A (Very) Brief History

Transcription

1 GAMES INDUSTRY

2 A (Very) Brief History 1961 SpaceWar: Steve Russell on a PDP-1 at MIT 1971 Computer Space: First coin-op game 1972 Pong: Arcade and home - the first hit : Golden age of the arcade Arcade revenues hit $5 billion The most ever Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Missile Command, Joust, Tempest, Defender 1984: Console crash Coleco, MB, Mattel, Atari, many third parties

3 History Cont d 1985 Tetris 1986 Console revival Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System bit era SNES, Sega Genesis, Nintendo GameBoy CD-ROMs, Doom, Dune 2, Myst bit era Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, N64 Rise and fall of 3Dfx, fall and rise of NVidia Ultima Online, Everquest, Counterstrike

4 Recent History Second-gen 3D consoles: PS2, Xbox, GameCube MS joins the race, Sega drops out On-line comes to consoles Ubiquitous PC 3D hardware acceleration ATI, NVidia MMPORGs (Lineage, EQ, WoW, CoH), The Sims, GTA, Halo Wireless mobile gaming WiFi/Bluetooth/cell: DS, PSP, phone, PDA, iphone Next-Gen : PS3, Xbox 360, Wii Some online distribution (Xbox Live Arcade, Wii Ware)

5 Current Platforms Console Biggest market: Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo PC Windows, Mac, online, nvidia, ATI Mobile Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, phone, PDA Arcade Coin-op, custom hardware Other Casino, sports bars, military simulation

6 The Business of Making Games Complex interaction among components: publishing development distribution hardware manufacturers One company may own or partly own others you can be working for a company that owns a competitor Competitors in one genre may be partners in another

7 Publishers Responsible for: Funding game development Acquiring, owning, maintaining IP licenses Marketing, PR, end-user tech support Sales and manufacturing of the game The majority of commercial games are: commissioned, funded, published or distributed by the major publishers Most of the revenue goes to publisher Remainder to console royalties, distributors Maybe even a little to the developer

8 Developers The companies or people who create the games: Programmers, artists, designers, sound engineers, musicians, producers, writers and others Ownership independent, part or wholly owned by a publisher, distributor or hardware manufacturer Funding most often by a publisher to develop a specific game some can and do fund projects internally

9 Distributors & Retailers The least understood (by developers, players) yet critical to the success of commercial games These companies get the games onto the shelves Publishers compete with each other for limited shelf space This is what goes on behind closed doors at trade shows like E3 The internet threatens this model Amazon, Steam Opportunity to bypass the publisher and the distributer Publishers still have the money, and the IP, though

10 Hardware Manufacturers PC/Mac open access: anything goes thousands of possible configurations with unknown stability and interactions between components Console Roughly 10X the size of the PC market closed access: all titles must be approved in advance Sony, MS, Nintendo get a cut of every unit sold (bigger than independent developers) fixed hardware architecture (limited resources) Rigorous QA process by Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft

11 Licensed Games Based upon an intellectual property (IP) Publisher or developer owns or has licensed rights to a movie, book, character, show, team, etc. Often large up-front fee to acquire rights to use IP Not good when based upon a future movie that flops Recognition factor to increase sales Marketing piggyback Often game release is tied to other releases of the same IP (movie typically) Video games are often an afterthought Rushed development, compromised product

12 Costs, Time, Team Size Today's multi-platform 3D console title: $5 - $30+ million (US) Development budget only! months people Expensive trends: Higher production values Multi-genera, open-world gameplay Licensing tie-ins Fully localized content Celebrity voice acting Technical and creative arms race

13 Realities Games engineering is fairly primitive Even compared to the overall abysmal practices throughout software development Don't know how to engineer fun yet Even mundane stuff isn't planned very well Bad planning, insufficient up-front design is prevalent History of one-man-team, wild-west cowboy practices Improving over time out of necessity Of course, our practices are great!

14 Games are Different Games are different from application or systems software At their heart, they are entertainment, not software This profoundly changes the overall engineering process Only about 20-30% game team members are programmers Nevertheless, many classical software problems have to be solved to create a game We still have to create complex software

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