Recently I’ve attended a webinar “3DVIA Virtools Webinar: Building Games Driven by Artists and Small Teams”. The presenter was Virgile Delporte who was talking about the evolution of the gaming industry. So, where were we 20 years ago as far as Games development? Typical team would include 400 people, very high skilled, strong management to get everybody aligned, take 3-4 years to develop a game, and cost 50-70 million dollars.
In general games are very expensive to build. Very expensive to market (due to the high costs of TV advertisement prime time). Very risky -it is considered a “hit or miss” business. Normally sales of over a million copies of your game is considered good, 5 million – very good, 10 million – almost impossible to achieve (Modern Warfare 2 – a phenomena in the gaming industry – was sold at 12 million copies).
As far as the platform, games for PC is not where the money are. The money come from PlayStation, XBox, and other gaming platforms.
Middlewhere is widely accepted.
The trend is that all games are moved over to the most widely used platform – web. To support this statement few facts were brought up :
a couple of stock charts – UbiSoft and Electronic Arts – both stocks were trending down since March, while stocks of Apple (creator of iPhone) and Google (search engine) were going up.
Another interesting fact was that Electronic Arts confirmed 300 million dollars Playfish acquisition, while laying off 1,500 people. Playfish is a company that had some successful games on Facebook. All that should be a support the fact that surfing the social network and playing games on social network has much wider audience that traditional gaming audiences. Although people will keep playing on consoles, opportunities outside the console will be much wider.
How games are developed?
The XBox and PlayStation games cost around 60 dollars and that’s a fairly decent price to pay for the game.
Majority of the price comes from distributors – you have to pay Wal Mart to put it on the shelves. Typical lifespan on the “top shelf” is 1 to 6 months. After that, if the game is not popular, it goes to one of the bottom shelves
Clearly Apple’s iPhone is a winner in this non-player space, although PlayStation is expected to drive most of the revenue in the next years.
Apple changed industry landscape by making 3rd party tools available for everyone to build the games, and making revenue flows easy (no intermediaries, the product goes directly from the developer to the user – this model actually poses a threat to the traditional game developers), it’s an instant purchase, nothing to do with traditional retail business.
Typical dilema with game developing teams in typical game developing companies is that employees don’t play the games, they look at the documents and specs, made by someone else, to build the game.
What is the way for the new game company to adapt? Probably one of the ways is to have small teams doing smaller projects. Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket, in other words, don’t through all your resources on big projects – it’s extremely risky. Big players like UbiSoft have big advantage of investing into big projects – like extremely high quality Facebook app online – but for a smaller company it’s going to be extremely hard to compete.
What should they (small companies) do? LISTEN. If you have an advantage of creating your idea online, and get a feedback from the community – that would be the way to go. Using social network tools to start communities of players that you grow and that you listen to (on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc).
BE AGILE. Don’t be afraid to start over and move on. Don’t spend too much time on something that does not work – start over. Also, keep an eye on new trends(and that includes not only new technologies, but also for example H1&1). A good book on how you should structure your Free/Premium model is a “Free” book from Chris Anderson on the promotional marketing activity. FOCUS ON THE STORY AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. Graphics is impressive, but it’s not really what the players care about. You have to find some innovative way to really set yourself apart, by providing a great experience and a story to your users.
USE EXISTING TOOLS. Web is the most popular platform, more popular that consoles, so start thinking about it when you are planning a new game. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF TECHNOLOGY. Augumented reality, 3D cameras (MS product, released by the end of the year, that will allow you to have no device in your hands, like joystick or keyboard), Stereo Games allow you to have a single building block; Brain analysis (sensors on your head) – that’s coming. Suggested video on that is “TECHNOLOGY LIVE EXAMPLE: AUGUMENTED REALITY” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzCMAgVrPFc), where the cereal box is used as a game console. SOCIAL. That’s the future of the games. It’s been announced in November, that you’ll be able to connect to Facebook and Twitter via XBox. Other platforms followed. Also multiplatofrm is coming soon (if I am playing a game on the web browser with 2 of my friends, one of whom is on XBox, the other on PlayStation).
The next big thing is probably going to be 3D games played on Facebook.
OPTIMAL GAME DEVELOPMENT SCENARIO:
Deliver prototype first, then the game > Target games, play online > Get Feedback > Filter the best of the feedback and implement it.
– FB)