| Go Small or Go Home |
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| Written by Greg Gorden | |
| Thursday, 03 September 2009 14:04 | |
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Two independent events collided to form the topic for this weeks's musings: my son's football season, which started today, and Starcraft's further delayed release. Common thread? A philosophy of 'Go big, or go home.' The phrase probably still works for football, but I think it has been usurped in games. 'Go small or go home' is what works in games today. As a result, I think we could be entering a new golden ages for games. I am not saying big-budget console or PC titles don't dominate the landscape. Money talks, and budgets of tens of millions of dollars can speak pretty loudly. But there are newer arenas, such as Big Fish Games, Armor Games, or the iPhone app store, where smaller teams can successfully distribute their efforts and garner an audience. The result is an explosion of titles nearly unimaginable ten years ago, or twenty years ago when the game industry was in the midst of what many people now consider the golden age of game innovation and advancement. The results are predictably bell-curved; with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of titles out there. A lot of it looks pretty familiar: platformers, tetris-clon es, tower-defense games, dungeon-crawls ... but even in these you can see evolution, nice touches or twists which make the games more enjoyable. There are outliers, such as This is the only level on Armor games, which are enough of a twist to become different sort of game entirely. It won't take you long to find a game differerent enough to intrigue you.
The difference in the expectation between the old publisher model and the new young turks, both in terms of commercial success and development cycle, is astounding. I am working with one company which uses the old publisher model; since May we have been tinkering with a 'proof of concept' demo to go ahead to full funding. In the same time another company I work with, smaller than the first, has released three iPhone games. I doubt the second publisher is expecting the sort of revenue from a single title as the first; they don't have to. But I think long term the odds of success greater for the second company than the traditional company. Why? Because games are like experiments. You form a hypothesis about what would make a fun game, build the game, and the release it to players to see if your hypothesis was correct. The more games you release, the more experiments you perform, the more you learn, and the better your future game experiments can be. Right now, company two is learning more about what makes good games than company one, about what their audience wants in a game, and how to best deliver that experience. Company two has another huge advantage: they can afford to fail. When you release a plethora of titles, some are not going to work. But you can survive a failure because you have other releases that are successful, and no title has taken too great a percentage of your resources. Releasing a failed game stings like crazy. But being able to afford a failure has a marvelous flip side; you can afford to try something different. I have seen a common pattern with larger, old line companies: they must minimize risk in order to get funding for their development. To prove they have minimum risk, developers often have to point to a body of successful titles and show why their title swims comfortably in those well-known waters. Innovation is therefore a considerable risk; you have no body of success with which to associate your proposed title. Innovation is a difficult upsell; sticking to the formula can get you funded. Those two factors combine to suggest that the next big thing is going to come from a company like company two; and there are at least 10 times as many company-two's as there are company-one's. Once the next big thing has hit, then the old line companies will be able to do their multi-million dollar console version. Eventually the innovation will trickle upward. But as a gamer you don't have to wait. I think these next few years are going to be incredibly fertile ones for game development. I would give even money that the next ten years will become known as the golden age for games. As long as we Go Small to get there.
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