Of Three Types of Game Developers, Two Are Going Extinct

[ryukage_sama]

The Escapist shouldn't publish this kind of self-promoting garbage from game developers. I can agree on some of the marks against the AAA-game industry, but his overall purpose in writing this self-aggrandizing fluff piece is that HIS company will be successful because they are good at everything.

 

[Master Cerberus]

Text Wall Warning!

Although most of the article rings true with what I have observed in the gaming trends and my own media consumption the examples that are used for the new guard are terrible, just plain wrong. I have experiences with both Riot and Nexon, these companies DO NOT put player satisfaction and happiness over aggressive monetization. Nexon represents some of the worst business practices still alive in the market, horrible customer service (for myself it took them half a year to resolve a simple ticket, for others I have heard stories of them taking over a year to respond), they most certainly do not listen to their players or look at them as anything other than a cash cow, they have a rampant hacking problem in almost all of their games because they refuse to upgrade to better game security, their releases in games focus on getting as much money out of players as they can, they introduce artificial barriers in their games to drive sales (a cardinal sin, they sell power, not customization), they kill off some of their most unique intellectual properties because of poor support and hacking issues, god the list goes on its not really a surprise that anyone I have ever know who has contact with this company refers to them as the gaming Devil. Riot is a far lesser offender than Nexon is, but they are still a terrible company, they have the resources to do so much with their game yet they actually do so little and ***** about how hard it is for them every step of the way. Lets look at their business practices, they focus on selling customization (better than Nexon at least), but they dont distribute their customization evenly across their champion base, I know its because some champions get played more and they get more skins because of it, but its that kind of favoritism that is part of their mentality as a company. Their servers are fairly buggy, anyone who has experienced their share of lag and disconnects can tell you that, their software management is poor. Their matchmaking system is broken, I have had their support personnel admit as much and its full of exploitable loop holes which players abuse to gain an unfair advantage. Their game balancing revolves around their competitive scene even though some of the changes made dont make sense for the 99% of their player base, another example of the favoritism that I found. If you want a true example of innovators of the gaming industry look at Digital Extremes, a company that is currently working on Warframe. They are an independent producer which are producing a AAA quality game with content that is regularly updated, they actively listen to their player base and incorporate their ideas into the game (literally,a lot of the content is directly influenced by the players), they have bi-weekly live streams where they show their faces and discuss the health/development/etc of the game instead of hiding behind forums and did I mention that 90% of the content in the game is available for free. Also unlike Nexon or Riot when they make mistakes and the player base calls them out on it they admit it and fix them, not pretend that they don't exist or ignore them altogether. I do realize this sounds like free advertising for them, but I am just stating the drastic differences between the business practices of these companies, Nexon and Riot should not be praised, they have abundant resources and a large player base, but they neglect them and squander their wealth instead of producing truly superior products. After all, why bother making it good when it works as it is, am I right?

 

[Branindain]

Why are you praising Riot for their strong community? I've heard nothing but disdain for the LoL masses.

As a LoL player, I have to stick up for Riot. The tales of MOBA toxicity get a bit hyperbolic sometimes but there is quite a bit of truth to them. HOWEVER, those people are not Riot. Riot are marvellous at engaging and interacting with their fan base and the 80% of the fan base who are non-toxic appreciate them greatly for it. You can tell, because anytime a Riot employee posts on a forum they rack up hundreds of "likes" almost immediately.

 

[Kieve]

"Game-Design By Way of Corporate Mission Statement" is neither interesting nor engaging, and my only take-away from this is "Oh look, another Suit who doesn't understand what industry he's in."

Dear Escapist,
As abrasive as Cliffy B can be at times, I'd prefer a dozen articles of whatever drivel he's spewing over corporate slog like this. You want "From the Industry" articles worth posting? Talk to the guys who made FTL [http://www.ftlgame.com/] - they've got a new expansion coming in 2014, Advanced Edition. Ask some Minecraft Server admins what it's like to handle the community on a daily basis. Get some feedback from the devs behind Kerbal Space Program [https://kerbalspaceprogram.com], Rochard [http://www.rochardthegame.com/en], Kinetic Void [http://badlandstudio.com/kinetic-void/], Space Engineers [http://www.spaceengineersgame.com/], The Swapper [http://facepalmgames.com/the-swapper/], or a dozen other small-studio / indie developers.

