Game Publishers Are Obsolete – So Why Haven’t Developers Ditched Them Yet?
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This is doubtless an incomplete list.
1. Money. I've put this first for obvious reasons, but as the article alludes to, the industry cycle itself is incredibly unsteady (I can look up the exact figures, but I recall that something like 50% of yearly sales of boxed games are done within one month around Christmas), alongside the studio financial model being obviously unsteady (work for 3-5 years to release a game that generates 90%+ of its lifetime revenue in 2 months). When you look at it like this, publishers look like the subservient ones: a studio that produces a flop often has another title in development with another publisher, and just misses out on royalties; a publisher that has a string of flops goes bankrupt. If this relationship didn't exist, AAA studios would be less likely to stick together (as the failure of even one game would disperse the team) - that means no Blizzard, no id, no Bethesda, no Rare, no Lionhead, no Bioware - essentially any studio who have ever pushed back a game, or released a market failure or a slow-burner would probably be out of business.
2. Platform-holder pressure. Sony, MSFT, Nintendo have (no so much now) incredibly strict rules about what games can do on their platforms, ranging from "no printf() calls" to "no GUI elements within 12 pixels of the edge of the screen" to "your game is not allowed to crash after being played for 48 hours straight". As a developer going straight to platform, you have zero leverage with the platform-owner (remember, they know that if your game flops you're gone as a company). Going through a publisher, well, far be it from me to imply that any underhand tactics, such as threatening to delay other titles so they don't coincide nicely with the platform-holder's plans, might occur.
3. Boring stuff. Games need hosting, translation, websites, promoting the game to retailers (which is a more adversarial process than you might expect), supply chain logistics, getting the game rated, getting manuals written, dealing with returns from physical shops, collector's editions, merchandise, blah blah blah...after a decade of work in the industry, I'm aware that my knowledge here barely scratches the surface of what's required to put out an AAA game once the code is signed off and the assets finished. This is doubtless the easiest function of publishers to replace, but no-one except publishers offers this service at the moment, and any studio who deliberately goes without this is shooting themselves in the head.
4. Quality. This doesn't always work well, but a publisher is often the first party to see the game outside the studio, so they have the best information to predict the state of the art when your game launches. Advice like "those shaders aren't good enough" is never easy to hear, but it's always better than releasing a game that is panned for dated graphics.
5. Media relations. This doesn't get talked about much...but publishers are the ones with all the power over both paper magazines (exclusives, pre-reviews etc.) and online games sites. In return for access to games before the release date, there's usually a subtle or not-so-subtle pressure to give the games a positive review. (This is why games that are given an average of 8/10 being regarded as a flop.) Media outlets that don't follow this protocol are simply frozen out of the pre-review process. I don't think this is a good thing for the industry, but in the same way as point 3 above, any developer who forgoes this process is putting themselves at a disadvantage relative to other development studios following a more traditional model.
[1] The ways:
1. Mice/Keyboard vs. Clumsy controllers.
2. Superior hardware.
3. You already have one, so no new purchases needed.
4. A vastly greater array of games to choose from.
5. Almost always cheaper games.Because consoles are _easy_. You plop them into your entertainment center, and you're done. No need to maintain the latest security patches, find just the right combo of drivers to make it work, etc. Not to mention the wonderful "buy yet another graphics card, please - your previous one you bought 6 months ago is too slow".
They also take less space than PCs. "Clumsy controllers" are easy to set up. Keyboard and mouse really require some dedicated space. (Yes, you could pull them out when you need them. It's annoying as heck)
From the developers point of view: The game looks and feels the same for every single player out there. I don't need to worry about dozens of graphics fallback paths depending on what hardware you use.
So, for everybody involved in the game development cycle, they're more convenient. All your points still hold, but they don't matter in the face of convenience. Not for the average person, at least.
They are also a lot easier to use. No need to install an anti-virus, worry about having the latest drivers, or having background programs eat up all the resources and thus receive a bad gaming experience.
Also, the time it takes to boot up a console and start playing takes seconds. Booting up an old windows install on a HDD takes forever.
Superior hardware on the PC, sure. But it's locked behind a mountain of drivers. On the console, you can get much more direct access. This means that some stuff is actually faster on XBox360 than a brand new 7000 series radeon.
> Mice/Keyboard vs. Clumsy controllers.
