Go Big, Go Small, or Go Home?
According to an interview on GamesIndustry.biz with Christopher Kline, a technical director at 2K Boston, the market has pretty much split with big-name blockbusters or small, budget, casual games. There is no longer a market for "mid-budget" developers.

Now, this doesn't involve the "indies" so much, as we're dealing with shoestring budgets in the casual game range anyway, and he's talking specifically about games in the range of "3-4 million."

This saddens me, because historically, those have been the games I have enjoyed the most. The big, massive blockbusters have often been fun - but too often they gleam and glisten on the outside but are pablum on the inside. It's those middle-of-the-road games that make me all warm and fuzzy about video games.

Including Irrational Games' (2K Boston's previous incarnation) own Freedom Force games, which kicked all kinds of butt. But apparently, they didn't sell well. But looking back, a good deal of my favorite games were not the big-budget, massively-marketed blockbusters of the day. If he's right, and if that's the prevailing attitude of the industry, then ... well, from my perspective at least, we're pretty much screwed.

But I'm not sure about that.

By the sounds of it, some middle-budget games have been doing quite well. Like Galactic Civilizations II, Sins of a Solar Empire, Sam & Max, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, the "X" series of open-ended Elite-style games. These games had a budget that I suspect was significantly above that of the average casual game, though I guess I could be wrong. And it certainly sounds as if they have been plenty profitable - though again, I could be wrong. And I expect there are others... After all, Guitar Hero started out, according to the post-mortem, as a cheap-and-dirty low-to-mid-budget game.

But the gutters of the games business is littered with the bodies of dead who tried to buck these odds and failed. Troika Games seemed like it would be the savior of hardcore and avant-garde RPGs, but couldn't sustain its business. I doubt we'll find another company from the mainstream industry trying to make "mid-budget" RPGs in the future. If it does happen, they'll be coming up from the ranks of the indies.

So is Kline right? Are we left with nothing but low-budget indie games and top-shelf, glitzy blockbusters? Or is there still a market for mid-budget games if the companies can figure out how to tap into the market, as apparently certain "big indies" have done?

Discussion on the Forum!

Labels: Biz, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:11 AM (Permalink)