PA Developer Blog

In Game Ads and Development Costs

josh — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:46:48 +0000

Let’s talk about in game ads. They’ve become very popular in sports games and even some action games. For games which take place in the present ads can actually make the game more realistic. When you go to a hockey game, there really are ads all around the ice, race cars really are sponsored by all kinds of real world companies who’s logos appear on the vehicles. In these cases ads are an inevitable way to reduce production cost. What that means to the consumer is game prices stay the same. Seems screwy doesn’t it? Not when you consider the root cause of all this, game design costs are going through the roof.

As games and graphics engines get more complex they take longer to develop content for. The more polygons a character has the longer it takes to model that character and the more it costs the company to pay that artist. Bigger and better cost money, today’s gamers demand bigger and better. So by adding ads into games, game studio’s are able to keep from raising their prices as their costs rise. It’s all very logical and business like. Now lets talk about the consequences of all this.

Ads in games aren’t a problem yet, like I said, they’ve started in places where they actually add to the realism of the game, ads for real products behind real athletes make it feel more like a real hockey game, or soccer game etc. Advertisers are still new to the video game arena and they aren’t making any demands, they’re just happy to get their products out there and into this new medium. The problems really start down the line, once games depends on ads to make it out the door. Once games can’t get made without advertisers we’ll start seeing advertisers telling game makers what they can and can’t do. It’ll start simple, with a company asking that the you not see as much blood in a boxing game because they want to keep the ESRB rating down. The game company won’t want to lose the income from the ads, so they tone it down a little. That starts a domino effect and before you know it games are having their creative control placed in the hands of advertising companies. Right now you’re thinking one of three things, 1) Oh my God, he’s right, we’re screwed, 2) This guys a conspiracy theorist nut job or 3) What’s so bad about that?

Yes, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, to a lot of people it probably sounds like I’m being overly melodramatic (and to a lot of other people it probably seems like I’m understating things). The bottom line is, right now games don’t have to answer to anyone but the market and their publishers. Publishers often stifle creativity and game design enough, now with advertisers to answer to, advertisers who want to make sure a game appeals to a certain demographic and wants to make sure the game gets into someone’s home, there will be even less incentive for a publisher to encourage original game design. That’s only the tip of the ice berg though. What happens to period games in all this? Where does a Coke fit into Age of Empires, DDO or Warcraft? Advertising in games like those will be nigh impossible to do without ruining the setting (that’s right, I said nigh impossible). So now game companies have less of a reason to develop those games. So now we see a narrowing of genre’s or a bastardization of period games, some choice that is. As games become reliant on advertising dollars these things will come to pass, it won’t happen over night, but big companies go where the money is.

Are we really screwed? Are games going to be heading quickly down the shitter? Unless the game industry changes the way it does things, the answer is yes. Since the beginning of the video game boom the industry has looked to Hollywood as it’s model, specifically big budget action movies. Every so often you’ll get a really solid indie game company who peaks it’s head up with something unique and cool, but even they turn to the action movie philosophy pretty quickly. Before we find an answer, let’s look at how we got here.

It used to be that you got a lot of different games in every genre you could think of. The gaming market was a place where all kinds of games could have moderate success and that led to lots of experimentation. Than first person shooters hit, real-time-blow-peoples-heads-off action hit and gaming changed. Gaming became a hobby which required a huge investment of time and money, many casual gamers disappeared, or simply stopped upgrading and looking for new games. Hardware and game costs limited the field of potential customers. This created a much smaller demographic for gamers and continued to change the way games got made. People invest serious money in their gaming rigs and they just aren’t happy if the games aren’t pushing the limits of that technology. This has brought us to a world where games rival Hollywood films for budget. This isn’t just a problem in the realm of PC games, console games suffer the exact same problem, for proof I refer you to the price of the PS3 and XBox 360.

