Hollywood has become increasingly creatively bankrupt and the game industry could follow, but there is still hope. Over the decades we’ve seen a huge paradigm shift in how we like to experience digital entertainment; the complex and big budget video-games we have today are certainly not the games that your father played. Much like Hollywood before it; the game industry is growing in terms of profitability (18% revenue spike in 2017), and is now a 36 billion dollar+ industry, but in many regards creativity is at risk of stagnating. Now, this is not to discount the fact that we are possibly moving into a golden era of gaming, nor is to say that there aren’t a lot of great movies or more importantly; games still being made – unfortunately, we may just have to go through some growing pains at a consumer level as well as a corporate level. In the last decade video games have started blossoming into a more malleable form of entertainment. We’ve heard the debates and arguments as to whether video-games can be art, and quite frankly the very question is absurd. Video-games can absolutely be classified as art. Period. This is not an opinion – they are literally made up of every artistic medium in the spectrum: music, illustration, photography and storytelling. However, this is a less important tangent than the core of what I’m getting at. Video-games have the potential to become a very viable and transcendent form of both art and entertainment. I’ve worked in the game industry for over a decade and I’ve always been a passionate gamer from a young age – to this point I believe that people in this industry should be in it for the passion of making games. Of course, this industry, like all entertainment industries is going to be driven by corporate profits and the industry needs to be profitable in order to sustain the jobs and livelihood of very talented and dedicated content providers: artists, developers, musicians, designers and world builders.
Eitr – an amazing looking “indie” game
The problem isn’t that companies are trying to make money off of games; some companies have simply lost their way and have let a cyclical pseudo-consumerist approach dictate their business models. When I say, ‘pseudo-consumerist’ approach, I mean that some companies think they are giving gamers what they’ve asked for, because they offer something that some people will pay for. Eventually when dangerous thinking like this becomes the norm there is a tipping point; much like what we’re seeing with loot boxes and a lot of DLC. Adopting a free-to-play model in a paid AAA game is not the way to garner gamer’s trust and we’re finally starting to see some repercussions from these kinds of business models. To make it abundantly clear – consumers are as much to blame for the current state of this industry as the corporate culture and shareholders of these big companies. In the last two decades we’ve seen gaming grow exponentially, both in terms of scope and in terms of cost. We’ve had big name actors starring in these franchises – “Keifer Sutherland in… Metal Gear!?” The marketing budgets in these games have also gotten so big that they are rivaling Hollywood movies in terms of productions costs and marketing budgets – GTA V had a marketing budget of around 265 million dollars!
GTA V had a marketing budget of around 265 million dollars!
The growing problem with the gamer mentality is that many of them want games to be less than $60 and thanks to some high quality lower priced indie content we’re entering an era where we can see a high-quality game with slightly lower quality production values costing a lot less to make, market and buy. This is and should be a good thing for consumers, but it’s sort of changing expectations in terms of price. It’s also causing a tonal shift in some gamers that think some indie titles are “overpriced” due to not having AAA budgets and production values. There are countless comments on Steam with users stating, “I’ll wait for this game to be 5 bucks” – or, “Why does this game cost so much when it’s an indie title?” The other problem is that high-budget AAA games are costing so much to make and market that developers are feeling scared to go out of the bounds of their bread and butter franchises (see Call of Duty). On top of this the developers are finding creative ways to get more money out of consumers to offset the marketing and development costs of these games. Obviously, there is a lot of standard corporate greed at work here, but it’s also true that games cost a lot more to make and gamers sure have much higher standards than they used to. They want double the quality for a smaller price – this is not realistic. We’re even seeing a trend with some companies saying single-player gaming is dying and ripping story campaigns straight out of their titles and focusing purely on multiplayer since they believe this what their fans want and that it also will save them money and time.
Death Stranding – by Hideo Kojima and starring Norman Reedus
With new emerging technologies; truly next-gen open worlds and the game industry growing bigger and faster than ever before we could be entering the golden era of gaming – we need to tread carefully and look at what has has happened to Hollywood – speaking of which; can you imagine if we had to pay three dollars extra to watch the end credits of a Marvel movie? Our hope doesn’t lie in the mountain of poorly catered indie shovelware ‘Minecraft clones’, nor does it lie in the cookie cutter lootbox driven franchise titles. It’s in the wallets of gamers and in the hands of AAA developers honing their craft and creating new amazing and “complete” worlds for us to explore — with publishers brave enough to support high quality indie content that can create truly unique and niche experiences. With studios like CD Project Red and Santa Monica Studio the industry itself should realize what gamers already know. If you have high quality creative, story driven single player experiences that take risks and entertains – your game will sell. Some bigger publishers are even branching out and operating under separate divisions within their companies in order to facilitate the development of high quality indie titles. We’ve even seen companies self publishing ‘AA’ games as higher tier “indies” with better production values; Vampyr from Dontnod and Hellblade by Ninja theory are two examples of such games. Now, I won’t even go down the rabbit hole of broken dreams regarding Kickstarter financed games too much, but honestly there has been some success there (Hyper Light Drifter as an example) and hopefully we can be encouraged by some of these shining examples that gives us gamers, and risk-taking developers hope in this brave new world of gaming. Multiplayer games are awesome, but single-player games will never die and developers should always find a way to make their games profitable – cosmetic DLC is fine when executed tastefully, but loot boxes are just lazy and bad for the industry. We need profits to keep making these games, but we still need to maintain a creative first approach – it’s good for the industry and good for the gamers.
From App Annie
brandon boswell 