guarantees that your investment in creative works has a short shelf life
Talk to Thomas if you want actual numbers, but the overwhelming majority of AAA games have fairly predictable sales curves with a peak window measured in weeks or, in some cases, days. See also books, movies, music, etc.
Evergreen content is highly anomalous in creative industries.
> the overwhelming majority of AAA games have fairly predictable sales curves with a peak window measured in weeks or, in some cases, days
Yep, big games are horrendously front-loaded and with very short legs (you can see that if you follow sales threads at e.g. Neogaf).
This is why DRMs which technically "fail" (they fall in, say, 2 weeks) have performed admirably, and as asked/required: for two weeks, where 90% of the game's sales happen, pirated games were not competition.
This is why I can only shake my head in disbelief when people claim DRMs fail as a DRM finally gets cracked 1 month after a game release: as far as publishers are concerned, a DRM which lasted 4~5 weeks has performed way beyond the call of duty, and you can be sure their next game will be using the same breed of DRM.
AMA video game researcher (Computer Science). I can confirm the truth of this, but I don't have any hard sources right now.
If a AAA title doesn't move 1 million copies in opening week, the studio is going to be in trouble either directly financially, or with the publisher (see: Mirror's Edge).
Everyone is fully aware of the ridiculousness of where the market is right now.
I bet game developers hate this effect, years of development time to effectively try and market a game into peoples hands in the first couple of weeks whether they like it or not.
This I much prefer the path many MMO's have taken or a game like TF2, continue to add over time to keep a solid value proposition for years to come rather than the 2 weeks after it comes out.
I think this is sort of what I'm getting at. The Game industry is moving rapidly to copy the Movie industry. Years of work, tens of millions of dollars, splashy and expensive ad campaign all culminating in a couple weeks' worth of sales and the bargain bin/used game box/forgotten 3 months later. The vast majority of which barely break even with production costs.
Old game mags used to have a metric called "replayability". Games with poor re-playability were dinged by the gaming press as offering low-value for the dollar to the gamer. I'm just wondering if the Movie style approach offers similar low-value for the dollar for the game makers in terms of the amount of money required to advertise to gamers for every AAA title that comes out the door, only to throw all that work away next month. It's almost like the industry is pumping out Mandalas, then sweeping them away.
Heck Mega Man (Rock Man) has had 7 or 8 games with virtually the same artwork (the most expensive part of game production). A modern developer might look at this and say "we'll just release a MegaMan game and every year release more enemies with more stages, weapons and bosses that just figure into the main release."
(I'm thinking Mega Man of course because I'm in the process of replaying through the series again and Capcom is losing millions from the PSN nonsense).
I guess what I'm rambling about is that there has to be a better way for the studios and the gamers to find better value in terms of longevity on both the development costs and the purchase price of the games -- and tying the games to a transient online auth system isn't going to do it.
One issue is perception of value. It's a lot easier to monetise a brand new game over one which is being updated or added to.
To everyone except hardcore gamers the current release method is probably very tiring, as in I might pick up a new game and play it for a few months at the rate I play games. In that time so many of these big titles would have come out.
It also means once these releases drop off best seller lists they quickly become unloved. I've seen big bugs and game mechanics issue that just never get fixed I guess because most of the sales have already happened.
Comments
guarantees that your investment in creative works has a short shelf life
Talk to Thomas if you want actual numbers, but the overwhelming majority of AAA games have fairly predictable sales curves with a peak window measured in weeks or, in some cases, days. See also books, movies, music, etc.
Evergreen content is highly anomalous in creative industries.
> the overwhelming majority of AAA games have fairly predictable sales curves with a peak window measured in weeks or, in some cases, days
Yep, big games are horrendously front-loaded and with very short legs (you can see that if you follow sales threads at e.g. Neogaf).
This is why DRMs which technically "fail" (they fall in, say, 2 weeks) have performed admirably, and as asked/required: for two weeks, where 90% of the game's sales happen, pirated games were not competition.
This is why I can only shake my head in disbelief when people claim DRMs fail as a DRM finally gets cracked 1 month after a game release: as far as publishers are concerned, a DRM which lasted 4~5 weeks has performed way beyond the call of duty, and you can be sure their next game will be using the same breed of DRM.
AMA video game researcher (Computer Science). I can confirm the truth of this, but I don't have any hard sources right now.
If a AAA title doesn't move 1 million copies in opening week, the studio is going to be in trouble either directly financially, or with the publisher (see: Mirror's Edge).
Everyone is fully aware of the ridiculousness of where the market is right now.
I bet game developers hate this effect, years of development time to effectively try and market a game into peoples hands in the first couple of weeks whether they like it or not.
This I much prefer the path many MMO's have taken or a game like TF2, continue to add over time to keep a solid value proposition for years to come rather than the 2 weeks after it comes out.
I think this is sort of what I'm getting at. The Game industry is moving rapidly to copy the Movie industry. Years of work, tens of millions of dollars, splashy and expensive ad campaign all culminating in a couple weeks' worth of sales and the bargain bin/used game box/forgotten 3 months later. The vast majority of which barely break even with production costs.
Old game mags used to have a metric called "replayability". Games with poor re-playability were dinged by the gaming press as offering low-value for the dollar to the gamer. I'm just wondering if the Movie style approach offers similar low-value for the dollar for the game makers in terms of the amount of money required to advertise to gamers for every AAA title that comes out the door, only to throw all that work away next month. It's almost like the industry is pumping out Mandalas, then sweeping them away.
Heck Mega Man (Rock Man) has had 7 or 8 games with virtually the same artwork (the most expensive part of game production). A modern developer might look at this and say "we'll just release a MegaMan game and every year release more enemies with more stages, weapons and bosses that just figure into the main release."
(I'm thinking Mega Man of course because I'm in the process of replaying through the series again and Capcom is losing millions from the PSN nonsense).
I guess what I'm rambling about is that there has to be a better way for the studios and the gamers to find better value in terms of longevity on both the development costs and the purchase price of the games -- and tying the games to a transient online auth system isn't going to do it.
One issue is perception of value. It's a lot easier to monetise a brand new game over one which is being updated or added to.
To everyone except hardcore gamers the current release method is probably very tiring, as in I might pick up a new game and play it for a few months at the rate I play games. In that time so many of these big titles would have come out.
It also means once these releases drop off best seller lists they quickly become unloved. I've seen big bugs and game mechanics issue that just never get fixed I guess because most of the sales have already happened.