i believe this industry is slow right now partially due to the ever-growing picky customer who expects greatness from a game he/she buys to play. and partially because of big-name companies buying smaller companies and asking them to make stupid games (like sequels and triquels...). and partially due to the slow economy. and partially due to big-name companies pouring huge sums of money into game development which only makes it harder for others to survive, since they can make a big impact on where the game industry goes. anyways, what to do for a small game development studio to get a project that is funded in this industry where former big name companies are sinking?

> i believe this industry is slow right

Overall sales of games in the US rose by 4% in July (it's too early to get the August numbers yet). Sales of titles for newer consoles rose 20% in the same period while legacy fell 61%{source:NPDFunworld}. Console hardware sales were sluggist all summer, prompting waves of price cuts, promotions, bundles and rebates.

> and partially due to the slow economy.

Not really. Apart from the hardware which follows the IT economic cycle, home entertainment in general has an opposite economic cycle as it become a replacement for luxury entertainment such as travel, etc. during a lull.

> big-name companies pouring huge sums of money into game development
> which only makes it harder for others to survive

It used to take $1M in cash and one year to make a title; it's probably closer to $3M and 24 months now. And all for 3 months of glory, at best. SplinterCell is out of the premium promotion boxes since March. 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets' went from CDN$79.99 this Christmas down to the CDN$29.99 value bin this week. The GhostRecon bundle is on the lowest part of the shelf and the original 3 titles are not sold anymore. And those are the successful ones.

When it becomes easy to enter an industry, people do so en masse until it saturates to the point of suffocation. This is what happened in the PC segment and everyone is suffering. Consoles OTOH are more immune from such disaster because titles and companies are hand-picked; I call this the 'Oligopoly Club'...

> what to do for a small game development studio

It's like the cinema industry: there's always a niche for independent films. But that's far from being a cash cow IMHO. You could enter segments that few people have entered yet, such as airline systems (AirView), handicapped children, casual gaming (hotels & airports), iTV, etc. You could follow the herd with mobile games for the Palm, Pocket-PC, and phones. Or you could tempt pure souls with MMORPG titles, or even jump in the fad bandwagon with MMORTS titles. You could enter a similar market such as simulation tools for the heavy industry or the military (hey! just change the bitmaps, a few models, bust the physics engine and you get 'Twisted Metal: Black'!). Or you could do like all the others do: make a shooter and just go wild with optical effects, dynamic shadows, motion blur, lens flares, and all that Doom3 and HL2 are already doing.

-cb


[edited by - cbenoi1 on September 4, 2003 1:29:41 PM]