For many types of games, I prefer a controller to a mouse and keyboard. On consoles, the controllers are designed to be used to play games. On computers, the games are designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard.
> Superior hardware.
It doesn't matter, if all the games with a big enough budget to take advantage of that hardware are also coming out on the consoles. Also, developers can leverage more out of the limited capabilities of a console because of their uniform hardware, whereas with computers they have to take into account a range of hardware and that precludes them leveraging those capabilities as much.
> You already have one, so no new purchases needed.
Many computers aren't gaming rigs. If you don't have a gaming rig, then a new console is a cheaper option than a gaming computer. It may even be the case that it's cheaper to get a general-purpose computer plus a console than to get one specialized gaming computer.
> A vastly greater array of games to choose from.
Doesn't matter if enough of the games that you want to play are coming out on consoles too.
> Almost always cheaper games.
But the console hardware is cheaper, so that balances out (depending out many games you buy). And you can get many games that are more than about a year old for $10-20. Not as cheap as a Steam sale, but getting close.
I think there are a bunch of differences, which you've mainly seen, but perhaps have a flip-side to them you haven't considered. The only point you have maybe overlooked is tribalism (brand loyalty) - there are people who have been buying Nintendo consoles for literally 30 years. That's quite a bit of marketing momentum.
Controllers: I would guess that you're mainly an RTS or FPS player - FPS, at a guess. Certain genres work much better on controllers - fighting games, racing games, and to a lesser extend adventure games. I consider mouse/keyboard strictly superior (by a great deal) to controllers for FPS, but only in a competitive way - for actually playing a game with them I'm indifferent. (Can't say the same for RTSs, of course.)
Superior hardware is a double-edge sword. Consoles are generally released with pretty top-end kit (e.g. the 360 launched with 3 3.2GHz processors in 2005, which despite them being in-order was pretty awesome at the time) but of course are overtaken by generalized hardware in time. The PC is an (unbelievably) fragmented market, though, and consoles generally have specialized hardware to make them more compelling (e.g. the 360's shared memory bus between the processors and the GPU). Coupled with additional experience, time you can devote to a single platform, and tooling, consoles hold their own performance-wise much longer than the specs would tell you.
Not unrelated to the last point, sure, everyone has a PC, but most people don't have one capable of playing games that look as good as the ones on their console, and maybe don't have the inclination or knowledge to upgrade their PC to a point where they do. Additionally, maintaining a PC is just harder work than maintaining a console, and most people don't have PCs set up to output to their TV.
I hate to break it to you, but most people don't care about the choice of games they have...they want to play maybe 3-5 games they know of, and don't care about getting indie games from Steam or independently. Similarly I don't think many people buy enough games (especially considering the healthy console second-hand market) to justify the purchase of a PC on cost.
I'm going to guess the #1 reason is ease of compatibility. You only have one set of hardware on an Xbox..but a ton of different types of hardware on a PC.
Piracy might also be an issue. Generally, console games are much more difficult to pirate. In fact, After the Xbox 360 came out, I don't know anyone that pirates the games. But everyone I know pirates PC games.
The reason they don't is a mixture of financial obligations (children, wife, etc), risk management (failure rate is high, career advancement goes out the window at your current job, lots of money invested with no guarantee of return, etc), size of challenge problem (publishers have everything already in place vs you having to do it all yourself), and having the personality for it, among other things.
We can look at examples like Mojang and see huge successes, but it's a self selection process -- we almost always only hear about the successful indie companies, not the ones that tried to get the word out and got nowhere and failed.
Finally, the authors final suggestion of organizing a boycott or a movement seems right in line with "online petitions" and "If this baby gets 1000 likes he will get his cancer treatment". The most effective way to fight Publishers who treat their developers like crap is to vote with your wallet -- a trait that many gamers seem unwilling to do (See: Modern Warfare 2 boycott, Mass Effect 3 boycott, etc).
After participating in a few boycotts myself (and following through on what I said I would do, not just grandstanding), only to see companies continue to make record profits, its hard not to feel like you are fighting against the tide coming in.
First, most of the games they discuss that cost 40-60 bucks, the CoDs of the world, require enough capital outlay to deter any small band of developers. You need money for art assets, voice acting, advertising, sound design etc. etc. You can get by with the just a couple of developers on laptops, but you have to scale back your ambitions (see Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, Spiderweb Software).
