Before you think it, no, I’m not nostalgic for the olden days. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to see any of the ‘art’ that I’ve made in the past will tell you there’s no way I could make games from my bedroom without someone else providing the visuals.

But my point is, twenty years ago you could make a game with a team of one or two developers (be they programmers or artists). You’d be developing on the NES, Spectrum or Commodore, and your games probably retail for 15-20 pounds sterling. Skip forward to 1991, and you’re developing for the SNES or MegaDrive – your team is around 8-10 people, and your games probably retail for about 40 pounds. Then on to 97 – you have the Playstation and N64, by now your team is around 20 people, and your games are probably retailing for about 40 pounds still. 2002, you’re on the PlayStation 2 or XBox, your team is now 40 or so people, and your game is still retailing for 40 pounds. 2006, you’re starting on a PS3 or XBox360, average team size is now pushing 100 people.

To pluck a cost figure from the air a team of 40 or so people developing on PS2 resulted in a cost of between 1m and 2m pounds per title. Looking over develop‘s top 100 list this year, there are many, many games on the top studio’s books that aren’t making back half a million pounds. Okay, so thats just from the UK market, and the US market is much larger, but you see my point that margins are getting tighter and tighter.

The games industry is being led along a growth path where revenue is rising fairly linearly (10% a year is a generous figure), but costs are rising exponentially! The old system where publishers used the massive revenues from the titles that sold well to underwrite the cost of the games that flop is falling apart, solely down to the diminished profits they can make from successful titles. The increasing fragility of both developers and publishers is, in my opinion, just a worrying symptom of the underlying problem. As we let costs spiral out of control, we start to price ourselves out of business.

Even an established and successful studio can be crippled by more than one bad title or deal in a row, because the costs involved in getting even a poor title close to market are growing rapidly massive. Much as I’d like to blame the publishers for the problem (for attempting to keep their costs down by mistreating developers rather than encouraging efficiency), I think in the end the issue lies with the hardware manufacturers. We are moving onto the next generation of hardware, when we’re not limited by technology, but by the level of complexity the market is willing to pay for. Sure, if the consumers were happy to pay double for twice the complexity, or if twice as many units sold when the technology improved, then it would be sustainable, but its not.

Roughly the same consumers who bought the current generation of console will buy the next generation; when they buy games they expect them to be at the same 40-50 pound price point, because they don’t see enough value to justify paying any more for the games. So in the end, the games industry tries to make more complex, expensive games, for the same revenue as before, just so they don’t get left behind.

So what’s my proposed solution? Well, for console games, I don’t think I have one, apart from maybe to keep producing quality games for PS2 for as long as possible. For PC games I think its clear – make games at the same level of costs as now, and try to make use of better technology and middleware to improve the quality, rather than trying to increase complexity to match what the hardware is capable of.

Console timeline cribbed from here.

GI.biz covers in their weekly newsletter this week the announcement that most of the major film distributors are cancelling or massively scaling back their future UMD format releases, and talks about the death of an unloved and mostly unwanted format. I think most of us were saying that right from the start, when they announced the format the PSP would use, and then touted it as a portable movie player. Why would I pay money for another (lower quality) version of a film I already have on DVD, to watch it on my PSP on the few occasions where I have a couple of hours to kill? How it made business sense to Sony in the first place I have no idea.

I also had the pleasure to attend a BCS lecture given by one of my old colleagues from VIS, who was talking on the nature and history of the games industry. He brought up some points relating to the exponential growth of the size of game team needed to produce a top flight title, and it struck me just how bad things actually are these days in the games industry. Anyway, in the post lecture drinking session, I found myself expounding various different problems in the industry today, some of which have solutions which we [the industry] just aren’t doing, some of which I can’t see a fix for.

Anyway, I think I’m going to write up some thoughts on my stance on the whole she-bang, and make a new category here called ‘Industry Rants’. Don’t get me wrong, I love the games industry and am dedicated to it, but some things about the way we work today are just stupid.

Man, just installed the new CPU fan on the server machine, and the difference in volume level is astounding. Its almost quiet enough that I’d be happy leaving it on 24/7. 🙂

Hmm, just fired up the server machine, only to have it emit a loud electrical sounding pop midway through the boot process. Its a blind machine with no monitor or keyboard, so no telling what it was doing when it happened, and it’s booted fine after checking for any obvious fuse or chronic failures inside. Still, time to double check the logs to make sure the off-site backup process is working as expected. Oh, and to find a torch and some fuse-wire in case the next pop takes out the fusebox as well!

I think its time I considered retiring that machine. It was only a couple of years old when I got it, but something’s been not quite right with it since the start – erratic failures, constantly having to boot it twice due to random disk failure checks on startup. Plus the fan-noise is awful. There’s a replacement CPU fan in the post at the moment, but I don’t know if it will be enough, or whether the PSU fan is just as noisy.

