Whilst I was working down in California this summer, I had the opportunity to see a facinating talk/conversation between Will Wright and Brian Eno. This talk, hosted by the Long Now Foundation, was one of those times in your life where much of what they say haunted your mind on the train-ride home, and you would spend days thinking about it. Certainly an interesting experience. And now, due to the magic of the internet and FORA.tv, you too can share in that pleasure.
Introduction
Apple is certainly has in the last few years really taken off in terms of profitability and general consumer awareness of their products. There have been a number of radical and aggressive moves undertaken by the management, many of which have proved to be successful. Despite the surges in profit and market share in the last few years, and the popular marketing campaigns, Apple has failed to entrench itself as a serious competitor against PCs in terms of market share. Apple’s 2006 Year over Year market share increase of 16%, while massively out-weighing the industry average still only results in an increase from 4.4% to 4.8%, Hardly a major threat to the PC platform.[digg=http://digg.com/gaming_news/Why_Apple_Gaming_Sucks]
I had the fortunate privilege of working for Apple last summer as an intern, and I can tell you the company is just as phenomenal from the inside as they seem to be from the outside. Having never used a mac before working there, I was definitely a fan of the smooth interface and the elimination of the “Death by a thousand paper-cuts” experience that one often finds using Windows (or Linux, for that matter). Despite this, at the end of the summer I couldn’t bring myself to buy a Mac, even though I needed a new computer, and I could leverage employee discounts. The reason was simple. Gaming.
I always thought it would be a neat idea to create additional content for a game by way of Alternate Reality Game type materials, and use it as a profit center. For example, frequently AAA games will release Art Books as a premium buy for people who are really hardcore about a product (Blizzard does this frequently). I think it would be significantly more interesting if such books were sold over Amazon.com or eBay under the pretense of being integrated into the storyline. Clearly this isn’t possible in all games, but in a significant number it would be.
Imagine, for example, one made a game based on the Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft. If the designers of the game were to include part of their story bible, as well as some art work or concept sketches into a book, and call it the Necronomicon, sell it on eBay under some pretense of finding the thing somewhere, and leak the existence of such a book to the gaming press.
Well that’d be kinda cool.
This stealth-marketing ploy could even be possible pre-release to drum up a few bucks. The caveat there would be that the publishing channels one would have to go through would be less conventional, such as Lulu.com. Even so, this isn’t necessarly a bad thing, and in fact opens this up as a possible revenue channel for Indie game designers as well.
And here at GhostRazor, we’re all about the little guy.
Forbes put out an article last December illustrating the breakdown the the price of next-gen console games, and why they carry that hefty $60 price tag. I think this article really serves to show why there’s so much hype about digital delivery systems. Under this breakdown scheme
Art/Design $15 Programming and Engineering $12 Retail $ 12 Console owner fee $7 Marketing $4 Market Development Fund $3 Manufacturing Costs, Packaging $3 Licensing $3 Publisher Profit $1 Distributor: $1 Corporate Costs: $.20 Hardware Development The publisher profit is only $1 (1.5%) on each title sold. Many publishers claim that they need to sell 500k copies to even break even. With game piracy as rampant as it is these days on the PC, you can see why the scenario doesn’t significantly improve in that realm either. Digital Delivery, while coming aboard with many issues in its own right, at least solves the problem of many of these costs. About 20% of the cost of the title is Retailer Profit. A digital delivery mechanism would allow publishers to move some of that money back into their own pockets. Another 5% of the cost is the Market Development Fund. This is the money the publisher pays the retailer to have premium location in their store, increasing the likelihood of sales. Digital Delivery could significantly reduce this cost as well. Another 5% is manufacturing cost. No Manufacturing, no cost. Digital Delivery Mechanisms such as Xbox Live, GameTap, or Steam have the potential to turn a paltry 1.5% of total cost being publisher profit into 31.5%. Even with a reduced sales total, this is a mechanism that will definitely be exploited in the coming years to a much greater extent than it is now. There’s no challenging figures like that. Of course in my example I’ve neglected the distribution costs somewhat, making the assumption that the costs of distribution through mainstream retail channels is approximately equivalent to what one would have to pay to set up on Steam or XLA.
I’ve recently finished reading Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, and it got me thinking about a new approach to game assets. Game assets are the “things” that go into a game. For example, artwork (textures, 3D Models, Sprites), Sound Effects, Music, Voice, etc.
