Games and Recession ... and Creativity
On the face of it, you wouldn't expect the next couple of years to be
very good for innovation and creativity in videogames. Admittedly,
widespread fears over the effects of recession are somewhat overblown -
right now, there's simply no evidence that economic woes are impacting
on videogame sales and 2009 still looks set to be a growth year for the
market.
However, the recession - and perhaps more importantly, the slow-down
of commercial lending from banks - creates a certain mindset among
businesspeople, even those whose sectors are still in rude health. EA's
John Riccitiello summed up the mood at the DICE Summit earlier this
month, where he told the audience that EA - which has recently cut
1,100 jobs in its worldwide operations - had become "too fat, too
reliant on where things were."
Of course, that would have been true even if the recession had never
happened - in fact, people including some of EA's own executives have
been suggesting that the company is bloated and inefficient for years,
a fact underlined by years of rising costs and relatively stagnant
revenues.
As Riccitiello admitted, however, to firms in this position (and it's
certainly not just EA that finds itself staring at the consequences of
uncontrolled cost rises), the recession has been a "blessing in
disguise". Suddenly, macro-economic conditions allow them to slash
their costs without anyone batting an eyelid, while the same moves
twelve months ago would have caused serious concerns about the
company's status.
So even for those companies whose products will continue to see sales
growth for the next couple of years, the atmosphere is one of
frugality. Drought in the credit markets doesn't help, naturally, but
for the most part this sense of belt-tightening is more to do with
companies taking the opportunity to scale back costs than it is to do
with any real financial necessity.
Sadly, when companies scale back costs, they often do so at the
expense of throwing out a whole creche full of babies along with the
bathwater. If you look at the operations of a big first-party studio,
for instance, much of the wasted resource comes from big-name titles,
especially those on 12 or 18 month franchise schedules. Money and
man-hours are thrown away on bloated, mismanaged teams, the legacy of
years of ill-advised "throw more people at the problem" solutions to
problematic deadlines.
However, trimming the fat from those teams is hard work. Everyone on
the team will fight their corner, claiming their intrinsic worth to the
profitable project. Each middle-manager will act like a minor feudal
lord, jealously guarding his painstakingly accumulated collection of
vassals and subjects. Team sizes, all too often, end up being more to
do with office politics and power-grabs than to do with the actual
requirements of making a game, and extricating a small, lean, efficient
team from this quagmire requires a huge amount of work and some very
tough decisions.
Meanwhile, most studios also boast a handful of nascent projects -
ideas which are floating around in the pre-production stages,
championed by a handful of developers and designers who are working on
the concept. On a slightly larger scale are the original game projects,
games in production but lacking a big franchise or IP license behind
them.
These projects are risky. They're not guaranteed any level of
commercial success, and while critics all profess to love original IP,
that doesn't mean that original projects are guaranteed a high
Metacritic rating either. Compared with the risks associated with
trying to trim back costs on high-profile franchise projects, the
decision to instead cut back on new ideas and teams working on unproven
IP will look extremely tempting to many studios. The same logic, too,
will apply at the publishing level, with risky ideas likely to find far
less warm receptions at publishers in the coming years.
Both from a creative perspective and from a more long-term business
perspective, this is bad news. Creativity has always demanded some risk
taking behaviour from publishers - more specifically, a willingness to
balance out the risk of some original projects against the guaranteed
returns of some blockbuster franchises. The industry's business model,
meanwhile, demands that creativity to survive. Without the risk-taking
that allows original IP to emerge, the games industry would soon find
itself feeding off scraps from the table of the movie, TV and sports
licensing industries.
However, not all publishers are quite as willing to clamp down on risk
as they used to be. EA is a perfect example; since Riccitiello returned
to the company, the firm has been making increasingly encouraging
noises and now seems to understand that risk is an essential part of
the business of making entertainment, rather than being an unfortunate
side-effect which must be controlled and reduced. Some other publishers
are slowly but surely getting the message; the platform holders, too,
are learning. Whatever else it may have done wrong of late, Sony
deserves special praise for its recent willingness to try out new ideas
and champion creativity through its first-party releases.
Even these bright spots in the gloom, however, don't change the fact
that many publishers are going to become more risk-averse and less
friendly to innovative ideas in the coming years. However, there's a
further variable to be reckoned with in this equation - the slow but
increasingly assured rise of independent games as a commercial force in
the market.
We've all been talking about independent games for years, of course.
Created outside the studio system by passionate, talented enthusiasts,
independent games have been celebrated by the media and even recognised
by the industry (thanks to the fantastic Independent Games Festival
which runs alongside GDC each year). Rarely, however, have they made
any significant impact on the commerce of the industry.
This is changing. It is changing because millions of new consumers who
have never played games before are now active in the market, and
looking for new experiences which traditional firms simply don't know
how to provide. It is changing because the tools which allow the
creation of superb games are no longer out of the reach of small teams
and even individuals. It is changing because word of mouth has become
more powerful than any marketing campaign could ever be. More than
anything, it is changing because every major console on the planet now
has a digital distribution system allowing consumers to download games
at a wide range of price points.
No longer are independent games confined to the PC platform. No longer
do they have to be given away for free, as they have been in many
cases. No longer are they kept away from the marketplace simply by the
high walls which surround retail, isolated from consumers by an
industry which has traditionally only understood the concept of selling
monolithic units of entertainment at a fixed £30 price point.
The explosion of creativity which will be created by this change is
only beginning. Certainly, barriers to entry still exist, but they are
slowly coming down - and I anticipate that it won't be long before
services like PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Arcade start to offer
developers the same level of easy access to market that something like
Apple's iPhone App Store does.
This revolution will give us a new wave of developers who see games
through very different eyes to those of their studio-bound compatriots.
Forced to consider the financial bottom line, the technological
bleeding edge and the whims of Metacritic at each turn, big studio
development is by no means uncreative, but certainly has to follow
certain set patterns. With few such concerns, independent game
developers can follow their hearts and their instincts to a far greater
extent.
The studio system couldn't have created a game like Flower, the
utterly beautiful PSN title which came out earlier this month; but more
than that, it couldn't have created a persona like Jenova Chen, the
mind behind Flower, who happily talks in interviews about evoking
emotions, moving past primal feelings and "maturing" the industry in
ways that don't involve sex, blood and swearing. He talks about making
games that don't empower gamers, but instead make them experience other
things, other emotions. It's spine-tingling stuff. It's also commercial
suicide - or would be, to a studio working in the traditional
development context.
Others like him are emerging, or have emerged, from this scene. Let's
not beat around the bush - many of them will build games which will be
terrible. Many will try so hard to depart from the way games are
traditionally made that they'll fail to notice that some of those
things stem from hard-learned lessons, not constrictive rules. Others
will make games which are fascinating, or extraordinary, or immensely
entertaining, but which simply fail to find a market.
But from among them, there will come a select few who will make games
that tick all of the boxes. They will be new, and fresh, and daring -
and hugely, vastly commercially successful. Developed for a handful of
notes, they will make millions, and they will fuel the careers of new
auteurs and the passion of new generations of creators.
The studio blockbuster system won't go away any time soon - and nobody
should want it to, any more than any serious movie fan should genuinely
wish for the demise of Hollywood. However, the studio system is no
longer alone, and its role in creating commercial success will soon no
longer be a monopoly. Creativity will face tough times in recession -
but no financial downturn will stop it from blooming, even if it's not
in the places we might expect.
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
Mstation Games Review
Sat, 28 Feb 2009
