The decline of mid tier game development
Interesting interview with Lorne Lanning about one of the reasons mid tier development has disappeared. By mid tier he is meaning games with a development budget much less than blockbusters, but still a lot more than smaller indie titles, which is traditionally the kind of games he and his studio have made. It probably won't apply to most people here (indie developers), but I thought it could be useful anyway because 1) Lanning has so much experience making both major 2D and 3D games, and 2) He is very outspoken about issues of money & publisher relations, seeing his studio grow from modest 2D roots, to developing larger budget 3D games, and then declining the offer to make games with publishers because of increasingly stricter restrictions on IP and studio ownership.
Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey remake comes out later this month and according to Lanning has been paid for independently through the digital sales of other Oddworld games on various platforms, rather than any publishers fronting cash. Their next project will hinge on the success of this game.
Does anyone have anything to add about their feelings towards this 'mid tier' style game development, do you think its good/bad, sustainable, clever, or outdated? Just looking for some thoughts here as most of my research favors games in this bracket of the market.
Edit: Oops, link to interview here - http://metro.co.uk/2014/07/08/oddworld-new-n-tasty-preview-and-lorne-lanning-interview-weve-become-triple-a-indie-4790351/
Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey remake comes out later this month and according to Lanning has been paid for independently through the digital sales of other Oddworld games on various platforms, rather than any publishers fronting cash. Their next project will hinge on the success of this game.
Does anyone have anything to add about their feelings towards this 'mid tier' style game development, do you think its good/bad, sustainable, clever, or outdated? Just looking for some thoughts here as most of my research favors games in this bracket of the market.
Edit: Oops, link to interview here - http://metro.co.uk/2014/07/08/oddworld-new-n-tasty-preview-and-lorne-lanning-interview-weve-become-triple-a-indie-4790351/
Comments
And that he also stated that he thinks there is now a strong niche for mid tier development (which, if you consider "No Man's Sky" to be "mid tier" certainly seems true), which digital distribution is making possible.
Onto your comments, do you think an ideal situation for a studio wanting to make games is to have a combination of mid tier, indie, or just stick to indie, less ambitious titles? Lanning has said that they didn't take to Kickstarter because their games fell outside of the generally successful kickstarter price bracket for games, and maybe that explains why No Mans Sky was also a publisher fronted effort. The price flexibility of digital obviously helps mid tier development thrive (like you mentioned), but is this an ideal position to maneuver into as a game developer? Why, for example, is Lanning not content with just making less financially resourceful games? When I consider in my research the sheer number of combos of game settings/mechanics and level design that remains untapped it blows my mind, like for example no-ones really riffed off or improved on the formula of Spartan X, which is one of those few beat-em-ups that takes place on a single plane. Then there's overhead combat games, which apart from Speed Rumbler with its Car Combat Mad Max inspired gameplay almost always had characters walking around shooting up shit in a jungle/futuristic environment. Then there's sports games, which are almost exclusively sim based without anyone doing creative/anime inspired stuff (like Technos did with Dodgeball, Volleyball), and SNK with Super sidekicks. Then there's probably the most untapped old school genre, light gun games, which apart from HOTD:Overkill hasn't really pushed the boundaries in thematic content or mechanics. Wet is another example, a mid tier game that wasn't afraid to take chances to reinterpret the third person shooter formula by making the main character more agile, and *shock* a psychotic female who is mostly a loner. I didn't want this to turn into a rant, but I'm just a bit skeptical about this whole 'mid tier' style of development and if its really something devs should aspire to, because even though I enjoyed both HOTD: Overkill and Wet, I wonder if these studios would not have better spent their time making smaller, shorter games.
And although I think there are opportunities in mid tier development, that doesn't mean it's necessarily more financially or creatively rewarding.
For me it comes down to: "What game do you want to make?" and "What skills do you have?". Lorne Lanning wants to make fairly large expensive games, that's the experience he wants to deliver, and he's done it before, so it makes sense for him.
I agree with you that aspiring to be mid tier isn't necessarily a good thing to aspire to.
Regarding Spartan X: Have you been watching the mobile space? I'm pretty certain there's a lot of similar to Spartan X games being released there.
But I'd suggest that when the cost of the game is enough to bankrupt several people several times over, and they start making safe(ish) decisions as a result, it's mid tier.
A bit of a random rant:
Lorne Lanning is all like "in AAA games there's so much money involved that there are teams of people second-guessing every decision and it makes it less creative", and also all like "AAA is all sequels and man-shooters".
But at the same time, in order to fund his next game, Lorne Lanning is developing TWO re-makes of his existing games from the 90s.
