Why Do Games and Game Studios Fail? 389
LukeG writes "This new article discusses the reason behind games and their developers failing, noting the distance of those selling the games, from those that buy them as one possible cause. Doomed games such as Bablylon 5 come under the spotlight, while the ubiquitous Duke Nukem Forever is also touched upon." For me, this article brought to mind the twin disasters of Fallout Tactics and the Farscape based game.
Technology before Content (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is a very complicated issue: (Score:5, Insightful)
Mainly because innovation has warming the bench, and the team is out there playing the same endless game. Bust some caps, click click death, whatever.
The money is in the innovation . Make something totally new, and chances are it will be successful.
I'm personally tired to death in blowing stuff up in the first person, I'd rather play solitaire.
Tony Hawk Pro "Pogo Stick"
THE MARKET IS OVERSATURATED. (Score:5, Insightful)
Repetition (Score:2, Insightful)
Most games that manage to finally get published are rehashes of already popular games, and often just a quick game version of something already popular in another medium already (tv, movies, books, etc.). For one of those to succeed, it has to *really* be well put together, with great art and marketing (like, say, Spiderman). It's surprising when a game like that doesn't fail. Hopefully the article spends more time discussing the whys and wherefores of games that aren't going to have an obviously high chance of failing (Black and White, say).
Re:Games fail. (Score:2, Insightful)
They're a bunch of lemmings who parrot each others work ad nauseam; all they seem to have produced over the past few years are RTSes and FPSes, with a smattering of other genres. One game becomes succesful, the rest of them start making exactly the same kind of game. Look how many WW2 FPSes have come out recently.
It's pretty simple really.... (Score:5, Insightful)
An interesting question (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the Journeyman Project II - I got number II as a birthday present - and I swear, it was the best game I ever played (along with Marathon... but that's another story
I was filled with the most enormous sense of satisfaction when I completed that game.
Then, I hear the news about a month ago that Presto Studios, the makers of the game, have just shut down. A real shame. I for one will remember and appreciate their work, if only on that game.
-- james
Its called a free market (Score:3, Insightful)
The release now patch later philosophy obviously doesn't work. Couple that with the extreme arrogance of some of the prima donna game makers and you have a disaster waiting to happen.
Marketing pushes these games so hard, nothing could live up to the hype. Why announce a game 4 years before release? Why announce it 6 months before release?
I'm not the biggest fan of Blizzard but at least they have cool beta programs and test their products. I can't count how many games I've bought over the years and had to toss in the trash because they were so bad (SIN comes to mind).
In the end it's developers such as Epic, Id and Blizzard who survive because they actually care about what they are releasing.
It's gotten to the point where I don't buy games until six months or so after the release when the first 3-4 patches have come out and I can read the reviews to see how bad it sucks.
Pac-Man anybody? (Score:2, Insightful)
I have bought $50 games on 6 CD's that have bored me to tears after a few hours. I often find myself playing real.com games like diamond mine and alchemy as opposed to the latest greatest bloatware on the shelves.
Perhaps if a company would attempt to actually make the game enjoyable as opposed to just pretty, the industry would be doing better.
Re:technology? (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, what are two of the most popular and critically acclaimed games of the past 2 years? The Sims and GTA, neither of which could be said to be bleeding edge in terms of grapbics technology.
Games take too long. (Score:5, Insightful)
valid survey question (Score:2, Insightful)
While I thought that this article was fairly nteresting, this conclusion bothers me. Did the author ever think about the possibility that the question was put on the survey with the intention of validating the accuracy of the survey? You need to put some bullshit questions on a survey to test if people are blindly checking off boxes, or are really answering truthfully and thoughtfully...
Blame the people (Score:5, Insightful)
huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that games don't do well on release is a mystery. Games are announced years before release, where as movies only a few months unless you read all the rumor sites. If a game that's announced 4 years ahead of time can't succeed with it's built up hype machine then that burden falls squarely on the developers.
Are there sleeper titles? Sometimes but it's incredibly rare.
All this Article does is pose the question... (Score:5, Insightful)
I make this assessment as an Industry Insider and someone who helped build a very successful Game Studio from almost nothing, and has insider information on some the companies and games he muses about.
What that said to establish my knowledge, know that I would love to write my own version of the question with a detailed look at what I consider to be the real answers. However, that would take weeks and result in about a 20,000 word novella.
