News flash: The game industry is changing again. This isn’t really news for anyone who’s been in the thick of things for several years. 8-bit gaming has come and gone, so has the 16-bit era. CGI was a flash in the pan during the heady days in the mid-90′s when there was hundreds of megabytes on CD to fill with whatever melodramatic video and audio developers could tack on to a game. Remember Night Trap? 3D shooters like DOOM were a novelty, and so was the digital distribution of the shareware that helped fuel the game’s popularity. Add another 15 years of seasoning, thanks to dramatic leaps in new technology and a vastly widened bandwidth pipeline — and the business, as always, remains a work in progress.
Yet, we are indeed caught in the middle of a major disruptive phase in the business of developing games. Social games distributed by the web and via mobile platforms are on the rise, as audiences by the millions are gathered into social web portals. Retail stores and traditionally packaged games are increasingly losing market share of the entire sales pie as more game content is accessible at the click of a mouse. The traditional 5 year console rise-peak-fall cycle has been broken. The Xbox 360 will be entering its 6th year, the PlayStation 3 it’s fifth, with no plans for next generation consoles on the immediate horizon.
Amongst all this change, dedicated old school gamers are left to wonder, “Where have all our new hardcore games gone?” By hardcore games, I mean games on consoles and PC with harsh death penalties, steep challenge curves and lavish storylines, graphics and audio. The barbarians — in the form of farm animals, pet handlers and city planners — are at the gate and knocking. In response, many of the lantern-jawed traditional developers have seemingly fled into the night, leaving their smaller but devoted audience of gamers to deal with a flood of Trojan horse gifts invitations to try out social games.
Or is the status quo across the gaming landscape really as black and white as that? Hardcore vs. social? Dedicated game hardware vs. mobile and the web?
Cash-rich social game developers are taking their profits and investment capital and placing their bets on traditional developers who have experience with deeper, richer experiences. Gordon Walton, who was VP and Co- General Manager at BioWare Austin, the studio driving development of the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG, has joined Playdom. Bruce Shelley, co-founder of Ensemble Studios and the developer behind Age of Empires, is now a contractor for Zynga. Richard Garriott is one of the most recognized names in the business, developer of the Ultima series of games, working for Electronic Arts and NCSoft, and he’s now on board the social game development train with his own company, Portalarium. These developers, and many others who represent the brain drain from traditional game developers to social game companies, bring with them talent and experience from the console and PC world that social games need to become deeper and more diverse in their game play. Yes, these changes make companies like Sony, EA, and Ubisoft leaner, but they help social game companies mature too.
On the other side of the coin, veteran game developers are learning to explore new models that attract and retain a newer and larger audience. In a talk at 2011 DICE, Mark Cerny, designer of the arcade classic Marble Madness and a PlayStation programmer and designer, said, according to Seth Schiesel of the New York Times, “that many designers were still trying to grow past the basic structures inherited decades ago from the arcade. Limited ‘lives,’ harsh penalties for failure, arbitrary goal structures, competition rather than cooperation — these are all dynamics that have their origins in the incessant need of an arcade game to keep gobbling quarters.”
Another reason the major studios are considering social games, aside from revenue and large audiences is the other half of the equation, lower overhead costs to develop a social or mobile game. Consider Chillingo’s Angry Birds. The popular gaming app, which cost about $150,000 to develop, accumulated 50 million downloads last year and massive profits, and lastly a $20 million acquisition from Electronic Arts. That sort of math is too seductive for an industry that has become accustomed to, and weary of, the kind of budgets that rival some Hollywood blockbuster movies. The risk is less with a lower outlay of cash needed to fund a well designed, quickly developed social game and a much lower threshold for profitability.
The surprising thing is, that it seems it’s hardcore gamers who have adapted the most quickly to these new games, defying the stereotype that it’s moms and other casual gamers who are the earliest adopters. Wired’s Chris Kohler noted that, ‘Anita Frazier, an analyst with the NPD Group, said (at DICE 2011) game console owners spend more time playing mobile games than do those in the general population. And 38 percent of people who play social networking games like FarmVille are “established console gamers,’ she said.”
One of the recently popular ways for major developers and publishers to add value to the development of multi-million dollar blockbuster games is the addition of social gaming features or create Facebook games based on their blockbuster IPs. Ubisoft created a Facebook game for Assassin’s Creed and EA has created a social game derived from Dragon Age. An alternative is to create more immersive, tougher experiences on Android and iOS smartphones, as Electronic Arts has done with Dead Space, bringing a more console-like experience to the mobile platforms.
There will always be a place for hardcore gamers, if it can even be decided to start with who’s more hardcore, but game developers are being forced to adapt or fail by the growing and changing audience they serve. I’d guess in the time I took to write this, the barbarians probably already won over a few of your friends with digital gifts of flora and fauna.
