The gaming industry has changed massively over the past
years, the industry has expanded and become something much bigger, especially
with the growth of the internet, it is now competing with the Film and TV
industries, even becoming something bigger than them.
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| Graph showing the increase in sales of video games since 1905-2008 |
At first people didn’t
think that games would become this big and that their audiences were only
teenagers or kids and that it would grow out of popularity. They would soon
learn how wrong they were. It has become a modern day culture and it’s still
expanding and developing, more and more people are becoming used to the idea of
games being popular and that can only be good for the games industry.
In the early days there only used to be just a few people
working on a game, and they all had general skills in 3D modelling, concepting,
coding, animation and whatever else. There wasn’t really any need for a
specialist coder or artist, if your 3d modeller could do all 3 tasks for the
same pay. It was cheap and that was
important as there wasn’t any big budgets for games back in the old days as
they weren’t as popular as they are now.
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| Electronic Arts Studio in Redwood Shores |
It was pretty hard to train for these jobs too, they were
broad and finding the software to start learning how to code or create 3d
models wasn’t easy either. I remember one of my lecturer’s saying how he had to
meet someone in a back alley for a copy of some software he wanted so he can
start learning these skills. It is a lot easier nowadays as the internet has
given us a lot more access and freedom to finding tutorials and these programs.
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| Riot Games Office in Europe |
In the industry nowadays a lot of work is now outsourced to
very specialist companies or free-lancers. The amount of people who work on a
single game has also vastly increased, almost the same as a big budget film
especially if it’s a big AAA title, since there are a lot more tasks and jobs
to do in creating a game.
There is more demand for specialist coders and programmers
since the work is a lot harder and requires a lot more knowledge about how the
job is done, the same applies for everyone else, companies like to outsource
material since its cheaper than paying a salary to someone in-house.
Why pay a whole year salary for a job that only takes a
couple of weeks to accomplish?
There is a game industry value chain which is interesting.
Its made up of 6 connected and distinctive layers
First is the paying and investing for the development of new
titles by large companies or rich investors.
Second is the production of the art and talent layer, it
includes developers, designers and artists to start planning and concepting the
game.
Third is the actual game production with the 3D models,
engine work and programming/coding that goes into the game.
Fourth is the Distribution and Publishing part of the chain
which involves generating audiences and marketing catalogues of games for
retail and online distribution.
Fifth is the Hardware layer which is basically the part
where the game is accessed through either consoles or online media.
Last is the actual users and players, playing the game.
With the rising costs of video games, there are some
drawbacks, since this is still a business, the main aim is to create as much
revenue as possible, and that means taking risks on what games should be
produced.
The games industry is known to be unstable and a lot of
companies have gone bankrupt or bust simply because they didn’t create enough
sales. A lot of jobs are lost due to this, and this is why a lot of big
companies are not willing to take risks with new ideas and titles, they would
rather invest in something safe which they will know bring them revenue no
matter what. One example of this is THQ, a seemingly great games company that recently went bust, because their games didn't sell, and their last ditch effort to save the company, Darksiders 2, didn't do as well as it was supposed to and in the end they had to sell their company off to regain something back.
It’s why we see so
many CoD games over the past years, its cause they know people will buy it,
just people it has the franchise name on it. This is really sad as there are
awesome new pitches and ideas for video games that could really break new
grounds if they took a risk, but with that much money it’s not a surprise they
would rather invest in something safe and not different or new.
But there is hope, a lot of new indie companies are taking
the lead with creating new idea’s, and although they don’t have a big budget,
if they have a great idea, they can now opt in to get their idea crowd sourced
on websites like KickStarter.
https://www.kickstarter.com/
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