Don't waste our time with watered-down crap like this, it's just one more symptom of what's wrong with the industry.

 

[MpG]

Seriously? This guy is holding up Nexon as a company to uphold? The nicest thing you can possibly say about Nexon is that despite their abuse of F2P mechanics (and the psychology behind much of it), there are worse companies. Wow, there went any interest I possibly would have had in Rumble Games.

Seriously, this is just a bad PR statement posing as a article.

 

[Amir Kondori]

I don't think I have read such self serving poppycock in quite some time. This f2p bubble is going to pop as people get burned and realize that these free to play games are much more expensive than games that cost $29-$59 up front.

Some f2p games will remain, or even more likely some f2p mechanics in paid games, but this imagined f2p revolution is dead in its tracks. You come back to this comment 5 years from now and tell me I was wrong.

 

[The Maddest March Hare]

This was nothing more than a lengthy chunk of marketing copy written as a way of justifying the author's current business strategy. The concept of AAA games going under to be replaced by cheap/free games is just laughable. You really think that people are going to put down Skyrim and pick up Ridiculous Fishing? Sure, both are fun in their own way, but there is absolutely no way that mobile gaming and the free to play model like LoL are going to replace the AAA gaming scene.

The examples of businesses who have fallen is taken out of context and doesn't focus on why they actually fell. It's like someone claiming that Mobile Device manufacturers are all going to die out soon because BlackBerry went under. They were making poorer quality games, being badly run, they fell behind and were, ultimately, lost. It had nothing to do with the AAA industry as a whole, and a lot more to do with their own personal internal issues with management and production.

Mobile gaming is increasing, for sure, but that doesn't mean it's replacing anything. Please go pout to yourself in a mirror instead of posting your self congratulatory drivel in the guise of an "article" again. Thanks.

 

[infinity_turtles]

I literally started laughing so hard I cried at the thought of Nexon prioritizing player happiness. While I wouldn't say it's a smart or accurate article, that alone means I've got a bit of a soft-spot for it as a comedy piece.

 

[Jachwe]

When you start reading the article you think this text is supposed to be an argument about how the industry is changing but soon you realize how wrong you were.
In the end it is a too long advertisment for Rumble Entertainment that only is pathos and preying on gullible people to believe anything at face value or already in accordance to their believes.

The text works on two levels: First we get a philosophical history about the video game industry that reminds the readers of the marxian history. The age of the "old guard" is the feudalism, the "online opportunists" are the capitalists and the now dawning "new innovators" are communism. Interestingly the slave owning society was left out but this is simple to rectify. It can be the time before 1983 as the video game crash was a game changer for the industry and the "old guard" as we know it just like the crumbling of the roman empire and the beginning of the dark ages. Specifics are not the point here, but the subliminal effect of the text is.
Second we get a dichotomy. The "new innovators" are opposed to the "old guard", the "new innovators" are oppsed to the "online opportunists". The phrase is carefully crafted advertisment. We also see a development as the "old guard" gets replaced by the new "online opportunists" which in turn will be replaced be the "new innovators". First the "old" disappears then the "oppportunists" disappear leaving only our utopia of game development. Both "old" as well as "opportunists" have a bad connotation and our "new innovators" are in juxtaposition to both these words. We are being forced not by reason to agree to the "arguments" of the text but by how the PR department have worded the text. This is the lowest denominator. It tries to tingle our heart strings by envoking pathos wihtout our reason coming into play and qeustion the arguemnts that are made.
As for the arguments, there are none. The text consists of statements disguised as arguments because the author lists examples of specimen examplifying what he is talking about. One might be inclined to say it is enough to list examples but this someone would be wrong. All the author does is list examples and I dont know why they are supposed to be in the same group of game developers. It is very telling if words like "thus" or "therefore" not even words like "if" or "when" are used. How are all the statements or examples logicaly connected? Is the argument reasonable? There is no way of telling with this text. We dont know "where", "when", "who", or "how" anything is supposed to have happended or is supposed to happen because of something. Only once the word "because" is uttered. In the conlusion:"The New Innovators will survive and thrive in the modern game industry because they are dedicated in quality". This refers of course to the statement about gamers wanting quality content (for free). But the author never tried to argue if gamers want this quality content. He simply states in his marxian way of thinking that gamers evolve from getting free to play games that implement short term monetizationmodels to demanding quality content for free. There are no numbers nor any sentence with a "because" which would try to convince us using reason.

