Elite Co-Creator Gives Thumbs Down to Big Budget Development

[Phishfood]

I have the same gripe against both the movie and music industries really. Both are crying out that piracy is killing them and in both cases my answer is the same: Stop trying to get more money from us and instead stop paying actors $20M+ for one film/game.

I bought a game off steam recently called "atom zombie smashers" It has terrible graphics, but you know what? it was cheap and its fun. Cost about the same as a cinema ticket yet so far I have had 5 hours entertainment. It was developed by one guy (I think). We need more games like torchlight and magicka, less like Crysis. I thought Crysis was very pretty, but a boring game and in the end the boring far outweighed the pretty.

I've spent many more hours playing Tetris and Elite than I have all the CoD series put together.

Bottom line:
Throwing money at a project does not make it good and it would be much easier to make a profit if you DIDN'T throw so much money at it.

 

[FoolKiller]

There are two options I see for maintaining the current trend.

1. Raise the price of new games. Seriously, they cost the same thing 2 decades ago, while everything went up in price. In Canada, the average new game is $59.99 when it used to be $69.99 twenty years ago. If we go by the inflation rate of only 3% a year (which is what Canada averaged over that time) a game that was $69.99 should cost $126.41 today.

2. Take the middlemen out of the equation. Yes, controversial. But sell games directly through an online store AND stop charging the same or more than retail. No transport costs. No retail markup.

That's my two cents worth.

 

[Zer_]

I'm all for product placement, but it needs to be subtle. Think Sam Fisher chewing Airwaves, rather than the spam of Axe billboards in R6: Vegas 2, the rest of Vegas 2 was pretty good incorporating film posters but there was too much Axe.

Awesome product placement is The Fifth Element, with McDonald's.

Also Coca Cola with Blade Runner. They fit into the world. Obviously, fantasy RPGs are a bit difficult to do when wanting product placement.

 

[XHolySmokesX]

As most of you have probably realised, games have reached a graphical milestone, where nearly every game looks great.
This means that games are starting to be valuated mainly on their looks less and less, leaving more room for content.
Also the creation of better graphics engines that create better looking models and textures with half as much data as they would have needed 10 years ago means that after a few years it may be so simple to create a game that looks however you want it to, that developers start to put a lot more time and money in content and other aspects of a game.

I don't personally believe lowering the budget on a game is the best idea, as this should sort itself out as the tech improves in quality and price, but i do believe that games should be delt with differently when they reach game shops.
I cant remember the statistic off the top of my head but the percent of revenue the design team get it pitiful concidering they created the game in its entirety.
The way to best save the industry would be for the design team to get a larger percent of the revenue and for games to become more prestigeos like films rather than being seen as childrens toys or something that lonely guys play in their parents basement.

 

[googleback]

online will do to gaming what TV did to movies on demand. now you dont have to go all the way to the cinema to see a film you were kind of interested in, like sky TV here in the UK are showing some smaller productions on box office day in date with their cinema release. all those idiots need to realise is why the HELL would someone want to pay 10 POUNDS for a box office movie!?

 

[Phishfood]

Awesome product placement is The Fifth Element, with McDonald's.

Also Coca Cola with Blade Runner. They fit into the world. Obviously, fantasy RPGs are a bit difficult to do when wanting product placement.

I can think of a few, Health potions are already red so why not make it a "Coke" Health potion. Then you can make Mana potions "Pepsi" and really confuse things.

Battlefield 2142 showed how to do it wrong - advertise high spec processors that in game context are a century and a half out of date and to the player are probably something you already own.


Personally I am all for paid content like TF2's hats. Pointless prestige items that give the devs money but don't actually alter the game. I am also not (in principle) against paying a subscription for a game, if you don't wanna pay play something else. Of course, if I AM paying continuously I expect to GET something continuously. I still play games from a decade ago (X-com) which hasn't been updated since. Why would I want to pay monthly for a static object?

 

[googleback]

Awesome product placement is The Fifth Element, with McDonald's.

Also Coca Cola with Blade Runner. They fit into the world. Obviously, fantasy RPGs are a bit difficult to do when wanting product placement.

