Gaming worth more than video and music combined
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
If I understand correctly it used to be the same in movies until the directors and stars started demanding more. IIRA United Artists was started because of these issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Artists
Also few games have the budget of movies. There's a few exceptions like say GTA5 or RD2 but mostly title for title game budgets are at least an order of magnitude lower than movies.
Could probably come up with many other examples. As someone who did dev in that industry I knew plenty technical people who had a outsized impact on gameplay, tone and style.
How many average people watching movies recognize Tom Cruise?
0 - https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/busine...
1 - https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/direct...
Given that the game industry is so large, his net worth should be comparable to lucas, Cameron, or Spielberg.
When it comes to excelling in a field, I don't even think Spielberg, Lucas and Cameron compare to Carmack. I can think of some actors that might, such as Daniel-Day Lewis, but not a director.
Doom and Quake are more niche than many movies Spike Lee has directed if you are outside of a tech/gamer bubble. According to wikipedia Doom as a series has sold 10 million units (by comparison a single Call of Duty game sells 30 million+) and Quake sold 1.1 million units life time (Gone Home sold 700K units). I agree that Carmack's impact and influence on the industry isn't captured in his networth (although really he's still ridiculously rich...)
On the whole, video-gaming profits accrue almost entirely to the investors.
There's a reason for that, and it's not because movie producers are nicer than game producers.
There are lots of theories regarding personality types that lead to speculation of why this is the case, but I'd really like to see some research that digs into this. Labor by developers is becoming more and more valuable, with this you expect more political strength.. but it does not seem to be happening.
People may not agree, but every argument I've heard against unionization contains this sentiment. Even if it isn't expressed so boldly.
The truly smart recognise it’s not their co-workers taking money away from them.
In capitalism the amount you get paid is dependent on supply and demand. The "value" you add is irrelevant if they could easily replace you with someone else.
Because before they were on the A-list, when they were no-names struggling to get by, it was the union rules that made it possible for them to eke out a living while they waited and worked for their big break, and it was the union rules that protected them from being exploited when they finally got their big break.
I feel like I notice this more in my dev friends than my non dev friends. I wonder why?
Please excuse my ignorance, but I was always under the impression that special interest groups are more likely to form for those whose conditions are pretty poor. I feel like programmers are treated pretty well compared to most other professions, especially when considering the lack of money and time required to enter the field so I'm not even sure what I'd want from a special interest group.
And there's no path for modern devs to get any sort of selling star power unless they also do game design (Zacktronics, Kojima, etc).
There's only one Shigeru Miyamoto.
People don't play a game because it's got 100% code coverage and the greatest end to end tests. Most of the time people play a game because it's fun. Programmers don't make games fun; it's the game designers that make it fun.
Sure the game would not exist without programmers, but you can take one set of programmers and replace it with another set and largely the game will be the same to the players, assuming the skills/experience of the programmers are similar.
In a way, programmers are necessary, but the most they can do is stop the game from completely falling apart. It's the game designers that have a much greater potential to make a game great.
It's easy to forget what absolutely touched lives we developers have, even the grunts.
Anyhow, it is incumbent on every technical worker to find and establish their niche over time. If you get called a "unicorn" in whatever field you land in, you're in a good negotiating position for things like salary.
I love this writeup[1] of the kit artists at Bethesda for example.
> Of course, there’s another reason that Skyrim had only two full-time kit artists; kits are really complicated things to work on. Kits require not only the artistic ability to produce high quality visuals, but also a technical competency in their art tool, a deep understanding of the editor and design workflow, and so on. This unique blend of left and right brain is somewhat at odds with what many art professionals value. I've worked with great artists who make excellent kits but hate working on them - so they don't.
> So when you’re trying to identify somebody with the the aptitude and interest to be a great kit artist, you’re basically looking for a unicorn. They're rare.
And they better be paid accordingly so they don't bolt and start their own game studios! You get to negotiate if you're a unicorn.
[1] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelBurgess/20130501/191514/...
Not really.
About half the devs on my old team were "gameplay programmers". Solid tech chops, but also with an eye towards gameplay you can bet they tweaked the shit out of our game system. We only had 3 'dedicated' designers so a non-trivial amount of work fell in the dev's hands.