The primary job of the Artists, Sound Engineers, and Designers is to create this content. As gamers continue to demand higher quality games, one of the most straightforward ways to increase such an ineffable metric as ‘quality’ is to increase the amount of content, especially artwork, as well as the complexity. While the tools to create these assets continue to evolve in parallel with increasing demands (and to a certain extent, driving these demands), Content developers can still only make new assets so fast. Developing these works is a rather specialized skill which requires a large modicum of creativity as well. As such, developing these assets is one of the most expensive parts of creating games. These costs have risen to the degree that barriers to entry in the video game industry are now quite prohibitive. This makes it difficult for small commercial studios and independent developers who have difficulty drumming up the resources to hire content developers to get off the ground.
It also makes life difficult for large developers and publishing studios. The Games Publishing Business, much like the recording industry, is a difficult and stressful business to be in. In the music industry, you have no way of speeding up creativity. The artist will create music at his or her own pace, so you have no real way of knowing when it will be ready. When it is ready, you don’t know if it will be good, and if it is good, you don’t know if the public will go for it. The games industry has mitigated these factors somewhat by sticking to formats which are well established. Publishers are less willing to fork over cash for a completely new idea that doesn’t have established sales potential when they could spend the same money to create a new first-person shooter. If the cost case is the same, they’re in the business of risk management. At the same time, however, completely original ideas are the seeds from which new genres, and thus new profit centers grow. Without fostering an environment in which these new ideas can be fleshed out, Publishers are choking off their own future revenues. What Publishers need is a way to promote methods for independent developers to bring out their new ideas in an inexpensive way, so that they can publish these titles without taking on large risk. Microsoft is already doing this to a certain extent through XNA and XBox Live Arcade. This does not, however, address the issue of expensive assets.
To resolve this issue, enter Wikinomics. There are several large publishing studios who also act as in-house development studios (Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Nintendo). What this means is that they own large amounts of sound and art assets which they are not currently using. What these publishing houses should do is license a large portion of the assets from development studios they own to the public for free under some form of Creative Commons License. The license would allow for commercial works, including derivatives to be created, as long as the original artist and studio were credited in the final production. Access to large volumes of free and fully utilizable content would massively reduce the cost of developing new titles.
Okay, so you probably see why it would be of benefit to indies to have access to all the art assets owned by Microsoft Games (Lionhead, Rare, Ensemble, Bungie, FASA), Electronic Arts (Bullfrog, Origin, Maxis, Westwood, EA Sports), Nintendo, and Ubisoft for no cost, but why would they do this?
Simple. These warehouses of assets are not profit-centers for these companies, but they could be. By opening up these assets, at virtually no cost to themselves, they would stimulate significant growth in the independant games community. These indies would be able to take assets which were professionally developed, modify them to their own needs, and more easily deploy a marketable title. Many of these titles will be new and innovative, and employ gameplay that would be too risky for a major developer to secure funding for. These indies are then going to be looking for someone to publish their titles. And by providing them with all that content, that goes a long way for goodwill towards the publisher. Publishing these titles through more inexpensive mechanisms like Steam or Xbox Live is a low-risk cost to these publishers, and it’s more than likely that some of these new titles might be a major hit, allowing the publisher to thus have turned their old warehoused assets into major profit centers.
Merck did this with pharmacetuical prototypes, and encouraged other major players to join in. It resulted in a major cost savings for everyone involved, as much of the overhead being done simutaneously be each individual company was reduced. I don’t see why this tactic couldn’t work for major development studios as well.
Unfortunately, unless a CEO somewhere has a massive flash of inspiration and drives this initiative, we’re not likely to see it in the near future (Come on Reggie, we’re counting on you now).
I came up with a neat game mechanic that I thought would work well in a First-person shooter. This mechanic would would in any setting of a FPS, but the one I had in mind was a Steampunk game. I think the Steampunk genre is under-served in todays marketplace. Many people are perhaps not aware of the genre, while at the same time I think there’s an intrinsic appeal to the whole Steampunk concept. My intuition on this is fueled by the popularity of works such as LXG, Van Helsing, and even such oddities as Steampunk Starwars which recently drew the attention of notable bloggers on Boing Boing and Wired’s Table of Malcontents.
