As I’ve started to try my hand at blogging professionally, I’ve found myself delving deeper into industry going ons. I’m not talking about spending more time reading publisher press releases. Nor am I talking about going to developer employee blogs for the latest “inside happenings”. Although I do both of those things, they don’t really give you a sense of the big picture, and the big picture is what I want to see. For me the big picture I see is painted with lots of old colors. Colors that have turned out to not be very popular in some industries and the kiss of death in others. While yes gaming is the new golden child of media, it is not new media. Yes, it uses web 2.0 and all it’s trappings such as blogs, podcasts, and social bookmarking sites to get the word out, all it’s internal functions are very old media.

Lets just take a look at how it functions, how the video game industry compares to other old school media, and how a different strategy could imporve either the out come or the satisfaction involved.

Salaries:

Programmers and Designers are paid a salary, most likely based off a 40 or 50 hour work week. It’s widely known that programmers for most development companies work longer hours than this. Some during crunch time only, others the whole damn time they are employed. Remember the EA fiasco over this a few years back?

This pretty standard across the board in MSM. It’s common for 90% of those employed on any given media project to receive a flat rate. There is an exception to this rule however. Actors, producers, directors, and various other key staff are given a percentage of the profit. True, Hollywood productions do suffer budget woes but they do sell products that have no peer in the entire world. This is because these people have a vested interest in seeing the project do as best as it can. Not only this, but it drives these people to work just as hard on every project they are involved with. With salaried people, not so much. Sure it looks good on their resume to be involved in games like Bioshock or Oblivion, or Mass Effect. Not so much that these people are willing to bust their asses doing this everyday for the rest of their lives. Many an article I have read about programmers and designers dropping out of games to do higher paying and/or less stressful work in their field.

I also remember reading articles both before and during the EA fiasco about programs/designers willing to work for significantly less up front for a chunk of the back end. This strikes me as a reasonable idea. It frees up both parties for better options. It allows the good programs and designers to float to the top and gives the mediocre ones incentive to try harder. The developers benefit as well. Since talent would be recruited on a per job basis they can bring in more top tier talent and drop the 40 Timmy “the bug finder” interns from the roster. It also allows them to minimilize risk, the talent must be proven to even get through the door, upfront and overhead costs are slashed, and it brings a higher quality of product to market. I’m not saying the Hollywood model would be a perfect fit, but it would be a place to start.

Middlemen:

Most developers cannot afford the developing and/or advertising costs associated with bringing a game to market. To accomplish this they approach a publisher. Who then requires the developer to sign over all or nearly all rights to the IP. In exchange the developer gets enough money to survive but not enough to publish their own game next time around or even 3 games down the road. Some developers buck this trend due to a title’s popularity their next project is virtually guaranteed to sell but most live or die at the whim of publishers.

This is very music industry. It’s also the main reason the music industry gets no respect or sympathy from the consumer and is in free fall as you read this.
Musicians must borrow money with interest to tour, produce and promote their work. They also have to give up the rights to their IP. Today artists are also required to give up a percentage of endorsements, touring, and merchandising. While video game publishers are not quite this draconian, they are not far off. Just like the music industry developers are looking for ways to change this deal. Once again I’ve read many articles stating as much, but I have no comparable solution. Between closed hardware platforms gaining ground and rising development costs, the ability for developers to break free from this model seems to be getting progressively harder.

Bean Counters:

This is another publisher problem. While everyone has to watch their finances publishers also look for marketability. What this means is they judge how good an idea is off of how much it brings in. They have many tools at their disposal to help minimize the risk. One of these tools is following trends. See what everyone else is doing and follow suit. The consumer sees this as a glut of a particular genre on the shelves. A good example of this is the current crop of FPS/TPS Halo, Resistance Fall of Man, Gears of War, Call of Duty, Team Fortress, War Hawk, Haze, Fraction, Unreal, Turok, Rainbow Six, Stranglehold, Darkness, Blacksite Area 51, Command and Conquer:Tiberium, Kane and Lynch, Army of Two, Timeshift, Shadowrun, etc. You get the idea. Some of these games are quit good and bring something new to the table. Others are mediocre doing nothing more than taking game play elements from other genres and putting them in a FPS. Still a third group is terrible slapping a known IP to a FPS environment and banking on the name to sell. I leave you to categorize the above titles.

