Now That You're Done Firing Everyone...

[Inco]

Because i have little time, i will make this short.

I can tell you one game that did well for the graphics part, yet failed on pricing.
Halo:ODST

They used the Halo 3 engine, which saved a fair bit of time in the production of the game, but priced it quite highly.
The fact that people were keen enough (in reviews, Xplay was an example) to say that the halo 3 engine was showing its age.

Does that really matter? It looked nice then, it looks nice now. At least Bungie didn't slap on a extra year to 18 months to make the game because of the development in new graphics.

Same with Valve.
They use a Modified version of the Half Life 2 engine for left4dead 1 and 2, and some critics have the guts to call out on this 'flaw'. When in fact, it helps speed up the time it takes to create the games. Hell, i think it helped with the early creation of left4dead 2. *

Really, i prefer more games with similar engines, than less with different engines. It would add the amount of games (quality ones) that are on the market.


*Though in this comment, i do not wish to refer to HL2 E3. That has little excuse.

 

[Treblaine]

Hit the nail on the head with cheap games, I think THAT is why they are selling so well.

Take the Christmas Sale that Steam had recently, I can only speak for my own experiences but I WENT CRAZY!! Seriously, I looked back over my receipts and I spent over TWO HUNDRED POUNDS STERLING on games, more than I had spent in the past 3 years combined on Steam!

I hope Steam considers their amazing sale a success.

I have to say I can usually never afford to buy a game new at full launch price, I do play a LOT of games but I don't have all that much disposable income, £40 for a new game is too much for what is not going to be much more than 10 hours of entertainment and is a big gamble on a game that I may very well not like.

And it is getting to that point in this generation that $60 is too much for a single game, it made sense back in 2006/2007 when it was all very "next gen" but I think the booming pre-owned market says as much about how most gamers simply can't afford the original selling price, so Gamespot and its ilk run their little racket of buying for $15 and selling for $40 they are raking in the profits and the publishers don't get a penny from resales.

It sucks that it takes more balls to reduce the price point than to fire thousands of your own employees.

But who will lead the way. Perhaps Valve has shown if they ever publish their sales in relation to the recent Holiday sale.

 

[Worgen]

really firing people is more of an accounting tool then anything else. Its a way for a company to tell wallstreet "look at the money we just saved by not having to pay these ppl"

 

[Raptoricus]

This is a fairly frightening thing to be reading. I'm in my second year of a three year game development degree, and this is shedding a pretty harsh light on my getting a job after I finish. Even if the recession ends, and companies do start hiring again for new projects, there's going to be so much competition from people with games already under their belt, that getting a job is going to be a pretty slim chance.

I hope that they take your fine advice on board Shamus, otherwise, I might have a grim future ahead of me.

 

[wasalp]

Because i have little time, i will make this short.

I can tell you one game that did well for the graphics part, yet failed on pricing.
Halo:ODST

They used the Halo 3 engine, which saved a fair bit of time in the production of the game, but priced it quite highly.
The fact that people were keen enough (in reviews, Xplay was an example) to say that the halo 3 engine was showing its age.

Does that really matter? It looked nice then, it looks nice now. At least Bungie didn't slap on a extra year to 18 months to make the game because of the development in new graphics.

Same with Valve.
They use a Modified version of the Half Life 2 engine for left4dead 1 and 2, and some critics have the guts to call out on this 'flaw'. When in fact, it helps speed up the time it takes to create the games. Hell, i think it helped with the early creation of left4dead 2. *

Really, i prefer more games with similar engines, than less with different engines. It would add the amount of games (quality ones) that are on the market.


*Though in this comment, i do not wish to refer to HL2 E3. That has little excuse.

art style over graphics=tf2. Yeah love how valve uses the same stable, quite modable, engine for multiple of there games with great results.

 

[SaintWaldo]

All of these points of evil (and I do agree they are evils) can be connected to form a picture. That picture is of a stock prospectus and a non-gamer holding it demanding value for their investment.

In other words, if you want to fix the worst parts of what you are complaining about, in my opinion, you must abolish stock holders or at the very least their profit motive. Good luck with that, I'm with you whenever there's a plan.

 

[ccesarano]

Experienced Points: Now That You're Done Firing Everyone...

Shamus Young gives some handy pointers for saving your game company from financial disaster.

Read Full Article

I've wondered about slashing prices myself, especially after graduating and having trouble landing a job. GameFly is my best way to play new games unless I can find them for cheap, and the only games priced around $20 or less I've either already played or really don't want to. Seeing them at smaller prices would get me buying more games at launch, and I'm sure others feel the same way.


