The unreality of Casual Games Fortunes
There’s a great article up from the escapist on Casual Fortunes, which talks about the “fortunes” people are making developing casual games.
Overall it is an excellent article and definitely worth the read, although there’s a few points that I have to take issue with.
Perhaps the biggest thing is that Mr. Varney seems to imply that most casual game developers are extremely successful on an individual basis. While many are doing well, I don’t believe there is a large number of millionaires based on their casual game fortunes. At one point he even mentions Thomas Warfield of goodsol fame and says that he “is certainly well into his second million bucks” which may or may not be true, but considering that he’s been publishing on the internet since 1995 that’s just over $100K / year. Not pocket change, but not the enormous riches Varney makes it out to be.
The other issue I have with the article is that he implies most casual games are still built by just 2 or 3 people on a shoestring budget. Like it or not many of today’s successful casual games are becoming a relatively big budget business, with development costs around $150K+ complete with publishers, distributors, retailers and more. While he was right about the market as little as two years ago, today’s casual game marketplace is quickly becoming a much more “serious” business.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2005 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Casual Games, Game Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 31st
2005 at 7:12 am
Wow - $150k is the average! How many indie games developers have you talked to about this? I know many of them and I don’t know anyone who would spend that sort of money getting a game out. If you’re talking about three rings or Jagex then I guess it’s understandable, but mmo’s are a very different beast. Lone developers like Retro4, and Raptisoft are still 2/ 3 man teams with shoestring budgets who make massively successful games.
Now I think about it there is Diner Dash but that’s an exception (there’s always one) - I’m sure there are others but in general the ’shoestring’ game developement is very much alive and kicking.
August 31st
2005 at 9:09 am
I guess it depends on whether you’re talking about average in terms of the total number of games, or average in terms of the top games.
If you look at the top downloadable games at Zone, Shockwave, AOL, etc. You’ll see that the majority of those games are of exceptionally high quality and high production value. I don’t look at Diner Dash as the exception, I look at it as the norm for top-tier successful games.
I’m certainly not trying to knock small 2-3 person teams. I’m actually a big fan of Raptisoft and think they’ve made some great titles, but I think that size of team is becoming less and less typical, especially for very successful games.
August 31st
2005 at 12:41 pm
I’ve just been through the Shockwave site and their top download games are bigger ones which would have larger budgets, but I still can’t see them being $150k worth of budget.
I guess I’m coming from the bedroom coder side of things. The places that I frequent (mainly indiegamer forum) have larger developers like Reflexive but also have many, many smaller developers.
I think a lot of it comes down to how you define success actually. A small team like Raptisoft don’t need to sell as much as a company like Reflexive so can be ’successful’ with lower sales.
August 31st
2005 at 4:46 pm
I think Varney has been misled. Show me a rich indie game producer and I’ll introduce you to 1,000 broke ones who made better games. I think it’s about marketing. For marketing, you need money. As the market grows, so does the cost. If the market is recognised by the media it usually means it’s already flooded and that the ‘little guys’ are already on the way out. I only wish the article was true .. maybe then I could afford that monster truck I’ve always wanted ..
September 4th
2005 at 11:56 am
Having a great low buget game download means nothing if you don’t have the right marketing tools to get it out to the hands of the public.
September 5th
2005 at 2:06 pm
Darius I think you’re absolutely right on that, and aside from pure quality of gameplay the marketing behind a game is probably the biggest differentiator between titles.
Unfortunately a lot of the less successful developers don’t realize this and focus purely on making the best game they can. That’s a great goal, but in order to be truly succesful you need to have a strong distribution network and marketing to help support the title.
September 5th
2005 at 10:26 pm
I wrote that Escapist article. I can see where you’d get the impression from it that there are lots and lots of rich shareware developers; I stated things broadly to shake up the preconceived notions of the Escapist audience.
There are still plenty of small-team casual games — maybe they’re not the ones getting the big numbers on the major portals, but there’s a large shareware universe beyond the portals. Check the Indie Game Developer forums for a view into the community.
My article does mention the importance of marketing. But it more strongly emphasizes the superior working environment of indie games, quite apart from the money to be made. It’s a healthier, more sensible way to approach game design. And if you “only” pull down $100K a year — well, I hope there are designers stuck in some sweatshop studio who might be willing to make that tradeoff!
September 5th
2005 at 10:45 pm
Judging by the feedback I’ve seen I’d say you did a good job shaking things up Allen.
While I may not have explicitly mentioned it above, I agree with a lot of what you wrote, especially where it concerns the working environment and overall developer quality of life. Most casual game developers I know get to actually live their lives, and aren’t constantly facing multi-month (or even multi-week!) crunch times.
As for the shareware universe vs. the casual game/portal players, it’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now. Check out the next blog post for that discussion