To get concrete the smoothing/sticky algorithm and tuning of our aiming mechanism was created and owned by a single dev. Take a look at this[1] for a good breakdown of what goes into something like that.
[1] http://drstrangevolt.blogspot.com/2012/12/aim-acceleration-i...
I don't feel like you're disagreeing with me.
It just sounds like the roles on your team were more blurred but the point still stands. What's meaningful isn't your title but the type of work you do. The more influence you have over the design of the game, the bigger an impact you will have on how fun it is.
In fact the want to know what the largest predictor of if a game is going to be fun or not?
Talk to any game designer and they'll tell you it's the iteration cycle time of their tools. They'll be the first to admit that they don't know what fun is(otherwise we'd just formulate it, bottle it up and fire all the game designers). The more they can throw things at the wall that "stick" the better chance a game has at being fun.
I also can't think of any team I've been on my career(or other teams I know of) where roles weren't "blurred" it's expected and required in the industry even on large, AAA teams.
Your studio gets an 'advance' on development with milestones and the like. Only after you've paid back your advance + more do you start seeing royalties come to the studio. That advance allotment also usually includes the marketing budget which can be as much or more than the studio dev cost.
Studio employees are usually a tier below that as well, in my time I never saw a penny of royalties, bonuses or the like. Combined with a pay that's 40-70% below standard dev rates it's not really a great industry if you live in a high cost of living area.
And movies have the equivalent of underpaid overworked devs: extras and grips and so on.
The feel of the game is created through the cinemtography, sound, visual effects, assets, acting, etc. The only way programmers actually have an effect on the way the game feels to the player is if they screw up and introduce some game breaking bugs or fail to implement face rigging properly or something like that.
Otherwise, no, I'm sorry, but programmers are to modern games what production staff are to movies. Necessary, but utterly inconsequential in terms of the value of the final product for the consumer.
Dev teams are not interchangable cogs. Different developers will have different ideas for solutions to problems, game mechanics, etc. And different artists will create a completely different assets, even if given the same themes to work with.
Just like PMs and designers don't wholly own product direction for a web or mobile application, game designers and artists don't entirely own game feel and even if they do they are often gated or empowered by systems developed and designed by programmers. In most cases designers are also programmers ("scripters") so you can make the further argument that game system design actually is just a form of programming, even if the designers aren't always writing code in the traditional sense.
No, they really don't. Sid Meier, et al, make relatively little of the money of the games sold under their name, with the exception of Carmack and Newell, who own/majority owned their studios outright.
In contrast, the spoils in Hollywood and Music are shared with a much larger group, which sustains the industry in a way that the obscenely hit-based nature of gaming can't.
Also, to note: almost all workers on a Hollywood production (meaning movies released in America, not just those actually made in Hollywood, CA) are union members or protected by union rules even if they aren't yet members. Even extras. After your third role as an extra, you generally have to get/qualify for SAG-AFTRA membership.
Finally: Hollywood has the lovely concept of overtime. I have a great many friends who work in the industry, and they love overtime. It starts at time and a half, and the multiple increases every few hours over the day and week so that theoretically a crew member (but not cast member) could be making 5x of their base hourly rate after a few days of Hollywood's equivalent of crunch time. (Exact amount of hours in a day/week before hourly rates go above 1.5x varies per union, but generally starts at 12 hours/day or 50 hours/week). Needless to say, because abusing their workers gets so expensive, studios plan production to limit crunch time during a production. While it's relatively common for production schedules to include overtime, generally only mismanaged productions run into crunch time.
There is no equivalent in the gaming industry, and so crunch time of a year or two is common (see e.g., EA and Telltale Games). F/X studios operate like gaming studios, so those workers are relatively abused. Like game programmers and other game studio employees, they have largely resisted unionization and so are generally the only group of Hollywood workers that can be said to be both unpaid and overworked.
People caught onto this in comic books, however. There are savvy readers who follow writers and artists, not characters. There are savvy fans of Anime who do this as well. There are even people who do this with books and movies. There are some gamers who do this with games.
Same old story. There are those fooled by surfaces, and those who try to see beneath them.
Yes, but game developers aren't the ones doing the art, or writing, for games.
