Do you not think it is an issue that measures to reduce development costs drastically do not seem to be an industry norm?
Publishers and developers are constantly trying to improve development efficiencies. Just because it isn't readily visible doesn't mean this isn't happening.
Mixing in your other relevant post here...
We have the technology today to make the industry work better. Unfortunately, none of the platform holders want to agree on a standard of tools (and they never will) and publishers aren't investing enough into their own middleware tools to reduce costs.
All top tier publishers with their own inhouse dev capacity have actually generally invested huge amounts into their own tech and processes, and/or have heavily leveraged middleware.
Small publishers like 505 Games or Majesco don't, but their business model is very different, and they don't have inhouse dev.
Given that this is a reactionary industry, it would only take a single publisher to build a standard set of tools to speed along development.
EA bought Criterion to acquire both their Renderware engine and their production capacity. And while there was some mismanagement of both those things, ultimately they failed to establish Renderware as a standard across the company as the needs of individual games were just too divergent for a single engine solution to be viable. At the same time, third parties then shied away from licensing Renderware because they didn't want to be beholden to EA with respect to support and they would necessarily have to expose a competitor to their product roadmap.
A single engine or tool can't and will never be suitable for every game given the variety in the medium, and no industry will (willingly) adopt a standard where they are reliant on a competitor.
I believe with this new generation of consoles we are at the point where things like textures and facial animations don't need to be done by hand anymore. We can begin to use real people, scanning technology, and mocap to accomplish things significantly faster. Obviously this isn't applicable to every type of game, but those are the "indie projects" that people would work on.
This is a very naive view of content development. Leveraging technology and processes like mocap and scanning doesn't really reduce the cost of development so much as it improves the quality of it. Mocap can even be more time consuming and expensive than "animating by hand" given the performance setup, cleanup of data, and integration of motion.
There are tools, processes, and engines that can limit increases in development, but in aggregate given the advances of the platforms in producing higher fidelity experiences combined with the ever rising expectations of consumers costs are only going to increase for retail console development.
While I don't think they are stupid, I still firmly believe they are out of touch. Publishers rely too much on data they get now, and use that simply to react. That data should be driving innovation, not reactions in the short term to reflect profitability during a single quarter.
You are assuming how publishers are using and reacting to data, and also I think putting too much stock in the reliability of feedback.
Feedback is anecdotal and much more emotionally charged, and tends to only reflect opposing ends of the spectrum, where consumers have felt strongly enough about something to actually react to it. Data tells you what is
actually happening.
Consumers often do not actually do what they say they will or did. We see this all the time in our usability testing. This happens both consciously and unconsciously, and is not a behaviour just limited to games.
In the Battlefield Heroes talk I linked they had some very specific examples relating to the "pay to win" items in the game where those players most ardently opposed to the concept who threatened to leave not only didn't leave, but ended up spending at a much higher rate than the average player. The changes they made, in spite of a lot of the negative feedback, actually shifted the game to be much more profitable and people spent more time playing the game.
The problem is that there is no consistency here, and the portions of the portfolios of the major publishers (who are the primary offenders) are the popular titles. I completely agree that it is about controlling the message and not about the money, and that is a solid point...but at what point does controlling that message bite you? For all we saw with Microsofts "Message" during their XBO reveal months...you would think some would aim to avoid such a negative stigma.
Large companies are still grappling with the nature of the internet, and what you can and can't do.
What you definitely can't do is keep the lid on a misstep and try to suppress it. Ultimately, the truth is going to come out and spread.
What you
can do is maintain a product or brand position for a few days leading up to and post launch. This is where publishers try to exert the most control over what content and quality information about a game is released, because those are the days that matter with respect to retail sales which are totally front loaded. Suppressing social channels at this time is merely an extension of review embargo policy, which mostly exist for the same reason.
This may be a misguided or disingenuous approach that doesn't show faith in ones product, but they do it because every hour of good (or at least non negative) buzz at launch matters hugely in terms of revenue generated.
Where is that feedback going though? How meaningful is that feedback if, at the end of the day, Publishers are still aiming to meet the expectations of their shareholders and quarterly earnings reports?
Collating feedback is quite challenging given the many forms and channels it can arrive in. However, all major publishers have channels through which feedback is delivered to the appropriate people, whether it be the dev teams or otherwise.
Again, this is supplemented with other sources such as review scores, actual revenue and sales results, and actual other behavioural data in order to drive business decisions.
Publishers are not a charity. They are businesses that are making decisions towards profitability. So while you may not like the decisions they are making in the context of being a gamer, you need to understand .
Now, you may argue that keeping you as a gamer happy long term has more value to that publisher. But again you need to bear in mind that you, as a minority demographic, likely provide much less potential than if the publisher just focuses on keeping the bulk of their audience happy. And also, there is a short sightedness being generated by the quarterly earnings cycle makes any potential that is their irrelevant (relative to what they are tasked with achieving).
So, coming back to your original question of how meaningful is that feedback if, at the end of the day, publishers are still aiming to meet the expectations of their shareholders and quarterly earnings reports? It is only meaningful to the publisher if it drives profitability, and unfortunately that likely means that feedback isn't as valuable as you yourself thinks it is.
