Business Influence on Game Development?
polycounter lvl 11
How much influence do the business and sales departments have on game development?
I've been hearing, and somewhat agree, that there haven't been a lot of really great games released in a while. I know a lot of people here have professional jobs in the game industry, so I figured this was the best place to ask.
Now I know there are things like deadlines that you have to meet, and therefore, your unable to put a lot of things you planned on putting into a game. But what about the content of the game itself? Are games that are labeled simply as "cash grabbers" due to the fact the developers are changing how they make the games, or are the business departments stepping in and saying based on stats and sales of X game, we need to make our game like X game.
I was just thinking about this on my way home from work and thought I ask what you guys think about it, or if business departments even have an influence at all?
P.S I don't intend to insult anyone's hard work on the games they've helped develop. Good or bad, everyone should respect and appreciate the hard work people put in to get them shipped.
I've been hearing, and somewhat agree, that there haven't been a lot of really great games released in a while. I know a lot of people here have professional jobs in the game industry, so I figured this was the best place to ask.
Now I know there are things like deadlines that you have to meet, and therefore, your unable to put a lot of things you planned on putting into a game. But what about the content of the game itself? Are games that are labeled simply as "cash grabbers" due to the fact the developers are changing how they make the games, or are the business departments stepping in and saying based on stats and sales of X game, we need to make our game like X game.
I was just thinking about this on my way home from work and thought I ask what you guys think about it, or if business departments even have an influence at all?
P.S I don't intend to insult anyone's hard work on the games they've helped develop. Good or bad, everyone should respect and appreciate the hard work people put in to get them shipped.
Replies
"That's pretty much how this company got started, we just looked at what other people were doing and said, 'We can rip that off, haha!"
Business folks have a ridiculous amount of influence. It's why they're STILL making Halo games, and Call of Duty/Battlefield games, and why they make sequels that should've never been made ever. It's also why small indie games have turned into valuable gems lately, because they're such a refreshing dose of change and creativity and are usually not so influenced by "business folk" in their origins or creation.
Now, that being said - you can't really blame them. The numbers speak for themselves. But I do think eventually (at some point within the next 10 or 15 years) we're going to reach a plateau, and developers will be forced once again to branch out. (I kinda feel like the same thing happened x amount of years ago, we have someone who makes a game like Mario, then everyone else makes platformers for a long while because they work and they're what sell. Then we get tired of that, they branch out into more and more genres and get hung up on Call of Duty/FPS games...then we get tired of that, etc, etc).
Though I've never worked in house at a successful AAA studio so I can't say if this is really true or not.
Just my opinion
Minecraft is a perfecet example of an idea of a game taken from another idea and made into it's own. I'd say that Assassins Creed does a good job of that as well.
But yeah I still believe that the industry will fall on it's feet soon, crumble because of it's own success and growth. Hardware costs goes up, development time increases because of complexity, more devs needed to stay within timeframe and games still cost the same. No way in the end to make up for all the money unless you're creating superhits all the time like Blizzard.
It's quite worrying actually, I hope smarter people than me are researching different business alternatives.
I dont think everyone whom bought in brick and mortar has defected to digital(at least not yet).
In the US there's Gamestop and that's it, all their competitors were purchased or went out of business. It's starting to look like Blockbuster, the video rental juggernaut that went bankrupt and are now sad empty places selling their entire stock and furniture.
Digital sales account for 24% of overall game sales but I wonder if they are counting F2P games with virtual sales, all the moms spending money on Zynga games never walked into a Gamestop unless they were trying to buy "that plastic guitar game" as a christmas present.
It's already depressing when I walk downtown and it's just vacant shop after vacant shop, and God forbid I actually want to go to a decent record store, or independent game retailer they just don't exist!
I love the convenience of shopping online when I know I want something, but I also love the 'touchy feely' experience when I'm shopping for something I don't know much about.
Oh well, until they start serving coffee through fibre optic cables it looks like I'll still be leaving the house.
I've only heard complaints that the great firewall slows everything down
I think we're already seeing a huge trend of games going digital.
We're not really going to see a majority of games sales digitally until the next cycle of consoles however, where digital distribution is a major(or even the main) component. Right now a massive amount of games sales are for physical disk based console systems. Sure you can buy those disks at a wide variety of online retailers, but the fact of the matter is a massive amount of sales comes from little Johny 8-17 year old's Parents, or cash allowance, IE: little Johny doesn't have a credit card, and can't shop online without help from his parents.
This has more to due with the fact that traditional physical sales are still happening in physical stores than anything else. The infrastructure for digital distribution is there and has been for a while, at-least in the US.