I can think of a few, Health potions are already red so why not make it a "Coke" Health potion. Then you can make Mana potions "Pepsi" and really confuse things.

Battlefield 2142 showed how to do it wrong - advertise high spec processors that in game context are a century and a half out of date and to the player are probably something you already own.


Personally I am all for paid content like TF2's hats. Pointless prestige items that give the devs money but don't actually alter the game. I am also not (in principle) against paying a subscription for a game, if you don't wanna pay play something else. Of course, if I AM paying continuously I expect to GET something continuously. I still play games from a decade ago (X-com) which hasn't been updated since. Why would I want to pay monthly for a static object?

I remember in Rainbow Six Vegas they had Movie posters in multiplayer matches that changed every now and then. that was cool.

 

[risenbone]

While to us charging less for digital distabution from a business point of veiw you have a couple of hurdles to overcome.

Fiestly for that to work you need a majority of your customers to be connected to the internet and in the console market that simply isn't the case with under half of all consoles being connected.

This means you need a retail presence and most retailers will be up in arms if you provide a cheaper alternative to purchacing from a retail outlet not to mention but in America at least there are probably quite a few ways these retailers could find tie you up in legal proceeedings if you did release a cheap online download unfair trading practices and the like.

The major problem in the rise of development costs and the such is the push for realism in terms of graphics and such. Everything has to have a realistic look. To me however this is foolish if I want to look at a real looking tree I just look out the window the trees there are more realistic than anything a programmer can come up with. The humans walking by my front door are much more realistic than evan the most high quality computer graphics/animation have ever got. Actually the more realistic you go for in a computer generated enviroment the more the small unrealistic moments clash and disturb the fake reality making all that money spent in attempting to achieve reality a wasted effort.

The next added cost to development is the 3D stuff which will be the next checkbox added to the list of must haves for AAA development so I don't see this ending anytime soon.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

I agree with his diagnosis, but his ideas are horrible.

The funny thing about the industry is that it seems to only have two sizes of games: AAA games that they need to sell two million copies just to break even and XBLA type games. The indusrty- and I think the gaming press is largely at fault for this too- seems averse to, say, making a game with last generation's graphical technology so that they don't have to sell so many copies to make a return.

Look at the movie industry: Not every movie has a $300 million dollar budget. Sure, there are the summer blockbusters that have huge budgets, but the game industry's way of doing things would mean spending that kind of money on every movie they make. They'd have $300 million dollar romantic comedies in 3D with CGI landscapes.

Sure, there's room for big-budget games, but there can only be so many heavyweights that justify $50 million dollar budgets.

It seems to me that there are a lot of niches out there that would love to have a new game that actually had what they want gameplay-wise in exhange for realistic, cutting-edge graphics. I would personally pay more for another 2D, minimal voice acting Baldur's Gate type RPG that I would for another action game in RPGs' clothing.

 

[ThirdPrize]

Look at the movie industry: Not every movie has a $300 million dollar budget. Sure, there are the summer blockbusters that have huge budgets, but the game industry's way of doing things would mean spending that kind of money on every movie they make. They'd have $300 million dollar romantic comedies in 3D with CGI landscapes.

Another film analogy would be that in cinema everyone uses the same principles of cinematography and the same cameras to film the same sorts of things (people). Everything is pretty much off the shelf except for the props and sets. In games every other release has to use a swanky new engine that gets built from scratch (and probably accounts for a large chunk of the budget).

Avatar cost a lot to film as they had to build the technology to film it while your average buddy flick didn't.

Most of the great looking games are using their new engines while its the average looking games that use last years Unreal Engine. The need to rebuild everything from scratch each time is what pushes costs up.

 

[Formica Archonis]

Sorry, I can't tell what he's saying because there's too many damn Trumbles blocking my screen.

 

[TsunamiWombat]

Yo David Brabden ELite was a great game and i'ma let you finish but WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU DONE?

It's been what, a decade? Two decades? Since you made anything, let alone something of signifigance?

Can we propose a statue of limitations on internet wisdom? THe guy made a great thing and deserves much respect, that does not mean he operates from a posistion of authority on the games industry. I'd rather talk to someone whose -actually- working in the industry.