The "what is a successful game?"/"are exclusives worth it?" cost/benefit thread

[Silent_Buddha]

Added to that as PC exclusive devs start to dry up (either going out of business or already having transitioned to consoles) the ready pool of 3rd party potential X360 exclusive devs will be shrinking.

That was always one of the key points for Microsoft, making the platform easy to develope for and similar to the PC thus making it a very tempting target for PC exclusive devs that want to give consoles a try.

Going forward is ease of developement + MS funds going to be enough to maintain a large selection of 3rd party exclusives?

At least in the US, MS doesn't have to get over the hump of being considered a console player on par with Sony. In Europe however (other than Britain), it appears to still be considered the lesser console by the masses. And in Japan...well I have my doubts a western console will ever flourish there even with Japanese dev support.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The problem with 3rd party exclusives is that they are not guaranteed.

You don't have to rely on 3rd parties. If independent publishers won't produce exlusives, MS have the option to commission titles, 2nd party, like Gears. They secure exclusivity and can commission whatever projects they want, such as Natal titles, without having to own studios.

 

[ShadowRunner]

You don't have to rely on 3rd parties. If independent publishers won't produce exlusives, MS have the option to commission titles, 2nd party, like Gears. They secure exclusivity and can commission whatever projects they want, such as Natal titles, without having to own studios.

Yes but surely this will be a harder sell depending on the current success of the console, to the point where the deal they are getting may not be worth it for both parties.

Im not saying not having first parties is a bad thing, more that having them has positives and shouldnt be looked upon as irrelevant.

 

[AmFreak]

You don't have to rely on 3rd parties. If independent publishers won't produce exlusives, MS have the option to commission titles, 2nd party, like Gears. They secure exclusivity and can commission whatever projects they want, such as Natal titles, without having to own studios.

What's the advantage for a title like Gears1/2?. Microsoft pays the money for its dev cost. If it flops Ms is loosing more money (dev cost + dev share of sold units). If it hits Ms is earning less money cause of dev share of sold units.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

On the upside though, if Epic were to deliver a turkey, MS could drop them and shop around, whereas relying on first-parties, your talent pool is a little more limited.

But let's be honest here - I'm not the guy to argue against first-parties as I'm all for them! I believe it's important to have a strong first-party studio to call upon and that's something I feel Sony have very right. I'm not really sure where the extra costs running first parties lies versus going 2nd party, and you have the benefits of gaining technology which can be redistributed etc.

 

[Rolf N]

Added to that as PC exclusive devs start to dry up (either going out of business or already having transitioned to consoles) the ready pool of 3rd party potential X360 exclusive devs will be shrinking.

That was always one of the key points for Microsoft, making the platform easy to develope for and similar to the PC thus making it a very tempting target for PC exclusive devs that want to give consoles a try.

Going forward is ease of developement + MS funds going to be enough to maintain a large selection of 3rd party exclusives?

I think I ranted about that at the beginning of the generation, and it's still an interesting tangent.

Microsoft has migrated almost all PC games developers to console development, thus creating a new influx of studios that helped them shape the platform in the early days. Those were the same studios that thought PS3 hardware was exceptionally weird -- they had never worked with PS2s!
But that is a one-time push. You can only go through that transformation once, and the end result is a multiplatform console studio, where exclusive Xbox development may make sense at some point in the transition, but not as its conclusion. See Bethesda, id, Epic, Bioware etc. Big-budget productions almost have to be on consoles now to be viable.

Microsoft won't be able to kick-start another generation by luring and transforming highish-profile PC-only studios -- there will be no such thing left. Well except for Blizzard, good luck with that! Otherwise this resource is consumed.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I believe it's important to have a strong first-party studio to call upon and that's something I feel Sony have very right..

They've started a hiring rampage for 343 industries recently. Several ex-Bungie guys are there too, so MS is paying attention and allocating resources where necessary.
They also have Lionhead and they're quite large by now as far as I know, although I'm not sure if their games are ideal for a new hardware launch.

But why would either Epic or Bioware or others say no to MS if they are offering a good deal? Sure multiplatform is better, but I expect them to once again beat Sony to the market by at least a year, which gives them leverage again. An UE4 "launch" game would have all the tech advantage over all other competitors on the market, I don't see Epic passing on an opportunity like that...

 

[Crossbar]

This topic is interesting. Some suggested that Japan was a small and pretty irrelevant market. My country: Sweden has a population that is less than a tenth of the population of Japan and still there are tailor made console games for it that are commercially successful.

For example I recently was pleasently surprised to find out that this game will be released within a month. It´s a Singstar game with a Swedish group called Kent that sings in Swedish, i.e. the market outside Sweden is neglectable. It will without doubt be a huge success saleswise, Kent has delivered a large number of commercially successful records and is seen as one of the best live groups in Sweden at the moment. I´ve been to one of their concerts myself earlier this year.

Singstar games are obviously pretty cheap to produce, the hard part is probably the royalty deals for the songs and videos. Still if you can make exclusive localised material tha cater to these small markets there are obviously money to be made.

