"Why Paradox boss wants 'more Goat Simulator, less Call of Duty'"

[kane_magus]

I can understand their point, and I mostly agree with it. If the video game industry were indeed to finally check itself and take a step back from all the outrageous, needless, multimillion dollar, so-called AAA games and such, that would be nothing but a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

"One signal there is when Square Enix shipped [Tomb Raider], the latest edition of that, it's like 'it's a new record for Square Enix! Shipping 5.3 million units day one!' And it's still 1.2 million units under their target. Then I feel like 'okay your target is 30 percent more than you've ever done before ever ever ever, and that's your target' There's something that's a bit strange here."

As for the two specific examples from the headline, though... well, I could personally do without both the Calls of Duty (Call of Duties? Call of Dutys?) and the Goat Simulators. There's got to be a happy medium somewhere between the over-produced, gigantic projects and the over-simplified, tiny, started-as-a-joke-but-then-became-a-"real"-game schlock.

Comments

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

I pretty much agree. The big companies seem to have this fixation that if they spend X dollars on developing a game, then they'll definitely definitely definitely earn back anywhere from 2X to 10X in profits within a few months. And so they seem to spend millions and millions on the project somehow and come away with... nothing special.

The fact that Square/Enix actually set their target sales excessively higher than anything they've managed before kinda shows this mentality.

This is obviously retarded.

So long as you budget properly, and know your audience, a developer can turn a decent profit on just about any type of game. There are developers that make money doing things as simple as visual novels for instance. Cheap to do, and so long as you have one good writer and one good artist you're pretty much set. (Real programmers aren't even needed for that given there are some game maker type programs that make those types of games - just add the story, visuals, and audio.

It's how the freaking indie industry thrives.