Marketable
This got past my radar on the weekend, but luckily a clarification put it back on front pages today: Electronic Entertainment Design and Research helps companies make profitable games… or not, as the article explains, detailing how different features (multiplayer, cross-platform design) can be hit-or-miss in terms of overall profitability. The big figure that everyone is tossing around from this story is the percentage of games that become profitable: 4% of all games that enter production, and 20% of those that reach the market.
There’s a couple of things to note here. The obvious point is that with such low sales figures, if your system doesn’t print money and become a pervasive cultural phenomenon (and I would place the Madden series alongside Wii Fit in this category) then you probably don’t have the cash to fool around with less potentially successful releases. Of course, everyone already knew that was why companies kept designing games that worked with the same proven mechanics and visible franchises, but to see it in such stark terms is a painful reminder of just how bad the problem is.
But what really got my attention was the way the percentage jumps between games in production and at market. Since the statistic rises from 4% to 20%, that means that four out of five projects are abandoned before they’re completed, and presumably most of those are lost due to concerns over sunken costs and lacking purchase power. In other words, a game like oh let’s say WinBack was still considered potentially profitable enough to complete the work and put it up for sale.
Think of all the high-profile cancellations you could hear about in a given year: EarthBound 64 getting canned, the new Ghostbusters losing its own developer, the endless whirlpools that made Daikatana famous and continue to provide Duke Nukem Forever as the punchline to jokes about delays (and all the more relevant now that Chinese Democracy is actually purchasable at your local Wal-Mart.) Now try to understand that these stories are just the tip of the symbolic iceberg that neurologists like to rant about when it’s compared to the human brain. Literally hundreds of games are disappearing into the ether every year, simply because the market research suggests that they won’t maximize the company’s profits. If I were a developer, I might actually spend less time working on my game than I would on fudging the numbers and forcing the ideas down the public’s collective throat, just so there’d be a market to sell to when it was done.
Tags: Game Production