Gamasutra
January 30, 1998
Vol. 2: Issue 5
Past Scores
To Mac or Not to Mac
[01.23.98]
Muscle Cars vs. Subcompact - Take 2
[01.01.98]
A Million Monopolies!?!
[12.12.97]
Settle the Score?
[View Thread]
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I was having dinner with Warren Katz, founder and President of MÄK Technologies the other day, and he said some things that I found both very depressing and very hopeful at the same time. It’s all related to the bottom feeding frenzy we’ve been in for the last couple of years that has totally redefined the relationship between the game makers and the publishers.
You remember the old days. You’d have a cool idea for a game, get a really great graphic artist to storyboard it out, and build a prototype of the first level, just to prove you weren’t a complete jerk as a programmer. Then you’d take it around to the publishers like Electronic Arts or Activision and hope they liked it enough to want to publish it. Then they would give you what felt like a big fat advance, enough to pay for the year it would take you to finish it. Of course, it took two years, and you had to go back to them mid-way through and beg for more money -- a boon they would be more than happy to exchange for a cut out of what little royalty you were going to have left. And if two companies liked your stuff, by showing it to both, you pretty much guaranteed that you would have a knock-off from the other company trying to beat you out to market. Then, when you shipped, you would beg, wheedle and pray that they actually put some $$$ behind marketing the thing since the producers that had originally negotiated your contract had now moved on or been laid off and no one left at the publisher even knew what the game was about.
These were, of course, known as the good old days.
Then came the great title flood. PC games stopped being ripped of at a 90% rate because CD-ROM drives prevented easy copying and game publishers started to really make some serious money. That led to the great clone debacle at E3 about 3 years ago. Everyone who could read a book on how to build a 3D engine built some damn Doom clone, and the rest ripped off Command & Conquer. There was gold in "them-thar" discs, and everybody with a CD-Burner had joined the rush. Of course the only ones to make real money during the real gold rush of 1849 were the banks, and sure enough, most of the publishers of 1995 did just fine. In fact, something fundamental changed about the way things were done.
Because so much money was being made on games, game development companies were actually able to get some of their own funding. Also, some had made successful games, and were using profits to make second and third titles. A lot of companies were doing this. So with a glut of games, many of them almost completed, the publishers realized that they didn’t need to take the chance on paying for a new game from concept through completion, they could just wait till the damn thing was done and pick it up for a song. That was the situation Warren recently found himself in with MÄK.
MÄK was basically a military contractor, doing military simulation games linked over various networks. Recently the military decided it would be cool if MÄK made some of that technology into commercially released games. (It was a combination of good PR—“Be All That You Can Play”—and a misguided notion that games were the place to make the serious bucks—wrong part of the decade, boys.) They – the military -- paid for half the development of the games. So here was Warren, with extremely cool, proven technology, and half the game paid for by people who didn’t even want to be paid back, and he was still having trouble getting the publishers to bite. In the old days there would have been a piranha-like feeding frenzy around this title, but now, he just barely got it picked up.
I’d known about this trend for a while, and it had been depressing the hell out of me. I had pitched a wonderful design (OK, it’s mine, so of course I think it’s wonderful) for an on-line social environment to a couple of the 3D card guys. A friend told me that they loved the idea, but just didn’t have money to put into things that weren’t already complete. In previous years, these companies would have funded new concepts that showed off their hardware.
Warren pointed out something that should have been obvious to me from the beginning. This current process of not financing ideas is bad ecology.
He pointed out, and rightfully so, that all the “A” titles had been snapped up already, and the publishers were picking the crumbs of the “B” titles. In the meantime, nobody’s been paying the current generation of young punks to make anything new. The money for new software is gone. It dried up between one and two years ago. That means that next year should be fine, because the pipeline was already stuffed, but after that, it’s going to get really, really lean. The only people who will have been able to do new games are the companies that currently have hits. The industry will dry out. Suddenly, somebody with a good idea and proof they could actually do it will become a hot commodity again, and the cycle will start again, from the part that I like.
The bottom line: Take heart, the time of the game developer is coming again!
-B
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Unemployed with a Theater Degree
from Brandeis back in 1984, Ben Calica has been making a living in the computer
and gaming business in various incarnations since then, Including: Founding
Editor of New Media Magazine, First Toys Editor for Wired, one of the few
single boys to write for Parents Magazine. Product Manager for the multimedia
authoring system, SuperCard Director of Production for CyberFlix; (design
credits on Lunicus, Creepy Castle, and conceptual design for Skull Cracker)
Product Manger for the ill-fated modem for the Sega Genesis, the Edge, for
AT&T [which, by the way, we decided stood for All Tiny Testi---maybe
I'd better tell that another time -BC]; Worked for NeXT long enough to get
into real good argument with Steve Jobs; And recently was the guy behind
Apple Game Sprockets... He did a bunch of work on interactive drama (wrote script for MacWorld CD-ROM game of the year in 1993), before he decided it just didn't work. Spends a lot of free time now lecturing on multi-player/virtual world stuff. For a day job he works as Director of Product Development for ThinkFish, an artistic rendering company that recently merged with Viewpoint Datalabs. He could show you the secret desktop software he's working on, but then he'd have to kill you. |