In a previous post about Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Steve asked if it was a bad sign that companies are dumping huge amounts of money into blockbuster games and only getting mediocre products for their investments.

It’s not so much that companies are always getting mediocre products, it’s that the rising costs of development and the hit-driven nature of the industry mean there’s an awful lot riding on publishers’ flagship titles.

Big budget games are just plain expensive to make. It takes huge teams of professionals to take advantage of the horsepower that modern consoles offer. Detailed models with hi-res textures, for instance, take more artists to produce than simple NES sprite graphics. Grand Theft Auto IV took around 150 core team members who spent years on the project.

At the same time, as Ralph Koster points out, the difference in the amount of money made by the #1-selling game and the #2 game is phenomenal. By the time you’re at #21, you might as well not even bother showing up. That bid for the top spot means hype, hype, hype, which is why the two stories on the local news bumper last night were 1) devastating financial news that sent the stock market plunging and 2) George Lucas promoting the new Star Wars game.

“Only the top 20 percent is going to make money at any given moment. Most of what we make is destined for the garbage heap of history. Most content is disposable,” said Koser.

The hits are the domain of the big boys. You want to compete with World of Warcraft? Activision did. Then they figured they’d need a half-billion dollar investment just to even try, with still no guarantee of success. So instead, they bought World of Warcraft.

The other problem is, hits are getting rare across all media. As Koser points out, “a hit television show at the moment captures about 15 percent of the US audience, while in the 1950s that figure was closer to 75 percent.”

So, what’s the answer? Well, right now the answer is to be one of the big boys, able to innovate and grow your market while being able to suffer an expensive failure. A game being huge and hyped doesn’t mean it’s more likely to be mediocre than any other game, just that the stakes are higher.
 I’ve said before, I think EA is doing quite well at this, and I look forward to seeing riskier games like Mirror’s Edge in the future.

In the longer term, I see encouragement in digital distribution. If Yahtzee does a video that says “Hey guys, this game from two years ago was awesome,” then you’re probably out of luck unless it’s up on Steam. Music and movies don’t have the same absurd turnover in the retail space that video games do, but with digital distribution, a good game can have some legs and be viable over a longer period of time. Sales of Painkiller quadrupled overnight on Steam after the Zero Punctuation review. Xbox Live Arcade and The PlayStation Network are also providing a space on the console side to sell quality smaller games.

The indie game scene is still quietly chugging along too, and always will. As long as there are games, we’ll always have people making them simply because they love it.

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