Why video games suck
Actually, video games -- a lot of them -- don't suck. But many of them do. The New York Times recently posted an article explaining some of the basic economics of the business and how that just totally throttles creativity.
If you take this stuff for granted and are involved in the business, there's not a lot new here -- there's no secret that games cost huge money and companies don't want to outlay lots of cash unless they know there's a reasonable ROI around the corner, hence they're conservative and hedge their bets with derivative properties and sequels. But it makes for an interesting read. They talked with American McGee, Alex Seropian, and some others who know of what they speak.
Excerpt:
In the motion picture world, by contrast, "anyone who knows film editing and has $10,000 and a Macintosh can make a movie," said J Allard, corporate vice president at Microsoft. But because of high development costs, "that's not the case in the console game business."
Comments
That was just a dumb assertion. Which good movies were produced on a shoestring budget like that?
Posted by: FC | September 21, 2004 03:02 PM
Well, I don't think J Allard is making the case that you can win an Oscar on a shoestring -- he didn't say anything about a *good* movie. Though there certainly have been at least a few indie films that have been cut on Final Cut Pro shown at Sundance at this point (including one avant-garde piece that was done with *iMovie*, believe it or not).
But Allard's point stands -- the tools to at least go through the motions are fairly inexpensive and democratically accessible to Mac or PC users. Console game development has a much steeper technology ramp, and to be taken seriously, clearly you need the backing of a big company.
Posted by: flargh | September 22, 2004 01:46 AM
It's not really the tools, it's the people's time that make software development expensive. Let's say you have 20 people on your staff and each one has a kick-ass rig; that would cost about $80,000. Office space and maintenance for 2 years should cost about $240,000, but the payroll would amount to about $2 million at an average salary of $50k/year. That's why some studios are trying to transfer all core development to branch offices in Eastern European countries and Russia, where they can get cheaper labor.
Posted by: FC | September 22, 2004 06:21 PM
The other thing not taken into account by Mr Allard is cost of entry to the market.
Movies and games can be produced on the cheap, and good ones at that. But to get distribution, to get your product to the public, that's the really prohibitively expensive part, and what keeps one-man-shows off the market these days.
Posted by: johnl | September 25, 2004 11:31 AM