Of the above examples the responsibility for the quality titles can be laid at the feet of developers that are trying to expand the FPS genre. These developers are often established in the industry and are given free reign to develop a given IP as they wish. The titles that are absolute crap can be laid at the feet of the bean counters wanting to make a quick buck. This is the second problem of dealing with publishers. Most often these developers are told what IP to use, given a tight deadline, minimal funding or any one of an infinite number of restrictions. Some developers trying to make the project work as best they can, others are just as in different as the bean counters. Yes you’re suppose to make money, yes you have to put restrictions on time and costs or development will go on forever. But only to a point as ultimately you stifle the creative process. Just like the music industry you end up with a glut of cliche IP and no new ideas.

Not only do you have to deal with the above two problems with bean counters but there is still a third issue. Units moved. That’s all that matters to the publisher. They don’t care about the reviews, which have been largely bought or bullied across the industry. They care about how many units they sold. If it didn’t sell well the IP is put on the shelf or handed to a newer/smaller development team where the sequel is sure to bury the IP. I offer up Beyond Good and Evil as an example. The irony is they end up going back to this shelved IP and reusing it anyway, e.g. Command and Conquer FPS. Thus having to re-build consumer awareness and IP reputation. Again it’s a perfect analogy to the music industry. Since all the new talent isn’t selling as well as the old talent they are pulling out their back catalog for covers, reunion tours, and one off shows.

There is yet another problem, those damn bean counters really throw a wrench in the works. That problem is minimal risk. The bean counters love their comfort zone. This is why you see certain reoccurring trends, some you may not even be aware of. One is that console players must have an avatar that they can control inside the game. The commonly held belief with publishers is that gamers will shy away from a game if it doesn’t have a main character you can identify with. An equally bad sin in their eyes is giving the gamer an avatar and not letting them control it. This may have been the case when games were played mostly by the 13-20 crowd, but not so much today. Today the biggest group of gamers are the 18-36 crowd. Both Battle for Middle Earth and Command and Conquer on the Xbox 360 have proven that non avatar based can indeed be popular.

Still a fifth issue, DAMN BEAN COUNTERS!! That is of the least common denominator. Games are made to appeal to the widest audience as possible. Translation: Dumb it down. Developers can be accomplices in this case. The best example of this is MMO’s. Ultima Online was the only MMO to have an in game economy that didn’t become drastically out of balance within months of release. It also was the only game that provided you with something to do other than swing a sword. Sure other MMO’s have crafting, but they are tack-ons to the game. In UO you could make a character that never touched a sword and still have a great time. But since it wasn’t the most popular way to play and added to development time it was stripped from all future MMO’s. This wasn’t the only economy making feature done away with. Weapon and armor wear, spell components, item loss upon death, the list goes on as t how these games were made”more easily accessible”. MMO’s are not the only one’s guilty of this.This year a lot of developers are trying thier hands at RTS’s and they are removing elements of game play. Not to stream line the process or replace it with an inovative feature, but to dumb it down. So that a perceived “average gamer” who is a moron none the less can more easily grasp it.

Raising the Floor:

This is actually standard procedure in any maturing market. Raise the cost of entry. Yes it is quite common for a company to raise the costs to enter their industry. Why? Because often times it’s cheaper to pay a little more in operating costs rather than deal with competition. This is why car companies embrace ever changing safety standards. Sure more capable hardware is adding to the cost of games today, but it isn’t the only thing causing games to run 20+ million a title.

Piracy:

Gaming is actually handling this pretty good from a consumer stand point. Unlike the music industry they are not suing every third customer of theirs and then exclaiming “I don’t understand why no one wants to buy our product!” The developers are painting themselves into a corner. I think the big move towards consoles is because they offer a closed platform that is more difficult to hack and harder to play stolen games. This is all fine and good, but they expose themselves to more publisher and hardware manufacturer whims. What did Ben Franklin say,” If you give up freedom for security, you end up with neither.”? Something like that.

I really think developers are selling themselves short. They can tackle a million lines of code but are afraid to draw outside the lines when it comes to the back office? I’d like to see some developers talking to venture capitalists and maybe get some of their freedom back.