Why is the game industry model broken?
polycounter lvl 18
Hey guys, Why are SO many studios closing and or having huge layoffs? If you look at how many who have been laid off in the past year in the game industry, the numbers are quite staggering. Why is that?
Are people really not buying as many games as they used to?
Are game studios just not being innovative enough?
Are AAA budgets just too big to support the demand?
Are people OVER entertained and hence don't have time to get to all the new releases coming out?
I'm very interested in hearing your thoughts on this, it's a topic that has been on my mind for some time, and the recent layoffs at Zynga and Sony Bend just brought it to light once again.
Are people really not buying as many games as they used to?
Are game studios just not being innovative enough?
Are AAA budgets just too big to support the demand?
Are people OVER entertained and hence don't have time to get to all the new releases coming out?
I'm very interested in hearing your thoughts on this, it's a topic that has been on my mind for some time, and the recent layoffs at Zynga and Sony Bend just brought it to light once again.
Replies
The hubris of the industry that thinks you need a mega studio. Yet, forget how much it actually costs to run one of them in terms of heating, AC, power, upkeep, etc. If you can afford it, then awesome. But far too many studios go under or are under duress due to the overhead cost of the building they are in.
It's the economy, stupid. Games and film, and the entertainment industry as whole always lags behind the general recession. I create environments on the side, but I work as an architect. When we got rocked by the 2008 fallout, I lost my job. At first, it was fine. I played and bought a lot of games as that's all I had time to do. Fast forward after being on unemployment for a bit and my freelancing wasn't as steady as I'd like, my game purchases fell off sharply. Even though I have a new full time gig, plus freelance on the side, I still buy games as if I was out of work. If I am going to spend $60 plus on a game, it better damn well be worth it. Very few games this year have met that criteria for me. Where in the past, I'd buy the game where you say to yourself, "I know this will suck but oh what the hell, I'm curious."
From my point of view I see it as the investors/funders fault who become too shaken with bad investments to make any bold decisions, and the fact that they are so shaken of what they see on the news that they see the projects that they fund will flop. Resulting in lost jobs and sleezy business dealings that are not caught by regulatory agencies.
Most layoffs I have heard about is mostly non-essential workers. Developers remain untouched. There may be 50-100 people working on one project and plus an additional 500 for other things like HR, Marketing, Technicians(non-dev), Server admins, Security, Facilities, PR, and off-site staff. When a layoff occurs, the ones that go first is non-dev's and then it leaks to developers.
Its Unfortunate that things like this occur, but new studios are forming up at the same time developing games from lessons learned from the past.
I don't like the term non-essential staff, it gives you the false idea that developers aren't effected. If you are just doing pre-production on the next project you can save a lot of money cutting your 20 man art team down to 1-2 artist - most of recent layoffs have involved a large portion of artists & designers.
Now we have a retail establishment that is in a fairly drastic decline, and the game industry's major players are having to scale back. All of this combined with higher production quality requirements and an unreasonable expectation of lowered unit costs. Games have been getting more complex and complicated to produce, but no one seems willing to pay more for them on an individual unit basis.
The companies that are most stable are the ones who scaled their production properly from the beginning, and who anticipated the shift in retail. Valve is a prime example.
First of all, holy shit there's a lot of extremely expensive stuff involved, a lot of which you wouldn't even think of. Every table, every chair, all the appliances from refrigerators and mirowaves to refreshment stations, boards, and lamps, Cintiqs and workstations for every artist, hundreds of computers, just tons and tons of expensive shit. Then you have to rent this massive place, hire security, hire maintenance, hire secretaries and people to keep the place itself running, and then you have people associated with the actual product, both management and hands-on, and you have to pay those people competitively, ideally with benefits and all that. One of 38's selling points was that artists could expect about a $60k salary and good benefits, if, for the sake of getting a sense of scale, you treat that as the average employees would make, and if you figure the studio employs about 300 people, then that really adds up; $18mil a year at face value, but much more likely closer to $24mil or more. Add all of these things together. Now factor in that you only make money if people buy the game, and you have no guarantee of that, just speculation.
