AGC Rivebrog: The Age of the Dinosaurs

[schild]

Film is more an art of the closeup, and silence.

What?

[Slyfeind]

Speaking of film, we've heard games bringing in more money than movies these days, yet devs are still paid crappy salaries, and it's getting prohibitively expensive just to make a game now. This REALLY confused me for a long time. If games are making more money than movies, devs should be making movie-star salaries, and nobody would be worried about the rising costs of game content.

I have yet to hear an answer to that one. I want the books open, by cracky!

There is movie-style alternative funding. We don't get Warcraft Happy Meals here in America. So I figure it's either that, or someone up top is finding more and more expensive hookers.

[Gooney]

I think the point that people miss when Raph gets to pontificating is that he is speaking in wildly generalist terms.

Glorified chat systems and personal 3d spaces will not replace games like Wow for gamers.  The most obvious reason for that is that hey, we, they are gamers not glorified 3d chat system users.  Sure we use chats sometimes, like when I need a buddy to invite me into his Skype connection or when Im at work and babbling to a buddy, usually about games.

Point is that Raph, in this case is talking about an essentially un-tapped market, but not necessarily a gamers market.  He used to love games and making games that he would love to play.  Now he seems to be firmly in the religious oracle segment of the gaming making profession.

Tell me gamers.  When was the last time Pontiff Koster actually made a game that:
 1.  A company could actually implement and support.
 2.  That you could actually play as he intended it.

Answer, never.  Why on earth do people spend so much time listening to this guy.  Hes at best an entertaining and thought provoking fella but he is almost purely academic, but he is no where near say...a Will Wright in actually producing something people want to buy.

Raph describes the gaming universe in Broad strokes, throwing around prophecies like Nostradamus, his predictions from what Ive seen have been no more accurate than the great alchemists. 

Meanwhile, Lum the Mad, Scott Jennings had much more important things to say at AGC than did Koster..in my very humble and unimportant opinion.

-Gooney

[Murgos]

Point is that Raph, in this case is talking about an essentially un-tapped market, but not necessarily a gamers market.  He used to love games and making games that he would love to play.  Now he seems to be firmly in the religious oracle segment of the gaming making profession.

I think Raph has made it abundantly clear that he is pitching to producers (the people that pay his salary) that there are more consumers (The people that make the producers want to pay his salary) in non-conventional MMO spaces than there are in the standard Diku-based crap fest we have now.  He's trying to look at the forest and you people keep bitching about how this bush has yellow AND blue flowers.

[Raph]

Speaking of film, we've heard games bringing in more money than movies these days, yet devs are still paid crappy salaries, and it's getting prohibitively expensive just to make a game now. This REALLY confused me for a long time. If games are making more money than movies, devs should be making movie-star salaries, and nobody would be worried about the rising costs of game content.

I have yet to hear an answer to that one. I want the books open, by cracky!

There is movie-style alternative funding. We don't get Warcraft Happy Meals here in America. So I figure it's either that, or someone up top is finding more and more expensive hookers.

The answer is that games do not make anywhere near what movies do. I spoke to this in the presentation on the slides about business ecology.

The stats that gets cited is "video games sales including all hardware pulls in more revenue than movie box office domestically." Domestic box office isn't even the largest fraction of the money made by a movie.

The Happy Meals are re-use of IP, not alternative financing. In Hollywood, you borrow the money to make a movie -- you don't spend your own. This model doesn't really exist in the videogame business.

[stray]

Film is more an art of the closeup, and silence.

What?

People do not see your face on stage in the same way as they do film (This isn't to say that you don't act with your face at all on stage. There's just a different emphasis in where the subtleties lie is all.). While in film, ninety percent of the time, your acting is limited to the waist up. Especially the face. Secondly, many teachers in theater also moonlight as dancing instructors, or have some interest in some form of choreography like that. You rarely see this kind of thing in film, outside of instructions on where and where not the camera is going to be, where you should and shouldn't move, etc.. Unless you're doing an action movie, how you move is mostly up to you.

Silence: Perhaps I shouldn't have used that word. All I'm doing is contrasting it with how much volume you have to push when doing a play (this has nothing to do with "shouting" either. I just mean that you have to talk LOUD...Which is kind of an art in and of itself). You don't want to walk in to an audition and make an ass of yourself by speaking 100 decibels higher than what people are used to (it's something many stage actors are guilty of). You don't want to do that when a microphone is hanging right over your head either.

[Raph]

Answer, never.  Why on earth do people spend so much time listening to this guy.  Hes at best an entertaining and thought provoking fella but he is almost purely academic, but he is no where near say...a Will Wright in actually producing something people want to buy.

Sorry, gonna call bullshit. The games that I have been most directly involved in made over a half a billion dollars. No, I am nowhere near Will Wright. Nobody is, in PC games. But I'm not irrelevant either.

