Less people wanted to see it.<\/em> I’m sure you can do similar comparisons with books and television shows. It’s sad, but hardly unique to games. It’s a problem with human beings in general and not something related to the ongoing platform wars.<\/p>\nHere are some other thoughts I didn’t put in the article, because I didn’t have a definitive position on them. I offer them as questions:<\/p>\n
Once or twice a year, the movie industry gives us one of those huge blockbusters with a $100 million budget. (These can be great, like Avatar, or horrible, like Waterworld.) But what if they were making a half dozen of those movies a year? For every $100m action epic there are a dozen $15m Rom-Coms or $30m Buddy Cop movies. On the gaming side, are they just making too many blockbusters? Are too many studios chasing the Modern Warfare money, and not enough chasing (say) The Sims, Sam & Max, or Total War?<\/strong><\/p>\nFollow-up question: What’s the budget difference between The Sims and a modern brown cover-based shooter? Is it actually cheaper to make?<\/strong><\/p>\nWe keep looking to indies to deliver us, but is that reasonable? Note the gap in budgets. If someone wanted to make another System Shock 2, how could it be done? It’s too niche for a current-gen big-budget game – the development costs of making a game that big and open with today’s technology would be astronomical compared to the cost of making the game back in 1998. On the other hand, making a first-person game is really tough for indies. The jump from 2D to 3D requires an increase in the size of your team. Even if you’re working with old tech, it still takes a lot of different people to make a character, texture them, animate them, voice them, and give them proper AI. It’s probably completely unreasonable to attempt such a thing with the usual indie team of one to five people. Is it reasonable to say that some games simply cannot be made, even though certain people would love them?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So my Friday column went up last night. On Thursday. For some reason. It’s all good. Check it out. It’s a bit about how games are getting simpler, shallower, and broader. This is one of those articles where I thought of a dozen more points to make after I’d turned it in. Near the end […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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