So where do I see things heading? Well I have no actual expertise in the field of predicting and dealing with these things, BUT I have thought a great deal about it.
In my opinion one of the ways forward would be to cut out the office space out entirely. So no renting out an office and buying the myriad expensive bits to fill it with. Secondly without an office you don't need to hire for office positions, so no need to hire the obvious ones like maintenance, but also most of management could be cut out entirely. If anything a good team would self-manage, a lot of indie teams do and it makes sense that the people doing the work understand the context.
So what would be a hypothetical approach to cutting the office. I could see a game being made by people who all work remotely and chat over vent or a similar sevice. Each person is able to live anywhere in the world so long as it has an internet connection, which allows for a much bigger pool of talent, but also much more flexibility with wage and cost of living (if you are employing people in a city you are paying them to live in a city, if people can move wherever they want, they can live somewhere nice but affordable). If people work from home (which isn't a crazy notion because freelancers already do that) then it cuts a lot bullshit; they don't require a car to get to work and don't need to pay for that gas and transportation, they have more flexibility in schedule and comfort.
And everything can be communicated, perhaps even more effectively, online. There are group chat services like vent, but you can also do video chats, see other people's desktops and what they're working on without moving from yours, ask questions through text without interrupting people, or pose a technical question vocally in the chat for the relevant group of people to solve, and the bystanders potentially learning something. There are free services that can be used to track the non-idle hours that certain programs are used; in that way there could be a flexible schedule with 'no-specific work times, but make sure to do at least X number of non-idle work hours per week'.
So in this hypothetical instance, what does it cost to run an operation like this? The answer is primarily the wage of the people employed, with 'the people employed' being the bare minimum of what it takes to make the actual game (no HR department, no management walking about, no maintenance and secretaries). The team can manage itself and decide on realistic deadlines and whether or not to hire people. Heck, I'd even argue that the core team is what should be in charge of those things anyway. And as for sales, the influx of indie development and services such as Steam are making that much more streamlined, no need for dedicated departments, at least in the beginning.
This would never ever work. Even if you had gigabit networking, personal interaction is still a requirement. I don't know about your experience but I've been a lead for many years now and I can't imagine running any department with just online cooperation. It'd be a disaster.
Cutting the outrageous expenses should be a good start though.
It's worked demonstrably for indie and mod projects, and I honestly don't see, in an objective sense, why it couldn't for a more significant project.
It is now pretty standard for work to be outsourced and contracted in many different and disparate ways, and that trend will become increasingly relevant as the world gets smaller. The fact that you can't imagine running something remotely doesn't mean that it doesn't, that it can't and that it won't happen. I understand where you're coming from in that the fundamental mentality and structure would be different; you have something closer to self-management and collaborative freelance in this system; perhaps that's where the dissonance comes from.
Edit: also as a side-note, what you're saying is incredibly similar to what critics of MOOC (online education such as through Coursera, Udacity, Khan, etc) say, and yet those programs have been incredibly successful and efficient. I think many people here can attest to the fact that you don't need a person physically caressing you in order for you to learn and do things.
I was involved heavily in indie games and mods before I got into the game industry so I think any savings gained from everyone working from home would be lost in the LOOOOOOOOOOOONG development cycles. If I were going to go office-less I'd at least require everyone to be able to physically meet once a week.
Graphics aren't everything. If they were, WoW wouldn't be the success it was. The PC is more than graphic fidelity. You can do a lot with a PC that's not possible on a console. A PC can use just about any peripheral with a USB plug. With the extra performance of a PC you can have fewer loading screens (more RAM), smarter AI (multicore CPU), bigger worlds (more storage), and even better graphics (better GPU).
I don't get excited with most AAA shooters because they are typically just more of the same recycled mechanics, design motif, story, and characters. It has little to do with graphics at all.
I think a good question to ask then is 'how many people do you need?' Is it necessary to have 100-200 artists on a project? 38 Studios had about 75 Cintiq's, and given all of them were being used it would lead me to believe that there was about that number of artists on the team. Now this is a company that was being actively pressured to hire more than it needed.
