canadamus_prime said:
GoddyofAus said:
canadamus_prime said:
At this point I want to see the industry crash again. Maybe then publishers will get it through their thick skulls that the way they do business only hurts the industry.
Or they'll just take the massive profits they've already made, give the industry and its supporters the finger and walk away cackling into the shadows, leaving an absolute trainwreck in their wake.
Never underestimate the cowardess of big business when the chips are well and truly down.
I could see Microsoft and Sony doing that as they have their fingers in many pies and the fate of the video game industry wouldn't hurt them a whole lot, but companies like EA, Activision, Sega, Capcom, and Nintendo who's sole source of profit is video games, they'll have to learn to adapt to survive or die and any of them that don't won't be missed. And any of these businesses that are out to make money want to continue to make money.
Well, yes and no. The thing to understand that the core interests at the heart of companies like EA, Activision, and other major companies are a combination of shareholders, who generally maintain investment portfolios accross a number of businesses, and executives like Bobby Kotick that have made enough money where they are able to live in the lap of luxury for the rest of their lives without lifting a finger if they did absolutly nothing else. The entire thing is motivated by rich people getting richer. If most of the powers behind these video game companies walked, it wouldn't really hurt the people at the top of the food chain, just the employees. The crash would leave massive devestation of the industry, and yes there would be some executives hitting the poverty line, but the big boys would be just fine. Most of them would just go on to other investments, find other executive jobs, or just decide to sit down like huge bloated toads on vast piles of money and live out the rest of their lives in luxury without worrying about either the gamers OR the employees whose lives they wrecked.
To be honest, I'm thinking we might very well be seeing a choice of "Video Game Crash, or supporting our own massive exploitation". Truthfully I think a crash would be better, because while we would go without games for a while, the simple fact that there is a demand means someone would rise to fill it. A crash would basically be a sort of "reboot" of the entire industry in hopes that the new version would do better this time.
I'll also say something else that is rather unpopular, as much as people like to point fingers at gaming executives, shareholders, and the big business aspects of things, the fault is also heavily with the developers. At the end of the day the cost of developing a game is largely a matter of human resources, the cost of office space, computers, etc... is minimal compared to these huge budgets. The rising cost of games is because the people making games increasingly demand more money, if a game succeeds and makes a publisher a bundle, the developer wants a bigger share of the pie due to it's success when they make their next game. A developer known for successes thus demands increasingly large amounts of money. A lot of this goes to the "faces" like Studio Heads directly, but a lot of it also goes into the increasingly bloated salaries and wages of line coders, graphics developers, music creators, and other people. Despite the popularized image of developers as ordinary people who just love games, they are hardly ordinary people, though I suppose many are jaded into thinking so if their peer group is a lot like them. Maxim once did an article called "Why Game Developers Drive Ferraris" which simply reported what differant people in the industry made on average per year based on reports, and it wasn't exactly a normal existance. The a lot of the reasons why a publisher (which is evil and greedy in it's own right) needs to do so much to make money in so many cases is because of how much it paid the devs. The devs being the reason why you might see a comparitively short, derivitive, dialed in entry in a series, or even a new franchise, that needs to sell a shocking number of copies to be profitable, having taken more money to develop than previous, comparable games (especially when tech hasn't advanced much), it's because those developers demanded more money based on their previous success. If you see a budget to produce basically the same thing raise from 50 to 70 mil the question to ask yourself is who the raises are going to.
At it's core, it's all understandable. A publisher wants a return on their investment. A developer, like any other employee or person providing a skill, wants fair compensation for their work. Of course as an industry becomes successful and makes tons of money, people's self-importanance inflates as does expectations of what fair compensation is. If your job is to be say a graphics designer, and part of your job is to learn all the new technology and such as being part of the field to begin with, your doing pretty much what's expected of you whenever you make a game no matter what technology it uses, it's part of being a professional. When what you think you should be being fairly paid becomes less about what your actually doing, and is instead based on how much your bosses/investors/publishers are making off the product you produce that's a problem. You demand more, you get it, the price of the product increases, it trickles down to the customers. Cycle continues, more and more is done to make up the differance and keep things similarly profitable, and eventually the entire thing crashes because at the end of the day it all forms to the consumers. The devs aren't willing to settle for a fair wage, and the publishers aren't going to reduce their profits (especially when they expect growth) all of it falls squarely on the consumer until you eventually break.
To be honest, in part I think a crash would be good, because while the publishers would be the big winners, I think a lot of developers need a kick in the teeth too.
One interesting question that comes up with Dead Space 3 for example is that if ne needs to sell X million copies, how much did it actually cost to make? That's the money the guys at Visceral were paid, which set the price and needs to begin with.
To be honest sometime people might want to sit down with a game, and then compare the cost with the price to produce it. You might be going "wow, that was an incredible piece of work" but then carefully analyze to yourself if you think it should have cost like 70 million dollars (or whatever) to produce that. Stop and think about what else you could have achieved with that much money. It puts things into perspective. Maybe it's a good product, but in Maxim terms, do you think it's enough where you feel justified in it allowing some line coder to go buzzing around in a Ferrari?
