New media has to find some legitimacy. It has to prove it is part of the culture, it has to be an accepted part of society. The easiest way of doing that is to prove it's a good business. Almost anything is alright in a capitalist society, no matter how silly, or flimsy if you can prove that the people involved are making stacks of cash off it. Business is important, it allows talented people to be payed to do what they are good at, but there has to be more or you may as well be packing sardines for a living. Hey its a profitable business.
Games quickly hooked onto the movie industry as it's role model and competitor. Why movies? Well movies are creative forms of entertainment, they are created in studios. Games have spectacle like a blockbuster movie and.... well that's about it really.
What makes the comparison so appealing? Well movies are glamorous, the actors become superstars recognised globally. Movie profits are vast (when a movie is successful).
The truth is games and movies are very different beasts. A movie shoots in a few months and normally is completed in much less than 12 months. Games take much longer. You can make a game in a shorter time but if you compare a big blockbuster movie to an equivalent game the game takes much much longer. Gran Turismo 5 took five years! Duke Nukem Forever, well that's exceptional.
A movie is seen by tens or hundreds of millions of people. A best selling console game sells about 8 million copies. The difference here is the price of admission. A movie ticket is pretty cheap - approximately £5 compared to £35 for a game. This is why the game industry appears to make movie amounts of money.
The movie industry has a chain of outlets for it's product. Starting at the cinema, then DVD and BluRay sales, download, movie rental, satelite and terrestrial TV rights not to mention movie merchandise and licensing. It's no wonder so many people see movies, the movies reach out to them and play wherever they fit in a persons life. To play games you have to buy a console and sit in your room. It's a much more limited experience. Recent games on Facebook have shown that if games reach out to the audience the audience will respond. And the numbers of people playing those games is much closer to the movie experience, even if the content is not the epic content we expect from a blockbuster. As for games secondary market, it's a disaster. The problem with games is the hardware. The best we can do is sell the old games at a cheaper price with altered packaging. Even worse the retailers have started a secondhand trade that canabalise the market.
Movies are mainstream. There are few people in the world who haven't seen a movie. There are millions of people who have never played a videogame, and have no wish to do so.
Classic movies are still a vital part of human culture. An old movie isn't disposable like a game is, Citizen Kane is still hailed as the greatest movie of all time but it was made with old technology many years ago. This year Star Wars will be released again on Blu-Ray. People still care about it enough to consider buying it again. Can you name a game that's 35+ years old and is still relevant?
I think this list of differences could get pretty huge. The point is that games and movies are very different and so the way we do business needs to be very different. So I started thinking about other industries that Gaming is like and what their business models are.
My first comparison was to Whiskey production. I'm partial to a single malt, Scotch or Irish. Whiskey makers make a batch and sit on it for 5, 8, 10, 12, 18 or 25 years. They know that the time it takes to make a malt is X years so they line up batches and sit on them and as they mature they start the next btach and wait and eventually after the first (and longest) wait they can produce a malt every year. Could we create games like this? Well the time given to the process is important and games do benefit from time spent building, playing, re-building. So this is similar. But Whiskey gets laid down for most of it's maturing period. Labour is negligible whereas games require a team of people all the way through. But staggering game production is great if you can afford it because you get extra time to develop but you maintain shelf space as each game is produced on a regular cycle.
Then I thought about another showbiz example. Theatre productions often involve a committed team of talented people, working to create something incredible. The team often strats work at normal hours but as they get closer to the start of the show they work longer and longer perfecting their show. This is similar to a games development where the team enters crunch to get the huge amount of work done for release. But that's when things change. the theatre team then stay with the show and run it day after day for years. They have time to keep working on the show and honing it to keep the audience coming, even getting them to return and see the show again. A game gets released and the team move onto a new project. Lets have another go.
Architecture is a lot like games. The architect plans a building and then works closely with a specialised team of constructors and builders to get the work done. The construction may take years and the architect must stay with the project as unforseen consequences have an impact on the building. The architect may need to alter the design and priorities may change as the situation develops. This process does sound very similar to the game development process. But there is a fundemental difference. The building project begins with someone comissioning the building. The person who commisions it knows what they want the building to do, and when you create a new building the requirements are factual. For example 'this building must be the tallest in the world', or 'this building must be a home to 5000 people'. The requirements are not vague like they are in the world of entertainment 'people have to love the main character', or 'this has to be the coolest game in the genre'. When the builkding is complete it has a purpose and the design will serve the purpose. There is no chance that the building will fail because the person that comissioned it, did so knowing what they required from the building before they started. Games can be built to specifications but may not be successful for reasons other than the design and quality of the work. That's not specific to games - all entertainment is the same. There are very few sure-fire hits.
So maybe funding games is closest to horse racing. The people funding development just back a horse, and pay for feed and training and when it's ready they let it race and go home rich or sell it for glue.
It doesn't need to be like this.
This is our industry and it looks pretty bleak at the moment. For an industry that rides new techology like a surfer why can't we look ahead and choose how we want to run things? Sure we can chase dollars without looking forward and eventually we'll grab that last dollar and look up to see the paths led us to a cliff edge. Or we can choose to make our industry better than that.
Gaming is still a young industry. It has every chance to find new ways of doing business. It can nurture new talent and make money but we have to be bold enough to realise that we haven't got all the answers here, now. We need to decide what we want and have the courage to chase it.
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