this whole big budget idea for games is a load of malarkey. I don’t think that any game should cost $50 million to make. That’s just insane. You don’t need $50 million to make a game that is entertaining to a lot of people and we’ve had plenty examples of that over the last couple of years. It’s just very nice to hear guys like Lum and others that I met at AGC who are think they can be just as successful if they don’t go Hollywood with games.
D out.
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September 25th, 2008 at 11:24 am
I like cookies.. where can I find this goose lady?
Small development teams have a lot of potential, especially when their creativity isn’t constrained by the wrong money people. (see -> Vulture capitalists) The problem is though that servers seem to cost so much. I wonder if its possible to build up and expand more slowly using weaker machines for servers.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
*cough* Mount & Blade… *cough* (go buy it now)
September 26th, 2008 at 10:21 am
A smaller design studio is more likely to be groundbreaking, admittedly, because it has less to lose if it’s not playing with a $50 million budget. However, sometimes you just need that amount of money to produce a product that is of sufficient quality and polish to move the genre forward, and I’m sure the next Blizzard title will do exactly that because for them money is literally no object. They can do whatever they want with their next MMO, and test it to perfection, because they don’t have a budgetary restriction. The smaller guys in the middle, the Funcoms and Turbines and Mythics, are probably the ones we need to worry about a little more.
One place a small dev team could actually help, though, would be in the CONTINUED development of a game (I mentioned this on my recent blog post on expansions). It’s ridiculous that MMO developers think a game is ‘finished’ when it ships, and reassign some of the development staff to other projects. We’re paying for a box game every three months with our subscription, so really development on the game should continue at the rate it did before the game shipped. A small team that stayed committed to the MMO and continued to add new content at the same rate as it did pre-release could really a make a name for itself doing so.
September 27th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
I’m torn on this.
On one side, I’m old-school and have this huge appreciation for single-handed game production (ala Rollercoaster Tycoon) and I think most large game developments have been a mess lately.
But I also think a $50 million game can be perfectly reasonable if it’s managed right. I rarely think films can be compared to games, but this is one of the few times they can as simply projects with a large and variable workforce and these sorts of budgets are commonplace for movies. WoW’s original budget would have made an average film, that’s a perspective eh?
Really depends upon the scope of the game. I came to MMORPGs in part because I was tired of playing new games each week, I wanted to settle into an environment for awhile. That does take a big budget or at least a lot of work.
September 28th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I am only responding to the part in which you said games should not cost $50mill.
The price tag of the game purely relies on the size of the team and the scope of the project. Not all games need to cost as much as the others. I happen to know that even Wii titles can cost between 10-15mill and that is basically the price of 2 years of development on a team of a 100 people. Probably undercutting what some of the bigger companies spend. But then there are MMOs, generally 3-5+ years of development for a good MMO (and doesn’t stop after release). That is a long as a time to make a game. So 50mill is not out of the question for even a basic MMO.
September 28th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
If a game costs $50 million to make, then it must sell in millions just to break even. Subscription-based games can get more of that back from the subscription fees over time, but still need to do quite well.
How many MMO games in the Western hemisphere have sold in the millions so far? I can only think of two: World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. A number of MMOs are profitable without selling in millions, so a _basic_ MMO certainly do not need that kind of numbers.
Would an MMO game that cost $25 million, $5 million, $1 million be less fun to play? Maybe, maybe not. But smaller budgets generally mean less development time and less risk to loose a lot of money if things go wrong. And if things go right, you do not need that many players before you start earning money.
A few game companies, like Blizzard, cannot really avoid making the big budget titles though. That is their area of expertise in the game industry to make the highly refined games that reach the mass market. And that bit of refinement costs a lot of money.