DnVill wrote...
Noatz wrote...
I've no idea who this guy is, or what "Wedbrush Securities" are or why anyone cares what he/they have to say.
I do know that hes flat out wrong in at least some of what hes saying however.
Saying the industry cannot support longer development times and still remain profitable? From what I see Blizzard have always and are still doing rather well with extremely lengthy development periods.
If as a supposed "games commentator" he makes ignorant statements such as that, I have a hard time taking any of what he says seriously.
Not to mention that Blizzard is concentrating only on PC.
He is right, actually. Long dev times= more money spent, more resources and manpower allocated to singular projects, and overall, less impact on the market.
Basically, if you have five development studios working on five games for five years, versus those five studios working on ten games for five years, you tend to lose more money than gain money. Most of those games would not be triple A titles, they would be new I.P's to establish new franchises, older I.Ps for sequel power and brand familiarity, and even speculative games.
EA, for example, has Madden, Battlefield 3 and Mass Effect 3 as their major bits out right now, but they also have collaborated on speculative titles like Kingdoms of Amalur, and had studios develop titles like Mirrors Edge and new I.Ps like Dead Space, to generate a more diverse portfolio.
Dev times were cut down for most of this, and for the lesser experienced teams it shows heavy sometimes. That said, the average development cycle for a game is 24 months, most good games take 2-3 years to complete, some with longer cycles 3-4, although that is when you see feature creep...but thats another story. But you also got to keep in mind that most games never make money. An average game is usually a cost of 20-30 million, unless if the numbers have gone up recently. Most games make a fraction of that back, with few exceptions. And those numbers are based on average dev-times and team size. A bigger scaled project would be double that, 60-70 million, if it took longer to make. It would also cost an arm and a leg more for advertising costs as well to keep interest up during the games development.
Arguably, Blizzard is in worse shape than EA. EA may have lower stocks than from five years ago, but EA has also been fairly consistant for the past five years in terms of averaging out losses and gains. Blizzard, on the other hand:
A) has had their revenue stream begin to wane in the past three years.Cataclysm underperformed based on previous numbers for WoW, and they lost a lot of the player base because of FTP modeled MMO's.
Has not made a new I.P since Starcraft in 1998, so 14 years. Since then it's been Warcraft, Diablo, and WoW (which is based off an I.P) and more Starcraft.
C) Has not really made a new game from 2004-2010, when Starcraft II came out. And it was considered lackluster as well.
D) Is co-owned by Activision, even though it is a laizee faire policy between the two, they are basically following Activision rules for short-term gains over long term investments. Simply put, Activisions buisness model is short-term profit making, then when the bubble bursts, to no longer exploit it. Guitar Hero was the big casualty of that, CoD is close to following suit soon, Tony Hawk died that way as well, and in it's wake Activision is promoting the hell out of Skylanders and Prototype.
Because of this, I am honestly half-expecting Blizzard to take heavy losses in the coming years, mainly because they are banking on Mists of Pandaria to keep WoW going a bit longer, and Diablo III to sell well when pre-release buzz has been really lukewarm. Hell, when one of your product managers says not to get overly excited about the game they are making, thats a red flag to me.
Anyway, my point is, longer dev times making better games is basically a myth. Some studios get away with it, Nintendo and Rockstar come to mind, but for the most part, that is a skill that is difficult to master correctly...and it takes really good business sense to balance out a fiscal year involving 20 or so releases per year to keep the company afloat as much as possible.
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