Technology has certainly gotten more complex, and some platform holders (Sony) didn't do much to help in that regard last generation (or the generation before that).
While I agree with you from an architecture perspective, Sony actually invested heavily in tools and an engine that they made available to developers and publishers for free.
We actually built several games on their engine, and actually ported it to 360 and PC.
However, I still believe that investing in tools to reduce these costs in house would be a better approach to increasing profitability and sustainability than simply raising the prices of your titles.
Again, publishers are both doing that and investing in middleware where it makes sense. It
is happening, along with other exercises designed to reduce costs like code and asset reuse.
DLC isn't always a bad thing, however, the content creation and what you get for your money are often hit or miss. Publishers and developers alike know what content they've created. They've play tested it dozens of times. They know (for the most part) the shortest amount of time it will take to play, the content it offers, etc. Why, then, are they still so inconsistent with pricing, rather, determining their value appropriately? Certainly with all of this data, publisher can see where something has succeeded and failed, and they can appropriately gauge how much they should charge for a title...no ?
Relatively speaking, it is still early days for DLC as part of the business model. Some publishers are more sophisticated than others, but all are learning at their own pace.
As people move between companies and the knowledge disseminates more, you'll start to see more consistency emerge.
Facebook and mobile game developers and publishers are much more advanced in this area because the rate of learning is faster as the rate of game releases and version iteration is much more granular than console. Those people moving back into the traditional industry will help create some standardization in pricing also.
Also remember, of course, that publishers are privy to the sales data that gamers are not. It may seem like something is heavily overpriced relative to your perceived value, but a critical mass of other gamers may not see it that way. What functionality or specific additional gameplay time is added via DLC is actually (perhaps surprisingly) a very separate question to what it should actually be priced at given humans are somewhat irrational when it comes to a lot of purchase behaviour (on that note I can recommend the Century of the Self documentary which explores this concept
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/ ).
Do you think out of control budgets, lack of publisher created tools / adoption among studios, and massive marketing budgets had anything to do with this? I understand that those obligations would still be there, but I can't help but think the publishers put their studios in this position. The marketing budgets for some bigger titles alone is probably larger than smaller ones, which is unfathomable to me. In the day of new technology, why are we seeing marketing strategies from two decades ago? Why are publishers not pushing their own products as a service? There is zero focus to bring the consumer to the publisher, and instead they are simply okay with selling the individual product.
There are a lot of reasons why individual developers and publishers have gone out of business over the years. I was just highlighting the root cause of a lot of recent strife because there are many who attributed the demise of one entity or another to the wrong things.
Large development and marketing budgets are again symptoms of the market, not the cause of the problems themselves. However, a failure to divert from this arms race is a problem in itself, and the slow reaction to the issues has put many companies in a precarious (and long term unsustainable) position.
Note though, some companies, like Ubisoft, want an arms race. They want the barrier to entry to be high to create a defensible position and limit the competition.
Disney does a great job with their branding as a publisher, and (most of the time) it is successful for them. With the exception of a few major stinkers, Disney has done a great job of making their "Brand" synonymous with quality among the mass market. Publishers need to drive that message, not simply sell their biggest product to consumers.
Don't mistake apparently high quality messaging and product for market success. Disney has made some huge strategic missteps when it comes to their platform and product choices.
Somebody who has done it "better" than Disney is Warner Bros who I'd argue has had both a consistently high quality output which they have combined with commercial success. However, Warner Bros has totally under-invested in digital distribution, mobile, and web which I think is going to hurt them long term (a topic for another htread).
In addition to that, when a publisher releases dozens of titles per year, there is no reason not to attach your own store front to every title (through a menu, not an obstructive advertisement) to promote their own titles and content. Again, this is something that would be very possible if the investment into your own tools and development environment was made a priority among studios. I can't help but feel this type of investment would pay off in spades over the course of a few years.
This is a heavily utilized technique in web and mobile games, and is something that console publishers could consider (though I'm sure many gamers would object).
I agree that we're the minority, but the minority is also the group that is generally the loudest and gains the most attention, no?
Hardcore gamers are the most visible to publishers, yes, as they are the most vocal.
But that doesn't mean they should be listened to more than any other segment of the market. Indeed, publishers and developers often need to be careful to put the feedback of hardcore gamers in context because playing to that group could potentially result in decisions which heavily limit the accessibility and revenue potential of an individual product.
Anyway, on the subject of changes and evolution re: DLC...should we really still be feeling things out nearly a decade later? Seems extremely counterproductive given the oft unstable state of development studios.
DLC was only really introduced in the last generation, so it was very new to everyone - publishers, developers, and gamers. Everybody was starting from zero.
As mentioned further above, with console games you only get to try new things on a very slow schedule given the cadence of releases. Technology and expertise only gets built up over time as you get the opportunity to experiment and innovate.
I'd expect things to shake out within just a couple of years once publishers gravitate to the "optimal" pricing and monetization models.
Again, thanks for the time, and I hope I'm not too off base here (though I expect I may be!). Thanks
You are just operating with only half of the picture, and that is no fault of your own given publishers keep a lot very close to their chest.
Hopefully my comments can help fill in some of the gaps and add perspective.