If you look at a game like Hawken which uses Unreal, the team is about 6 people large and able to be made almost entirely of artists, asset makers. The smaller the team the better the communication, as you've said, but that fact doesn't change whether you're communicating over video chat or face to face, it's a matter of numbers. Three people require three connections, four people require six connections, etc.
I've managed a lot of outsource production. Takes way more time and you have far less artistic and technical control over the results compared to having the artist sitting next to you in the same room.
Your recipe would just sink everything even deeper with longer production schedules and more wasted work costing a lot more than what you can save on the office rent. And your remote workers would have to be payed more anyway because it'd be them who have to provide fast internet access, office space, heating/aircon etc. etc. and it'd be way less efficient that way.
About outsourcing - we're getting more and more. Lots of TV series, like stuff from the man with the beard who then in the 2000's decided to make 3 really bad prequels... or stuff from Naughty dog. There's a few outsourcers which can deliver top notch quality, but just not many. Our own list of whom we view as direct competition ain't big. Right now we have 1000 people here and we're still hiring.
I think outsourcing to big shops is the way to go vs. lone contractors. Outsourcing to e.g. 20 different contractors/freelancers who're remote on top sounds like a lot of work and hassle and it's the same problem for your HR as hiring regular people - lots of individuals to call and negotiate with.
With a big outsourcer your HR has no ramp up, no ramp down issues - your team is available immediately and you don't have to fire anyone - you get a team and not individual warriors, you get producers who know what they need from the client and what they need to deliver to avoid the usual "outsourcer hassles". We worked on stuff like Rango and Mission Impossible, those sports titles that get relaunched every year, etc. - so yes, high quality outsourcing exists (anyone want a business card?
Yes, you can't compare Hawken to an MMO - most AAA fps studios are pretty small compared to MMO studios. Also, I'm not saying there's 100-200 artist, you forgot about designers & programmers.
I too always wonder if that's really necessary. Sure, if your name starts with Blizz and ends with ard then go for the Cintiqs! But does a 10x more expensive Cintiq make your art 10x better? We work with Bamboos here... yeah my studio ain't as cozy, but at least I don't feel bad qhen seeing some of the waste other studios have, which in theory should not have the cash for that.
Or like the small new studios who deck themselves out with macs and gaming rooms'n'shit before they even sold anything.
@vergatom, As I said I didn't mean to suggest everything would be headed in this direction necessarily, but I do see how for smaller, concentrated and skilled teams (maybe 15 to 30 artists with a good sdk) it would be lightyears ahead. Purely on principle though, I wouldn't be so dismissive of different ideas of how to do business; it was less than a year ago that getting $4mil in funding through Kickstarter seemed absurd, but now it happens; it was only a few years ago that f2p was thought of by 'professionals' as a Korean gimmick that wouldn't work with Western markets, and now everyone's doing it (in fact the 38 project was going to be f2p). So yeah in general it doesn't really do you much good to bet that something can't happen. Crazier things have.
Yep. Games on SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and PSX were all very innovative differed from one another quite vastly. Even PS2 and Xbox were pretty creative with their titles.
SNES is still my favorite system to date... just with the quality of games that came out for its time.
Creativity came to a painfully slow crawl when it became very business-centric once PS3 and 360 came out. It is very difficult to get innovative work out when the money-backers do not want innovation... they want repetitive products that statistically support sales.
However, for why companies lay off tons of people, I think it's a matter of growing too quickly and not managing the workforce or project financing properly.
iOS games are much more innovative, way cheaper (a whole freaking dollar), and require smaller teams to make. The dollar transaction is why so many games are incorporating micro-transactions now. In this economy people can much more realistically justify spending $1-$10 than $60.
Mo money mo problems!
what was the name of the company that made Daikatana? Didnt they put in a god-dam IMAX theater at their office?