Raph describes the gaming universe in Broad strokes, throwing around prophecies like Nostradamus, his predictions from what Ive seen have been no more accurate than the great alchemists. 

I also think that if you go back through the things I was called "crazy" for, you'll find a startlingly large number of them taken for granted in the games today. Latest example is WoW showing off their dance moves for the expansion.

[Margalis]

If you look at SWG and what happened after Raph left, it's clear the project was just riddled with incompetence. Its not fair to blame that on Raph. When he left if anything things got worse.

[WindupAtheist]

A couple points regarding Raph's slides:

*  That asteroid is way too big.  One that size would wipe out every living thing down to the microscopic level.

*  Star Trek 2.0 sucks ass.  Get that "Spock Market" shit off my screen so I can watch the fucking show.

No, I didn't have anything topical to say...

[Righ]

Why on earth do people spend so much time listening to this guy.  Hes at best an entertaining and thought provoking fella but he is almost purely academic, but he is no where near say...a Will Wright in actually producing something people want to buy.

We care because his games have the most potential and are the closest approach to the sorts of games we would like to play. He gets harsh words from time to time because he actually tries to hit the target rather than just shooting at an easier target that we're not so interested in. People do want to buy his games, and they buy the compromises that the publishers saddle us with in the hopes of getting them. When somebody produces a more enjoyable and open-ended online world than Raph has, you'll have something to crow about, and not before. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy playing with your dolls house.

[Slyfeind]

The stats that gets cited is "video games sales including all hardware pulls in more revenue than movie box office domestically." Domestic box office isn't even the largest fraction of the money made by a movie.

I gotta wonder about that. Studio execs can juggle numbers around until even a blockbuster like Spider-Man 2 looks like a flop. LIES I tell you!

The Happy Meals are re-use of IP, not alternative financing. In Hollywood, you borrow the money to make a movie -- you don't spend your own. This model doesn't really exist in the videogame business.

Not that's interesting. I thought that devs borrowed the money to make games, and whatever the game made went to pay off those investors.

Point clarified about re-use versus alternate funding. But in Asia, we have Lineage Pepsi cans and Final Fantasy anime. Can't we just go "Hey Mr. Publisher, we're going to sell 10 million of these games in China. Pepsi will pay us another two million just to use our image, see? Lineage is doing it too!"

(Numbers pulled out of my ass, of course.)

[HaemishM]

The stats that gets cited is "video games sales including all hardware pulls in more revenue than movie box office domestically." Domestic box office isn't even the largest fraction of the money made by a movie.

I gotta wonder about that. Studio execs can juggle numbers around until even a blockbuster like Spider-Man 2 looks like a flop. LIES I tell you!

And the funny part about the numbers Raph's mentioning? The movie industry has multi-use revenue streams for each product. Video games are lucky if they get a month of sales, other than MMOG's. They have no second revenue stream, even though the EB's and Gamestop's of the world get that second and third revenue stream with used games. If video game makers are lucky, they get one or two expansion packs and if they are Blizzard, they get merchandising deals like PNP RPG's and CCG's. The rest of the industry is left trying to squeeze blood from steel ore buried under the surface of fucking Mars.

[Raph]

The stats that gets cited is "video games sales including all hardware pulls in more revenue than movie box office domestically." Domestic box office isn't even the largest fraction of the money made by a movie.

I gotta wonder about that. Studio execs can juggle numbers around until even a blockbuster like Spider-Man 2 looks like a flop. LIES I tell you!

The movie business is a great racket. :)

They borrow money from banks and suckers to make the movies. They enter production deals with contractors to actually make them film. Then they sell the distribution rights, pay-per-view rights, premium cable rights, TV rights, syndication rights, international rights, and merchandising rights to themselves by selling from one subsidiary to another. That's how they can show a loss, and then avoid paying back the original money. Even the banks are "pet banks."

The Happy Meals are re-use of IP, not alternative financing. In Hollywood, you borrow the money to make a movie -- you don't spend your own. This model doesn't really exist in the videogame business.

Not that's interesting. I thought that devs borrowed the money to make games, and whatever the game made went to pay off those investors.[/quote]

Nope.

Indie case: the dev fronts the money to make a "vertical slice." The publisher sees it, and 90% of the time says no, and the dev folds. The rest of the time, the publisher puts the dev on milestone payments, and in exchange for that money to make the game, the developer gets a royalty on the finished product, but the publisher ends up owning the IP rights. The game then typically does not break even, so the developer folds. The rest of the time, the pub owns the IP, so they get to make the sequels, cutting out the dev if they so choose. The dev must wait to earn out the advances to get royalties, and in the meantime, has to start making another vertical slice...

