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Post by ECM on Jul 23, 2011 20:30:15 GMT -5
...when you sell a million units and your game fails to turn a profit: We don't even need to get into the argument over whether the game deserved better sales/it's actually a great game/People Can Fly are good, God-fearing, Christians who, like Job, just couldn't catch a break. No, what I want to harp on (to death) is the fact that you can sell 1 million copies of a videogame and manage to LOSE money in the deal. Basically, they would have had to have spent upwards of 20 million dollars producing and marketing Bulletstorm for it to fail to turn even a meager profit at 1 million units. 20 million dollars! On a no-name IP! "If we build it they will...completely ignore it. (Then we'll blame used games and piracy for why our company is sucking wind.)"[footnote:1]I am not saying Epic is saying this (they are not) but it's an object lesson in how developers are *destroyed* by their own hand and blaming everything EXCEPT the elephant (made out of solid platinum) in the room.[/footnote] So the next time you hear some clownish game dev harping on how piracy and used game sales are destroying the biz, remember that these people are spending *insane* money to produce these games and that is--just maybe!!--a 'root cause' of why some many devs are struggling these days. (I have more to say, but I'll let someone else have the soapbox for a bit.)
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Post by elchevalier on Jul 23, 2011 21:05:12 GMT -5
Also, yet another argument for them to move everything into download only content. Thus controlling the game via online (forcing us to be online to play, pimpin DLC and so on)
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Post by feilong80 on Jul 23, 2011 21:15:50 GMT -5
Epic, I think, fell prey to this thinking that their "brand" alone could move units. Very few actual customers care if something is made by Epic; Bulletstorm attempted to fill a niche that didn't exist (scatalogical AAA premium shooter?) and consequently failed.
Most brands that succeed usually do so from a gradual, steady build up; or some kind of very lucky break (see: Halo being the de facto Xbox launch title), or filling a spot in the market that didn't exist (that had demand).
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Post by ECM on Jul 23, 2011 21:31:47 GMT -5
I think most devs fall prey to this: Shen Mue cost, what, 70 million dollars when all was said and done? And that's hardly an isolated incident.
And, hell, the average 'next-gen' game costs 10-15 mil to produce which is just ridiculous when there's just no way, with the sheer quantity of games coming out these days, that the market can support them all, yet they do it anyway.
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Post by kog3100edw on Jul 25, 2011 14:52:30 GMT -5
Yeah, agreed on all points.
And y'know what? By cutting a few of the things that have nothing to do with how the game plays (cutscenes, voice actors, etc.) they can save scads of money.
I'm not sure they can afford to be cheap on marketing a game, mind you. Still have so much to compete against.
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Post by ECM on Jul 25, 2011 18:51:41 GMT -5
That's the weird thing: they send so many games out to die, too.
There's endless examples of very good games that get no marketing spend at all, while the big ones that everyone wants/is going to buy for sure get insane ad buys. (A good, recent, example is Shadows of the Damned which would have probably benefited from a marketing budget 1/20th that of the newest Madden or 1/50th of that for Call of Duty XIII: This Time We're Killing People Wholesale....Again...But With Bigger Guns.)
This is especially true of Wii games, which seem to sell in proportional numbers to how much advertising is thrown at them, with the result being that core games just get shipped to market with *zero* support outside of (if they're lucky) some lame web ads on endemic sites. (Which is retarded, of course, because everyone reading those sites already knows about games!)
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Post by feilong80 on Jul 25, 2011 19:00:01 GMT -5
Yeah, agreed on all points. And y'know what? By cutting a few of the things that have nothing to do with how the game plays (cutscenes, voice actors, etc.) they can save scads of money. I'm not sure they can afford to be cheap on marketing a game, mind you. Still have so much to compete against. From what I can tell, professional CGI cutscenes are the culprit more than voice acting. Budget devs can routinely get pretty good voice acting talent in meager budgets (in my personal experience). Those pre-rendered cinemas, however, are very costly.
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Post by kog3100edw on Jul 26, 2011 15:27:54 GMT -5
There's probably a lot of cost in unnecessary market research, and suits getting paid for their interference-- shit endemic to companies getting too big and really worrying about their bottom line to the tune of millions of dollars.
And I agree ECM. You make a point that exists in every mass market entertainment media too. I read a pretty eloquent quote from Charles Grant, the horror author about this phenomena. He was saying how Stephen King does not need massive cardboard standups housing his back catalog every time he has a new release, but he gets it. He gets big banners strung across the entrance of Barnes&Noble. Whereas middle and low-tier authors (like Grant) however talented they might be, never get anything past a spot on the new release shelf. He didn't have anything against King, but his point is valid. I find lots of good books, DVDs, and games because I search high and low. That shouldn't HAVE to happen. Authors like Stephen King have reached the level of recognition and popularity that he can only be adding fractions of percents in sales at this point, no matter how big the marketing blitz. Whereas bringing a new author a bigger readership stands to be quite profitable, particularly if the publisher has a more favorable contract with the lower-tier author.
You'd think the sense would lie with growing your entire stable of games, films, filmmakers, devs, authors, etc. Not just making these huge pushes for one or two.
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Post by kog3100edw on Jul 26, 2011 15:58:38 GMT -5
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Post by ECM on Jul 26, 2011 17:58:13 GMT -5
Bingo:
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Post by kog3100edw on Jul 26, 2011 19:23:30 GMT -5
Y'know? I'll blow a little sunshine on the sitch here:
Super Street Fighter IV or SSFIV:AE (if you didn't by SFIV first), EDF:IA, and Child of Eden all decent retail games with extensive one-player aspects (even though YES, fighting games better with two), achievements, blah blah blah...