If somebody thinks they can get more money with less effort then we want them to try working that way instead.
In other words, corporations make a cost/benefit calculation. In the case of software developers and lead software developers, my experience is that most corporations can concretely read the dollar amount as cost, but often drastically underestimate the potential cost of bad software.
There are situations where many people are valued below market for a long, long time. Markets aren't omniscient and infinitely fast.
Even games released by superstars like Edmund Mcmillen have flops. The culture around game designers isn't to this point YET.
Sid Meyer Christy Marx Richard Garriott
Well at least i did anyway. Maybe i am alone in this.
Funds flowing to proven creators, successful entrepreneurs and shrewd investors is a good thing because those are exactly the people who know how to deploy those assets productively.
Having said all that, I've no idea specifically about Carmack.
How to link investors up with startups and growth opportunities in businesses is an old problem that ideally needs multiple solutions available.
[rant]I think the success of capitalism has partially been the reward mechanism, but it's also been that it allows and encourages multiple mechanisms for capital to link up with investment opportunities. The alternatives have all offered grand ideal, theoretically perfect mechanisms for the distribution and allocation of assets. It's not that those mechanisms are necessarily all useless, I do think a degree of state capitalism and central planning for really big, long term or essential projects have their place, but they can't be the only solution. At it's core capitalism is about individual freedom, and that includes the freedom to own your own small business, or to aggregate together into large group enterprises like banks and corporations, or to vote for governments that fund essential services. These are not natural opposites IMHO, and ideologies on the left or the right that force them into opposition do so only because they themselves are flawed.[/rant]
You don't have to be a star in order to collectively bargain, you just need to organize with your colleagues.
If the Weinstein scandal is any indication, no it hasn't. Unions are not without their problems, while more widespread awareness about the actual working conditions in any given industry (be it acting or game development) is highly effective, one way or the other. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Issues in getting jobs have to do with the limited supply of capitalized projects, high project transactional costs (including fairly high financial, equipment and professional costs), restrictions upon actor country of origin on the basis of bilateral entertainment tax treaties and a number of other structural issues. All of these issues mean that there's a substantial amount of activation energy required to get an entertainment product off the ground, which limits the amount of product projects in motion at any given time.
Feel free to look up the various guild pay grades. The minimums are very low, and they're designed to prevent the 'be in this motion picture for free for exposure' race to the bottom, not to price small projects out of the market.
It takes some fighting and searching to get all three, the last seeming most hard. But it is possible and not really hard.
Collective bargaining would not yield Tom Cruise-like returns or even exceptional returns.
The reason is that devs are ultimately a commodity.
Actors, by the way - even good ones - are even more of a commodity. There are tons of spectacular actors who would work cheap.
What brings in the audience is not the quality of the acting, it's the familiarity of the person, or the 'living brand'.
The 'human being Tom Cruise' obviously has the most amazing, unbreakable IP protection on the 'brand Tom Cruise'.
And it's the 'brand Tom Cruise' that has value. (And He only has to be a decent actor, not a even a great one)
Unions might help with some things ... but generally that's not going to be it.
The other thing to consider is the hugely risky and hit-driven nature of the business. Any 'investor' in games is risking so much, that the returns may be a little biased.
Consider that even for a game that 'made a lot of money' - it still may not be rational to have invested in that game! It still maybe overall a 'bad investment' to invest in such things.
A union could do a lot for those who work in the game industry. Game developers work such insane hours during crunch time when there's really no need for it. With a union mandating a standard work week, the onus would be put on the producers of the game to plan effectively in order to meet a deadline.
Game producers would have us all believe that games are uniquely complicated in a way that sets them apart from films and requires such ridiculous time commitments. That's rubbish. The vast majority of the work that goes into a triple A game is asset creation (graphics and sound). This makes games extremely similar to films which are dominated by CG and post-production work these days.
Some games, especially follow ons of well established 'game brands' I can see as being less risky ... but for new titles?
But yes, there's no reason for the countless hours, that's basically just taking advantage of creatives no doubt and admittedly unions may help in some way.
Writing staff on hit tv shows also don't see the monetary gain that actors do unless they own the production, which is rare.
I'm guessing once people get fed up enough they just leave which is much easier than forming some kind of special interest group or union.
