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 Features
What's Wrong with the Games Industry (And How to Make It Right)
 The Demo
One of the key shifts that will happen in the industry in the next few years is that publishers will pay for demos.
Many corporations actively fund seed projects as potential products and this will happen in games soon. As the television industry funds its pilots rather than expecting the likes of Ronald D Moore to come up with the requisite millions himself, so too the smart publishers will realize that always waiting for development companies to come to them with million dollar demos is inevitably going to result in the same old faces pitching the same old ideas. The current demo cycle encourages the developer with the deepest pockets to win and is a hold-over from those early 90s bad practices, but that doesn’t mean that publishers are seeing the smartest product. To a corporation like EA, production company pitches will become the equivalent of Apple turning to a freelance product designer.
Circumventing the traditional process by inviting quality pitches from production companies rather than developers, and then buying the rights and paying for demos is just better business practise because it gives them a broader range of potential projects. This is especially important going forward as most of the pitches that publishers are now receiving are from the same unfocused, resource-heavy incompetent companies that are circling toward self-destruction. Pretty soon there will be no companies out there of sufficient ability that a publisher can strike a deal with any sense of confidence.
The way the demo process works is that the production company hires a demo team of well respected contractors with one goal: To make a demo to match the pitch.
This pre-production phase more fully evaluates existing technologies and tools, builds features in a timely fashion, constructs whatever tools are necessary, plans content, prototypes controls, and finalizes game mechanics. The one thing that it does not do is immediately engage in large amounts of content generation, because that is always fruitless work at this stage. The demo is designed to be a focused demonstration of the promise of the pitch, a ready-to-rock technology environment, whose goal is to fund main development and build publisher confidence.
Flexibility
One amazing fact that has yet to permeate the strata of the industry is that most of their employees have the equipment that they need to do their jobs at home. One example is freelance audio engineers, who do most of their work off site and mail the files in. However, for code, design and art there are still large levels of resistance to the idea that you can effectively export work off site and maintain control.
On-site control is an illusion, and while the camaraderie of a large office space is nice, it is also the least financially efficient way of getting production work done in an age of broadband. A development company spends $5,000 dollars and more per month per desk in wages, rent and other costs. A production company uses a roster of professionals charging professional rate fees who work from home or their outsourcing firm. These professionals are hired based on work available, so the production company pays on material rather than time.
In practise, this means that individual pieces of work appear more valuable (because a professional freelancer is likely to charge double what he would have on salary to cover his down time), but not when all the other wastage of the development company methods are taken into account (rent, equipment, software licenses, relocation costs, support staff, sundries, etc). Should the project run into trouble, or the publishers pull it for whatever reason, the production company is not left holding the bag.
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