All of 'em FORTY DOLLARS at retail on release day instead of sixty.
Quality games that the devs/pubs at hand all decided to 'value price' and turn out to be pretty bitchin'. So it IS possible to turn out a game, maybe w/out quite so many bells and whistles, issue it on a physical disk, and price it within reason. And actually I think that none of them require 25 hours plus of riveted attention is also a big selling point.
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Post by kog3100edw on Jul 26, 2011 19:26:03 GMT -5
I know there are lots of good value-price releases AND the usual 'Platinum Hits' style reissue bargains, but I picked these out for how recent they are and that they AREN'T re-issues.
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Post by elchevalier on Jul 26, 2011 19:49:01 GMT -5
I might be missing something here, but why are companies behaving like there is infinite money to spend on pointless ads, cutscenes, and other crap, when they know (or should know by this point) that they are NOT going to recover all that money? This is going to implode at any moment.
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Post by ECM on Jul 26, 2011 20:30:11 GMT -5
Because marketing 'knows' that you have to have these things.
They 'know' these things for a few reasons:
* Focus groups made up of non-gamers who may not like games but almost always like movies, so when they fill out their forms, they say "movies were awesome!" and, thus, they have to be in the game (even thought these people probably won't ever buy them).
* 'X' game sold three-trillion copies and it was heavy on cutscnees and voice acting so, in order for our game to be successful, it has to have tons of cutscenes. Preferably more than game 'X'. This is also why games that have no hope of ever developing any sort of online community *still* have online play. (We call this checkbox-itis and it's driven by marketing.)<--This paragraph right here is a huge, huge, huge part of the overall problem.
Then you have the dev side:
* You'd be shocked stupid to learn that *most* (on the order of 90%+) people on the dev side, especially at the big pubs, aren't remotely as hardcore about games as you are.
Sure, they play them, but they play the same games as the people we rag on a lot, e.g. Call of Duty, WoW, Halo, etc. They do not play stuff like Shadows of the Damned or Child of Eden, almost *never* import games, and wouldn't know what, say, Silhouette Mirage was if you showed them the game running on a Saturn.
This lack of scope/knowledge, in turn, reinforces all of the above nonsense w/ cutscenes, etc., because that's all they know because they're only playing the usual suspects.
*Then you have gaming auteur-itis which is part of the whole 'games as art' thing.
A lot of the exec producers on these games fancy themselves the next Spielberg. SO while they're not playing Shadows of the Damned, Child of Eden or, really, being exposed to any other games that aren't super mainstream, they're busy trying to figure how best to tell a story, with gameplay being a second (or tertiary--see: graphics) concern.
This is why I harp on sooo many games being way too long: they focus so hard on the 'cinematic experience' (because that's what sells a zillion copies; see above) that they expect said story to carry the game and not the gameplay.
This has gotten to the point, actually, where I hear people bitching that Super Mario Galaxy has a weak story and that this is somehow a serious problem! What's worse is you actually hear this shit from devs! One of the lead guys on God of War took SMG to the woodshed a few years ago because the *story* wasn't compelling enough! In SMG! WTF?! (Even worse, LOTS of people agreed w/ him.)
(You can also see this shit at work in the recent Bioware brouhaha over how their writers are designers and, thus, super mega awesome, blahblahblah. WHO THE FUCK WANTS A WRITER DESIGNING GAMEPLAY??!?! Trust me on this, as someone that has been paid for nearly fifteen years to write and knows lots of writers: this is probably the last group of people on Earth you want designing games. The same goes for artists, which is why, for example, El Shaddai is gorgeous...and completely hollow as a game.)[footnote:1]I'm NOT saying you can't have a great writer who is also a great designer--I'm saying that, in the vast, vast majority of cases, the two skills are not compatible for a variety of reasons.[/footnote]
I daresay a guy like Borsalio is about as hardcore as you can expect out of the dev ranks. He's *probably* the most hardcore I've ever run into and I've run into *a lot* of devs and he is most certainly the extreme exception and not the rule.
Anyway, I've written enough here, but it should at least give you some idea what's going on: it's basically an unholy marriage between marketing & sales and development, and everyone, for different reasons, is on the same page. And that page reads: "we need to have 'xyz' in our game because, if we don't, we'll flop."
(I should also note that, on balance, marketing/sales is the bigger villain here than development, kinda like it is everywhere.)
Of course, the hilarity is rib-snapping when you see things like the recent post-mortem on Brink over at Eurogamer. Basically, one of the devs blames everything except the fact that the game part of his, uh, game sucks for its failure--in other words, they don't learn from their mistakes, so the cycle begins anew....need more cutscenes! And better graphics! And MOAR!!!!!!
All of this, incidentally, explains why the CEOs at a lot of these companies can't grasp why 'x' game didn't sell like it 'should have'. They figure, hey, we checked all the boxes, spent plenty on marketing, so 3 mil is in the bag. Only, uh, the game part of the, uh, game isn't any good...
(The killer in all of this is there's a market for A or AA games (see: CAVE's stuff) that isn't being served, even if it isn't nearly as large as it once was. The bigger killer is that you could develop 3-4 of them for the price of one AAA game and, who knows!, you might even find some hits when you increase the overall number of games produced instead of betting the farm on *every game you make*.)
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Post by elchevalier on Jul 26, 2011 20:49:20 GMT -5
The thing is, the studios are not making the money they need, so all the suits will have to realize they are doing it wrooooooong. That this model is not working, but they will keep blaming us, the consumers, and used games sells, among other things.
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