Let me know when there's a star developer who's name on the front of a video game cover will guarantee a moderate number of sales no matter how bad the game is. That's when the comparison against the top 0.1% of actors will make sense.
...until he finally oversold his overselling, that is.
I seriously doubt most game developers make anywhere near that.
There are exceptions but I saw my salary double when I left the industry and from talking with other people it seemed like a pretty common pattern.
FWIW games follows the 90/10 rule(90% of revenue goes to 10% of the market) so while the 100k average may be "accurate" it doesn't paint a clear picture.
I mean it's still a lot more than the zero that most musicians and actors make, but an extremely surprising amount nonetheless.
The real twist on this is that these aren't stable jobs either. Every studio I know had some sort of closure/downsizing around the 3-5 year mark. I know many people who had to be constantly moving between SEA/SF/Austin/etc just to keep a job across a career.
.
I know they are a joke in the gaming world, but at least they pay people what they are worth.
As does Valve.
as an example Sony has 10-15 divisions. TVs, batteries, Lcd screens, cameras, etc. For the last 10 to 15 yrs all of them have lost money except the game division but the game division has the lowest salaries.
Your average game industry employee is not equivalent to directors and stars in movies though. They're much closer to employees/contractors at visual effects companies or grips, none of them are getting millions even on the biggest films. At least as a mid-tier engineer on a hit AAA game you can get total compensation equal to or better than big tech pays in some cases, and as an artist you can make more than you would in film with more stability.
Companies like inXile, Obsidian and Compulsion Games were using crowdfunding, but got swallowed by MS apparently because they couldn't sustain projects of the size they wanted to, using just crowdfunded money.
It's a problem really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhmYENdFZc8
I see lots of replies that a network programmer is not a name to anyone. To that I'd say that's a strawman. People, the game director, the art director, maybe the lead programmer, are all people that generally have a reputation for making hits. They arguably deserve at least as much credit as Sorkin or Spielberg or Fincher.
The talk about points out no one cared about directors until the directors started doing their own PR and then eventually convincing the powers that be that promoting the staff "You'll love this new game because it's made by the director of the last game you loved" is a huge marketing advantage.
That's much better entertainment value than a $20 movie.
However, not all games, music, or video provide 100s of hours of entertainment so I'm not sure I understand your generalization.
> A good album can also provide hundreds of hours of entertainment for $10.
Passive/supplemental entertainment maybe. Outside of a very small percentage of serious audiophiles, I don't know anyone listening to 1 album for hundreds of hours other than as background noise.
I also love System of a Down. Probably paid sub-$100 for their discography. Must have hundreds of hours of listening pleasure. Isn't this a better value than ME:A?
I'm also a huge Star Wars fan. The $30 I paid for the movie ticket and the popcorn combo when I went to see Rogue One brought me much more pleasure than those 30h of ME:A, so was this a better value?
I know, that's one game, one artist, one movie, but that's just to illustrate that it's not that clear-cut.
I was just ignoring the games and movies that suck and would be a waste of time and money.
We're talking about is the games you actually end up playing versus the movies you actually end up watching. For me the value for money is crushingly in favor of games, both in terms of hours per dollar and in terms of subjective enjoyment.
Other people might have a different overall experience, but let's at least compare the right things.
Fair enough. Really depends on the type of games you enjoy though. They really don't all have the same replay value. As you said, other people might have different experiences.
Average play time doesn't mean much in terms of actual game quality and value for your money. I've played games just to go through them, get the story and play the sequel, the one that's actually good.
Average time played is not a good metric because people on both extremes will skew it heavily, like any average - people who bought the game but never played it, or people who play it way too much. It also depends a lot on the game. On an okay-ish game that has a +/-20h campaign will be pretty easy to munch through just to check it off, but one can easily abandon an okay-ish game with 5-10 minute matches after a handful of hours.
I understand the point you are making in regards to average time played, but surely the people who, quote-unquote, play the game way too much, enjoy that specific game very much? Please note that you can also see the median playtime on the abovementioned website.
Is that a common practice? I once accidentally bought a "standard" version of a game instead of the "ultimate" on my Xbox One and had to deal with a couple of support people to refund my original purchase in order to get the other.
