In the 1980’s, while I was still fantasizing about becoming a programmer and trying to figure out how to kiss girls (or maybe the other way ’round<\/a>) your average videogame development team was A Guy. Sometimes larger teams might include His Buddy. As we entered the 90’s and the age of Doom we saw team sizes swell to numbers that occasionally made it feasible to play a little doubles tennis. Not that anyone had time for that sort of thing. A few years later and development teams could, if they ever went outside, possibly fill the positions in a baseball diamond. A few years after that and we had teams of 20 or more people and something strange started to happen. Games started getting shorter. When Max Payne blasted his way onto the scene everyone pointed at his short little 10 hour game and giggled. 10 hours? Who is going to pay $40 for a ten hour game?<\/p>\n Well, all of us, eventually. If we’re lucky<\/em>. But now we can look back fondly at those days. Teams are still getting bigger and games are still getting shorter. It now takes a hundred people to produce content that offers even less gameplay than Max Payne did. Oh yeah: And development time has increased as well, so not only are you paying a lot more people but you’re also paying them for a lot longer before you actually get your game. <\/p>\n This is not a good trend and it should fill reasonable developers with apprehension, because it can’t keep going like this. The number of PC gamers hasn’t really gone up all that much. You’re still aiming for that 4 million units target you were a decade ago. To put it another way, you’re now funding teams five times as large for twice as long to sell shorter games to an audience that is roughly the same size. You can quibble with these numbers if you like, but the trend is there, and it’s visible. If I’ve overstated or understated the problem by some margin it doesn’t really change that fact the PC Gaming is seeing an unsustainable escalation of development costs. <\/p>\n In Wolfenstein 3D, you can fire up the level editor and make a single room in less then a minute. In Doom you might spend ten minutes making a room. Around the turn of the century you might spend a couple of hours on it. Last I heard it now takes several people (usually a mapper, a 3D modeler, a texture artist, and possibly some sort of scripting person) working together for a couple of days to make that room. Yes, the room is very realistic and cool looking, but it takes 72 man-hours to make the damn thing.<\/p><\/div>\n Each new graphics generation requires more development hours to exploit it. The jump from 2D spites to moving 3D characters was a pretty compelling one. The leap forward in lighting technology that give us flashlights actually added something to the gameplay. But adding another lighting pass to make sure a doorknob can support multiple specular reflections? Improving the shading and density of foliage by 25%? Are these really<\/em> worth the development time and the upgrade cost for the user? How many of those customers would you lose if you didn’t take the next step? What if you just stayed where you are right now from a technology standpoint, instead of adding another 50 people or another six months of development time to your game? Sure, you wouldn’t have the latest graphics, but how many sales is that going to cost you? I hear people claim that they can’t<\/em> attract gamers without the next-gen graphics, but… when was the last time anyone honestly tried<\/em>?<\/p>\n I don’t know what the hardware breakdown is out there. How many PC owners have which graphics cards? Now, your first answer might be to jump over and have a look at the Valve Hardware Survey<\/a>. “Oh look! An overwhelming majority of users have NVidia 6000 series or better!” It really gets on my nerves when you do that and if I could I would whap you on the head with this copy of Game Informer I keep handy for when I need a good laugh. That survey is for Steam users, and therefore mostly people who already own<\/em> Half-Life 2. Which is exactly the problem you keep running into. You keep aiming your game at the same fragment of the potential audience.<\/p>\n Like I said, I don’t know the breakdown, but if it’s not a bell curve I’ll eat my keyboard. I’ve heard that nothing makes a presentation seem professional like a good chart, so with that in mind I give you this:<\/p>\n
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