If anything I'd say sequels are better than re-makes. And I think it's kind of ironic that Lorne Lanning bemoans the poverty of risk-taking that the budgets of AAA games cause, when he's engaged in multiple re-makes himself.
Obviously Lanning considers his path vastly preferable to AAA development... but it's not like he's making original games right now, and that's a direct result of him only wanting to make games with $5,000,000 plus budgets. Making original, but smaller Oddworld games is a path available to him that he isn't taking.
Broforce by comparison is going to cost less than $400,000 (I sincerely hope)
I'm also not convinced at the usefulness of "mid-tier" as a term. It seems to cover a kind of development that's never really gone away either: There are loads of studios that make games with PS1-style budgets all over the world and I'd be very surprised if that number had actually ever declined TBH. Yes, individual studios may rise and fall, but I feel like the number of studios total in that "bracket" has probably only gone up.
As for DD: 10 people in the end. Not a huge budget by international standards, nowhere near.
This is something we're thinking about at Free Lives. We have the means to make a bigger game after the current one, and there are certain game types that really benefit in the market from bigger budgets (e.g. a lot of FPS experiences)... but do we really want to take that path?
Re: your situation and comment about FPS games, I'd like to mention some observations I'm making on the industry the last year and a half. Since the earliest Oculus Rift videos on tested (one of the earliest being TF2), 600 or so VR demo's have officially been released for the Oculus Rift. Most of these are first-person experiences, and I've tried about 30 or so demo's myself from Parking simulators, to 2D platformers and skiing simulators. The experience (coupled with my ongoing research project into the history and evolution of action games) convinced me almost immediately that there's a huge genre leap in commercial gaming coming, similar to when 3D polygon graphics quickly uptook in the mid to late 90's and the most popular genres were no longer sprite based 2D games. I can't see how any devs who love games arent at least planning/prototyping at least a few VR projects right now.
However, Broforce is your bread winner right? I wonder, is Broforce popular enough for a Kickstarter related sister project? You have the leverage, why not use it? Doesn't mean you can't have another things going on in the background too.
So right now, I think, making a game for Oculus Rift means working within a lot of constraints. It also means making a game that works without VR and with it. Because there aren't enough people with VR Headsets to sell to, and there unless they ship far faster than I expect, there won't be a large audience for VR games any time soon.
No Man's Sky is certainly being designed with VR in mind. And it will do well. Though No Man's Sky will certainly sell 10X as many copies to consumers without VR as it does to consumers with VR.
So regarding VR. I think it puts a lot of restrictions on the kind of games that can be made. And I expect a lot of the games that do well on Oculus Rift will be relatively expensive games to make, like No Man's Sky.
And I personally don't really want to make No Man's Sky :P
Although I'm quite looking forward to playing Proteus on an Oculus Rift.
(Of course there are a lot of people who share your excitement about the Oculus Rift, and I think there will be some excellent games made for it)
some number driven items I found interesting on this topic.
I wish that No More 1Ups article had more info on indie development. I know it's not a big part of the pie revenue-wise... but the indie scene in some countries is becoming larger than the AAA scene (source: http://www.gamesinvestor.com/content/Research/Industry-Reports/Making-Games-in-the-UK-Today-(2014) ).
@Silvaring In truth, I've only played with an outdated model of the Oculus Rift. And my concerns about motion sickness might be mooted by the final product.
So what I'm about to speculate on is just that, speculation with very limited information.
What I'd expect from the Oculus Rift in terms of successful games are a lot of horror FPS games (like Amnesia: Machine of Pigs) and some other slow paced experiences (like No Man's Sky). I expect this because traditional action FPS's caused severe motion sickness, or were harder to play, on the device we had. Again, my predictions about what games work might be mooted by the final product.
The reason why action FPS's didn't control well was that they were designed for mouse movement (or controller movement). In order to cause less motion sickness the Oculus must move with the player's head (as I understand it) and that is necessarily slower at turning. Hence FPS's where the dexterousness of the player is the core challenge (like Call of Duty) won't be ideally played on Oculus.
However, I might be proven wrong by cunning developers or brilliant engineering.
My other concern is that the adoption rate of VR headsets might not be very high. Fortunately a lot of great games inherently work well on the Oculus (like Proteus or Amnesia: Machine of Pigs) so it's not going to be a Kinect type situation where no one is making good content for the device.
I think that's within the realm of possibility if the cost of buying the equipment comes down drastically. Right now Oculus is targeting the price of $300. I'd imagine the Oculus would have to be half of that for a significant amount of non-gamers to purchase it in addition to their existing TVs. Or purchase several Oculus's for their family in order to watch reality TV together (as they do now).