Money may not make the world go ‘round but it sure does grease the gears.
I think it goes without saying that most forms of media today are a slave to the almighty dollar. I’m not just talking about at the register, but more importantly, how much cash flow it takes to even get a AAA title off the ground in 2015. Whether it’s movies, music or of course games, you practically have to move Heaven and Earth just to get the ball rolling.
It’s a trend that is very different than the days of the Atari 2600, where a team of two could knock-out a best-selling hit over the course of a few weeks while simply locked in a room together. Granted there was a lot of pot, alcohol and hot-tub tomfoolery going on, but hey, it was the ‘70s, man!
Today it’s almost impossible to produce a game that will line the shelves of GameStop or Best Buy unless you have the backing of a multi-million dollar studio. Strauss Zelnick (who is Take-Two’s CEO) stated as much during a recent interview with Bloomberg. Calling it an “expensive business,” Zelnick suggests the “risk profile reflects that,” but that he feels the potential rewards are worth the risk.
Zelnick continues: “That said, those very expenses: production, marketing, overhead, and in the case of sports titles, licensing, they do create a risk profile. And from our point of view it embeds the winners even further. It actually creates a barrier to entry in our business… a developer cannot get in, not without having a couple hundred high quality engineers and artists, loads of capital and lots of money to market the title.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of these old fogeys who’s preaching a “back in my day” mentality we should all quickly return to. I happen to love modern technology and the leaps we’ve taken over the last 10-20 years are, I feel, astounding. Take the current breakthroughs on the VR front, for example. For the first time, we may actually be looking at a Star Trek holodeck situation sometime in the near future. That’s a long stride from the old red/blue paper 3D glasses of old, which only resulted in a very real headache jumping off the screen and right into your brain.
I’m a realist above all else. I get all of this is due to capital. Innovation can be expensive and without a continuous cash infusion, things become stagnant and forward momentum becomes near impossible. My concern is for the “little guy” that has been and always will be lost in the shuffle. Just think about how many amazing narratives and gameplay opportunities we’ve had fall into limbo, simply because they were made by a company that didn’t possess the same muscle to compete with a Call of Duty or GTA .
It’s very much like presidential campaigns. Have you ever noticed the same ten people run on both sides of the aisle every four years? In a country of almost 320 million people, I find that to be a strange coincidence. It’s all due to the incredibly high buy-in of a metaphoric poker game only a small handful are invited to (which is why corporations own the country through special interest groups and politicians). Our industry is seemingly beginning to mirror this trend.
I’d hate to see video games continue down that same path to the point of no return. Hopefully the indie scene continues to evolve, and can perhaps even get top billing next to mainstream titles one day in the future.
Wishful thinking, I know, but that’s often where the real innovation lies.