341–350 of 392 posts
The assets of this company are, essentially, worthless. I think the liquidator would jump for joy on a bid of, let's say, 5 or 10k euros for all IP of this game. I've seen cases where IP that cost orders of magnitude more to develop sell for less, sometimes under the condition 'you have to take the office inventory too, because otherwise I have to pay for getting it disposed of' (where 'I' is the liquidator). If anyo…
I don't have data to back this up other than years of entrepreneurship. I'm sure someone could invest the time to dig-up the data and corroborate or refute my statement. I think game development must rank way up there with restaurants in terms of business failure rates. It might even be worst than restaurants but the data could be impossible to collect. Why? Because restaurant failures are a matter of public record w…
My take is that a large proportion of game developers are actually game addicts or view it as their artistic calling.
So reason doesn't really enter into the make game / don't make game and scope-creep decisions.
I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong! When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one an…
Stupid, deceptively-simple question: Why can't you do something like "Game on Rails", where you set up a basic framework that has all the stuff a game normally needs, and then you only have to layer your assets and logic on top of it? Do game devs already use something like that and still have these delays?
No one of those features stops you, but you get a "death by paper cuts" effect, because you eventually hit a mine that requires original technology to be written - most commonly, something to do with collision code. A good team led by a competent producer is able to figure out how to get the right effect within the budget, but it's never an easy process, and game productions have a habit of "pitching the moon and shipping with swiss cheese".
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The issue that I'm struggling with as I picked up experience and learned how to estimate better (read: higher) is of becoming a wet blanket. People will rave about this awesome thing we could do, and I'm the one saying "no, we can't, and this is why". That's why Steve Jobs said to stay foolish, it lets you chase after ideas that a rational person would consider too risky or just plain impossible.
My solution, where possible is to run with one (or more) of the following responses: - I think there will be some challenges in that, can we take some time to think through the implications of ______ (or how we would deal with _____, etc) - I think it's a great idea, but we're going to need to come up with a creative solution to solve _______ - I think we're probably under-estimating how much work that is. Maybe ther…
I don't have data to back this up other than years of entrepreneurship. I'm sure someone could invest the time to dig-up the data and corroborate or refute my statement. I think game development must rank way up there with restaurants in terms of business failure rates. It might even be worst than restaurants but the data could be impossible to collect. Why? Because restaurant failures are a matter of public record w…
I don't have much to add than this is solid info and advice. Glad I got out of the industry a long time ago.
The angle I forgot to add is that Apple has, in my opinion, destroyed the ecosystem. The race-to-the-bottom they promoted created a situation where a game development team could very well spend a million or more developing and game and have to give it away on a hope and a prayer.
And "hope and prayer" it is because you have to dump even more money into marketing and hope it catches on so that your freemium or in-app-purchases model generates enough cash to recoup your investment and make money.
Not everyone is going to get a hit at the level of "Clash of Clans", yet everyone is now expected to produce stunning graphics, animations and game-play, give it away, create a back-end infrastructure to support hordes of free players and hope the game engages enough to generate revenue thorough IAP or ads.
My guess is one could do better gambling with a million dollars in Vegas than creating a game with that money.
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AAA games are frequently one platform, generally either PC for UI reasons or locked into a particular console as an exclusive.
PC-only AAA games are incredibly rare these days. I'd say most AAA games are on as many platforms as possible to have as many sources of revenue as possible to recoup dev (and marketing) costs. The exceptions are games that get a large amount of funding to be single platform by the platform's owner and there's no real "owner" of the PC platform (arguably Microsoft, but their focus is on Xbox) to do that.
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It's a real shame, since I was really looking forward to this game! I suppose I should count myself fortunate that I didn't Kickstart Woolfe. Seeing these failed projects is grim reminder that just because you back something doesn't mean it will be delivered.
Actually, more failing projects should be funded IMO - Kickstarter has been too much like a store for too long, which caused a lot of people to have overly high expectations for projects they backed.
It doesn't help the perception that there are a lot of companies out there that seem to be using Kickstarter as a service for basically taking pre-orders though. Often I've thought "Why the heck is that big company with lots of money doing a Kickstarter? Isn't Kickstarter for people that wouldn't have the money to fund the project at all?".
A whole other debate, I know.
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PC-only AAA games are incredibly rare these days. I'd say most AAA games are on as many platforms as possible to have as many sources of revenue as possible to recoup dev (and marketing) costs. The exceptions are games that get a large amount of funding to be single platform by the platform's owner and there's no real "owner" of the PC platform (arguably Microsoft, but their focus is on Xbox) to do that.
Are there any PC Only "AAA" titles anymore? I'd think stuff like the Witcher 3 and XCOM 2 are more in the AA range. It is such a murky definition.
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"AAA" doesn't mean "very successful." It is a category for the games with the very highest development and advertising budgets. Minecraft was built and released with near-zero budget and is, therefore, not a AAA game.
If I just said "it's semantic", and then I'm saying "I meant AAA success on a low budget", why do you feel the need to debate the meaning of words? For what it's worth, "semantic" means "related to definition of words". The argument we're having is still semantic. And semantic arguments are usually pointless. Just in case you didn't know.