Your Wish…
July 29th, 2008Commenter laesperanzapaz posts a link to this Variety article positing that gaming publishers exert too much control over the industry and requests some discussion.
The thesis of the article is that, unlike the movie business, which has varying power sources in studios, stars, networks, agencies, and presumably directors, the gaming industry buck stops only with the publisher. Therefore, developers essentially see their value expropriated and their contributions marginalized. In those rare instances where developers are able to break out of the mold (think Blizzard), they’re purchased by publishers eager to control them.
My reaction: partially true.
There are a few problems with this argument. The first is that the movie analogy is somewhat strained: it’s indubitably true that there are more sources of power in the field than in gaming, but this is due simply to the fact that movies are a bigger industry with more personalities put front and center. But the era of the bankable movie star is on the wane, and the studios, in essence, provide funding and distribution for everything. If the studios didn’t exist, the modern movie wouldn’t either, and they serve pretty much the same role as publishers.
The second is that, apropos of this point, publishers serve a vital role - if they didn’t provide the budgets for big-budget titles, the marketing muscle to push them into stores and off of shelves, and the distribution to allow them to move effectively, gaming wouldn’t be anything like it is today. To argue that publishers are too powerful is to minimize the key point that they possess that power because developers need them more than the reverse: i.e., to state a tautology.
Third, the structure of the industry hasn’t allowed many specific designers to become well-known personalities, but this is also partly due to the industry’s youth. An average game takes 3-5 years to develop these days; even if it’s a blockbuster, it probably takes at least two games for people to realize that you’re talented and that your success wasn’t a fluke. That means that you’ve got perhaps 10 years, minimum, before your success is going to be realized - and modern gaming has really only been around in its current state for perhaps 20 or so. The fact that only a handful of people like Sid Meier, Will Wright, or Shigeru Miyamoto are as well-known as they are reflects the fact that they had to start sowing the seeds of their success quite some time ago. When you layer on the requirement that designers be commercially successful as well as artistically proficient, it’s easier to understand the problem here.
And as the article itself notes, developers as a group have been able to forge identities for themselves even where individual personalities have not. As a result, Blizzard, Bungie, and similar studios have created identities for themselves independent of their publishers. Yet they allow themselves to be bought willingly. In part, this is because they have little interest in day-to-day business issues (they’re in this to make games). But regardless of the full rationale, I can’t blame the publishers too much for wanting to buy successful studios, nor the studios for selling out to them. The power they’ve been granted has come at the behest of the developers, not the other way around.
OK - so all that aside, I will be the first to admit that publishers are quite powerful. They exert undeniable strength over developers and this can result in somewhat humiliating defeats: viz., Bungie’s announcement “retraction” at E3. So what can people do about it? The article offers up some intriguing possibilities. But it seems to me that if developers are going to continue to request access to funding and marketing, this is going to be a power that continues to grow.
Posted in Geoff, Industry, Personalities |
July 30th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
“it’s indubitably true” I
‘d
anyways, great great points, jeff. Here’s what I wrote in a small-time forum I frequent:
great article thanks
VG business model is very unique from music, movies, and such. As tech gets better, the resources required to meet “the bar” [i.e. expected level of technical sophistication] gets higher forever.
In the music or movies, it either gets cheaper or, costs may stay similar as the tech increases.
What that means is that the highly influential behemoth “middleman” such as music labels or movie studios that were once mandatory for music/film making is now optional to making competent music/movie [provided it's not too bombastic, overproduced, etc.]
In the VG, however, this option is near-nonexistant, because as I said, technology forces a certain level of expectation, and increases the costs of a game, because production-level is mandatory to make a highly hyped game….unlike movies or music. Skipping the IP-pocketing middleman can only come about through a decidely low-tech development [i.e. 2D flash or sprite games] that are decidely low profile, low hype, and sold as a low-priced download. Not to mention, there are always BUGS to fix!!!!
Now, As for the union thing….as a politcal moderate who recognizes the immense contributions of unions past, but is not ravingly pro-union, but that also game design is not easily outsourced [only development of it is], I support some kind of pro-developer organization. Whether that means UNION or something more subtle is not something I can answer. Episodes like the “EA spouse” had long convinced me of publisher exploitation, and Wii crap titles have also convinced me of such.
INdeed it’s a big question mark: how many instances are there where a developer made a high profile game without the necessary backing of a highly financed entity like publishers? Are developers who care to own what they create - i.e. having the content belong to content creators instead of BiG Content [i.e. content distributors or "middlemen"] - forced to just low-end games?
July 30th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Another slightly relevant issue:
there is a strong barrier to entry into game creation. A music listener and music creator, for example, are much more in tune with eac other and easier to understand each otehr….because they can easily do what the other does. In other words, one can easily appreciate good music, then go about making music. It is quite easy to understand music, provided that you avoid the overly complex classical scene. I can vouch for this: everything I know about music, I learned from listening to classic acts, and by rejecting the complex ‘formalities’ that my old piano teacher tried to drill into me.
Same with movies: a movie watcher and a movie maker are more in tune with one another, because there’s little technical barriers into making movies. You watch alot of movies, then with a camera, you can make movies too.
Not so with games. Games require programming knowledge. And this is the key: the higher the technical level/production level of the game, the higher the barrier in learning the programming skills. I mention this because i feel it’s related to how high profile games completely dominate the scene [altho less so recently], and thus “making it” involves going through these hoops.