Have you ever wondered why a popular game like the original Phoenix Wright was so hard to find in stores? MTV has an interesting article on the business behind how many copies of each game get made.
“The sales life cycle of a product is shrinking,” said Svensson. If a game undersells its first month at retail, it’s finished at retail. Often, though, it’s quicker: if a game underperforms its first week, it is more than likely “dead on arrival.”
Over the last few decades, a number of video game genres have come in and out of fashion repeatedly: turn-based strategy games, fightings games, RPGs, etc. There seems to be a pattern to this process.
Genres can stay in each stage for years, even decades. Western-style RPGs were born very early in the history of video games. They started very simple, but grew more and more complicated until they dropped in popularity. It took Diablo, Fallout and Baldur’s Gate to bring them back to popularity with a new point of view and a new way of playing (top-down point and click instead of first-person turn-based).
A number of modern games seem to be getting far into this process. FPSs are getting more complicated rather than more sophisticated. They got a new life by being introduced to console players, but even then I believe they’re getting into the “complexification” stage. RTSs have long reached the complexification stage and are going toward death. A few years ago you couldn’t throw a stick without hitting a RTS, now I can’t name a single one that came out in 2007. Turn-based strategy games may be having a small rebirth on handhelds: Advance Wars is doing great on the DS and the PSP has many Japanese Tactical RPGs.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve stumbled into an alternate universe. When I was a teenager, admitting to liking computers was social suicide, now fancy computers are created specifically for fashion-conscious women. Going on a BBS was the height of nerdity, now all the cool kids use Facebook. Computers were big beige boxes that cost the price of a used car, now the tiny EEE PC costs a few hundreds.
PCs have become a cheap commodity. They’re not really exciting anymore, you buy one to browse the web and hope you won’t have to buy another one for as long as possible. Price is what matters for most people, not performance.
Buying a 500$ video card doesn’t make much sense when the rest of the computer costs less than that. The enthusiasts who are willing to get an expensive PC to put that card in are also technologically knowledgeable enough to pirate games — and chances are they will if they want to save the money to buy their next PC.
As PCs become an inexpensive commodity, it makes less and less sense to target the most powerful computers on the market. Indeed, casual games are booming while hardcore games have a hard time becoming hits.
PCs will still be good platforms to put games on, but I expect they’ll get fewer high-performance games in the future. The most successful PC games will make creative use of the PC’s unparalleled network access and openness.
Distributing games online is an obvious thing to do, but what about dynamic pricing? You could make a website that sells your game at a price that varies according to its popularity. The first 100 buyer get it for $1, rewarding the early adopters, the next 100 get it for $2 and so on.
The system could look at sales in the last few weeks and base the game’s price based on that, trying to find the optimal balance between offer and demand. The more popular a game, the more expensive it is. Old games already get discounted, why not automate it?
While I have to live under the iron-fisted rule of the ESRB, I have to say I hate this secretive order of censors. Here’s why.
Books have existed for centuries and they work great without any kind of ratings. Why can’t games?
Greg Costikyan recently gave a keynote presentation at Game Focus Germany. I didn’t attend this conference, but the Powerpoint presentation is available online here. It’s a great overview of possible business models outside of the typical developer-publisher relationship.
I’m not telling you anything new by saying piracy is a huge issue on the PC. Call of Duty 4, last year’s best-selling game, sold over 7 million copies in total, but less than a million of those were for the PC. Both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3, two major PC games, had lackluster sales number. Given this, it’s unsurprising to see fewer big titles being created for computers.
The situation is even worse in parts of Asia — at least in North America you’re unlikely to find stores openly selling pirated games. Unable to make a profit selling games, Chinese and Korean game developers have turned to online games. MMORPG like World of Warcraft are massive hits there, and so are free games like MapleStory that make you pay for special items.
A game, as a product, can be copied and distributed very easily. A game, as a service, cannot be duplicated and each player must pay for his experience — pirating a service isn’t possible. While western PC gaming is crashing down because of piracy, eastern PC gaming is booming despite piracy.
Games as service are coming on our side of the Pacific ocean. MMORPG are already popular and a few companies are hard at work bringing to our shores the free games model from Korea. This change in business model will have a big impact on the games we play, starting with a bigger focus on multiplayer. I expect consoles to follow this trend too, now that they’re able to go online.
Would you go see a movie without having seen a trailer for it? A game without a demo is like a movie without a trailer.
A game trailer isn’t enough because you can’t convey interactivity properly through a non-interactive video. You’re showing all the superficial aspects of the game without showing what it’s really about: gameplay.
While no one could accuse Hollywood of being unwilling to create sequels to their hit movies, their efforts are nothing compared to game publishers. You rarely see movie titles ending with a number larger than 3 these days, whereas it’s practically the norm in gaming. This isn’t because movie makers are more creative than game developers, but simply because game sequels have more financial success than movie sequels. There are two main reasons for this.
The first reason is that movies have to reinvent themselves with each sequel. You can’t have the same story in a new location with slightly different enemies; a movie must have a new story for each sequel. A different story brings the risk that it will be worse than the previous one, leading to a poorer movie.
Games on the other hand can get away with repeating the same gameplay — even the same story — multiple time in a row. How many times will Link rescue a captive Zelda by finding a sword, a bow and a boomerang along the way? The risks of ruining the magic behind a succesful game is much lower if all you do is create a few new levels.
The second reason is that a movie’s sequel often costs just as much to make as the original. New sets must be built, actors must be paid, special effects must be prepared, etc. To be profitable a movie sequel must be just as popular as the original.
Game sequels often cost less to make than the first in the series: characters are already modeled, enemy AI is already implemented and tuned, the engine is already up and running, etc. Making a sequel to an unprofitable game can actually bring the franchise to profitability, whereas making a sequel to an unprofitable movie is just spending good money after bad.
So that’s why we have so many game sequels: they’re easier and more profitable to make than movie sequels. However, sequels are generally more of the same and cannot really expand the audience for video games. That’s why original games are so important to transform video gaming into a truly mainstream media.