Wholly owned is similar, except the the dev doesn't fold but is paid for out of the pub's slush fund and therefore doesn't get royalties. Should the dev studio fail to make a profit seen as a business entity, however, it will still likely go away.

Point clarified about re-use versus alternate funding. But in Asia, we have Lineage Pepsi cans and Final Fantasy anime. Can't we just go "Hey Mr. Publisher, we're going to sell 10 million of these games in China. Pepsi will pay us another two million just to use our image, see? Lineage is doing it too!"

(Numbers pulled out of my ass, of course.)

The Pacific Rim developers are much much better than the West is at creating merchandisable IP, is what it boils down to.

[Yoru]

(aside) Turns out there's even a World of Warcraft semi-hardcore strategy board game. I hear it's pretty good, although I haven't actually played it since neither I nor any of my board game group are interested in dropping half a hundred simoleons on it. And it's not a minor one either - it's being done by Fantasy Flight, one of the major hardcore board gaming companies. It even has an expansion out already.

(Yes, the WoW boardgame has an expansion out before the source material does. Awesome, ain't it?)

[stray]

Looks like a Warcraft board game to me. Not a "World of Warcraft" one. ;)

[Yoru]

The box uses WoW art. Directly. I've looked at it in person at the trademark Local Wall-Hole of Gaming Iniquity and/or Miniatures. You have seminal WoW-box night elf bewbies and various iconography lifted directly from the game.

That's not to say I'm an expert on Warcraft art; if they've been using the same exact nelf headshot for years, then I'm merely guilty of ignorance. :)

[stray]

Same artists, etc..

The Night Elf pic is from the Warcraft Night Elf Edition box. There was an Undead edition (same graphic as the one next to the Night Elf), Orc cover art (same pic as the one on the bottom of that page), and a Human edition (that had a picture of the pre-Lich Arthas).

Anyways, I'm pretty sure this board game's been out awhile (hence, the time they had to do an expansion). Blizzard has been pushing WC into other mediums before WoW came along (actually, WoW itself would be a part of that grand scheme). They've had books, comics, etc..

[Slyfeind]

The Pacific Rim developers are much much better than the West is at creating merchandisable IP, is what it boils down to.

We should do games more like they do in Asia. That would be awesome.

Turns out there's even a World of Warcraft semi-hardcore strategy board game. I hear it's pretty good, although I haven't actually played it since neither I nor any of my board game group are interested in dropping half a hundred simoleons on it. And it's not a minor one either - it's being done by Fantasy Flight, one of the major hardcore board gaming companies. It even has an expansion out already.

EQ has a tabletop RPG, City of Heroes has a comic book, Diablo has toys...and just about every game has t-shirts, even ATITD and M59. I wonder how far this merchandising thing can be taken.




...hehe

[Margalis]

The movie industry analogy has always been a terrible one.

Music industry analogies are probably better, as are book industry analogies. (Really)

What few people get about the movie industry is that nearly every movie loses money at the box office. The movie business is not about people going to see movies any more. The movies themselves are just ads for DVDs, HBO, pay-per-view, on-demand, happy meals, toys, etc.

The book industry analogy is a great one. A few bestsellers dominate all sales. There are no alternate revenue streams. Once books lose shelf space most are never heard of again. The industry is dominated by sequels and hype. Used books are common and have no value to the original publisher.

On the production side obviously writing a book is very different than making a computer game, but the overall industry is pretty similar in the economics. If a book cost $12 million to write the two industries would be basically identical.

[Merusk]

Same artists, etc..

The Night Elf pic is from the Warcraft Night Elf Edition box. There was an Undead edition (same graphic as the one next to the Night Elf), Orc cover art (same pic as the one on the bottom of that page), and a Human edition (that had a picture of the pre-Lich Arthas).

Anyways, I'm pretty sure this board game's been out awhile (hence, the time they had to do an expansion). Blizzard has been pushing WC into other mediums before WoW came along (actually, WoW itself would be a part of that grand scheme). They've had books, comics, etc..

I was about to post that it's World of Warcraft, not Warcraft.  Glad I went and took another look at the link, because that one IS Warcraft.  However, I recalled there being a WoW game the WoW main page when it was available for preorder.  A quick google and sure enough I remembered right.  Different publisher (Dragon Talon Games) but your little plastic avatar can level-up and you can get "drops" to equip from the cards.

[HaemishM]

The WoW board game is supposed to be fun, according to a buddy of mine.

[Merusk]

I imagine it is.. it can only accurately reflect the 1-60 game.  How does one have an "endgame" in a board game? "Woo, max level, now we start playing Axis & Allies: Warcraft Edition!  Go outside and find 36 other players so we can kill the dragon card and I'll start inflating the spirit healer!"