That said, there are a few big themes that loom over the industry that I can summarize. (This is not a complete list)
1) Production Values and feature demands for an "AAA" title in 2002. In a word: HUGE Moore's Law applies here too.
2) The large number of titles (PC and consoles) released that compete for the player's dollars and attention.
3) The cost of development. Because of #1 and #2, you get pressure to out-do your competition. This leads to #4
4) A "Tiering effect" of PC games (and console games). You have the "best" titles taking home the lion's share of the money, shelf space, review space, and mindshare. The majority of titles can't make money at the top level of production values leading to #5
5) A substantial (majority?) of game projects don't make back the money used in production. This means you either a) eventually close shop or b) have a system where successful titles subsidize the unsuccessful ones.
6) The side effect of 1 through 5, that causes publishers to be conservative in an effort to stay profitable. That leads to increased emphasis on franchises and less support for innovative and risky titles.
7) How talent is defined and treated. Many, many companies are created by their owners as vehicles to make wealth for themselves by most efficiently exploiting their workers. Game developers and programmers especially consider themselves to be more than mere assembly line workers. This is why you get a lot of churn of staff and people that consider themselves exploited. This is partially the fault of the employees because...
8) A lot of people get into the Game industry because they love games, and approach it as a passion, not a business. Reality (life, family, needs, mortgages, etc) intrudes with personal maturity. If the initial setup was exploitive, you see a lot of burnt-out, disillusioned people leave the industry.
9) The production demands of an extreme niche of the software industry on people. That is 90 hour work weeks as normal only to have something shipped despite your protests because to make a release date.
10) Equitable distribution of credit, recognition and compensation. John Carmack's Ferraris may have inspired thousands of dreams, but the state of the business has left a trail of broken promises of royalties, credit, recognition, or even a sane working environment.
11) Companies that believe that the games are produced by the top people; the C?O's, the management and marketing people, not the artists, designers, sound engineers and programmers. (*cough*) Believe that "Those people" are just there to mechanically realize the vision of the "creative" people, and they get what they deserve.
12) I'm getting tired of typing...
!!! Nothing in the above list is an absolute that can be applied to every single company in the industry. They just are general issues that push my hot buttons.
* The opinions expressed here are those of the Author and do not reflect or represent his employer in any way.
Hint, hint... (Score:2, Insightful)
An observation from a casual gamer:
The sequence seems to be: (1) publish a game, (2) publish a "cheats" book, (3) watch the game's staying power approach zero.
My only serious computer games were Zork (I,II,III) and most other Infocom text adventures, Lemmings (I,II,III, Tribes), Doom, and Quake (with mission packs 1 & 2, I think). For one Infocom game (Starcross) I used a hint book... it was a total letdown. Why pay good money for a game then cop out by using cheats?
One cannot blame the publishers but their prefered sequence might be: sell a game, sell a cheatbook for that game, sell another game, sell a cheatbook for that game, and so forth to infinity.
Apparently, at some point the money stops flowing.
It should be Customers not Games that come first (Score:5, Insightful)
i've bought every blizzard game from blackthorne on floppy to starcraft to diablo but after what they did I did not purchase WarCraft III, yea I'm just one consumer and yea they dont' give a fuck about me but at least I make an effort to be consistent, where they do not.
Its not always the programmers fault (Score:2, Insightful)
Fun versus Pretty (Score:4, Insightful)
We have PCs, NES, SNES, Genesis, PS, X-Box in the house, and my kids spend more time playing old FUN games such as Dragon Warrior IV, Solstice, Landtalker, Shining Force II than they do Final Fantasy XI or Baldur's Gate.
I still think Civ II is more fun than Alpha Centauri or Civ III -- I may later change my mind, but I still need more experience with C3 before it gets fun -- Civ II was fun out of the box.
Do games keep needing to get harder?
The issue is.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Games and their Dying exposed (Score:4, Insightful)
I would agree, though, that you have to decide up front whether you're making a multiplayer game or not. Some games (Deus Ex, Tropico) just don't lend themselves to being multiplayer games. That's OK--just done try to pound a single-player game into a multiplayer hole. Your reviews and sales will suffer badly.
