The Fiscal State of Indie Downloadable Games7
Matt posted in Games, My Work, The Industry on February 17th, 2009

There are no official numbers for any digital distribution channels, but in looking at the only estimates I can find, on vgchartz.com, the sales outcome for most downloadable titles is pretty bleak. This goes against my philosophical stance of trusting a website that substitutes a z for an s, but they seem to be the only data that is readily available. So, here’s a link to the most up to date sales data through 2/13/09. Sorting that data by cumulative revenue, the top 10 is as follows: Texas Hold’em, Castle Crashers, Bankshot Billiards 2, Uno, Worms HD, Street Fighter 2 HF, Bomberman Live, Boom Boom Rocket, Castlevainia: SOTN, and PacMan CE. Four of those titles have been included in some sort of bundle, either with an Xbox console or the Xbox Live Unplugged bundle DVD game. Out of the 6 remaining, there’s only one original IP, Castle Crashers, which is doing amazingly well.  I have to congratulate the Behemoth for not only putting together a kick ass game but for actually creating one that has really achieved the holy grail of indie game development by making a ton of money as well. Now comes the bad news.

If we look at all games that aren’t free, there are 184 titles. Just under half of them made less than $500,000. Now, half a million may seem like a large budget for an indie game, but you have to consider that Microsoft and/or a publisher is taking a cut. Assuming the split put forward here, and the developers are only taking 35% of that $500k, that’s $175k. Developing an Xbox Live title is most likely going to cost you more than $175k. It can vary widely, so I’m not going to speculate on the average cost, but I think it’s safe to say that well over half the titles on XBLA are not profitable.

But in looking at the upper end, Castle Crashers has over half a million units if vgchartz stats are accurate. It’s still fairly early in the lifecycle of the product, and it’s selling quite well currently, but I’d be surprised if they could break a million. The only titles that have so far are Uno and Aegis Wing. Aegis Wing is free, and Uno is a very popular card game and only costs $5 and is included in both the Xbox Live Arcade console and with the Xbox Vision Camera. 1 million in sales is nothing to scoff at, but it’s hardly the amazing cash out of some indie movie successes like the Blair Witch Project. (It cost $60,000 and grossed $140 million in the box office)

 I think this is why publishers aren’t really all that keen about this space. Although there are movie companies like Lions Gate and Focus that focus on indie and smaller budget movies, the payoff for an indie film can be huge – enough to amortize the loss of many unsuccessful indie films. Although some indie movies have limited appeal, I think many indie or inexpensive movies can have audience sizes that are in line with many blockbusters. I think plenty of games sell multiple millions (the real blockbuster games break 10 million), but multiple millions is unheard of in the XBLA space. Aegis Wing  is free and has only gotten 1.5 million downloads (according to vgchartz). That to me means that the average gamer isn’t really all that interested in smaller cheaper games, which is disappointing because that’s all indies can afford to make.

Another troubling fact is that if you look at the high sales games, most are remakes or rereleases. Ignoring the anomalous Castle Crashers and the various bundled games, Braid comes in as the first original game that’s not a remake or rerelease behind 6 other titles (and Castle Crashers and some bundled games of course). The trend continues in the top sellers. Two thirds of the top 30 games by revenue games are board/card/video game remakes or sequels to existing IPs. I imagine that sends the message to publishers that their best bet is to rerelease old stuff and not invest in new original products.

Anyway, I’m not trying to say that indie game development is doomed. Obviously if I thought that, I wouldn’t be trying my hand at it. But, I think it’s important to look at indie game for what it is. It’s a very fulfilling thing to work on, but a very difficult thing to make money from. Do I think Retro/Grade will be successful financially? Yes I do. If I didn’t, then I would make adjustments to make sure I thought that it would be. Am I the best judge of that? No, of course not. It’s my baby. Every parent thinks their baby is the cutest regardless of how hideous he/she is. Hahahahah Of course I think it’s fun and worth what we will charge for it. Will the general public? Only time will tell.

