game business

John Lanchester argues in this essay that the production of games has become so expensive, the democratic effect is vanishing – quite in contrast to the rest of media, where the internet made it simpler and cheaper to produce for.

One of the problems is that the new consoles are difficult and expensive to create games for: no one can create a game for the PS3 or Xbox 360 without access to significant amounts of capital. The next generation of consoles is a long way away, and this will likely be even more the case by the time they’ve grown up. As the tools of filmmaking have got cheaper, those for game making have got more expensive; this might mean that the game industry never gets to move on from the need to create blockbuster equivalents. Already the industry suffers from an excessive proliferation of sequels – always a sign that the moneymen are in charge. Games do a good job of competing with blockbusters, but it would be a pity if that was the summit of their artistic development.

I don't think I agree with this. There have been many initiatives to get young, designers to work for those consoles. Also, I think there is a certain backlash: the more big studios are out there, the more independent developers have a reason to produce a counter-culture. The current economic crisis that is also affecting the game industry is definitely helping in this cause: since game designers are laid off, they might form their own small development studios.

After all, games just don't have the pedigree yet, compared to other media. It is still something in search of its own form.

More on the monetization of games, following up yesterday's post: Apparently Jesse Schell made some annotations to his famous speech about achviements. He sees different types of game designers:

• the persuaders
• the fulfillers
• the artists
• the humanitarians

All of those have different goals when creating games. And the persuader is the one that tries to get money out of it. More over at Play This Thing.

Wow – if the people behind GameLab (supposedly most of my teachers) can keep up at the current rate of posts, they would have produced the most successful relaunch of a blog ever. Even if it's just reposts as in this case.

The post deals with the current trend to monetize games – the so-called freemium model: People are allowed to download the game for free, the can play with it, but as soon as they want to become really good and advance faster, they have to pay (real money) in order to get boosts.

They author argues that this is breaking the magic circle of games; especially when it comes to their utopian properties. In contrast to a ludic world, where only luck and skill matter, the freemium model favours the same people that rule in the real world: the ones with the money.

In my opinion, (video) games have always dealt with the balance between utopia and realism: as a designer, you are torn between simulating the real world and breaking all the rules that confine you to your existence. Getting money into play is therefore just another rule taken over into the simulation.

The question is: do we, as players, want that? Do we prefer the simulation over the utopia? And how much are we willing to pay for such an utopia?

Thank the gods for Google Reader Recommendations. Otherwise I would have missed this informative post by Anna Anthropy on how the IGF is judged:

i judged the igf this year. it was a frustrating experience. i’m going to try and identify the biggest problems with the igf process and suggest some solutions. that’s if the igf is interesting in actually “rewarding innovation in indie games” (its claim) instead of simply being a press spectacle. the competition seems perfectly happy, at present, being a press spectacle.

[…] igf entries are rated in categories such as: excellence in audio. excellence in visual art. technical excellence. (remember when the categories were “innovation in” rather than “excellence in”? maybe they felt they were being dishonest.) why, as far outside of the big games industry and the enthusiast press as we supposedly are, are we still partitioning games like they do, as though a game’s graphics could be judged seperately from its worth as a whole? this is the independent games festival: are graphics and sound really the areas in which small creative authors and developers have the most to contribute?

[….] the igf needs more perspectives. NOT more judges - more perspectives. it needs more people who do not share the same mindset. why even have more than one judge if every judge will value the same done-already physics game (joe danger) or bland, polished commercial title (cogs) the highest? why even have a competition?

Interesting to read that after our two weeks of game business, as it lets you peer more into the processes at work there (and of course, as a game designer, thinking of ways to use them to your advantage).

More things to remember from last week:

The real problem is not making a game, it is finishing it, as Alex Amsel, one of our guest speakers, pointed out. This is especially true if you are working with a publisher or try to put your games onto XBox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network or WiiWare: be prepared to work through pages of checklists to complete all specifications. Repeated testing and repairing things might easily take up to a year until your game is finally downloadable. Also: it costs a lot.

Plan to be multilingual. If you have all text somewhere hardcoded, it will take forever to extract those strings and translate them. (Obviously, that is exactly the thing I did in xeophin's CarbonCopy ...) For me that probably means I have to learn to get down and dirty with XML and how to get them parsed in Unity.

Getting licensed to work on XBox 360 or PlayStation or any of the Nintendo platforms is a "lengthy and traumatic experience". Ouch.

And as an aside: soon I will have business cards. Yay.

After a first, tightly packed week about game business, it is time to write down some essential bits of advice.