Lecture 9 (17 October 07)
American Online Game Market Approach--Developer Perspective
Abstract: This lecture focuses attention to the concerns of game developers
in producing satisfying and fun game play experiences that are
repeatable, and that may excel in either single-player or multi-player
game play modes.
- Game developers are globally distributed, but are concentrated in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Korea.
- Developers continue to seek new game development tools that
enable their game products to operate on multiple game platforms,
including game consoles.
- Game developers may also need to develop games whose game play
experience can continue across multiple end-user devices (for example,
across cell phones, UMPC, desktop PC, and broadcast television
networks).
- Game development studios are moving away from building their own
game engines, and towards licensing of top-tier game engines and game
development tools.
- Game developers are increasingly looking for ways and means to
deploy their games directly to end-users without going engaging game
publishers.
- Game development studios will therefore seek new ways and means
for financing game development, as well as to engage in alternative
game production processes that can reduce development costs or shorten
game development time.
Game development goes global
- Corporate versus independent game developers--not in opposition, just different ways of reaching game developers
- Corporate game developers often work for large studios that are part of a larger game publishing studio
- Electronic Arts, Nintendo, THQ, NCSoft, Nexon, etc.
- Limited creative freedom
- Game design usually limited to established game genres or established game brands (Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, Super Mario, etc.)
- Most game studios seek to operate corporate game developers that maintain strong ties to large game publisher
- Maintain flow of financial resources to keep developers employed.
- Not likely to seek independent game development tools--will use what is provided
- Large studios/publishers all moving towards multi-national game development teams
- seeking lower perceived cost of development via "outsourcing" or "off-shoring"
- Community channel: Game Developer magazine and annual Game Developer Conference (GDC)
- Recent top concern: Job recruitment/placement by large studios, including international positions
- Independent game developers often work in smaller studios or as contractors, independent of game publishers
- May have more creative freedom on game design and ability to innovate
- new game genres and new game interface devices come from independent game development studios
- Innovation often necessary to maintain flow of financial resources to keep developerd employed.
- Comfortable using independent/new game development tools
- often available at lower costs
- may seek to prototype newgames via game modding
- may seek to license new game engines and software development kits to enter retail game market
- requires financial resources--either from investors
(mixed) or from advanced royalities (depends on prior record for
successful game development and sales)
- Small independent game studios typically operate in single location, primarily located in U.S. or Europe.
- Some effort to consolidate or aggregate many small development studios into a large independent game studio
- Community channel: IGDA--Independent Game Developers Association and Indie Game Festival (coincides with GDC)
Role of new game development tools
- Lead game developers perplexed in how best to program new multi-core processors
- Developers know how to program in C, C++, Java, etc., all of which generally assume sequential or multi-threaded computation
- Designing for concurrency or parallelism
- which tools to use?
- what "design notation" to use?
- what form of concurrency to design
- to maximize overall game performance
- to maximize game play experience
- to balance major game functions (audio, graphics, networking, user interface, data management, etc.)
- multi-threading versus multi-tasking versus multi-agent models of concurrency?
- what about "functional programming languages" (e.g., Haskell) or dataflow programming languages (Irvine Dataflow)?
- Debugging concurrent programs
- Interacts with software design
- Latent or unintended concurrencies (those arising by oversight or error) most difficult to debug
- some may require memory mapping of program execution traces
- Excellent overview of game programming language technology issues in 2006 by Tim Sweeney
- Lead Developer, Epic Games (developers of the Unreal family of game engines and multi-title game engine licenses)
- Also, provides a case study in leading PC game development (Gears of War, 3M unit sales in ten weeks)
Challenges for developers to build multi-device games
- Multi-device games most likely to emerge as multi-platform games
- make new device work with many alternative game platforms, or with ubiquitious platforms (Web services)
- Independent game studios may lead the development of new game play devices
- Harmonix, designers of the "Rock Band" musical game instruments
- Cross-licensed to Electronic Arts (publisher) and MTV Networks (music video--television--broadcaster)
- Cross licensing increases revenue potential and cross
marketing promotion (television ads linking EA and MTV to Harmonix
Games and potential rock music publishers)
- Will most popular new rock music titles move rapidly to Rock Band games?
- If limited to retail package release, then smaller
potential market compared to electronic/Web based distribution (more
timely, less overhead)
Licensing game engines and development tools
- Avoid development of any "middleware" software tools
- Unless developing game engine as commercial endeavor
- High risk commercial investment!
- Open source software may provide a low cost alternative, but may lack competitive performance of commercial alternatives
Deploying games direct to end-users, if possible
Financing game development
- Alternatives to publishers for bringing new games to market
- U.S. retail sales
- Major retailers--not without a big publisher
- Limits sales window to best selling games
- Slowly building games sales may result in removal from sale
- Web-based distribution
- Placement on retail game portal
- Development of corporate portal site for game distribution
- Long, slow path to profitability
- Example: Valve Software and Steam electronic distribution network
- Increased revenue through cross-licensing of distribution channel (Steam) to other game studios
- Also see David Perry's presentation slides
- Pay-to-play versus free-to-play
- Abandon the retail purchase and high-cost subscription business model
- Free-to-play with micro-transactions for in-game or near-game object sales)
- Game developers making money from advertising rather than sales?