I guess I really don’t have to tell you, ’cause you could have guessed it anyway…
The decline of video games sales.
It’s obvious, but it’s worth mentioning, if only to learn a couple lessons. You would hope that these lessons are self-evident, but… apparently not! The article is pretty good.
Lesson 1: Don’t rely on selling the same thing over and over again to the same customer.
At a fundamental level, a first-person-shooter is a first-person-shooter. An RPG is an RPG. It’s very comfortable to sell people something where they know what they’re getting. People won’t get mad at you. They will already know how to play the game you’re selling (they’ve played it before in some form or other).
The problem with selling the same thing over and over again to the same people is that you really struggle to find some sort of hook, some sales pitch that will convince people it’s worth buying again.
The crutch that has kept modern gaming hobbling along to this point is Better Graphics. Next Generation games look better.
Or, on a more general level, Production Quality. Next Generation games are more polished.
This leads us to Lesson 2:
Lesson2: Invest in areas where you get a return on your investment.
“Although the graphical fidelity of video games increases with each generation of new games console, it takes increasingly more people and resources to utilise the power of the new machines.
“In this current generation a tipping point has been reached where some games development has become almost prohibitively expensive.”
Polish is really expensive. It’s really expensive because instead of shipping something merely different you are forced to ship something demonstrably better. If you just shipped something different that had a comparable level of polish, you’d be okay.
But no, you’re trying to do the same thing, except you have to polish it enough that people will pay full retail price for it again.
And you hit the point of diminishing returns very quickly.
It’s a spiral. More polish means higher expectations the next time, which means higher costs, which means more at stake, which means innovation is not an option because you need to guarantee success.
Hmm… sounds a lot like Hollywood.
Why I’m Ranting
I don’t really care about video games. What really got me about this article is that it highlights something I see a lot in my day to day – We’ve lost the concept of ‘good enough’.
The need to sell more stuff pushes us way past the optimal cost/benefit point of ‘good enough’ to design things that just aren’t worth it. They’re too complex. They’re environmentally unfriendly. They’re 200% of the price for 105% of the value.
And the kicker is… we believe that things *have* to be this way because things *are* this way. Game producers will cry that they have to spend more on pixel-pushing because that’s what gamers want.
No… That’s what they’ve *taught* gamers to want.
If it’s a cycle of stupidity then it’s a self inflicted cycle of stupidity.
Nowhere is this more true than in gaming.
The final conclusive evidence
You don’t need a million man hours to make a great game. You just need a few great man hours.