In most FPSs, there are a series of various weapons you can aquire. Typically there are pistols, and shotguns, and machine guns, some type of rocket launcher, etc. Defining these as known weapons makes the artists life easy, as well as the game designer, as the tools the player has at hand are always known within a certain range, and levels can be planned accordingly. What I propose is to instead of finding weapons, find parts, and build your weapons. You might find, for example, some type of stock, which would have slots you could put other parts into (a mundane example would be a barrel, some type of ammunition container, and a trigger mechanism). The parts you use to build the weapon would result in different properties, range, damage, etc. The individual pieces would have to be animated by an artist, and programmatically joined on the fly. One might also have special parts which are rare or hard to find, or have different types of technologies which might give bonuses when interfaced together, or penalties when interfaced with alternate types. Another mechanism which might be interesting is to have the parts wear out, so that the player is not continually using one weapon, but is forced to rebuild and try different tactics (I’m not sure whether this would be fun or not though).
In a Steampunk setting, this could result in all manner of strange, steam-powered, gear whirring weapons and systems. A System Shock type game could be reborn, but in a Difference Engine-like world with characters such as Charles Babbage and Lord Byron. I think a game thus designed could be very beautiful, and a lot of fun to play. The mechanism itself though would easily work in a futuristic or modern setting as well.
Things to do in the future perhaps.
Update: I told you so!
Sorry for the issues, I seem to be having difficulty getting blogger to allow comments, so I’ve had to recreate the entire blog and copy all the posts over. In the process I’ve upset my DNS server, so it will be aproximately a week before this all ends up back on Ghostrazor.com. The RSS Feed will probably be booched too.
Please bear with me. =)
I don’t usually get wild over tech demos but.
My god, this engine is beautiful
Chris Hecker has apologized for calling the Wii a piece of shit! If you missed out, Chris Hecker, one of the developers for Spore, attacked Nintendo during a session at GDC 2007 this week. Calling the Wii “…Two Gamecubes haphazardly stuck together with duct tape”, and saying that “Nintendo for not taking games as a serious art form”.
Chris has done a complete 180 today, apologizing and saying that he “was trying to be thought provoking and entertaining and fun, and a lot of the stuff went too far over the top”.
You think?
Chris won an award at last year’s GDC for his very thought-provoking speech on how we, as a people, are privileged to be living at a time when the medium of video games is emerging, and how we need to be careful how we craft it. He’s not a stupid guy. I really do believe he was speaking out of personal frustration with the processing limitations of the Wii from the perspective of someone who’s trying to implement a very processor heavy game. That said, there’s a time and place to vent those frustrations, and blasting Nintendo up and down during a public talk is not exactly what we would refer to as Politico.
The Wii was never supposed to be a power-house. Nintendo decided to move in a risky and wildly different direction as one would expect they would, because that’s how Nintendo avoids playing in a three way tug of war for quality content. Criticize that if you like for being the wrong move, but don’t just upend them as if they have, in some way, completely taken a face-plant just because the platform isn’t appropriate for YOUR game.
I suspect that a lot of his friends and co-workers ripped him a new one after that talk. Lesson learned I hope. Go back to making Spore as good as it should be and leave Nintendo to do their thing.
Maybe I spoke too soon. The big buzz around the GDC is Sony’s online Matchmaking System “Home”. Essentially a more structured version of Second Life, but fully integrated into the PS3 Matchmaking service. The video below shows it off pretty well.
Kinda makes Miis look pretty chinsy.The gorgeous open visuals are really starting to tempt me on that system. Unfortunately a lot of the content they’re pitching will probably suffer the same problem us Canadians have with Apple’s iTMS, Microsoft’s Video Marketplace, and Amazon’s Unbox… in that the content is only sold in the US, not in Canada. Somehow I don’t see Sony being the ones to carry that torch up north.
Sony’s Trophy room or “Hall of Fame” as they call it looks pretty sweet. And while I can imagine playing around in there for my person ego boost, somehow I don’t see myself spending that much time playing around in OTHER people’s Halls of Fame. The only time I really look at other people’s Achievements in Xbox Live is when i’m sitting around in a lobby waiting for a game to start, and that doesn’t require me to start rendering gorgeous 3D visuals. Nevertheless, probably something you should check out. See the video below for more details.