It cost you $2.66/hr for entertainment, that sounds like a great investment.
> Isn't this a better value than ME:A?
Not necessarily. One required active mental participation, one was passive. The big question is what value did you get out of each one?
You should have been alert to EA screwing up the Mass Effect franchise from all the garbage they pulled on Mass effect 3 (Weak ending, making Javik DLC when he was clearly a main character, etc.)
Waiting 30-60 days meant that the game was available for less than half that.
www.humblebundle.com -> Great place to find indie deals
www.factorio.com -> Game I've invested 100s of hours into because building and number management. Plus Mods!
If you include hardware costs I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on video games. The number of games I've spent more than 200 hours playing is in the single digits.
And that music streaming service probably comes close to maxing out the entertainment most people can get from purchasing music, so for most people, music isn't really competing against games in their entertainment budget.
There is a large population of concert goers, and large market for music merchandise and musical instruments.
I'd be surprised is music streaming services comprise 50% of the total music market, although they might be more than 50% of all recorded music.
If we're talking about concerts though, you're talking about a higher cost per hour than movies. Not comparable to $120 for hundreds of hours.
>market for music merchandise
I'm going to avoid merch because games have merch too, so it doesn't really seem worth comparing.
>and musical instruments
Musical instruments, for people who are interested, probably do provide a higher entertainment value per dollar than games, but they are definitely a much smaller niche market.
I understand the reasoning, but time spent is not really a great measurement of value. I probably spent hundreds of hours on a couple of games back in middle/high school and I'd be lying if I said I didn't regret at least some of that.
A day at Disney World costs far more per hour than a movie. Does that mean people should stay away from Disney World?
There's a huge continuum beyond the "am I entertained?" binary, and that matters much more than dollars per hour.
A trip to Disney for somebody might conceivably be something that they remember for the rest of their lives and that has value.
So while there is a greater value per hour of use for games, that does not necessarily equate to a "better entertainment value" for all users.
What you say about the complexity of entertainment is absolutely true, but we somehow need to model it in a relatively easy way, and that means throwing out some details.
And from in naive guess, people don't enjoy themselves significantly more watching film than playing videogames. So dollar per hour is a good enough metric for our purposes.
One of the things I've been paying attention to as I get older is how many unique experiences a thing offers. Games that are hundreds of hours long, or otherwise provide hundreds of hours of entertainment, generally involve a lot of repetition. Repetition is intrinsically unmemorable.
The games keep you busy, and you might not describe yourself as bored while playing them, but it's not like you can remember all of the riveting times you fought a Zubat. And in that sense, was it an optimal use of time? Sometime I find it disturbing to think about. There are games where my total playtime adds up to literal months, but the number of unique memories I have of actually playing are depressingly few.
[0] https://kotaku.com/the-free-gear-in-black-ops-4-is-an-unforg...
This is one of the reasons why Fortnite has been so successful: its easier to justify a single 10 dollar payment for a few weeks and know what you're getting based on what you play.
I've collectively dumped hundreds of hours in Factorio, Stardew Valley, and Kerbal Space Program.
You dont have to look very far to find games which have long play times and no lootboxes (which is a fairly recent thing). Sometimes, games are just good without exploitative mechanics
Netflix/Spotify model comes to mind. The collective pool of subscriptions fund creation of AAA titles just like the EA pass.
Can u recommend some sort of a factorio for star-exploration type game ?
Kerbal itself is far too complex and detailed oriented for me
Now that's value for money.
Love single player games with good story, but really sink time into challenging dexterity games I can play in short sessions for a break.
I remember reading a post about a Path of Exile gamer who successfully convinced Grinding Gear Games to put in special rules for his account because he was a gambling addict.
Where've you been for the past five years? That's what microtransactions are all about. Hijacking our brain's reward system to extract maximum money.
My point there was that there is no such equivalent in video & music. I guess if you factor in "superchats" for video you could count those.
I always wonder if these experiences can be priced accordingly
Flagship games have been priced at $60 for 25 years and should be priced higher to reflect a variety of other things, but their primary purchasers dont have the money for more. People really into games dont have money, and children’s parents dont respect the medium to want to pay more. (Fortunately there is the aging demographic of everyone else, who do have money and dont mind preordering)
But with the price of a game being mentally fixed in the collective conscious I wodber what the average price per user is now with the in game transactions factored in
It's terribly inefficient in every possible way, but it appears to work.