All creative works suffer this problem (Score:5, Insightful)
This process occurs in movies, TV, books, music, theatre, and, of course, video games. There are surprises both ways. The Blair Witch Project was a movie that was not expected to be successful, but was hugely so and has changed the movie industry. Citizen Kane was an important film (often considered the greatest American film) but a commercial failure. Yet Orson Welles was given unprecedented freedom from the studio to make the picture, not because they respected him as an artist, but because they thought he would make them a fortune.
Sometimes the alchemy of commercial appeal and artistic daring produces a wonder. Sometimes they fight, and the result achieves neither ver well. But there is no formula -- there can't be, because every work changes the landscape, and the bigger the work, the bigger the change. And of course, originality and formulaic are opposites.
Re:This is a very complicated issue: (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is the stuff that game companies have become convinced that the best route to a bestseller is to make it exactly like games that have been around for years. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's like Hollywood, where they figure with enough special effects they can really clean up, and making interesting movies is too big a gamble.
Look how much trouble Sid Meier had getting EA to back the Sims.
Re:Fallout Tactics? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only a rare few games achieve success after they bombed on release, if any. I can't think of any offhand. Most of the old games that make comebacks were hits in their time (like the rereleases of old gold-box SSI AD&D games, and the myriad re-releases of old games for newer platforms like the Final Fantasy Anthology for PS2, and all the old SNES games released for the Gameboy Advance). If something bombed, few except the terminally bored, collectors, or bargain bin hunters will ever get into them. I'm one of the bargain bin hunters so I have a lot of also-ran games in my collection. Some of them were diamonds in the rough, but the vast majority of them bombed for one of two good reasons. They either were too buggy to play upon release (Pool of Radiance 2 being one of the more visible and worst offenders) or were just plain not great games.
I'll tell ya why. (Score:5, Insightful)
Games fail for the same reson records fail.
Some of them are mass market crap following a formula... First person shooters are the boy bands of the computer gaming world.
Some of them are from small companies that don't have the money to break into the market, so many games die a poor death as shareware.
But I think the reason most games fail is because the board room mentality that builds them. Why take a risk on something new and untested, when you can slap some new graphics and tweek the engine on the old game?
It happends with music, movie, beer, etc. The board room mentality will be the death of them all... Creativity is dieing because of meetings where people are afraid to take a risk.
okay, back to drinking my microbrewed beer... made from people more concerned with making the best beer possable, instead of making the most profits.
--T
Re:You are entitled to your opinion... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why Games Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason most games fail is becuase of the people developing them and who they develop them for. The thing is that I know a ton of talented programmers, and they all love games. Some would love to program game, others love the engine but ultimately they love the technical side of it but don't have a handle on the not non-technical aspects of creating a game.
You could probalbly break games that fail into one of four categories,
I think the most common item of failure would be Lack of marketing, there are some people that can make a good game but lack the backing of a distributor. This hurts alot of small game developers and caters to large developers. A good example is GameSpot, any game that they follow and cover is Always given a good score. They are also the games that have the most marketing power. A good example is the Age of Mythology, they had been covering and hyping that game for almost a year, you think that the score for that game was even going to approach less than really good? Other games that they review are more objective, so they have good and bad ones in there but a good scoring game is far from proving it will get good sales. An example was a game I loved which was Kohan. Great game, no marketing so did not do so well overall in sales.
The second biggest killer is game instability. I cannot count the number of games that have just been crappy, not ready to be sold but pushed out the door anyways, just to make a few bucks. I can only assume that these games are pushed out too early and that they programmers for these games are not just bad, but considering the number of people who are interested in making a computer game, this also a realistic possibility.
While some people don't care if a game has a story line, if the game play is shallow you are going to need a story line to draw a person into the game. Like a mentioned before, alot of programmers would love to make a computer game, the problem is that they want to program a game, not a story. They don't have writing skills to develop a good story.
Unbalanced game play. This also another big one, alot people know how to play games, it is another thing to fine tune a game. Most people are not able or not willing to make the time to balance out their games to make them interesting which always result in games that become dull once you find the "Secret".
Another thing that I want to include but that is not on the list is that programmers will often program something for themselves, and totally disregard everyone else. This can result in a poor overall gameplay, or documentation for mods. This is often a complaint about some open-source projects but I think it really comes down to human nature. When making computer games becomes more accessible to those people who are not as technical, game quality will improve. When you limit the number of people, you are ultimately limiting the talent pool of potentially good game makers.
