Fast Jimmy wrote...
This is also part of the problem. Despite how many times developers seem to be bought out by EA, have their IPs get thrashed by fans just a few years later and then get dumped by EA, you'd think developers would say "Hey, this might not be the best course of action for us."
This indicates that you don't understand the fundamental problem. Development studios generally don't sell out to a publisher if they are doing just fine on their own. It's generally a mutually beneficial decision. Publishers provide capital. Publishers have foreign and domestic distribution channels. Publishers have marketing teams. Publishers have QA teams. Publishers have localization teams. Publishers have contracts with console developers for access to hardware and development tools. Publishers have certification teams. Publishers have legal teams. These are all things that a development studio must foot the bill for on their own if they wish to remain autonomous, and these are non-trivial costs. The smaller the studio, the more relatively expensive these costs become. The bigger you are, the more efficient these become because you can have one localization team cycle between multiple projects, one QA team cycle between multiple projects, one accounting department, etc.
To be honest, a lot of the studios that get picked up by publishers aren't in good shape. Bioware is a prime example of this - they were hemmorhaging money, despite making critically acclaimed and well-beloved games, and their operations weren't sustainable. EA merged with them and Pandemic, provided capital, lowered the overhead costs, and enabled them to continue operating, and today Bioware is a pretty reasonable financial success in the entertainment software world. Pandemic was unable to become solvent, and was shut down. Publishers don't
like having to lay people off and close studios. It's almost always a huge loss for them, and that means lost money. That's never a good thing; at the high level publishers and developers want the same thing - for studios to be productive, on time, and to make quality titles that sell well. When things go off budget, off schedule, off projections, then things have trouble. One of the biggest problems in the industry is the hyperbole in general - studios will often overpromise in order to obtain funding, which leads to overblown expectations, which leads to horrendous crunch to deliver what was promised, which leads to a shoddier product at the end.
It's easy to stand on the outside and say "Well, maybe the studios should just bite the bullet and live with it", but when you're a studio head and there are 100+ people who are depending on you to pay their mortgages and feed their families, I don't think "We should turn down EA/Ubisoft/Activision/etc. and instead just declare bankruptcy and lay everybody off in a month or two instead" is really a viable option. These are the actual sort of problems studio heads face. All that money has to come from somewhere, and if it isn't from a publisher, there's nowhere else aside from building your own distribution chain and self-publishing.
Studios that do
well get to name their price and remain as autonomous as they want. Bungie, Blizzard, etc. are part of larger publishers, but they are more-or-less free to do exactly what it is they want, because they bring it financially.
But developers keep doing it. Maybe EA's policies cause the backslide, or maybe it is the influx of new resources that cause the developers to begin chasing CoD sales pipe dream ideas... I really can't say for sure. But the history really does tell a tale.
It doesn't tell the sort of tale you seem to want it to.
Lots of studios fold over time. Some of them were because of publisher interference. Some of them were killed by their own mismanagement. You're insinuating something that you don't have any evidence for aside from "Well, I think this is how it is." I've worked for a lot of studios, both indie and publisher-owned. I've seen it happen from the inside, and it isn't how you're implying it is. The most important thing that can happen is the estimated sales forecasts. Publishers pour tons of time, energy, and money into these forecasts because it is literally the most important thing about development there is. Despite what conspiracy theorists say, publishers really don't all expect CoD sales for all games ever. That's not only ridiculous, but it just doesn't make sense for niche genres like fighting games, sports games, tactical RPGs, puzzle games, etc. to aim for that many sales. There is no way you're going to convince anyone that Tiger Woods Golf is seriously expecting to sell 25 million copies, but their team size is much more reasonable - they generally only employ ~30-40 developers or so, and they generally sell and earn enough to warrant a new game each year. They generate less revenue than FIFA's DLC by itself, but it's still enough to keep profitable, so they continue to develop it.
And the fans are the ones who ultimately suffer. Either with poorer IPs, cancelled studios, new policies like DRM or new revenue streams like D1DLC... it all seems to fall back on the gamers of the world rather than the publishers.
I'd say it's the developers who suffer more than the fans. You don't get an entertainment product you used to like. They lose their jobs and livelihoods.
I'm tempted to say "and that's why I Kickstart a lot more now" but I don't think that is honestly going to be the long-term solution. Every game can't be crowd-sourced and funded on a showstring. AAA developers and big-name publishers need to have a better way of doing business. Because before long, everything is going to be entirely digitally streamed and then it won't matter if you have distribution chains with thousands of retailers... anyone can put a pay site and a download link on a website. So what will the publishers of the world be offering at that point?
They'll be offering the same thing that they have been offering. Funding, localization, QA, marketing, distribution channels, certification, contracts, legal, etc. at a significantly reduced cost to the studio.
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And while that is indeed the only source we have, and will have for some time, there is considerable evidence to doubt its accuracy. Considerable evidence to doubt its accuracy and trivial evidence to prove it. Call it pessimistic or cynical if you will.
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