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Classic Games (Games)

Economics of a 2D Adventure 29

Posted by Zonk from the put-the-hampster-in-the-microwave dept.
Thanks to The Grumpy Gamer (Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame), for his excellent look at The Economics of 2D Adventure Games. "First, this is only a thought experiment. This is not something I am planning on doing, or even have a huge interest in doing, so please don't feed the rumor mills. Second, this article contains gory and gruesome details about the games business and, in particular, marketing and distribution. If you'd rather remain blissfully oblivious to the horrors of what goes on behind the scenes, this is the place to stop reading. If you're one of those people that can't help but stare at a car accident, read on."
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Economics of a 2D Adventure More

Economics of a 2D Adventure

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  • The first thing I noticed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by loopback_127001 ( 695885 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @01:13PM (#10577832)
    In the budget was this: Testing Subtotal: $30,000 In case anyone wants to ever wonder why the game industry releases consistently buggy, shitty product, there's your answer. Testing. ALL the testing for 1 year. $30k. Half the salary of a single developer. I would assume that's either for hiring a single real person at 30k to do the testing, or else to pay 30k to a contractor service for some amount of hours of testing. I think it's interesting, especially given that the stated numbers are from his experience in the industry. Perhaps in this specific case, with a known engine and no cutting-hedge technology, spending such a tiny amount of testing of the game could work out, if you also have the developers and everyone else playing the game / testing along the way as well. Overall, a really interesting breakdown of how things would work for even an extremely simple game idea, and how much money is involved.

    • Re:The first thing I noticed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AltaMannen ( 568693 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @01:17PM (#10577890)
      I don't think it was assumed testing is full time for the full time of the project.

      Until you have something "playable" the programmers and designers can do all the testing and that is going to take a certain amount of time.

      Also, going with the publisher approach may mean that they have an additional testing team that goes under "publisher overhead". Most titles today have way higher testing costs than $30k, but this is a low-budget project.
      • I both 'agree' and 'don't agree'.

        First, the agreeing! I think you're 100% on point about the publisher test team, since publisher's have their 'acceptance tests' that a game must pass before it can be declared gold, and their test team is a part of that overhead.

        The idea of test coming into the product to test something that's already playable is very likely a common approach (I don't work in the game sector, but it's a common attitude in other places in the software industry, so I feel pretty ok making
        • Bugs at the beginning of the design / implementation phase are generally the responsibility of the designer / programmer. We're not generally talking about the more sophisticated test casing and automated test script generation of the larger software industry, we're talking about people in their early twenties working for 10 dollars an hour or less. This is not to say that's how it should be: I've been pushing for more automated test solutions from programmers at the company where I work, and it has been

    • Re:The first thing I noticed (Score:5, Informative)

      by TwistedSquare ( 650445 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @01:18PM (#10577905) Homepage
      Though they did say they would be using an existing engine, which should reduce the amount of testing needed by quite a bit to my mind.
      • I agree. When was the last time you found a bug in a 2D adventure game? That's because it's just a new story on top of the same engine. As long as you make sure you can play through the entire game, you're pretty much fine. Really the only testing you need on the playable product is to play through the whole game a few times to make sure it's possible to win. The only real bugs that can occur then are broken room or item objects in the game. In most of these cases, the worst that happens is the user c
      • There's more kinds of defects that are possible in a game than just technical bugs.

        Some crucial kinds of questions the testing needs to tell the development team includes: Is it too hard? Is it too easy? Did you get stumped anywhere? Was it boring anywhere? Did the storyline make sense to you, or was it unclear in certain places?

        It won't take long for the development team to get so far into the weeds on the project that they won't be able to answer questions like those for themselves.

        Putting together

    • You also have to remember that the person who's developing something is also testing it as well, independent of the budget.
    • I don't know first hand, but I've read in a few places that game testers love their job and do very well at it. They bring forth many more problems than are fixed due to budget constraints and marketing pressure to release a game as early as possible. Also, companies don't like supporting or expanding upon finished products because it costs them money.

  • Not what I thought... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bluesman ( 104513 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @01:24PM (#10577970) Homepage
    From the title, I thought the article was going to be about how you can easily rack up 250 rupies for the blue ring in Zelda by going to the money making game and hitting reset only when you lose.

    Hey! Why don't they fund the new game that way?