One thing that sort of goes hand in hand with your mention of graphics is the mere ambition of some studios. There are a lot of games with great concepts that are simply way too ambitious for their own good. Shooting games that just don't cut it, are bland or even bad because they tried to make an absolutely huge game to compete with AAA-titles. It's hard to find small studios pushing the envelope so you can only rely on the huge studios with massive budgets.

While there are some exceptions (regardless of what you feel of Brutal Legend, the game's polish and quality is top notch for a game that's for the most part from a small studio, and same goes with Batman: Arkham Asylum), I feel Shadow Complex, Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, Penny Arcade: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness and Castle Crashers are key Xbox Live examples of small studios making excellent games without huge budgets. Sure Shadow Complex has the largest budget of the three, but all three are fun and proved to have a market.

Plus, I have no clue how much it would cost to develop any of those three games, but if you only sold 100,000 digital copies of the game you still made a pretty penny. Charging $10? You just made a million bucks. Charging $15? You made $1.5million.

I also think developers are under-estimating the desire for RPG's on the Xbox Live arcade as well. I love the Penny Arcade games because they feel like the old SNES era games with a bit of evolution (not to mention the writing), and I know a friend of mine and I would LOVE to see more games like that popping up to download and play. Yet instead I sit down to give the Divinity II demo a whirl and am greeted by obviously low-budget quality, horrible animations, clunky control and a complete lack of interest to even see the demo to completion. If the developers had been less ambitious and tried to make a game more to the scale of Shadow Complex, Penny Arcade or Castle Crashers, I might have been more interested.

The way I see it, the smaller studios need to be taking a huge advantage with the online marketplace. Build a game that "hardcore" gamers will want, or beckoning to long lost nostalgia, and market it as well as Shadow Complex or Castle Crashers were marketed, and let it loose. Chances are you'll do great.

But instead, everyone just wants to make games that are too big for them. That, or all the games on Arcade are basically coin-op style of gameplay. It's fun for a few minutes to half an hour, but it doesn't immerse in the same manner as a "hardcore" title would. AAA doesn't NEED to mean $60 retail disc. It could just mean the experience and quality the game will provide. Shadow Complex is as much a AAA product as Modern Warfare 2, Dragon Age, Brutal Legend, ODST, Batman, so on and so forth.

 

[PieMaker]

I still am oblivious as to why Modern Warfare 2 was so successful. Yes, I get it, it sold enough copies to buy a small country. However having seen it in action made me wonder if the sales were justified, or question the customers' taste.

Their marketing machine was top notch. Adding that with the publicity they got from both sides (mostly the "bad" publicity about the "controversial" moments in the game) makes everyone interested pretty much aware of the game's existance.

In the end, if the game is loved by many, and hated by zealots, it will do well in sales. This is not fool proof, but it worked with Duke Nukem 3D, Carmageddon and a few more.

 

[Noggy]

But what about the studies showing that if you price your game too low,people will think there's something wrong with it? Note that the Steam games they're selling at these low prices aren't the LAUNCH prices. The cheaper cost model only makes sense if you can sell the cheaper version later to the people who wouldn't have paid the higher price at launch.

I think a better recommendation to developers would be to remember that the market just doesn't go away after launch. Movies have the secondary sales of DVDs and rentals. Game publishers can capitalize on older games with cheaper prices as long as they actually KEEP SELLING THEM. There's a lot of games that I can only find used. Why shouldn't my money go to the developers instead of some gamestore reseller?

 

[heyheysg]

Was the first paragraph a Parrot Sketch reference?

 

[chowderface]

The thing about graphics, I've always considered good graphics to be more about style than realism.

I mean okay so you've got realistic people but everything's brown and it's fnucking boring to look at. I'mma go over here and stare at Dismissed as Kiddy 2. It's pretty.

 

[pumasuit]

A strong article. Strong opinion. You can neve go wrong with a well crafted story with excellent gameplay, no matter how shitty the graphics. Keep it up.

 

[Kollega]

Grrrrrrrraaaaah. Why, oh why the fucking CEOs look at everything only from a financial point of view?! If they actually spent five to ten minutes on, you know, digging deeper than basic company-running routines they've learned in their first year of financial college, they could have made a lot more money by making smart decisions. You can't just make money in entertainment industry by buying low and selling high or some shit like that - this ain't stock exchange. Nor it is banking. They could fire idiots in marketing and PR departments instead of valuable programmers. But they will not. Because all corporate executives are idiots who barely have enough brain cells to drool.

I hate big bloated megacorporations - mainly because they're even unable to do their jobs properly.

