I wouldn’t worry about that too much as the market for more hardcore games is still huge and trying to get a hit in the casual market isn’t nearly as understood as getting a hit in the core video game market, at the moment it’s pretty much a crap shoot.
It won’t happen as long as games like Modern Warfare 2 continue to generate hundreds of millions in revenue. And the 16-25 year old male market hasn’t moved over to Facebook gaming. Yet.
What is/will happen is that the games that fall between AAA and casual will continue to disappear. Companies will only bet on $50 million games that will sell zillions or tiny casual games that have to reach 50 million people to be deemed successful. And those tiny casual games will get more and more polished, and their budgets will increase to the point where they will cost millions, putting even more pressure on them to reach zillions of people.
This is all the result of the blockbuster culture. If you’re not a blockbuster, you barely exist. The whole “sell fewer of more things” was fine for a while, but we’re focusing so much of our own dollars on the blockbusters that we’re told we need to experience that it’s harder and harder to sell enough of anything.
People on boards like this who aren’t even in the industry obsess over sales lists, and get excited when billion dollar companies have a success. I mean, yay Xbox 360 for outselling the Wii? We’re happy for that scrappy upstart Microsoft? With all of us socially networked together, we get to further drive the blockbuster culture down each others throats.
Let me make it easy for everyone:
TV is to Movies as Social is to Core.
Didn’t those types of games already die a horrible death a few years ago only to be resurrected by Steam and its ilk? I’ve spoken to a number of the devs of games like Trine, Torchlight, Braid, Madballs and so forth, and they’ve all told me that they’re doing very well financially. Maybe it’s just lip service and maybe that will all change. I guess we’ll find out eventually…
The main thing I take from that Popcap talk is: “More proof that small teams can still make great games” (re 3 people to make PvZ).
That gives me confidence that we will continue to see a variety of interesting games released every year.
Tony
First!
~mink~
edit Damn. So close.
I think if you want to claim this is actually a bad thing, you might want to refrain from using PvsZ as an example of how “poor” a game is with limited development resources.
Contrarily, I have trouble imagining what they possibly could have added to PvsZ to make it better (other than free drugs and/or sexual favors via the internet somehow; and even then that’s a bit iffy).
Hardcore Gamers are only social with people they don’t know who share similar interests.
In that case, I’d rather have Reno 911 than Happy Gilmore.
A lot more people say they buy these kinds of games on Steam than actually buy these kinds of games on Steam, except when they’re on sale. And even those sales that put games at #1 for a week aren’t necessarily selling zillions of copies. If people expect a million bucks in revenue from $5 price points, they’re back in “it needs to be a blockbuster to make a profit”-ville. If it’s $100K, you’re in great shape.
I can’t speak to the development of Trine or whatever Madballs is, but you’ll always be fine If you can make a game with 2-3 people. The only concern is if the trend toward pushing expected prices under $10 continues. This will make it harder to make money without alternative revenue streams.
If it takes 20 people 18 months to make a game—which is a $2-$5 million budget—it’s harder and harder to get funded and to make a profit. If you’re a full-priced product, you’re competing with games made by hundreds of people with $20-$50 million budgets, and you’ll come up short on production values, scope, and/or polish. If you’re a low-price product, you need to sell an unreasonable number of copies to make back your investment. If you price somewhere in the middle, you get a weird price psychology effect where people will assume it’s crap because it’s not full price or it’s too expensive to be a cheap game.
There’s just little-to-no middle anymore. You can even see this with casual games. iPod games (and even Steam sales) have set the expected price point for that kind of experience at a considerably lower number than previously. Previously, PopCap would release its games at $20; today, do they need to be $10? $5? If so, they need to reach way more people with the “buy the full game” model to make the same revenue.
At the same time, the expectations of production values for even Facebook games is going up, meaning costs are going up. Going from Farmville to Frontierville has raised the bar for Zynga, and the next game will need to go even higher. Eventually, those cheap Facebook games won’t be so cheap to make anymore.
And as always, a great idea executed extremely well and inexpensively can trump all of this, but it’s a lot harder to come up with that great idea than it is to iterate on existing ones.