In the end though, everyone votes with their wallets, so if you want to continue to see lots of creative indie titles, be sure to keep buying them. That’s the only way to keep small developers doing creative and original games in business.

Why the Hollywood Studio Model Doesn’t Work for Games2
Matt posted in Games, My Work, The Industry on February 17th, 2009

Kotaku mentioned an article on Slate entitled What’s Killing the Video-Game Business? The author goes onto assert that more titles should be developed externally in order to save the publishers money and is surprised that is not what EA is doing. For those in the industry, this should seem ridiculous, but I wrote an explanation of why that doesn’t make sense for the Kotaku discussion that I figured I’d repeat here if anyone was interested. So here it is with a few slight additions:

The author really doesn’t understand how the video game industry works. Making video games is NOT the same as making movies! In film, there is a standard set of tools (cameras, actors, lights, etc), but that is far from the case in the game industry. Every game development company has their own proprietary tools, pipelines and technology. These vary greatly, so there’s no way that the game industry can switch to forming a company for just one game and disbanding at the end.

On the art side of things, all game shops pretty much use Maya (and to a lesser extent 3dsmax and XSI), but artists often use proprietary world building tools for placing assets, different tools for lighting, and the pipelines can vary a great deal. (The pipeline is how the art gets into the game) The actual job that designers do varies greatly from place to place. If they do their design purely on paper, then it’s quite easy to move them from project to project. Often designers have to use world building tools and/or scripting languages to set up the gameplay. This can have a steep learning curve, so it’s difficult to move them around.

For programmers, it’s the worst. When companies find a good programmer, they want to hold onto them for life because they are hard to find, and it is very difficult for people to debug code that was written by someone else. This is a fact of any software development and something that film completely doesn’t have to deal with. Technology stays around for years (and in some case over a decade), so you need someone to maintain and modify it that is familiar with it. Whenever a new programmer is hired, there is a steep learning curve until they can get up to full speed regardless of programmer talent. The best in the industry can get up to speed quicker, but no one can ever just pick up where someone else left off. Sometimes companies even want to hang onto bad programmers when they worked on an important facet of the technology and their code is a mystery to everyone else.

The only thing analogous to video game development in the film world is the development of CG movies. CG shops have many developers working on their internal tools and technology.  Dreamworks, Pixar, and Blue Sky don’t disband after every production because they have internal software and artists trained to use them. If it doesn’t make sense for them, it certainly doesn’t make sense for games where the net product is software and not a series of static images.

Bringing more titles in house to publishers makes sense from a business perspective. Although to my knowledge, no publisher has been particularly successful at this, having one shared set of tools, pipelines and technology that they use for most if not all of their titles would give the publisher more flexibility in moving people between projects, which is important from a manpower standpoint. As well, as the cost of each art asset rises as the amount of detail is increased, more publishers will probably maintain a library of game assets to share between their internal teams. Doing more work internally is a cost saving measure. Reversing that would be a nightmare. The only caveat is outsourcing for art and animation, cutscenes and other well defined tasks is definitely going to increase, but the actual production of the game (especially the programming) is going to stay in house.

As someone who just recently started a game company, I don’t want to see all the work stay with the publishers, but from their standpoint, it makes the most sense. If publishers go out of business, that’s not going to help us either, so what is best for them fiscally is best for the industry. I only hope I can get 24 Caret Games established before it’s too late because it’s only getting harder to start a new studio as time progresses. That was one of the reasons why I decided to start it now because it seemed like it was now or never. If 24 Caret Games fails, then I may have to abandon hope of working for myself…

[In response to commentors talking about unions in the game industry] Also, unions are never going to happen. They raise the cost of development. If one did happen, that would just drive more work overseas. There is no shortage of people willing to work crazy hours in any game discipline (especially testing), so unions will never get off the ground. The only time organized labor works is when you can’t find people willing to do the job or when an existing union controls the people who do it currently. I think unions in most fields in the United States have outlived their usefulness and are driving more jobs overseas.