Anyway, totally unrelated, but interesting too: SketchUp. Great, user friendly little building tool, easy to use, and just what you need to quickly knock up 3D concepts for game maps, buildings, etc. User licence is 300 and some dollars, sans VAT, but as an intermediate tool between nothing and Max or Maya, it seems worth the price. Which reminds me, really need to look into getting VAT registered…

To be found here at Lost Garden. Worth reading, if only for the comedic diagrams near the start.

Okay, I’ll fess up – Alfred the Oranda is now fertilising the plants in the rockery, and was replaced by Bertie the, well, Common. Yes, I know, Bertie the Common doesn’t sound as fancy, but he seems to be a bit hardier than his predecessor, so we’re not going to hold that against him.

In more relevant news, I’ve been talking with people at a rather large games company down south about working with them on projects coming up after my contract at Barco ends – nothing confirmed as yet, but very interesting prospects nonetheless. It would be nice to get my hands dirty with some next-gen kit anyway, as I’ve yet to play with any of the new toys which my contemporaries have been working on, and I have a variety of interesting avenues I’d like to investigate with regards to multi-core programming.

The game proposal I mentioned previously has been worked over a couple of times to the point at which I can see a real game in there, interesting and definitely one I’d like to make. I think its got real potential to go places, if I can find enough time to develop a prototype to test out the core mechanics.

And in other news, looks like Atari are looking a little shaky. I recall this happening to BAM just before they bought VIS, although I think Atari are in a stronger position (mostly due to their size). Can’t help that Infogrames are struggling either. This is the same company that was supposedly going to grant VIS a contract for SOE2 which would bail us out of a hole, shortly before that disintegrated because they were ‘restructuring’. And speaking of the kiss-of-death which is BAM, what happened to them? Their web site’s disappeared, but they’re still being tentatively traded (okay only a fifth of a cent per share, but still). All very strange.

I guess my point is – what’s with all the publishers? Developers are always complaining about how the publishers take all the money; and yet it seems there’s always one going under or about to go. Do you think that their cut-throat treatment of developers is finally coming back to bite? Run roughshod over the developers until they go under, then find yourself short of quality products by Q4 a couple of years later? Well, its probably a lot of things, but I can’t help but thinking that the publishers who are on the brink are there because they keep churning out bad games which don’t sell; maybe a little more nurturing of developers would get them better, more reliably good products to sell.

At my old company, I always felt there wasn’t enough life around the office. Okay, so it’s a games development company, so technically a ‘hostile living environment’ for most plants (animals, and lets face it, developers), but I liked to buy plants to make my desk feel a little more healthy. My old co-workers will attest to the hardiness of the various plants which did survive, and there were always replacements for the ones that ended up little more than twigs in a pot.

But here at the Company, I’ve decided that things will be different. As many plants as we can keep alive, and now for added organic feel, we have a mascot! Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce: Alfred the Oranda.

Why Alfred? Well, we realise the life expectancy of our mascots might not be so long, so some kind of alphabetical naming system á la tropical storms seemed appropriate. He doesn’t seem to move around much, so a bit like me, but I’m sure he’ll settle in fine.

Currently on the work agenda: looking at automated testing frameworks, as well as evaluating a game idea proposed to us recently.

Sorry to hear about the demise of Visual Science this week, although from the news the past month or so it wasn’t entirely unexpected. The Scottish games industry is starting to look a little cramped, shall we say. Here’s hoping another company will rise to fill VS’s spot north of the border (mostly because I don’t want to have to tempt all those people back north again when our time comes ;-)).

Anyway – I hope all the staff now redundant come out of this okay. Nick Oakley tells me that Kuju in Godalming are looking for people right now if that’s any help.

Okay, lets not be relying on the auto-upgrader from Dreamhost, as it’ll nuke the site templates. Urgh, I’ll restore from backups in a bit…

EDIT: Wow – that really did go quite badly wrong. Looks like it tried to do some horrible recursive copy sort of thing where it tried to backup the website into a subdirectory inside the website, which of course meant it fell over when it got to trying to back up the directory which it was filling up. All a bit messy. Mind you, its a beta feature, so I’ll give them some feedback as to where it went wrong, and hope they can fix it. In the meantime I think I’ll be doing my own patching/upgrading from now on, where I’ve only got myself to blame when I shaft the whole site! 🙂

Urgh – curse Pipex and their slow moving tar-pit of a customer service desk. Right! Sorry for the hiatus, but we have been sans Net connection for almost three weeks, following our move to a new place! My hands are still shaking from the withdrawal symptoms. But on the plus side, the new office desk and setup is way more ergonomic and pleasant than the last one, so I’m hoping the general raising of the pleasantness level in here will result in an increase in my work output too.

In other news – I’ve had all of my time sucked away by a full time contract with Barco down in Leith. Not the high-end display division, much to some people’s disappointment (like they’d give favourable deals to contractors anyway), but the medical imaging team (formerly known as Voxar). Much hard work, but pleasingly its back to hard core structural C++ programming, which has always been my favourite skill to exercise. Its also, heaven forbid, starting to convert me to the merits of exception based programming, test-driven-development, and XP!

More on my assessment of XP in the workplace later probably, still not sure if I’d adopt it wholesale, but its definitely got some good points.