Re:Games and their Dying exposed (Score:2, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that takes time and money, and most developers aren't willing to go the distance. In a lot of ways, the game industry is like the porn industry. It's all about quantity over quality.
Too much 3D, not enough 2D! (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO... (Score:2, Insightful)
Modding (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing to add (Score:3, Insightful)
But there is one that he, and many other people, have missed: an effective marketing system. I don't mean just a way of convincing the magazine buyer that the main character has a big sword, but a system by which a person without a desire at this moment to find out about games, can find out about games. In a month everywhere you turn will be filled with images of the Lord Of The Rings, from books to TV to Instant Messengers to billboards to "news" programs, a media saturation that no gaming company can hope to achieve. The best our game recieved was a mention on Sports Center.
Perhaps without this notion that any random company that catches the magazine's fancy can become a AAA title, we will see fewer titles given development hell-sized budgets and more innovative, cheap, existing-technology titles created. Perhaps then more AAA titles will break even, and developers will appreciate those who come to them with sub 10-million dollar size aspirations.
Of course, all of this involves gaming coming out of the shame closet that this culture holds it in... That will come with time.
Re:One thing to add - indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
If a game sucks as a game but is heavily promoted, it will suffer a backlash of bad word-of-mouth and review publicity making it harder to recoup the money spent on the marketing. It also does damage to a franchise's reputation.
On the other hand, it can really help a great game from an unknown source.
It's not that a random company can't make an AAA game, its just that for *anyone* to do so these days requires spending a lot of money to make competitive content. If they are going to spend serious bucks, then you can assume some of that will be spent on marketing and distribution, making it sort of self-fufilling.
Re:slashdotting (Score:3, Insightful)
Quality creative projects are, in the end, often about people, ideas and creativity, and not a particular mechanization of the process. Knowing the motions is simply not creative work.
One of the things they did is Pixar often didn't just simply hire people that knew how to use certain bits of software. Often, they hired people creative and talented in what you might consider "old medium" (non-computer), these artists and animators were trained to the software.
MMORPGs take forever (Score:1, Insightful)
The best games... (Score:3, Insightful)
And why was it successful? It was neither too complex or too simple. It was rewarding at introductory levels yet, as your skill improved, you could find new avenues to challenge yourself on (i.e. downloading CS and playing it). Basically everything said on Dave Sirlin's site [sirlin.net].
Most innovative games are forgotten. Die by the Sword? Killer UI for 3rd person sword fighting... yet the rest of the game was lacking. Dozens of other games can be listed that fall in the same category.
Unlike music or film, games are much more of a... viceral form of entertainment. A strong, ground-breaking element cannot make up for piss-poor gameplay (unlike making up for a bad story in movies or bad musicianship in music). How often would you play a game that looked photo-realistic yet crashed every 5 minutes and corrupted your HD?
The best games are focused. The worst ones try to be the omni-game. The be all and end all.
Re:valid survey question (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:technology? (Score:2, Insightful)
Daikatana was a really bad game. Honestly, I tried my hardest to like it when it came out, but it almost seemed like flashing back in the past and playing Hexen (though Hexen was actually fun). I've heard from some people who grunted through it that the game actually had merit halfway through and beyond, but extremely few people made it there.
Another reason, of course, is that Romero cast himself as a cult of personality. When someone has the gumption to do that, there will be a lot of people gunning for them. Couple that with endless articles portraying his game design brilliance and... people are just waiting with baited breath for a turd to present itself for analysis. It surely did.
Re:This is a very complicated issue: (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me guess: All new music sucks too? It all never lives up to that golden era when music was great. That, of course, was in [YOUR AGE AT 16-20]. Ah, those were the days.
There are a lot of incredible games nowadays. Personally I love Operation Flashpoint, and F1 2002 is quite good. I'm really looking forward to Hidden & Dangerous 2. Are there games that suck? Yup, just as there always has been. I remember having a pirate friend with a Commodore 64 with walls of pirate games (there were, quite literally, THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS). Of those I'd say about 99% weren't worth the time it took to load them.
Not really for RPG's.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Mind you, I am looking forward to doom3 and new kibbles, but that's probably not for a little while yet.
And what do they both have in common? (Score:2, Insightful)
If your game lets people do things they can't do in their real lives, it will be successful.