  • other scenarios (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JackBuckley ( 696547 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @01:33PM (#10578084) Homepage
    This is an interesting article, but the situation is quite hypothetical--the odds of someone trying this development model for a 2D point-and-click graphical adventure are slim. For real fans of this genre (who also might want to make a buck) it might be more interesting to relax some of the assumptions about part-time or hobbyist programming staff and the infeasibility of internet distribution (and/or even a shareware model). Developer/publishers like Spiderweb Software (makers of the Exile series, among other Ultima-type RPGs) help with the back-end stuff for small-time or hobbyist shareware developers. Similarly, sites like Home of the Underdogs promote and help sell "scratchware" games. The real question to me is, can a scratchware/shareware/late night after work development team make enough money to break even (given the real and opportunity costs of creating the game)?

  • Thought Experiments and Current Experience. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Musenik ( 789539 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @04:00PM (#10579751) Homepage
    First, Ron Gilbert deserves a lot praise for his explanation of the lost way of 2D games. I worked three years for Sierra Online, porting 10 titles to the Macintosh. He's right on. More recently, I've been working on a 2D adventure game that should go gold, next week.

    Thank Mr. Gilbert for observing that there are many other routes than his traditional approach. But this is the computer game industry, and tradition applies mostly to last week. The route we've taken is to design a game specifically for the women segment of the downloadable audience. They are largely unfamiliar with adventure games. For that reason, we hope to stand out among the billion puzzle games.

    Building 'The Witch's Yarn' [garagegames.com] cost, out of pocket, $10,000, including legal fees for the distribution agreement. That does not cover the principal developer's salary, but it did pay for the art, animation, proofreading, testing, sound engineering, and music licenses. Guerrilla developers can make real products (mac, pc, linux simultaenous) on real tight budgets. (the trick was to build a text adventure game that looks like a 2D adventure game - think comix)

    Now, $10,000 is all one should spend to build a game for the downloadable market. The biggest game portals [msn.com] charge the most money to sell your game, even more than the retail channel! Fortunately, you don't have manufacturing costs. A good selling game, might earn a developer $100,000, but less than $50,000 is more likely.

    Of course, who knows what'll be true next week.

  • I think he should rethink the "PC Game only" part (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Thag ( 8436 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:35PM (#10580739) Homepage
    In particular, the Game Boy Advance is the #2 console, and would be both cost-effective to develop for and well-suited to a 2D adventure format.

    You could easily do Monkey Island on it.

    You're going to have to go through Nintendo, but you'll have to go through a distributor on the PC side too.

    Jon Acheson
    • I'm sure you could get Nintendo on-board for an innovative, broadly approachable 2D adventure game for the Nintendo DS. I'm sure at this point they're desperate for games that could be ready by launch next year, and might be willing to take the larger risk to have an expanded launch lineup, especially with a proven team.

    • Re:I think he should rethink the "PC Game only" pa (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Since I've had to deal with some of these issues, being a game developer myself..

      Remember, one of his major reasons for not going on the console was that to do a console title, the console maker gets a big cut of the profit pie, on top of the cut already being taken by your publisher, which is taken no matter if you're distributing on the PC or on a console.

      Also, it is harder to develop/debug for consoles than on the PC, and you'll have to invest in development hardware (XBox dev kits, Playstation 2 Test
    • A problem with that is cartridge expenses are murder on small developers. Another problem is that non-franchise/non-sequel games simply don't sell to GBA owners in any real numbers.
    • Let me be one of the few people to support you on this. I don't think Monkey Island itself would be a great choice, but certainly a Game Boy point-'n'-click game could be really successful. You'd probably have to come up with an efficient way of using the D-pad to do the 'pointing' part, but I think that's a pretty minor problem to be honest. However, the hardware is now there for a great adventure game. A good opportunity, I'd have said.
  • This must be a pretty encouraging article if you are a small company or single person about to embark on developing your first 2D adventure game, but honestly, how many people is that? The article is interesting for its insight on budgets (other people have already mentioned the tiny testing budget) and other nastiness in the games industry, for sure. But most Slashdotters interested making their own adventure game would be well advised to check out something like Adventure Game Studio [adventureg...udio.co.uk], which has a friendly
  • You could reduce costs by a huge amount if you used something like Multimedia Fusion: http://www.clickteam.com/English/multimedia_fusion .htm You don't have to do nearly as much testing because programs made in Multimedia Fusion always work on a wide variety of computers. Heck, you could probably even use Adventure Game Studio to make a commercial 2D adventure game (although you would be more limited then you would be using Multimedia Fusion)! Try thinking outside the box a little! =)

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