Quality vs Quantity

At this year's Casual Connect, Arthur Humphrey has this to say regarding competition among casual games:

"Developers can best weather the storm of increased competition and falling prices in the casual game space by creating strong, innovative brands rather than cranking out greater numbers of cheaper low quality titles".

A both a developer and a fan, I have to agree that bringing value to your customer is always the best long term business decision. The message here is to avoid the pitfall of making the quick dollar which will only serve to foul the very waters of your market with an over saturation of poor games.

The Rise of the Audience

While listening to "Which way, studios?" on KCRW's The Business, Kim Masters, Stephen Galloway, and John Horn introduced the idea that star vehicles and franchises are no longer reliably effective in guaranteeing a return on investment in a major motion picture. This is attributable to the rise of the power of peer to peer communication superseding the hype of the Hollywood press or the allure of the super star:



"Movie ciritcs might not have liked Transformers sequel but the audience did. We live in a day where the audience can go see a movie on Friday night, and by the time they come out, their texting their friends, their putting something up on their Facebook or their mySpace page, so you can pay Eddie Murphy 20 million dollars and put him in "Imagine that" and by Fri night the audience has said this movie is terrible and your dead."



This idea can also be extended to the video game industry insofar that in the face of rising development costs and market overcrowding, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure a return on your development dollars even if you are in possession of a valuable franchise. It is far more important to generate a positive buzz from the core audience who will tweet the virtues or flaws of your product more cost effectively than any other form of advertising.

The way to capitalize on this phenomenon is to adopt a strategy of selling your title at cost in order to focus on getting your product into the hands of your audience. Whether on XBox Live Arcade, PSN, Wii Network, Facebook or iPhone Apps, it's all about getting your game in the top 50 downloads. If you've done your job and made a good game, you will quickly amass a huge following which can be monetized on the back end via micro purchases, level add-ons and game sequels.

Titans of the big screen hope to conquer a smaller screen: video games

A new crop of Hollywood suitors are getting back into the video games ring and are promising to get video game development right. According to a recent LA Times article:

An increasing number of big shots from the movie business are seeing new opportunities in the $50-billion global interactive entertainment industry. Power producers such as Jerry Bruckheimer and Thomas Tull, as well as hot directors such as Gore Verbinski and Zack Snyder, have all recently dived into the still-growing game market.

But simply buying up development assets and inserting movie industry savvy personnel in key positions is not the right way to finding a development pipeline that will translate motion picture IP to video game consoles. The inherent problem is that you have to match the right kind of game genre to your motion picture IP and game engines are proprietary to each game genre. The list of Video Game Genres is roughly as follows:

Action
Shooter
Action-adventure
Adventure
Construction/ Management simulation
Life simulation
Role-playing
Strategy
Vehicle simulation
Party Games
Sports Games
Puzzle Games
Music Games

If you are in the business of making the same video game sequel over and over again, reusing the same engine works fine, but video game audiences have become quite sophisticated and demand a great deal of technically advanced content from developers. In order to compete, video games must not only tout new content with each release, they must also introduce new game play dynamics to wow their audiences.

Most importantly, these game play dynamics must match the action and mood of the narrative. For example, if you are developing a video game title for "The Matrix", you'll probably connect well to your core audience if you build a fighting game that features the ability to leap from building to building. But if you choose to build a realtime strategy game where you deploy agents in the matrix as an operator, you will probably loose your audience. In each case, both game concepts are popular genres, but a realtime strategy game is truly a poor choice to capture the live action in-your-face style of fighting that made "The Matrix" arguably so successful.

Ok, so arriving at the conclusion that a kung fu stlyle game requires a kung fu style engine is not rocket surgury. But the problem arises when the project that follows is an epic World War II saga that is better suited to use a realtime strategy engine that allows for the large scale deployment and control of troops. None of the infrastructure of the previous kung fu style game engine is suitable to build the game you want. Video game development teams are not interchangeable components that can be switched out on the fly. These teams often take years to put together and hone into cost effective, creative teams that can develop award-winning games. This makes the potential overhead for game studios that support motion picture intellectual properties pretty huge. A typical startup will cost about $30 - 40 million to develop a title of reasonable quality, but only $5 - 8 million a year to maintain thereafter. If you have to eat the same startup costs everytime you want to develop a new game genre, then you are either faced with an unprofitable games division or you will have to limit yourself to making the same kind of movie every time since you only have one variety of proven game engine pipeline. Lucas Arts did precisely that - they only had to worry about supporting one film franchise and dedicated the rest of their games studio to pursuing titles that were unrelated to supporting movie franchses, such as their acclaimed Monkey Island series and others.

If Jerry Bruckheimer was smart (and the record thus far suggests that he is), this problem can be solved in two ways. The first solution is to build a games division that is so large, it contains game development teams that specialize in every major video game genre. You would have to be involved in several major motion pictures a year to sustain this kind of game studio model, which is precisely why Disney Interactive has been successful, while Dreamworks had to sell their videogames division to EA.

But the better solution for the rest of us is to outsource. It is simply impossible for any single game studio to have the capacity to develop for any game genre. If your only producing a few motion picture titles a year and you want to develop your properties for the video games market, then you should be creating a small publishing team staffed with production and development veterans from the video games community who are smart enough to walk the line between the motion picture and video games development world.

Perhaps this time, Hollywood will get video game development right.