Take-Two/EA "Merger" bullshit comes to an end...

[Blotus]

... and the inevitable Take-Two/Activision merger will surely follow!

Maybe not for a little while, anyway. But for now, T2 avoided being a subsidiary of EA. That's super rad. What may have happened had they been bought? While Blizzard will likely never be put under the thumb of Activision, what about companies like Bioware and Pandemic?

Bioware has been silent for a long time since the release of Mass Effect's expansion. One fucking side quest in almost what, a year? I understand there was a PC version to build which I figured may have been handed to another development team. If that were the case, and it may well not be, might we have seen something more out of Bioware? Or are they being ridden to finish Mass Effect 2?

As for Pandemic, Mercenaries 2 is getting some mixed reviews. The one common thing in most reviews does say that it is genuinely fun to blow shit up. But the game is also reportedly riddled with bugs. Shovel this one out the door, boys, 'cause you need these sales NOW so they don't take away from your next quarter's, or shit, week's releases!

I'm giving Activision a month before they declare that they're in talks with T2 or, hopefully, trying to get in talks with T2.


http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3169921

[SineSwiper]

Recap here. Who owns who in those companies right now?

[Zeus]

Bioware and Pandemic merged through SCI, a venture capitalist firm (partially owed by Bono). At that time, Riticello became the president of the merged company. He moved back to EA (came from there initially) and became their president. He then split EA up into 4 "groups" (EA Sports, EA Casual, EA Sims, and EA Games) so that they could be more decentralized and allow for better creativity by allowing the smaller dev companies within the company to exist independently and maintain their identity, completely opposite of the Borg-like mentality they had in the past when they got companies like Origin and Westwood and killed them. Then they purchased SCI for something like $800 million. So Bioware and Pandemic became a part of EA.

We've talked quite a bit about the Activision-Blizzard merger. That's basically all it was.

EA put in a hostile takeover bid for Take Two a month or so before GTA4 came out. Take Two said "pfft, piss off". They said "fuck that shit, we want you". They fought for a while, EA kept extending the deadlines, then for the last month they've been discussing shit behind closed doors. Looks like Take Two never wavered.

I don't see EA as buying them as a bad thing, not with how they've changed over the last year or so. It's almost better than some of the other companies, Act-Blizz included, buying them

[SineSwiper]

Well, okay, after you buy Blizzard and Take Two and Bioware and Pandemic and Activision, what the fuck good small time dev houses do you have left?! EA needs to slow the fuck down and quit acting like that just because they have this new system doesn't mean they have the right to buy every other dev house in site. Besides, they very well may buy some companies, and suddenly change the policy back to slaving programmers 70hrs a week.

What's next? 2K Games? Turbine? Tecmo? Valve?

[Eric]

Squaresoft is gonna buy them for that Western Foothold they've been lookin for! :p

[Zeus]

Tecmo is in merger talks with Koei after refusng Square's friendly takeover bid.

It's a simple matter of economics. We have an industry that is quickly maturing (3rd phase of the cycle if you decide to look it up) and that's where you get consolidation. It's natural. It costs more and more to make and take games to market so in order to survive, you need to consolidate. You may have some stranglers that hang around as small indies thanks to digital distribution, but it's becoming more and more rare.

EA has actually set up a sort of quasi consolidation thing with its EA Partners setup. You get companies like Valve or id to sign up for distribution and partnership deals without buying them. You get a close relationship with them and break the walls down. Then you get them accustomed to that and all of a sudden they need you. It's almost like they're becoming the crack dealers for these companies.

In the next little while, you'll only know companies like Epic or id as a marketing tool instead of as an independent. Sure you'll get the small guys like NIS America releasing small stuff, but it'll be almost dead. It's happening in Japan too.

That's what happens when the cost of a game goes from like $500k to $5+M in under 10 years.

[SineSwiper]

$500K? Back in my day, a single programmer did the art, music, and code for one game.

Besides, movies have the same problem, but they still find small time studios to make them. Sometimes they get backing from the big boys, sometimes they don't. However, they don't need to get absorbed to survive.