Re:Games and their Dying exposed (Score:3, Insightful)
* A code development team
* Artists
* application designers
* Project managers
* Executive staff
I would say that the application designers are in charge of figuring out how the program is supposed to work; artists are in charge of providing graphical work and models; coders are in charge of implementing the vision presented by the designers; and the project managers and executive staff are there to keep everything flowing nicely within the big picture. There's more people invovled usually (QA teams, for example), but let's keep it simple.
If you wanted to hold someone responsible for making bad software, I would divide responsibility pretty evenly between the executive staff and the application designers. Coders write code, and should be responsible for as much but not more. And it doesn't matter whether they make games, spreadsheet programs, or database systems. Games are basically another type of application, so this would be true for games as well.
If they make shitty code and the program crashes all the time, that's a coder issue. If the software isn't exactly useful or interesting, don't blame the coder. Blame the designer, and blame his bosses for letting shit end up on the store shelf.
Oh - I haven't bought a game in 3 years. Nothing out there that I like at all. Sad, really. I stick to Freecell.
Ok, I WORKED in the industry, here's the deal (Score:4, Insightful)
So all the publishers have consolidated down to four, half the dev companies have gone bankrupt, and the only games publishers want to make are sure-fire hit sequels. Innovation is too risky, that's why presto studios quit even though they were ahead.
You guys can talk about bad ideas and programmers until you're blue in the face but the real truth of the matter is that it takes too long to make a game anymore and the chances of making the money back on it are getting slimmer. Game developers work on average 70 hours a week and make less than equivalent jobs in the IT field. I'm not kidding, go ask a few.
Another perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
The first is obvious: the investors' terrified greed. When you throw a minimum of $5 MILLION dollars at a project, you get real conservative -- you want your money back, with interest. You only go with projects you KNOW will succeed, and so we get stuck with tired-out versions of InitiallyAmazingGame XVII.
The second reason is more insidious: Walmart. If Walmart won't carry your product, you LOSE. Period. They're the biggest chain around; most of your sales will come from your average American family browsing through Walmart. That means Walmart gets to dictate what's on the cover, how much it costs, what 'rating' it has, etc. Walmart doesn't care about innovation or game playability any more than the investor does; they both just want to make their money back, and then some.
Couple those two ball-and-chains onto any bright young company trying to make a new or innovative game, and it's no surprise computer game companies keep failing.
All it takes is one a-hole. (Score:5, Insightful)
September 18th, 2002. 9:27 am:
Payday.
I'm standing in front the office rubbing my sleepy eyes and dimly wondering why my key won't open the door. The thought that the locks have changed does not cross my sleep-addled brain. Leaning forward to find a glare less angle, I pause to consider the Kinko's-printed canvas sign leering down on me.
"Tremor Entertainment."
The logo is a dingy red Blizzard facsimile, poorly conceived and executed.
The door opens. I nearly tumble backwards in surprise. Grasping at teetering iron I manage to steady myself. The railing below has rusted out at its bases which are now milling with fire ants.
Karen, our CFO, is standing in the doorway, flanked by armed guards. She is wearing an expression of practiced concern and, oddly, poorly-masked triumph.
"There are no paychecks. The company has been shut down until the contract is renegotiated with Microsoft." Her first performance of the day.
We're told to get a few of our personal things, whatever we'll need or want while the company's on hiatus. I don't realize that I'll never see my Mr. Coffee, Thinkgeek caffeine mugs, and Rage Against the Machine CDs again. "I know it's not your fault," I tell the surly guard "but this is really insulting." He nods: a solemn, practiced, patronizing nod. Karen returns, this time demanding our now useless building keys.
"Do I have to turn in my hall pass too?" No response. The guard tells us to leave. Karen's told him we're not to touch the computers and he's getting jittery. His hand slides involuntarily to the holster on his belt. This is fucking ridiculous.
Standing in the parking lot an hour later, beer in hand, I realized that it was over.
As it turned out there were no 'renegotiations with Microsoft'. The first they heard were our frantic cell phone calls. Our Floridian CEO took the payroll money and ran. All it takes is one A-Hole.
The Tremor team included a number of brilliant, talented individuals; all of them underpaid for their dedication. The team was there for each other and for the project, not for money. This team included the Lead Designer of Starcraft, designers and artists from Warcraft 1& 2, Diablo and Sacrifice (among others.) The project, The Unseen (irony: located), was unassailably special both visually and in terms of gameplay. The contract was with Microsoft, a first-party development contract: the holy grail of game contracts. (I'll save the story of how Microsoft later rammed us in our collective cornhole with a red hot poker for tomorrow night, kiddies.)
