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richardhutnik on 02 September 2011
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oniyide said:
richardhutnik said:

You are getting a vibe, just are misreading it.  As a person who has designed over 60 board and card games, and not counting game coding I have done, who remembers the videogame industry back to Pong and the arcades, I tend to have more of a bias in favor of small team project than larger ones.  It isn't east vs west, it is size.  I also see the trends in the videogame industry where costs are shooting through the roof, and even while logging recored revenues, they have a hard time breaking even.  I see the focus being not on gameplay, but on whatever it takes to increase production costs to add an extra level of polish that may or may not be worth it.  I also see, outside of the Indie realm, less and less genres.  I have witnessed genres get driven into the ground (music) because the industry thought it was best to milk it to death.  And then throw in my post here that, despite all this, the low level people face immense job uncertainty, combine with lousy work conditions.  I have also worked in the IT industry, and have seen death spirals hit projects due to mismanagement, and demands that could in no way be met.  

If you want to know my bias and vibe, it is this.

I can get behind this, especially the bolded. I was gonna comment on how there are still small western devs that are doing ok and not facing the problems of some others, but you also mentioned indies, so that about covers it. However i dont feel that eastern devs are immune to this, didnt SE, Sega & Capcom close down some devs. and dont get me started on the Fabulos Crstallis Nova or whatever the hell its called

In order to do ok, and be able to stay in the game, you have to be able to entertain people with games that differentiate themselves sufficiently you don't have a red ocean bloodbath competing foe the same limited audience.  The attributes of the game have to be both sufficiently unique and appealing enough, enough people buy the product.  A kicker that happens with the industry is that they decide to increase the production value and drive up costs, to the extent that the investors backing it want to see a track record that a product will sell.  The end result is that the industry, as costs go up, end up focusing on smaller and smaller niches that have track record, and you end up with a glut, which then is a bubble, and it pops and genres die.  Things get stale.  The only way around this is to keep development costs WAY down, and have stuff that provides something new, and able to recover costs.  This is why smaller shops can make it, but other ones get closed down.   This cycle I find particularly problematic, because is how the industry thinks.  Luckily, smaller shops can get around it, and also the industry is getting freaked by the likes of Angry Birds being the BIG thing, because if small shops can make it, they can't have their same level of teams, and they don't get the same level of funding.  End result you have individuals in Nintendo fuming about the threat the iPhone is doing, and Sony trying to push the PSP as "real gaming", rather than the throw the paper in the trash game.