The author assumes you are already inclined towards his weltanschauung and only at the very end we get to know why he uses all this wording and the pathos. It is to convince us of this "new" age of game development. It is to advertise his own game development studio which is supposedly part of this "new" development. I dont know much about the focus on quality in their games but I can certify the amount of quality and care this studio takes in its advertisment.

 

[Grubby Ham Wallet]

What a load of bollocks. This reads like an extended ad for the author's own company, in which he states that they are part of an elite few that are going to be the saviours of the game industry, while all other companies are just clueless conglomerates. Besides all the incredibly vague ad-speak guff, the only difference between Rumble and their competitors that they seem to state is that while their rivals are happy to blindly produce games without asking people what they want, Rumble are good enough to tell the people exactly what it is they want before giving it to them. If their next game comes anywhere close to entertaining me as much as 'stale' AAA games like Deus Ex: HR, Portal 2 or Fallout 3 have then maybe I'll be less inclined to feel like this bloke's talking out of his arse, but I highly doubt that happening.

 

[Use_Imagination_here]

It reads like propaganda, basically. The points are unsubstantiated or outright falsehoods.

 

[Lightknight]

Old Guard? The huge studios with all the money and all those successes under their belts? The only studios that are failing are the ones who forget their niche. You don't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an RPG thinking that it'll make COD money just because COD makes it.

The studios that do that deserve what they get, or what they don't get as the case may be. But other studios know exactly what their target market is and what their budgets should be. The innovators are making a splash because they go into development cycles expecting to fail. They budget conservatively and their game has to survive on it's own quality. If it succeeds, then their ROI is huge. If not, then their losses are minimal. It would also be silly to pretend like for every new successful entrant to market success that there aren't thousands of failures around it.

As for clutching the old dedicated console model. This isn't a mistake. GTA V has two versions of the same game in the top 10 biggest sellers of 2013. In fact, the ps3 version is #1 with almost 15 million copies sold and the 360 version is #2 with over 12 million copies sold. They didn't even release a PC version (yet). That's a combined 27.3 million copies.

The ps4 and XBO are selling faster and better than they EVER have before. So, the notion that consoles are going to disappear or aren't worth selling on is a naive notion at best. It does not take into account that EVERY console generation marks the death of the console and/or the death of the gaming pc. Yet every time, both do well and everyone forgets what they said a decade ago.

So the old guard are dying, not because they aren't adapting quickly enough, but actually because they're forgetting basic business principles:

1. The customer is always right (aka be nice to your customers whenever possible).
2. Budgeting:
    a. Forecast the amount of money you can likely make, not how much you "want" to make.
    b. Budget according to that forecast while leaving room for the desired profit and accounting for unforeseen shortfalls and expenditures.
    c. Stick to the budget as closely as possible.
3. Create a product people want to buy.

Take EA for example. The reason we hate them is their failure to maintain number 1. They take losses on games that sell really well because of a failure in number 2.

Square Enix gets number 1 and number 3 just fine, what they fail on is number 2. That's the only way you can have three titles (Hitman, TombRaider, Sleeping Dogs) that sell MILLIONS of copies each and still lose money. Something happened in budgeting whether the problem was in forecasting or the budget itself. All three of those games were some of the best selling games in their years.

Any business, regardless of product and customer relations, can fail if number 2 is messed up. When you get into hundreds of millions of dollars being put into a failed budget then yeah, you're going to hurt. But these losses aren't the same to these companies that they'd be with others. Failures here are easily comped by past or future AAA hits. Ones that fail to adapt after a few failures are the ones that don't deserve to survive.

 

[FoolKiller]

This seems more like Rumble Entertainment's mission statement then an actual article.

It also seems very narrow-minded and one-sided in its description of things. It seems like someone is basically advertising here for their market.