 

[CustomMagnum]

Grrrrrrrraaaaah. Why, oh why the fucking CEOs look at everything only from a financial point of view?! If they actually spent five to ten minutes on, you know, digging deeper than basic company-running routines they've learned in their first year of financial college, they could have made a lot more money by making smart decisions. They could fire idiots in marketing and PR departments instead of valuable programmers. But they will not. Because all corporate executives are idiots who barely have enough brain cells to drool.

I hate big bloated megacorporations - mainly because they're even unable to do their jobs properly.

I think I have an answer for CEOs looking at everything from a financial point of view.

Namely that CEOs run businesses, and businesses exist to make money. It's that simple. You can say that they could've made a lot more money by 'making smart decisions', but where's your proof of that?

Yes, laying of 1500 employees and then spending $300 million or whatever for acquiring another gaming company seems stupid, but you know what else seems stupid in retrospect? Making new IPs for games instead of making sequels to the same franchise over and over again. Mirror's Edge and Dead Space didn't make nearly as much money as Madden, the Call of Duty's, or Halo.

We can really debate what game companies are doing as stupid all we want, but unless we have in company notices or psychic powers, we don't have the knowledge of why those 1500 employees were fired from EA. You can say that they could fire the guys from marketing and PR instead of the programmers, but think of it this way. If those marketing and PR guys had successfully marketed games that became hits constantly before the under-performing games but the game in question was the first game that those 1500 employees were working on and you needed to make cuts somewhere... what would you have done?

Now, I'm not saying that those marketing guys WERE successful for the company before or that those 1500 people were incompetent or had the bad luck to be working on a their first game that didn't do well, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case. But yet again, we really have no way of knowing why each of those employees got fired, because most of us don't work for EA or are privy to their CEOs' internal business plans.

 

[Kollega]

- snip (too damn long) -

I forgot to mention my main point, and it goes thus: unlike, say, banking, entertainment industry is not purely financial. You can't run a publishing company with ONLY financial methods - you also have to understand what the fuck are you doing, have a basic idea of how entertainment industry works.

Launching a game or a film is not dependant only on good marketing and getting as much revenue as you can for as little investment as possible. But "big boys" seem not to understand that.

And amounts of marketing dudes employed by each and every corporation in existence are just redundant anyway.

 

[elexis]

It would be nice to walk into EB games or the like and not realize that the latest AAA games are selling for AU$110 or worse, seeing that lest seasons AAA games are on sale for $80.

 

[duchaked]

I wonder how much more a game could sell if they gave it a lower starting price tag
like besides those obviously really crappy games, you know? and not a super big hit but still, could attract more buyers to help make profit

 

[duchaked]

Because i have little time, i will make this short.

I can tell you one game that did well for the graphics part, yet failed on pricing.
Halo:ODST

They used the Halo 3 engine, which saved a fair bit of time in the production of the game, but priced it quite highly.
The fact that people were keen enough (in reviews, Xplay was an example) to say that the halo 3 engine was showing its age.

Does that really matter? It looked nice then, it looks nice now. At least Bungie didn't slap on a extra year to 18 months to make the game because of the development in new graphics.

Same with Valve.
They use a Modified version of the Half Life 2 engine for left4dead 1 and 2, and some critics have the guts to call out on this 'flaw'. When in fact, it helps speed up the time it takes to create the games. Hell, i think it helped with the early creation of left4dead 2. *

Really, i prefer more games with similar engines, than less with different engines. It would add the amount of games (quality ones) that are on the market.


*Though in this comment, i do not wish to refer to HL2 E3. That has little excuse.

even though I wasn't disappointed by ODST because I knew what I was expecting/getting with the game, looking back it could really have been at a lower price (or they could've slapped on Matchmaking for Firefight)
guess it was originally meant to be only an expansion (as IGN put it, "identity problems"?) but oh well
but pricing aside, with Valve it was pretty impressive, it's just too bad them putting out Left4Dead2 so quickly was taken wrongly by so many consumers hahaha (except for those who feel it shoulda been an expansion, but that I can't comment cuz I haven't tried L4D2 yet)
and yeah, no excuse for HL2 H3, gr
but yeah I really do appreciate artistic style and such being implemented as much as newer and better graphics (still, MW2 was really really pretty haha)
I really liked seeing the art styles in PoP (08) and Borderlands

 

[Booze Zombie]

I do agree with you, Shamus, why drop people and hire more people?
Just make the people you've got do better stuff, it's not that hard, right?

e.g: Hey, Pandemic, get the Battlefield 2 engine and making Mercenaries 3 with free-running and air drops you can drop without standing four-feet from your target, that might sell well.

Also, bug test.

 

[Ryuk2]

Well, i can sum up this in one sentence - be like Valve!
I can only agree.