The biggest pot of money is on consoles, even with the recent trend towards PC gaming that happens at the nadir of a console generation. You have to be a big boy (at least moderately big) to be on those.
Large publishers can, and do, use Steam just as much as the little guy. And can afford an advertising budget.
Don't get me wrong, I love me some steam. I love 2d shooters, and there never has been a better time for playing them. But pay-per-view didn't lead to the death of big budget movies, and this won't lead to the death of larger games.
Our tools have come so far, and our computers have become so cheap, that the barrier to entry to making a solid, fun, good-looking game is removed. Gone. Poof!
All you need to do is be willing to learn and stubborn enough to execute, and you'll make it.
And you know what else?
We need this. We need hordes of little velociraptor indies to outbreed and outsell publishers. We need the bloated megacorp AbstractGameFactorys to die. We need to free up the IP, we need to encourage genuine risk-taking and technological progress, and we need to do our damnedest to kill off these fuckers before they irrecoverably damage the market and the gamers.
And they now have the staff to add new characters to the game every two weeks. The WoW devs add new wireframe modeled mobs maybe a half dozen times an expansion.
An indie team that knows their stuff could give the big boys a run for their money.
I've been a lead on several AAA games at 2K and without a doubt a team of 5-6 guys and the Unreal Engine can make a smash hit game.
I cant image the teams for Portal or Team Fortress are very big.
As for the "all you need part" - I've friends who've gone indie, and it's a _very_ painful route, with far from guaranteed success. Have you actually tried it?
Note also that we need to solve the art asset production problem--look at sites like cgtextures or similar for stabs at this. Look at procedural content and better tools like Unity. Those are some examples of how we can make assets cheaper and artists' lives easier.
As for trying to be an indie... job in progress (check my profile).
As for cgtextures, it's a useless site for a high-polish game - the textures are inconsistent in style and quality. (And that's what causes the real cost, polish). Believe me, I've looked at procedural content for a long time, and it's still a far cry from ready.
What we might see fairly soon is human-assisted procedural content, especially for all those areas of the game that are just there for ambience, not for actual gameplay. Even then, it's a large amount.
But then again, you'll find out all that for yourself :) (Good luck with that venture!)
I'm genuinely curious how much "polish" is actually needed and required by gamers.
My theory is that publishers have push the market to the point where games are very similar (not a bad thing in and of itself, but not inaccurate either) and so the differentiating factor for driving sales and advertising is visuals. That being the case, the increasingly far end of the tail of visual fidelity is being mined heavily, and "polish" is getting more and more and more expensive.
So, I think that you can get by on pretty solid gameplay and alright polish without needing to get a publisher to fund you--after all, it was their business model that made it so expensive to start with.
Does that seem like a reasonable conclusion?
They just found a way of doing that that is less asset intensive than "visual fidelity".
If you've found another way to make that work, you're set. But you pretty much by definition need to make an entirely different kind of game.
To replicate the dwarffortress combat system is a whole project in itself, bordering on insanity. (I know, because I only implemented parts of it, but still not completed yet)
The reason most developers of $60 games sign with publishers is because they do not have the money to develop games of that size themselves.
Whether it is a good idea for them to be doing this is really a different question (and it is complex to answer).
What does a low-end iphone game cost to develop? Angry Birds? What would a Modern Warfare clone cost? World of Warcraft?
I have no clue what the cost neighborhoods even are for any of those things...
Smaller $15 downloadable titles of high quality vary but are on the order of 3-5 million. Tim Schafer was recently quoted as saying a proper Psychonauts sequel would cost $20 million which sounds about right.
Mobile games are a bit of a wild card. High end iOS games can easily break a couple of million dollars. Other mobile games can also be done with a 2 man team living off ramen. The minimum entry fee however is rising every day.
[0] http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/01/17/analyst-believes-sta...
Not really. Notch built the game alone and went it alone until there was success. Mojang (as a company, publisher and studio) evolved from Minecraft so you can't use them as any example of anything. The only thing they prove is that if your game is good enough and has enough buzz you don't need a publisher, but doesn't everyone know that already?
If you flood the market with lots of indie games (with a high ratio of low quality games), review websites will become stronger and more relevant in the industry and assume the role of content curators.
Today, review websites are already powerful. If publishers 'left' the game industry, their influence would be transferred to review sites and indie developers will be in the same position that they are today.