The answer to all of these problems is not simple, there’s no way to get EA to change how they make games, EA doesn’t listen to the customer, they only listen to the cash drawer. I’d like to think gamers might take a stand and not buy EA games, but we all know it just won’t happen. I’ve touched on part of the solution before, the tools out there for building games are becoming more and more robust everyday and cost next to nothing, this could really give us some options with indie games. That’s not enough though, for things to really get better companies need to start going after a different gaming demographic, PC game designers need to take a page from Nintendo’s book and make gamers out of the average computer user. Not ever game has to have blockbuster graphics and expensive voice actors. Sometimes a game with solid game play can bring people in. Look at Bejeweled and Zuma, there is plenty of room for innovation in gaming.

There’s a vast untapped market of people ready to be casual gamers, they just have to be tapped. If we’re lucky the big guns will see what’s out there and use the proceeds from smaller more profitable games to finance their juggernaut titles. While they’re at it they can stop throwing a popular movie or books name on a crap game and expecting that to pull in the masses.

Ben Heckendorn Rocks

josh — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:30:11 +0000

For those of you who don’t know who Ben Heckendorn is, he’s the king of hacking video game consoles. He’s written a book on the subject and made more of them than any other person on the planet (as far as I know). I thought he’d truly topped himself with his Atari 800 laptop, boy was I wrong. Ben’s most recent creation is an XBox 360 laptop, well it’s a portable more than a laptop (it has no battery). Still it’s less than 3 inches tall, has a hi-def screen and is watercooled. It’s pretty freaking awesome. There’s also a wi-fi card and video outs of all shapes and sizes. The kind of things this guy does with his spare time are pretty inspiring, it makes me realize I should be spending more time working on game designs and writing and less time browsing websites about cool game console mods. Check out the details of the mod here.

WoW Numbers Cause for Worries

josh — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:28:50 +0000

Innovation in the gaming industry is slowly dying. The dominance of WoW could stifle the biggest booming part of the industry. MMO’s have been a growing portion of the industry. Good and bad MMO’s have managed to stick around far longer then anyone thought, they even manage to make money sometimes. Up until now MMO’s have been encouraged to experiment and explore different parts of the industry. Since EQ fell from it’s pedestal no one has held this much of the market and the end user has benefited in the form of many different types of MMO’s. In the past though the gaming industry has proved they won’t mess with a successful combo. The right thing for the industry to do is to try new things and get out from under WoW’s shadow, I don’t think that will happen though. I expect to see a lot of clones in the next few years.

I suppose I should explain that I am not a WoW fan. Sure it looks pretty, but in my opinion it plays like shit. The entire game is a grind to level 60 (soon to be level 70) with little to no worthwhile story along the way. The end game is huge raids and there’s nothing intimate about the game design. I want to play with a few friends, I don’t want to have to join an uber guild to compete. I realize some of this is changing with the expansion, but you still have to get to level 61 before it really makes a difference. The bottom line is, I want to see games that are different, I want to see different takes on MMO’s. I want to have a tough decision between two MMO’s that are very different. WoW’s domination threatens that.

The state of gaming

josh — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 12:35:20 +0000

I read an interesting study the other day, it compared games to movies. We all know games don’t make nearly as much as movies. What you may not have realized is how much it costs to make a game. The budget of a game can often rival the budget of the average film (we’re not talking the Superman Returns of the world, although that does happen on occasion). Game companies are pumping out more and more money on development and getting only a little more back. The gaming industry is headed for rough times if it doesn’t learn to manage it’s development costs. Yes I’m well aware that games are very expensive to make, the more we push the limits of technology, the more it costs to develop the games. The problem being that people expect the games to cost the same no matter how good the technology, which they have every right to expect. So what are game companies doing wrong?

The answer to that question is, the big guys aren’t really doing anything wrong, companies like EA and Blizzard are making money. EA is quickly becoming a monopoly because it’s just got so many games in the works at any given time a failure or two isn’t going to kill them, hell they barely even notice the speed bump. Sure their profit margins are shrinking, but they’ve got a long way to go before it’s a big problem. The companies who are really feeling the crunch are small and medium sized companies. Without the cash reserves of the big guys it’s a real battle for them to keep up with them. EA is swiftly becoming a dangerous monopoly. The danger is we’re heading for a world where everything is EA.