The same infrastructure that allows us to download games on steam will work just fine when we've got digital distribution based consoles, so saying the cable companies are holding us back, its just illogical. Not everything in life is "the man screwing us over".
They could be a major player in the next generation of consoles. You already have a Netflix app for PS3/360, and PC of course. If they could figure out some way where you "rent" the game from them, and it downloads it instead of sending you a physical disc, it could be the way of the future.
Or maybe I'm just full of crap and nothing will happen... who knows?
It is like that living in the UK / other parts of Euroland where all the cables are held by a monopoly. We must have 30-40 ISPs here in the UK, but all but one of them are directly reliant on BT, who control almost all of the nations landline connections and have no need to improve their infrastructure since they already have almost everyone in their pocket. Virgin are taking over somewhat with their fibre-optics, but that's not as widely available as it could be (only in some cities, and not in all areas).
...not to mention people in places like Oz/Nz who suffer from 1-2Gb a month bandwidth caps. Downloading a game like Rage (22Gb) would take you 1-2 years.
=P
But yeah, I can't really speak on the UK/OZ/etc, I just know that in the US, highspeed broadband "uncapped"(or at the very least reasonably capped) is extremely common, even in rural areas.
Yes, it certainly is. The industry is in flux. The line between large and small studios is blurring. Perhaps more significantly, a lot of companies are beginning to question the current "blockbuster" game development model. Producing large-scale game projects is less profitable and more risky than ever.
Marketing in large-scale development often has way too much control over the creative process. The marketing department can and will make sweeping changes to a game in the interest of making it easier to sell.
In Sweden we have pretty much unhindered internet at cheap prices going all the way up to 200mbit, and we've been up to speed ever since steam launched and before, and it's no way like the picture you're painting of a high-speed internet nation.
Chinas problems are due to many other things but internet.
Stores have had to adjust for things, many focusing on hardware and console games, and most of them selling pre-order and collectors editions of pc games and even steam-versions for steam activation, they've also adjusted to selling both goods online and in retail, it works out for them.
But in short, I've been ordering things online since 10 years back and that hasn't changed much.
for consoles perhaps, but i havent bought a game from a shop for the last 5 or so years, its all Steam. My friends are the same, infact here in ireland its getting quite hard to find PC games in shops. Netwise I have a 250GB cap per month and 25MBit, buying games online is easy and practical.
The consoles are already capable, they just need to let people use bigger hard drives. Physical sales of console games are necessary because console makers aren't letting people use cheap high capacity HDD's. They could easily implement a system similar to Steam if it behooved them, it's just a storage issue. If people could attach their huge HDD's to the console, they could buy lots of games and store them for play. No game disc needed. Everything could be handled over USB or online.
That sounds a bit like OnLive. I think OnLive isn't going appeal to many since so many ISP impose data caps. If you use OnLive along with Netflix streaming, Spotify, drop box, and others simultaneously (because you have roomies or a family), you're going to hit that cap like a George of the Jungle hits a tree.
Oh I thought that's what Steam already did...
Did I say the consoles are not currently capable? Consoles are not only capable, but already doing it, with Xbox live etc. What I said was, until we have the next generation of consoles that will likely be heavily reliant on digital distribution as the main path of getting games into consumer's hands, you're still going to see the majority of sales trending towards physical copies.
There are a variety of issues that play into it, there is no reason to dumb it down into conspiracy theories like "Big bag telcom companies wont let us have it" or "Big bad console companies wont let us have it".
Netflix is going to be sending out physic game disc rentals, ala gamefly. I agree that renting ~30gb games on a streaming service every few days is going to tax a lot of pipes, but buying digitally distributed games in no more taxing than current systems like steam. So the idea that ISPs are holding anything back is just unfounded. ISPS are holding digital console distribution back as much as they are digital PC distribution(IE: not much).
Certainly if you and the 17 migrant workers who live in your basement want to steam netflix and download games all day long, that's going to be an issue. For the average user, its not really a problem.
The intra-chinese internet is quite fast
I still dunno where Chinese buy legit games (or DVDs). I haven't seen anything like a Gamestop yet, and unlike in Europe, Media Markt doesn't sell any games at all. Just hardware. Other than that, it's only small shops and guys with wooden push carts selling bootleg copies.
(*) which fast I mean you can stream hi res video without stuttering. Ain't possible with most sources outside China unless you're lucky. Practically most connections are around 2 mbit, which isn't even considered broadband any more in the US.
I never said they were evil, they're just greedy and underhanded. I reserve the word evil for those that commit atrocities against the human race.
Anyway, digital distribution is the future. It's just moving faster in countries that are more connected.