The mobile market is a really one of those market trend setters, and really clouds the future of at home devices. Not to mention the introduction of on demand game streaming, where now high end Console games and PC games are done on demand on a phone, tablet, or anything that is capable of streaming. (ie onlive)
I would add in, the bigger a company gets, the more money it wastes. I would also add that the bigger the project gets, the harder it becomes to manage. And of course, the bigger the project, the bigger the budget, the more the mistakes cost......
Eventually there reaches a point where mistakes are killing studios.
Finally, i think expectations are getting higher and higher, and also, how can I say......lamer?
Lets take arcade racing games for example. Personally I would love to see a return to carmageddon style racing games, with no brands and loads of politically incorrect death and destruction. GTA kinda speared this forward as well, and is really the only modern example.
However, the market has gone the other way, with licenced brands being pretty much expected in all major games. This is cool ofc, but there comes a blandness with this, you cant attach a severed rams head to the front of your mercedes, or have a ferrari sheared in two by a giant chainsaw, as well, it doesent give a very good image of the car.
However, it would take a SUPER confident publisher to push forward on a no licences, car cleaving, total destruction pedestrian running over, carmageddon gme these days, so i understand its not an easy fix (in fact it might even be banned?) However, that is the blandness i am talking about. The industry as a whole is becoming more risk averse as budgets get bigger (understandably) and the market, unknowingly, is asking for blander and blander games, by buying and being content with ever more watered down crap
Maybe it's because everything runs on one of three almost identical physics engines, or because with so many factors thrown into the mix like tire deformation models and realistic suspension travel models tuning the whole thing so the car is driveable is an accomplishment let alone fun. In any case, no racing game today feels like the first two Wipeout games, the first Driver, or the first Colin McRae Rally, which all feel mega satisfying to play.
This carries into FPSes too. UT3 and TF2 have this floaty, slow feel (even though in the former case you're moving faster than the first game!) while UT1 feels fast and tight and newer games running on older engines like Urban Terror feel amazing to bounce around the map at 60mph.
Like I said, it's a hard to articulate, particularly subjective thing, which is why I fear it is being overlooked.
Hawken had about 6 main team members and 3 'interns' if I recall correctly. Either way is semantics to the point that you don't need a lot of people in a team to make a good, AAA caliber game. A team can essentially be made purely of artists and scripters, people making the actual content, and using an already well developed sdk and engine to avoid the technical time sink.
gotta agree, i have no clue how there gonna be able to sustain themselves for very much longer :poly122:
The way I see it - and it's true across the board on a lot of industries beside games - is that the old sales models are dying. too many eggs in too few baskets - and big corporations have always been slow on the whole "figuring things out" thing...do what has always worked until it doesn't work any more. then do it some more - that's the way it always goes.
Meanwhile the smaller games with smaller teams and smaller budgets are scratching out their place. compare the number of mobile game studios now with just a couple of years ago - and there's no way that it's EXCLUSIVELY tied to the popularity and accessibility of devices. There's significantly more small studios that don't do mobile games than there used to be as well. Fact is that big studios have been shedding people and they've been collecting into lots of smaller studios - like drops of water after being splashed out of a larger puddle. They're not bound by share-holder fear, not too terribly concerned with maximizing profits and usually just want to make the games that they want to make because they want to make them.
So i wouldn't say it's broken - just that it's shifting away from business models that aren't applicable to our industry any more. We've got a product that can be made in a basement and sold over wires - we don't all need to get disks into gamestop any more. creative people will create even when they're laid off - and if they're lucky somebody will give them money for it eventually.
Change is painful, and we've been experiencing that, but it's also damn necessary. pick the corporate scab off, don't pick at the scar and climb up to the next branch says I!
However some software vendors, but not all, offer cheaper licenses for China, because they rather make a little money than no money at all. There's lots of small businesses in China and due to the lower income level they can never afford many of the western priced software. E.g. if you buy a PC here it has a special "China Windows 7 license" for which the OEM pays less, and in the end you pay a little bit less.
