As I see the different games that are coming out and listen to the continuing debate as to whether or not PC gaming is dead, Something keeps ringing in my ears. “Monetization” “Risk” “Expensive” and the now-infamous “You can’t make an MMO for half a billion dollars and guarantee that it will compete with WoW.”
It’s time for the consolidation of all the smaller studios into large publishing houses to stop. It’s time for smaller studios to say no to the short-term monetary win and make games for the sake of games, knowing that if it’s good the money will follow. It’s time for the game design process to self-correct.
Here is the major thing that I see as a problem. PC gaming isn’t dead, but today’s development houses are TRYING TO KILL IT. What do I mean by that? Simple. Here is the current process (as seen from the outside, admittedly this is perception and not necessarily true in every (or even most) case(s).
1. Float a balloon with the proposed IP. Give preference to licensing or developing around an exisiting IP.
2. Prototype the game. Unlike days past, this means not prototyping the actual game play but how it will be marketed, positioned, and monetized.
3. Choose a monetization model.
4. Start to design game play around it.
I know that in big studios, there is a large investment to be made before they can ship a product. This is particularly true of MMOs. You can’t truely develop a triple-A MMO title for less than 10′s of millions of dollars today. I’m not blind to that fact. There needs to be risk management. I think that where the companies are going wrong is that instead of stressing gameplay, polish, and competent design they are trying to find more ways to make money up front and incrementally. They are, in fact, telling us that they don’t think their product has the chops or the legs to make money from box sales or in the case of MMOs, box sales and subscriptions.
Maybe they are right.I’m still tired of all the silliness that is going on out there in this regard though. I’ll probably (almost definitely) buy Age of Conan, WAR, and Spore when they come out. I regularly buy Valve games. I won’t buy any more games that have a year at the end of their titles (Madden 2003/04/05/06/07/08.) I won’t be fed recycled content any more.
Games need to be built based on what is a great and entertaining game, then as the game is being designed, worry about how to monetize it. I still contend that you don’t need all these nickle and dime gimmicks if your game is good. You don’t need to trap us into long term subscriptions (Hellgate: London) or microtransactions to make money. Ask Blizzard. Ask Valve. Ask Epic.
We need to continue to vote with our dollars. We need to continue not buying crap in a pretty wrapper at retail, and supporting the hell out of good stuff no matter the budget it was produced with. Console gamers are getting a regular diet of good games, and there is no reason that can’t happen on the PC as well. It’s time for game company executives to pull their heads out of their, well you know, and start making games like the ones that made the industry huge in the first place.
We want innovation. We want entertaining, We want engaging. And if you huge gaming conglomerates can’t provide that, I say we start supporting the indy gaming movement and stop giveing those companies any of our money to squander on bad games and worse decisions.
One thing I’ve noticed about PC games and console games recently is that “play time” is vastly disproportional to development and production times. More specifically, I’ve noticed two extremes. First, you can spend an enormous amount of time and effort creating content only to see your players consume it in a single weekend or worse yet, never get around to seeing it. The higher end raid instances in World of Warcraft are a good example; Blizzard has admitted they’ve removed most of the attunement quests because they’ve spent a lot of time and effort designing instances such as Naxxramas, and they’d like people to, you know, actually see them. At the other end of the extreme, we all know of simple, casual games like Brain Age, Nintendogs, even Tetris that would, in theory, be easy for a programmer today to duplicate. By easy, I’m referring to maybe 160 labor hours in contrast to the two, three year long cycles of most MMOs, PC and console games. (Don’t get me started on Duke Nukem Forever.) It shouldn’t be hard to find a gamer who’s spent more hours playing Nintendogs than they’ve spent playing Halo 3.
The point I’m getting at is there’s nothing in the middle. Where are the original, fun, playable games that only take a year or less to develop? I think Electronic Arts likes Madden and other sports games so much because they can schedule and budget one year development cycles where they solicit requirements, add new features, test those features, update the rosters, quality test those games, update all the printed documentation (what there is of it), push it out the door and still have enough time in the cycle to gather feedback for next year’s version. If you exclude the actual “code innovative new features and debug them” segments, it seems reasonable to think you can apply standard business practices to improve the efficiency of the rest of the cycle. If you’re Electronic Arts or Sony or Microsoft, you should be able to get the process down to three months of support work and nine months of actual coding. With all the programming talent you have at your disposal, you should be able to set up Strike Teams such that each team consists of four or five programmers that all know each other and work well together, plus a designer, some art folks, a musician, a sys admin, etc etc. Then all you have to do is ask each team to deliver a new, original game each year. If the game sucks, you’re only out one year’s budget. If the game becomes the next big hit, you may be able to subsidize five or six other teams.
In hindsight, I don’t think it’s so much that companies are trying to “monetize” their games, I think it’s that they either don’t properly understand how they can apply economies of scale to the non-creative portions of a development team, or they’re too big to do it effectively. They’re instead following the (movie) studio system where they bankroll a bunch of separate projects and hope that at least one of those projects do well enough in the market to cover their losses elsewhere. The downside of that philosophy is that each and every single project feels the weight of the world on their respective shoulders, and they’ve got to hit it out of the park in their first at-bat.
With that thought in mind, I think Apple and the iPhone SDK may actually be the best thing to come along for independent game makers. I can hear some of you groaning in the background and no, I’m not here to shill for the iPhone. What I wanted to point out is that among other things, you basically pay $99 for a developer’s license so to speak, develop a game, pick a price point, and Apple will sell it through iTunes, leveraging their bandwidth and payment processing infrastructure. In other words, they’re willing to do the whole publishing distribution back office aspect of the business, effectively saving you two months off of my hypothetical 12 month development cycle. At some point, EA, Sony, Microsoft et al are going to have to standardize and consolidate those publishing and distribution functions too. As Genda says, Valve is already doing that. Is it any surprise that Portal came from Valve?
I think the 3rd generation of MMOs is just a scary place for developers. Everybody saw the crazy success of UO and EQ (OMG you actually get people to pay a monthly fee to play a computer game? And they’ll play it for HOW many years?!) So the second generation developers got busy, wanting a piece of that pie.
Where are we now? One game became a huge monster and the rest of the contestants were nearly drowned by their failure. Yes, there are still a few profitable contenders from that era, but largely all the second generations games came and went, even some of the heavy-hitter can’t-miss franchises.
So in this third generation now we have not only the hurdle of just making something good enough to put butts in the seats, we also have to hire a crew to use the jaws of life to pull those butts off the blizzard bench. Its no surprise to me in light of all these things that publishers would rather reverse-engineer a good subscription based MMO and try to create a success on “paper,” while actual gameplay takes a backseat.
Wow has been a blessing and a curse. It has brought millions of new people to the world of MMOs. They have made what used to be only discussed by nerds in the secrecy of the audio/visual club meetings a household name known to all and featured in television and movies. It has made it much more socially acceptable to spend a Friday night sitting at home playing a computer game. On the other hand, it has skewed the industry so bad that there is no longer healthy competition.
I liken it to a huge shark being swarmed by dozens of tiny piranhas taking tiny bites. The small fish will never make enough impact to really affect the shark, and any other large shark that comes on the scene can’t seem to keep from starving to death himself before he can face off against the king. There are two big sharks coming this year… if they both starve each other before they can get a piece of the big one we might be stuck playing wow for another 3-4 years.
I’m not sure what the solution is. I fear we might continue to see this type of champion vs challenger(s) trend for a long time unless people just get burnt out on MMOs in general, or maybe if some sort of open source MMO vehicle emerges and becomes popular. Until then we’ll have to wait and see how this fish battle plays out.