| greenmedic88 said: The question of production value comes into play here; whether the production value that requires a $60 price to recoup development costs is sustainable to the consumer base playing these games. If general interest ever shifts towards mobile games (majority share of market) then the current business plan of spending two years worth of a full developer studio's resources on a major budget game suddenly becomes questionable. Would there still be a market for these games? Of course. But the question is whether the market for such games would still be large enough to sell enough units to recoup costs and justify further development of such projects to whoever was financing the studio. If not, budgets shrink, projects become less ambitious and the focus may shift away from production values to profitability. Titles like Heavenly Sword and Enslaved come to mind when it comes to examples of games that clearly had big production value, yet were often measured by consumers on the basic merit of length in regards to whether they merited a $60 purchase and underperformed financially as a result. The question doesn't come into play as often (paying for production value as opposed to duration of entertainment hours/minutes), but when looking at something like film, a movie that cost less than $1m to produce still has the same ticket price as a film with a $100m budget at the same theater showing both films. In many cases in the gaming industry, there are titles that try to sneak a $60 full retail price for a game that clearly does not have the same production value/cost/man hours as say a AAA title priced the same. That's something that definitely won't be sustainable if the trend to mobile games continues. |
I had to edit this down somewhere, because I did want to reference it, but not list it all. It touched on a point I was going to raise here. The videogame industry keeps wanting to think it is, or wants to be, the movie industry, because it is doing total sales BOXOFFICE that match what the movie theater is. The issue it is running into is that it doesn't have box office to recover its costs, so it ends up being even more hit-driven than the movie industry. Because it insists on thinking it can budget like the movie industry, and try to put the same level of production value into games, it is going to run into issues.
Games DO NOT need the same level of production value to be entertaining. People can do $1 disposable games, and generate enough money for developers to keep going. They won't be able to hire voice actors for their games, or writers to produce scripts, but they can do an Angry Bird or a board or cardgame, or a puzzle game, and people be entertained by it.
The industry is learning that, for the most part, they can't be trying to make movies, with the same production value, and expect to guarantee staying in business. They can think more about doing games... that are games. If they don't, look for more Enslaved type titles to pop up, or Brutal Legends. You will get fans of the game posting on here wondering why millions aren't buying the title, and wondering why something like Mass Effect doesn't do 5 million plus in total sales. There isn't enough money out there to support $60 a pop titles to the degree the industry would like. End result is that studios will die, if they keep doing what they are doing.
