| zarx said:
I am not justifying it I am explaining the realities of the situation. A studio with 50 (Airtight are 51+ acording to linkedin) employees in America is $350k+ a month on just wages (add more for taxes, rent, utilities, medical etc etc). So given your rediculous $3 million budget example that is 8 and a half months of development for 50 people a studio would need to release 2 or more games of that size every year just to keep everyone payed and the lights on. And to give you an idiea of the kind of game $3 million buys you that is less than half a 2D point and click adventure game by Double Fine (a company that has 65 employees and is currently developing 6 announced projects at once 2 of which were crowd funded because publishers didn't want to publish them) it really isn't a lot of money.
If you make games that don't sell at best the developer would be just over breaking even (tho if they make a hit depending on their contract they could become rich). So developers have to alwayse have new projects to keep their employees payed if they don't make succesful games, naturally if you make games that don't sell publishers don't want to give you money to make game big or small and you go under. And you idea of if your games sell poorly just make games with budgets that small idea is incredibly naive. Less budget means less money spent making and marketing your game, which usually (unless you are increadibly lucky) means lower sales and or a lower price point which means you will most likely still lose money exept now you have to make more pitches to publishers to make more games which means even less time actually making games which leads to lower quality products or mass layoffs. Small studios making small games go under all the time as well, they just don't make the news. For every indie success story there are 20 failures. Making any game big or small is a risk and no one is going to give you free money. If you can't make successful games no one is going to keep paying you. |
Today we have another big issue. First, we have the AAA studios. They will work with large staffs and make expensive games, with good marketing budgets. The amount of money avaialable for a project in these studios will usually be enough to spend a good marketing budget and achieve sales decent enough to profit (unless you fail multiple projects in a row, like Crytek did). In the opposite side, we have indies with small budgets but with tiny teams that can create a game without big costs (a lot of times they won't even need to pay devs). They won't have marketing budgets, but the costs are low enough so them can get profit with lower sales that can be achieved just with word of mouth and one or two reviews on RockPaperShotgun or any other indie focused website.
The guys that have problems are the ones that sit in the middle. They are like large indies or small AAAs. They won't have a budget as large as the full AAAs, so marketing costs are cut down. But at the same time, they can rely only on word of mouth like indies because they need way more sales to profit because of bigger costs. This middleground is where devs are having more trouble. No developer in the world is capable of delivering a hit after another. I know someone will screan ND or Nintendo, but this guys actually cancel a lot of projects in the begining if they think it won't succeed. They are just experienced enough to notice that something won't work in an early stage and cut if off, instead of releasing it. Any dev will fail several projects before hitting (hopefully) a good game. But indies can fail because the costs are low and AAAs can fail because they have the money. The guys in the middle don't have the money and have high costs, so it's better to do it right in the first try and that's surely a harsh request.
