Chris Swain
You know how games are massive business nowadays and everybody is getting super rich off them? Well, according to Chris Swain, an assistant professor at the University of California faculty that indirectly brought us flOw, you're wrong.
In a recent interview Swain uttered the words, "Nine out of 10 console games don't make money back across the whole industry." Nine. Out of 10. That's a scary thought.
But who is this chap to put the wind up us? As well as being an assistant professor at the faculty that turned out Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, creators of the aforementioned flOw, he's the author of Game Design Workshop, a textbook on games making. Prior to working for the University of California he worked on games for Microsoft, Disney, Activision, Acclaim and Sony, having earned credits on God of War. He's been around the industry a bit.
He does not, however, cite the source of this information. He also went on to say, "Most everything that gets published by a developer - they are not making a royalty on it". Frankly, we're not even sure that's in English. So, we used the SPOnG American/English translator and came up with "Most developers don't get any royalties for the games they make."
We've contacted the good assistant professor to see if we can examine his figures more closely.
For the full interview, click here.
In a recent interview Swain uttered the words, "Nine out of 10 console games don't make money back across the whole industry." Nine. Out of 10. That's a scary thought.
But who is this chap to put the wind up us? As well as being an assistant professor at the faculty that turned out Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, creators of the aforementioned flOw, he's the author of Game Design Workshop, a textbook on games making. Prior to working for the University of California he worked on games for Microsoft, Disney, Activision, Acclaim and Sony, having earned credits on God of War. He's been around the industry a bit.
He does not, however, cite the source of this information. He also went on to say, "Most everything that gets published by a developer - they are not making a royalty on it". Frankly, we're not even sure that's in English. So, we used the SPOnG American/English translator and came up with "Most developers don't get any royalties for the games they make."
We've contacted the good assistant professor to see if we can examine his figures more closely.
For the full interview, click here.
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Comments
OptimusP 21 Nov 2008 23:07
1/1
It would explain a couple of things
1) didn't Rare said once that Viva Pinata did break-even and with that they're in the "minority" of games reaching that financial state.
2) The much lower number of games all publishers are making on HD-consoles compared to the PS2 on its own. Just compare Square-Enix list of PS2-games then all the games they released on all consoles barring the handhelds.
Publishers who want to make games on the Xbox360 and PS3 are faced with more massive development in time and volume just to make a character run in a world and with that higher associated costs. So they mostly make traditional games with very minimal of innovation and incremental refining improvements linked with technological advancement in general. This is done because they know there is a secure and certain market that will buy these games and did not choose the option of finding and drilling new markets (mostly because they don't know how except with watering down existing concepts but those failed).
Problem here is that this market is actually very demanding and can be seen as the high up-market. So to even get a piece of the pie you have to cater to those high demands, triggering the HD arms-race which probably the majority of publishers and developers were not ready for in terms of manpower and finances. The many mergers and acquisitions we see today is a direct result of this problem.
Now, in a normal industry, this type of arms-war to bring out the more advanced this and that in high-speed(resulting into higher costs) into a non-growing or even shrinking market (resulting in lowering profits) will result in one thing: the industry gradual crashing and burning. What saved everyone's butt? The DS.
Owh come on, that thing? With the two screens and s**t...anyone could have come up with that. Very possible that someone could have come up with a gaming device that would be the same succes as the DS and financially refueled the gaming industry as a whole. But in this universe, it happened to be the DS.
3) It supports one of my possibilities of what is wrong with gaming journalism in general being: 90% of all gamejournalists do not know what is happening in 60-75% of the entire gaming market they self-declared do know. Here's a interesting question to go with that.
Why was it at the last 2 E3's that the traditional gaming journalism cringed at Nintendo's press-outings and praised more those of Sony and MS but the general media (like the NYT and Washinton Post) called MS and Sony the dinosaurs of the industry? Let's leave out the discussion who's right because in the end, they're both right and wrong but still. Why is there such a gap in perception? How did this become to be? and mostly, why are those useless game-studies people not asking these questions?
1) didn't Rare said once that Viva Pinata did break-even and with that they're in the "minority" of games reaching that financial state.
2) The much lower number of games all publishers are making on HD-consoles compared to the PS2 on its own. Just compare Square-Enix list of PS2-games then all the games they released on all consoles barring the handhelds.
Publishers who want to make games on the Xbox360 and PS3 are faced with more massive development in time and volume just to make a character run in a world and with that higher associated costs. So they mostly make traditional games with very minimal of innovation and incremental refining improvements linked with technological advancement in general. This is done because they know there is a secure and certain market that will buy these games and did not choose the option of finding and drilling new markets (mostly because they don't know how except with watering down existing concepts but those failed).
Problem here is that this market is actually very demanding and can be seen as the high up-market. So to even get a piece of the pie you have to cater to those high demands, triggering the HD arms-race which probably the majority of publishers and developers were not ready for in terms of manpower and finances. The many mergers and acquisitions we see today is a direct result of this problem.
Now, in a normal industry, this type of arms-war to bring out the more advanced this and that in high-speed(resulting into higher costs) into a non-growing or even shrinking market (resulting in lowering profits) will result in one thing: the industry gradual crashing and burning. What saved everyone's butt? The DS.
Owh come on, that thing? With the two screens and s**t...anyone could have come up with that. Very possible that someone could have come up with a gaming device that would be the same succes as the DS and financially refueled the gaming industry as a whole. But in this universe, it happened to be the DS.
3) It supports one of my possibilities of what is wrong with gaming journalism in general being: 90% of all gamejournalists do not know what is happening in 60-75% of the entire gaming market they self-declared do know. Here's a interesting question to go with that.
Why was it at the last 2 E3's that the traditional gaming journalism cringed at Nintendo's press-outings and praised more those of Sony and MS but the general media (like the NYT and Washinton Post) called MS and Sony the dinosaurs of the industry? Let's leave out the discussion who's right because in the end, they're both right and wrong but still. Why is there such a gap in perception? How did this become to be? and mostly, why are those useless game-studies people not asking these questions?