[Don]

Assuming that talent for what makes a game is totally mutually exclusive, I'm pretty sure you can get away with 4 people at the most:

One guy that codes
One guy that draws
One guy that composes music
One guy that writes the story (really should only need the first 3 guys to steal some existing idea)

I know graphics take the most amount of money but with stuff like (whatever game) Maker out there I'm sure there must be some kind of cheap library of generic graphics out there you can just plug in. No it's not going to look like FF13 or whatever but it should be good enough.

[SineSwiper]

Well, you're really only going to get away with a 2D game that way. 3D graphics is pretty hefty, and takes a lot of time/money.

Even Braid as a 2D game still cost about $80K to make. None of the music was originally theirs (obscure, but not made by them), and there was more than just four people on the project.

[Julius Seeker]

On the dev side: music is almost always contracted out. Art Assets are certainly a large expense, but it is the coding side which costs more (FF8 style FMV aside, which is a very large expense).

[Kupek]

Even Braid as a 2D game still cost about $80K to make. None of the music was originally theirs (obscure, but not made by them), and there was more than just four people on the project.

I think it cost significantly more than that. I remember he said near launch that he needed many more sales to actually turn a profit, and on his blog (http://braid-game.com/news/), he quotes sales of about 55,000. At $15 each, that's $825,000. Of course, I have no idea how much of each $15 goes to his revenue, and how much goes to Microsoft, but $80,000 for total game costs sounds too low. Just considering that he had to house, clothe and feed himself for at least two years, and hire other people makes $80,000 sound too low.

[SineSwiper]

Source:

While videogame budgets at big studios can be millions of dollars, Mr. Blow estimates that he spent more than $180,000 of his own money during the past three years to develop Braid. He also took time off from his job as a videogame-industry consultant to focus on his project. "I have no idea how well Braid will sell," he says. "Realistically though, I could lose all of that [money]."

[Don]

I know most of the cost on a game now is in the graphics part because that's the part you can't just have talent cover the quantity needed, but you'd think there ought to be some kind of industry standard library to work with now if you just want to crank out a low budget game. I'm guessing they don't exist, but I'm curious why it doesn't.

Everything in game development could be made up by talent instead of raw numbers.

[Kupek]

Even Braid as a 2D game still cost about $80K to make. None of the music was originally theirs (obscure, but not made by them), and there was more than just four people on the project.

While videogame budgets at big studios can be millions of dollars, Mr. Blow estimates that he spent more than $180,000 of his own money during the past three years to develop Braid.

As I said, $80,000 sounded low.

[SineSwiper]

Well, there's stuff like DirectX for all of the low-level programming, and game engines for the underlying code for 3D engines. But, there's no such thing as "standard graphics" or "standard levels". And depending on the game, you will still take a lot of the interfacing and underlying code from stratch. (For example, SoM's ring menu system; somebody designed that, but they could take the code and use it for SoE. In general, though, companies don't let innovations like that go outside.)

You could take an Unreal engine, put new levels on it, and put some new music on it. But, people call those mods. Sometimes games start out like this, though. Team Fortress, Portal, and Left4Dead all started out as mods that were picked up and fleshed out as real standalone games.

That's the kind of thing that you'll only find with FPSs, generally, and even those take a lot of free time from different people to develop.

[SineSwiper]

As I said, $80,000 sounded low.

Yeah, I know. I was correcting the both of us.

[Kupek]

Sorry, I figured you meant to say $180k the first time and misremembered your post.

[Kupek]

Actually, Epic licenses out the Unreal Engine to other companies. It's part of their business model. I thought it was used in more non-FPSes, though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Un ... gine_games

Notable non-FPSes for Unreal Engine 3 are Lost Odyssey and Mass Effect. But, I think that even if you license someone else's engine, you still need people on hand to make custom changes.

[Don]

Well you obviously need people to do something to make a game, but I'd think you should have a model where you don't need to reinvent the wheel each time you make a game. If you just want to create a generic FPS for example, it really shouldn't cost very much because it sure isn't going to make very much either. With consoles I understand the development platform changes, but you should be able to have an unchanging environment (relatively) when it comes to computer gaming.

[Kupek]

You can do that, to a certain degree, with things like the Unreal Engine. The point I made with needing people to do custom changes is that the engine generally doesn't do exactly what the developers want, so they still have to spend time on the graphics.