Evidence #1: The ever-present existence of potato masher PC configurations (cheaper and more powerful than a console in qty 1) makes me doubt that consoles are loss leaders. The crypto bubble played with that math but it seems to generally hold.
Evidence #2: Sony keeps bragging about how many consoles their investments in first-party game studios have been able to move. Importantly: that's how they phrase it.
Evidence #3: This particular narrative has held true for several people in my bubble, including myself. People will buy a console to play Bloodborne, Horizon Zero Dawn, or God of War. The center-of-mass for single-player narrative-driven AAAs seems to be moving away from the PC, and the ones that stay on the PC seem to be bogged down with "alternative" monetization models.
25 years ago there was a much smaller base of game systems and capable PCs than exists today. At basically 0 incremental cost for each additional copy produced the big game publishers are still making more money than they did previously.
There's some of that, but I think it's more just gamer entitlement. Any company that prices a game above $60 will be crucified on Reddit, YouTube, and the gaming media, because games are "supposed to" cost $60 and anything more than that is "greedy".
Then the same people will say they don't understand why everything has microtransactions now.
Gamers got EA voted "worst company in America" two years running over companies that actually, literally killed people.
Compare this with $10/mo for Netflix or Spotify - gamers are getting a rough deal already just buying a few AAA titles a year. Personally I'm all for microtransactions so long as they don't impact gameplay in unfair ways - many developers are already doing this quite successfully, Fortnite and Overwatch being popular and generally well liked examples.
I wonder if there are any popular private or reverse engineered League of Legends or Fortnite servers. These are also the most profitable games in the world.
I have to wonder if a game like World of Warcraft, if it were released in 2019, would even consider a monthly subscription given what it has to compete against these days. I would assume private servers for WoW made sense because people wanted to dodge $15/mo.
In the case of music and video it seems that DRM is 100% ineffective, and particularly once the content is cracked it can be moved entirely outside the DRM system. In the case of games you still need a runtime environment which is at least somewhat proprietary.
Both music and movies have been devalued to a $10 month "all you can eat" scenario which has nowhere near the revenue potential of a $100 a month cable subscription or buying Blu-Ray at $20 a pop.
DRM only needs to work well enough that people can't copy and paste it to their friends. Most games have online multiplayer modes now that can endlessly check for a valid copy from a central server though.
But for the most part, I'd say that yeah priacy is effectively dead. The ease of hacking the consoles and running pirated games isn't there (IMO) and thus the percentage of users who are doing it is very small. Much more an enthusiast community moreso than a community of pirates who want to play games.
This could all change, but I don't think that the piracy scene for the newest generation is anywhere close to the last two.
Hell, I remember flashing the firmware on my xbox 360 disk drive within the first year.
Or soldering a modchip into my OG Xbox. RIP that console, best console ever.
Console piracy is effectively dead.
I'm not saying that DRM is a large reason that movies/TV are behind, but I don't think this is a good counterargument.
>One of the biggest arguments against anti-piracy checks built into video games (commonly known as "digital rights management," or DRM) is that they punish paying customers with stuttering, loading times, and other detractive gameplay issues. While leading DRM vendor Denuvo has long claimed that its tools don't hamper video games, the stats keep piling up to suggest otherwise.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/evidence-continues-to...
Even on PC, more games are going towards always online/multiplayer and lootbox/cosmetic/etc., which are also DRM by nature.
Since there is no other word for requesting that something be readable by the consumer and not readable by the consumer at the same time.
Somewhere in the mid 00s, society established a new gamer stereotype as some lazy man child who prefers to sit around reading comics and playing games to going out and "grabbing life by the horns" or some other nonsense.
Because gaming is pretty ubiquitous and accepted in American culture (at least in the coastal areas I've been to).
Playing games and identifying as a 'gamer' are definitely different, however. I play a lot of core games (PUBG, Overwatch, etc.) but I definitely do not label myself a 'gamer'.
Marketing video games to enhance a social setting rather than a way to escape one probably appeals to parents who are worried about the whole "screen zombies" thing.
I had no answer for that.