Video Gaming, Looking Forward into 2009 and Beyond!
There’s no turning on a TV, radio or pulling up the front page of our favorite news site these days without being confronted by the bleak economic news all across the world, even more recently these hard times are coming home to our own industry, once thought safe from a recession, in the form of mass layoffs and game studio closures. But fret not!
Our industry has gone through many changes over these years and what is going on right now is really more of a restructuring from one way of doing business to another. A restructuring that I truly believe is one of the most exciting changes in so many years, a renaissance in the way we do business and, what I hope, will be an explosion in creativity like noting we’ve seen in years!
Currently, many game developers are moving in the direction of smaller production teams and embracing the casual game market as the road to greater profits, lower overhead cost and less risk for their investors. This was originally lead by the growth of casual game market for the PC and cell phones, to the point where it has now spread to the Nintendo Wii and more recently Apple’s iPhone®. Where once the larger game publishers and developers saw this as a low-end market for them, they have awakened by the fact that games now being produced by just a handful of people in a few short months are selling millions of units worldwide!
But in this great awakening, the multi-million dollar question is, can these game publishers and developers adapt quickly enough to these new marketing conditions in time for their own survival? I believe they can, if they are truly willing to look at what is quickly becoming the future of game development and publishing in the not-so distant future.
They need to accept that casual games are here to stay and will be a large part of any successful game developer and or publishers future product line. Those who are not willing to acknowledge this fact and make whatever changes are necessary to their business model will not be around very long! Game developers and publishers who once bragged about having 100+ man teams devoted to a game project for two or more years are risking finical suicide in an economy embracing games at $19.95-$24.95. They also need to understand and adapt to the fact that traditional brick-and-mortar game outlet are not going to be the marketing battle ground of the future, so don’t plan on wasting your recourses chasing that shelf space near the front of ever store. The new battle ground will be negotiated over the front pages of game download portal sites, popular gaming sites and visibility on other high traffic web sites around the world.
Here are just a few of my recommendations:
1: During these harsh times I would recommend that any publisher or developer focus at lease 75% of there developer recourses on the casual game market, spread across multiple platforms. Anyone who fails to make a name for themselves over these next 5 years in the casual game market is going to have an extremely hard time moving up the ranks to an equal level of visibility of other publishers and developers starting now. Download portal sites, just like a physical store location, are only going to devote key front page visibility to those developers and publishers they have a good and long relationship with, so don’t waste time in not establishing a relationship with them as soon as possible!
2: Any casual game development project should be restricted to a development team of 10 or less people, for only 8-12 months. With the technology that is readily available and most developers already have on hand, this should be enough time for any casual game project. The key here to a successful development processes is not to over reach! A great number of game productions fail ever year due to the design being beyond the scope of the team’s capability, time to implement and or tune properly. This is where early planning becomes very important, and it starts with management’s appraisal of the capability of each team member. Planning a game production, of any kind, that expects too many, never-before-done elements, code wise or animation wise for your team to do, is only asking for trouble! If you look around, you will see many examples of very simple games that are just so polished to such a high level that they have become classics!
3: If you’re just a developer that is normally tied to getting your games to market via a devoted publisher, then keep your options open towards self-publishing. I know this will scare many developers who don’t have experience in marketing their own games, but this is a growing market you need to become part of as soon as possible. It will become a major part of being a game developer in the future, and unless you like the idea of giving your profits away to a third party and, in most cases a say in your creativity, you’ll make this a part of your future business model.
4: Don’t develop casual games for game platforms that have an extremely high overhead and ramp-up cost. I know for many new and even experienced game developers out there, it might seem exciting to develop games for the latest and greatest gaming system, but you have to be realistic in these times. Developing for some of these systems can not only magnify your development costs ten fold, but also brings a high risk of not getting your product done on time or at all! There is also the natural high overhead cost in highly experienced and costly programming professionals to pull it off successfully. Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to start small and think big!
5: Don’t be afraid to buy off-the-shelf technology and tools for your game projects. This is an area of game development that I’ve been frustrated with for years now, in seeing how many developers are so close minded to using all of these resources out there! If you just open your eye’s you will find, just about anything, from full game engines to art tools and vast free code libraries. Your studio makes no money in creating these assets from scratch when they are already out there and well suited for many of the gaming projects you are planning to develop. Likewise it’s more important that you spend whatever extra time you have polishing the play of your game than debugging a totally new piece of code! Look for tools out there to speed all aspects of your development process, you’ll not only find that it has great benefits in the speed in which you can finish a product, but also in the quality of your end-product and the upkeep of the mood of your development staff, in not having to fight with frustrating half-baked tools.
6: Game Publishers should keep an active eye towards what is coming out of the garage games development community, for this is an area of explosive growth over the next few years. I would even go so far as to recommend and encourage direct communication with such start-up developers at an early stage, providing guidance, advice and when it feels right, resources to such groups, for the payoff could be great!
This area of growing game development that I’m totally excited about, for as someone who has spent the better part of his life making professional video game and watching the growth and trends of this industry, it truly has become stale! Don’t get me wrong, for there has been some really exciting games to pop-up over the past few years, I still look back at the old arcade days and early days of this industry when game designers, programmers and artist had so little to work with and yet pulled off some of the most memorable games of all time! It just feels like we have, as an industry, spent way too much time focusing on the next advancement in pushing polygons, new wiz-bang lighting effects and trying to simulate real life in a game to stop and ask the question, are we making unique games? Or, are we just trying to impress ourselves! A lot of the games people are talk about have or are coming out of Nintendo! Why? Is it because it’s the best technology? Is it because of the best graphics? NO! It’s because they know that they have enough already on hand to make the best games, it just takes vision and ingenuity!
In the early 1990’s, when working on games for the Sega Geneses and SNES, our development team, lead by David Perry at the time, had a unique design philosophy, come up with one global game feature that everyone playing would get a kick out of and do everything else to a high polished state! Following this philosophy our products enjoyed great sales, great press coverage and as a team we never missed a deadline!
Just some food for thought - Happy Developing!
-William Anderson
This Article is Copyright © 2009 by William H. Anderson all rights reserved.