Then again, again, there's outsourcers in higher-wage countries too (e.g. Japan, US). Price for artist work is just one thing that makes it attractive. Other savings occur on the client's side - no matter where your outsourcer is based - when you save on HR overhead and slow ramp-up, buying licenses, renting office space. The danger lies in choosing the outsourcer. With the wrong one the savings on your side will be eaten up by re-work. That's why we really work very closely with clients here. We aim to be directly integratred into their pipeline, just as in-source studios are, and we had some really good experience with that on some AAA projects where e.g. 1 main, 2 in-source and us as outsource studio worked together on an upcoming title.
As outsourcer we're interested that you don't have to re-work stuff and that there's clear and transparent communication because we really want you coming back to us
What gives outsourcing a bad name are those countless mid sized shops who often fall short in quality and communication. And yes, I worked with those too and hated it.
But besides the financial barrier to entry being reduced for people looking to get into game development, the size of the community is increasing, and both the education and the quality of education available is also increasing. There is an increase in resources and connections to relevant people and information.
All of these things have me hopeful for where the industry is headed, and align well with what people are saying concerning the indie boom and where things go from there.
A lot of the cost of these tools comes from the support and help with integrating them into pipelines, taking feedback, bug tasks, etc. I wonder if at some ridiculously low prices the vendors actually lose money compared to if they pirated the tools instead.
Not endorsing the practice, just speculating.
almost everyone else has to pander to publishers and investors who either own the rights to the IP that the developer is working on, or just outright controls the studio through monetary power.
valve has neither of those problems, and has grown at what... 10-20% year on year, consistantly? they make what they want to make, they hire people who can bring new innovation to the business, among other things.
even the big Blizz can't claim to do that anymore.
that's (in my opinion) why the industry is "failing" at the moment. developers backed by cut-throat investors, little to no innovation either out of fear or ignorance, and that's all led to stagnation.
what never ceases to amaze me though, is how COD27 will still shift several hundred million units for essentially being the same piece of crap as COD3, and so they get financial backing (although they get fuck all freedom to innovate), while innovative studios get no financial backing and so therefor they fold.
I disagree. COD is a great series and I love all of their recent (past few years) games. I'm not going to go into why but lets be clear - COD games are very, very good.
there's definitely tons of piracy here - I can buy the games and TV series my studio works on from a guy with a wooden pushcart 100 meters down the road from where I work for $2 each
But big places like us, or Ubi-Shanghai, EA-Shanghai, Popcap, Epic Games SH & Co do have real licenses
Well, it depends on what you are encouraging them to follow. If what you mean is, "do the exact same thing that Valve did," then no, that's not going to work, because Valve already did it.
But perhaps you tell someone to "think about the industry the way that Valve did, and then pursue a course of action with plenty of potential for future growth." Valve didn't succeed just by making Steam. They looked at the course the industry was taking, realized that there was an opportunity no one else was pursuing, and they committed to that opportunity. Steam was the result.
They were also very careful in the actual execution. They spent plenty of time getting feedback and experimenting with different approaches instead of just steamrolling through it. And perhaps most important, they went out of their way to court developers, and provide them with an environment that they could be comfortable with.
You can't just do what another company does. That's an attitude that has lead to all sorts of mistakes within this industry. You have to stop and think about what you are doing and making.
I've personally seen the original version when I was working for a local PC gaming mag here, it ran on a Voodoo 1, looked and played very different than the final. I think there are many screenshots from that version available online today...
This was Gordon Freeman before they started almost from scratch.
And Valve is still privately owned, responsible to no-one but the original owners, and so on.
Almost no startup today has such luxury and so they can't afford to look at what Valve did or try to follow their thinking.
The only big example I can think of is Chris Roberts and Space Citizen - they just reached the $2 million goal today* (combining the RSI and Kickstarter pools) so it is definitely going to happen, all the extra money from now on goes to additional features and such.
But even this took a big name with a 20-year long track record, not to mention some $2-3 million private money to start the whole thing a few years ago so that they could apply for crowd funding with more than just a few pieces of concept art.
*: YEEEEEAAAAAH
More on topic though, Tim Schafer just condemned the fire/hire cycle the games industry goes through.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/tim-schafer-hire-and-fire-cycle-bad-for-industry-6398714