Re: Are Sports Video Games On Their Way Out?
Foreward: sorry for typing a book.
In my opinion, it's not so much sports-gaming that has a problem as much as all of AAA gaming has a problem. Budgets are massive, and the development workflows are obtuse, slow, and inflexible.
For a few examples, the budget for Bioshock Infinite was over $100 Million (rumored as high as $200M, but Irrational Games head Ken Levine refutes this without offering a specific number), and Tomb Raider 2013 sold over 4 million copies and was not considered a commercial success. Every publisher wants to fund the next Grand Theft Auto / Call of Duty / cultural phenomenon, and no one is making quality mid-level games.
The landscape of video game development is increasingly becoming more polar between AAA studios and indie studios, with no middle ground. This trend isn't going to slow down or reverse until either production costs for making boxed console games come way down or until shops decide that mid-level titles are worth the effort. Tools will help this to some extent - I'm very excited about how strong of a foothold Unity is getting in the console game development space, having worked with it for three years now - but there is going to have to be an attitude shift in the game-making business in order to maintain and grow the middle tiers of the industry.
As this applies to sports games, I have no doubt that the budgets for the biggest games - Madden, FIFA, and NBA 2K - are gigantic (though EA Sports is making efforts to reduce costs with their shared Ignite tech, it looks like). Add in to all the above list of concerns league licensing costs, which (likely) are becoming more extravagant with each passing negotiation and undoubtedly has a hand in killing off a number of the franchises we have lost over the years. Of the games that remain, they've got to make money somehow, thus the inclusion of Ultimate Team modes (which have been widely successful and I have no problem with in isolation) and more disturbingly the platform-wide pervasive virtual currency implementation included in NBA 2K14 on Gen8 consoles (which I do have a huge problem with).
I think that sports games could strongly consider the games-as-a-service method of content delivery. Players would subscribe to the game for a nominal monthly fee (say, $5 a month / $60 a year), download the client, and then have access to the game. The game would update regularly with roster updates, uniform updates, stadium updates, and so on being fed constantly from the servers. Gameplay updates could roll out monthly / bimonthly, tweaking old mechanics and introducing new ones. Draft classes could be downloaded immediately after the real-life draft occurs and the players enroll in their respective unions, then used in career modes (which could be carried over from year-to-year because the client doesn't ever make sweeping changes to the file format).
Though a tad bit apples-and-oranges, I look at the widely-popular League of Legends as an example - it's firmly positioned as THE game of the E-Sports scene, and it follows nearly the exact model I describe above (with respect to content distribution), and boasts 32 million active players as of October 2012. It also has a very strong competitive gaming infrastructure.
I'm obviously no businessman nor an economist, but IMO if this repositioning of sports games as more of a games-as-a-service E-Sports game (keeping the single-player component available, of course) were executed correctly, I think that this model could be much more palatable to consumers of sports games, cut distribution costs for publishers, cut development costs for studios, and ultimately make everyone more money and more happy.
Foreward: sorry for typing a book.
In my opinion, it's not so much sports-gaming that has a problem as much as all of AAA gaming has a problem. Budgets are massive, and the development workflows are obtuse, slow, and inflexible.
For a few examples, the budget for Bioshock Infinite was over $100 Million (rumored as high as $200M, but Irrational Games head Ken Levine refutes this without offering a specific number), and Tomb Raider 2013 sold over 4 million copies and was not considered a commercial success. Every publisher wants to fund the next Grand Theft Auto / Call of Duty / cultural phenomenon, and no one is making quality mid-level games.
The landscape of video game development is increasingly becoming more polar between AAA studios and indie studios, with no middle ground. This trend isn't going to slow down or reverse until either production costs for making boxed console games come way down or until shops decide that mid-level titles are worth the effort. Tools will help this to some extent - I'm very excited about how strong of a foothold Unity is getting in the console game development space, having worked with it for three years now - but there is going to have to be an attitude shift in the game-making business in order to maintain and grow the middle tiers of the industry.
As this applies to sports games, I have no doubt that the budgets for the biggest games - Madden, FIFA, and NBA 2K - are gigantic (though EA Sports is making efforts to reduce costs with their shared Ignite tech, it looks like). Add in to all the above list of concerns league licensing costs, which (likely) are becoming more extravagant with each passing negotiation and undoubtedly has a hand in killing off a number of the franchises we have lost over the years. Of the games that remain, they've got to make money somehow, thus the inclusion of Ultimate Team modes (which have been widely successful and I have no problem with in isolation) and more disturbingly the platform-wide pervasive virtual currency implementation included in NBA 2K14 on Gen8 consoles (which I do have a huge problem with).
I think that sports games could strongly consider the games-as-a-service method of content delivery. Players would subscribe to the game for a nominal monthly fee (say, $5 a month / $60 a year), download the client, and then have access to the game. The game would update regularly with roster updates, uniform updates, stadium updates, and so on being fed constantly from the servers. Gameplay updates could roll out monthly / bimonthly, tweaking old mechanics and introducing new ones. Draft classes could be downloaded immediately after the real-life draft occurs and the players enroll in their respective unions, then used in career modes (which could be carried over from year-to-year because the client doesn't ever make sweeping changes to the file format).
Though a tad bit apples-and-oranges, I look at the widely-popular League of Legends as an example - it's firmly positioned as THE game of the E-Sports scene, and it follows nearly the exact model I describe above (with respect to content distribution), and boasts 32 million active players as of October 2012. It also has a very strong competitive gaming infrastructure.
I'm obviously no businessman nor an economist, but IMO if this repositioning of sports games as more of a games-as-a-service E-Sports game (keeping the single-player component available, of course) were executed correctly, I think that this model could be much more palatable to consumers of sports games, cut distribution costs for publishers, cut development costs for studios, and ultimately make everyone more money and more happy.
Comment