More Thinking Aloud

Jason Della Rocca just mentioned modern portfolio theory.

(I should figure out what this trackback stuff is all about some day.)

Activision and EA mostly strategize by a different theory, which I've mentioned before:  tight / aggressive.

For the most part, they only back sure things.  And on those titles (hands?) they raise the stakes through the roof, spending insane amounts on development and marketing.

Which is why you and I are never going to get to play Dead Rush, the GTA-meets-zombies title that Treyarch was developing for a while before it got cancelled.  Or any of the other many titles you've heard of recently that sound interesting but aren't going to ship for one   reason or the other.  Which is sad.

But I have to admit, tight / aggressive seems like sound business.

Because breakout, out-of-nowhere hits like GTA and The Sims are incredibly rare.  Out of the dozens of cool new ideas that are developed each year, the bulk of them aren't profitable and only zero, one, or two of them might be the kind of stellar breakthrough that covers the losses of the rest of your company's failures.

Here's a question.  Maybe a team or studio is currently developing a wacky idea, that will be The Sims of 2008, if its funded and marketed to completion.  And maybe a publisher is thinking about pulling the plug on it.  You hear those rumors that The Sims was almost cancelled however many times.  Would that idea be lost forever?  Or...if the idea really is that great, won't it be able to survive in some form to eventually become the breakout hit it's destined to be?

I think the suckiest thing about risk-adverse publishers isn't that we won't get those breakout hits every n years.  The suckiest thing is that the not-quite-breakout ideas are lost.  The Dead Rushes of the world.  Because Dead Rush was a game I wanted to play.  I probably would have enjoyed it more than GTA.  But it wasn't going to be a GTA, not in terms of sales.

Comments

[Jeffool]

Gah, that really sucks. "GTA gameplay in the world of Dawn of the Dead" was the idea behind a game some friends and I did in school as our "thesis" game. Of course with only two months to do it, well, burnout is a cruel mistress.

But here's one for you. If The Sims was nearly-axed multiple times, imagine what games we've lost already in Gaming. Though as we reach a point of diminishing returns with graphics we'll see many of the ideas (though obviously not exact games,) brought back in some way. At least I hope so. "Zombie movies" rock, and a zombie game would thus rock more so.

[Greg]

I'm not sure "zombies meet clone of wildly successful game" is the best poster child for creativity in game development. Driving in GTA is tremendous fun, but at some point you'll probably have to get out and explain things through your shotgun, and the gun combat system was never that great. I really hated the (thankfully few) missions that felt better suited to a first-person shooter than to GTA's engine.

What I love about GTA is the "go anywhere, do anything, kill anyone" freedom, which finally fulfills some of the promises about open worlds we'd been hearing since the introduction of CD-ROMs. I don't see how a GTA clone is worth much without it, and I don't see how it's compatible with the claustrophobia of a good zombie movie.

[Fran]

i think the answer is clear. the hardcore should buy 2, maybe 3 copies of every game.

[nat loh]

Taking the analogy further, I think publishers need to pay to see the flop a bit more. That 2, 7 off suited might just pull a full house off the flop. 2, 4 off suited might be more in their ballpark.

One thing I'm also for is publisher funded RnD. take a small 4-6 man team that just develops cool stuff for the studio to use. new features, new engine stuff. Basically any franchised game that has to release every year doesn't have enough time to really develop any new features. A separate RnD team could work on these things that most likely aren't going to be in this year's version but next year it'll come as a major innovation to your franchise. instead we see slow baby steps taken and many features neglected. I don't think I've a poker analogy to pair this one.

[Fran]

the RnD analogy is kind of like staying in as the small blind when it's relatively cheap to see a potentially great flop.

[miles mackenzie]

why did dead rush get cancelled please email me and tell me because i was relly looking foward to it