In the end all it took was one man to destroy what so many had struggled so long to create.
Currently, the displaced employees of Tremor are involved in a civil lawsuit to recover unpaid wages. CEO Steven Oshinsky is under investigation by the FBI. He looks like Joey Buttafuco. www.tremor.net is still active, it appears.
Re:innovation isn't everything. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is par for the course for Carmack. He breaks technical ground. id doesn't break game design ground. Basically, the game is little more than the showcase for his new, latest game engine, which is then used to make actual games with by the modding and professional dev communities.
The Real Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
should be how do some games studios succeed.
Consider how hard it is to build a game.
Firstly you must come up with the concept. It must be sufficently original and innovative that your not dismissed as a clone but not so innovative or original that nobody is sure whether they'll enjoy it or not. Then you've got to build proof of a concept for stage two...
Begging for help. You must convince other people your game (which currently consists of a design plan) will be seriously sweet, will sell like hotcakes and will have manageable costs (people with money usually like money and if they give it away, they want to see it come back).
Thirdly you must find developers, artists, programmers, etc who are willing to work on your game for the money you can offer (which will probably be meager unless your idea is one of those mythical "guaranteed sell-outs") and who are capable of doing the job. Consider how high some of the studios have set the bar and that's a hell of a job.
Forthly you have go though the development phase without having your game managled by the development phase. As well as the regular dilbertisms you've also got to avoid many truisms unique to game development [gameai.com] and avoid having your product adjusted for political reasons (censorship, sensitivity to minorities, new management doesn't like old management's projects on the priniciple, funding runs out and nobody wants to give you more) etc.
Finally you have the game and it's all that you hoped for, your set right? Well no. Marketting has to spread across the world and convince geeks with money that they want to shell out for your game. If you lucky the marketting department will put out a somewhat accurate image of your game, game reviewers will be having a good day and enjoy it when it reaches their magazine/web site and people will have the spare cash to buy the game.
Then you can still get screwed should say your game not appeal to enough people, be overshadowed by another game of similar type (let's face it, if you release a first person shooter in the same season ID does, your going down) or by a totally different type (if everyone's buying the latest FPS by ID they're going to be playing it instead of your neat, low violence RPG).
So really, even if you have the idea of the century and you get support from other people the chances of you finishing up with a decent quality game with good marketting and high enough sales to generate a notable profit (to be distributed among all investing parties) is pretty damn slim.
Quite frankly it's a miracle any studio stays in business for more than one production run. It is most definitely no business for the faint of heart, the dispassionate or those who need a realiable income.
Art which requires too many cooks (Score:3, Insightful)
With almost a decade of experience working in the game industry, let me share my theory.
A game itself fails because it is a piece of art, and good art is very difficult to make. It requires focus and direction; it requires a visionary who imagines an end product which will communicate something unique to the audience. Normally this is done by a single person, and in other types of art (painting, photography, music, writing, etc) one person can create a finished piece themselves. But modern games cannot be made by one or even just a couple of people; most often it is a team of 15 or 20, and you have people joining and leaving the team throughout the project. Oftentimes the team is completely different at the end than it was at the beginning.
So how the heck can you have a focused piece of art when you have so many people (many of them just drifting in and out of the project more or less at random) working on it? You don't see novels written by a team of 15 writers, or songs written by 15 musicians. (Go look at the writing credits for your favorite band's songs; in most cases, they are all written by one or two key members of the band.) But games simply require too many elements, both technically and artistically, to be done by a single person. They are highly interactive, compared to other forms of art which are generally not even slightly interactive. So you have a catch-22 - they need the direction and focus of a single person's work, but require a huge team in order to produce the required art and technology.
There are two ways to do it. One is by dumb luck (this one rarely happens). The other is by having a dedicated leader who puts his or her heart and soul into directing the rest of the team, picking a chosing the art and gameplay that fits with their vision and throwing out the rest. This method is how most good games are made. However, it has many production-level downsides; everyone on the team will hate them (because they throw out 90% of the art that is produced) and the management/investors will hate them (because they throw out perfectly good work, causing production of the game to be 10 times as expensive as it would be otherwise).
Re:THE MARKET IS OVERSATURATED. (Score:2, Insightful)