There’s an answer for small and medium companies, they need to change their focus and take some risks. Game engine licenses have helped a lot, and they help companies like Epic stay in business. The number of companies licensing the Unreal 3 game engine is indeed unreal. The problem with this is we end up with a lot of games that play the same. A license of the Unreal engine gives you a lot of choices, but few companies concentrate on changing the game play and spend their time on the glitz. Small companies need to not only embrace different gameplay models. They need to change the rules or fall into obscurity. There are a couple of things which are doing a lot to change the way people play and buy games, small companies need to not only look at different gameplay models, but different business models as well.

XBox Live, the internet and the Wii’s online capabilities are going to change the way people get their games. The ease of getting a game out there, combined with inexpensive development tools (XNA, the Torque Game engine) there’s a real possibility for a gaming renaissance, where story, gameplay and original thinking drive the industry and steal some of EA’s thunder (let’s face it, EA is the new Microsoft and they aren’t going away). I’m trying to do all those things with Pandora’s Asylum. Not only am I looking at new gameplay models for my turnbased game, but future games. I’m looking at a story thread running through out Pandora’s Asylum’s games and I’m looking to whole new business models. Hopefully those things combined with a low cost of development tools and a small design team help me truly build Pandora’s Asylum into the next big gaming empire, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Birth of a Game Designer

josh — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 13:52:31 +0000

I started designing my first games when I was 8 years old on my Atari 800XL. I had a game that allowed you to design your own dungeons. The interface was simple but I amused myself for hours with it (even though I had no drives or way to save what I created). At the same time I started learning Atari Basic. When I was 11 I got a Commodore 64, the C64 really fanned my love for games and introduced me to several types of games you just couldn’t find on the quickly antiquated Atari 800XL. It was on the C64 which I discovered the Ultima series and a gained a passion for games of all shapes and sizes.

In 1990 The Official Book of Ultima was published. It was not only a hint guide to all the Ultima games released up to that point, but it also contained a biography of Lord British himself. Reading through that biography really clinched it for me, I knew I had to design games. It was no longer a hobby, or something I played around with. I knew I needed to move beyond programming in Basic. The next year I took the only programming class my high school offered. The class was a semester long and consisted of two parts. The first half of the semester we learned Hypercard. That’s right, my school taught Hypercard as part of it’s programming class. I suffered through the class and even managed to create an entire game based in Hypercard. The second half of the semester we started learning Pascal. Half a semester wasn’t much time, I’d only just begun to cut my teeth on my first higher programming language and the school year was over.

The next year my school completely changed it’s curriculum and dropped Hypercard from the “programming” class. This gave me the chance to spend an entire semester working with Pascal. By the end of the semester my teacher was begging me to complete one project out of the book. Early on I’d proven my knowledge of Pascal and moved past what the teacher was capable of. From that moment on I started figuring out how to build a game in Pascal. The semester ended and I had learned a lot about programming, but was still no closer to really understanding game design (it turns out Pascal is a horrible language to use for building a game).

The summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college was spent looking for a job and learning about C++. Over the next 12 years I continued to learn about programming in all shapes and sizes and I researched the art of game design. I feel it safe to say I’m an academic expert on the subject (which is to say I have very little direct experience working with a group of people to design a game, but have studied the process in depth).

In 2000 Garage Games burst onto the scene and Indie developers everywhere rejoiced. I was one of the earliest (although fairly silent) members of the Garage Games community and I was a very early adopter of the Torque Game Engine. I finally decided it was time to put my money where my mouth was and I formed Pandora’s Asylum (a company name which had been in my head for 5 years). Now I’m well into the first design document for Pandora’s and I’m looking at the best technology options to bring the game to life.

Welcome!

josh — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 14:19:05 +0000

Welcome to the Pandora’s Asylum developers blog. I decided if I’m really going to do this I should do it right and document the process as well as the design. Not sure how often this will get updated at this point, but look for some basic info on the design process in the next week or so.