There have been exlusive Swedish Singstar games before, but they have all been of the "Swedish hits" type, this is the first time it´s just one group singing in Swedish.
There have been Singstar Abba, Singstar Queen and Singstar Take That before, but they have all been international superstars. Does anyone know if there have another Singstar game with just one group for any other small markets in Europe?

Kind of interesting to know if this is a new trend.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

This topic is interesting. Some suggested that Japan was a small and pretty irrelevant market. My country: Sweden has a population that is less than a tenth of the population of Japan and still there are tailor made console games for it that are commercially successful.

For example I recently was pleasently surprised to find out that this game will be released within a month. It´s a Singstar game with a Swedish group called Kent that sings in Swedish, i.e. the market outside Sweden is neglectable. It will without doubt be a huge success saleswise, Kent has delivered a large number of commercially successful records and is seen as one of the best live groups in Sweden at the moment. I´ve been to one of their concerts myself earlier this year.

Singstar games are obviously pretty cheap to produce, the hard part is probably the royalty deals for the songs and videos. Still if you can make exclusive localised material tha cater to these small markets there are obviously money to be made.

There have been exlusive Swedish Singstar games before, but they have all been of the "Swedish hits" type, this is the first time it´s just one group singing in Swedish.
There have been Singstar Abba, Singstar Queen and Singstar Take That before, but they have all been international superstars. Does anyone know if there have another Singstar game with just one group for any other small markets in Europe?

Kind of interesting to know if this is a new trend.

The thing with that is the deveopement costs have already been amortised. So what's left in costs (other than licensing and royalties) is fairly negligible. Therefore games of these types are prime candidates for small-ish and specialized with appeal only to a relatively small niche.

Targetting somethign with the budget of KZ2 or Halo 3 at a small market would be virtual suicide.

As well, while the Japanese market may be relatively trivial to western titles and, IMO, western consoles. It's quite large for Japanese titles that generally, but not always, aren't very attractive to western audiences.

You can bet that a western devopement house would love to crack the Japanese market with a hit, but it's quite difficult. If successful however, the return could be quite large.

Regards,
SB

 

[Silent_Buddha]

What's the advantage for a title like Gears1/2?. Microsoft pays the money for its dev cost. If it flops Ms is loosing more money (dev cost + dev share of sold units). If it hits Ms is earning less money cause of dev share of sold units.

The potential ROI might be less for both parties, but the potential long term and short term risks are also much lower.

For the development house, you have guaranteed funding for X game. And a potential revenue stream if it is successful. You can also be sure that the publisher (in this case MS) is going to heavily market it at their own expense, thus guaranteeing large consumer exposure.

For the publisher (again MS in this case), it's a short term risk as opposed to a first party dev. house. If the title flops you can just cut your ties and your losses with a contracted 3rd party. With a first party dev you face the difficult decision whether to keep them or let them go. If you let them go, you are faced with the possibility of severance pay, unemployment fees, bad press, possible future difficulty attracting new talent (if you cut ties badly), etc. If you keep them on, you risk another flop compounding your losses.

On the flip side, a first party studio gives you a possibility of greater ROI, guaranteed exclusivity on future titles, etc.

For this generation, MS has decided to take the low risk route rather than the high risk - high reward route (which had mixed returns for the first gen Xbox). And so far it's paid off for them quite well.

One thing to note is that I'm sure they would have preferred to keep Bungie on, but it was deemed far more important to keep Bungie intact and stay on good relations with them. They could have forced the issue, but then the Bungie as we know it would no longer exist.

Back to the topic at hand...

If MS managed to launch the next Xbox before Sony releases the next Playstation, they'll again have strong 3rd party exclusives at least for the first 2-3 years. But as with the current situation (and possibly more so) many of them will be timed exclusives or exclusives only in their first incarnation. If PS4 launches first however, I'm not entirely sure MS will be in that good a position with regards to exclusives.

Heck, even now MS maintains some quite strong 3rd party exclusives without additional financial incentive from MS. I can think of Valve with Left 4 Dead as one of them.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There have been Singstar Abba, Singstar Queen and Singstar Take That before, but they have all been international superstars. Does anyone know if there have another Singstar game with just one group for any other small markets in Europe?

The expansion of DLC probably is discouraging regionalised prints where regional content can be handled as DLC. SingStore has some native-language content for all sorts of language. Just checking now, there are 33 Swedish tracks including 2 Kent tracks. It's a shame it's so slow to get content up. I wonder if an artist could approach Sony to have their content made available? That is, instead of creating a Swedish Kent game for Sweden, the producers could create Singstar content to make available on Singstore? It'd be way cheaper for them and have an already established install base; they'd only need market it as they would the game.

 

[Crossbar]

The expansion of DLC probably is discouraging regionalised prints where regional content can be handled as DLC. SingStore has some native-language content for all sorts of language. Just checking now, there are 33 Swedish tracks including 2 Kent tracks. It's a shame it's so slow to get content up. I wonder if an artist could approach Sony to have their content made available? That is, instead of creating a Swedish Kent game for Sweden, the producers could create Singstar content to make available on Singstore? It'd be way cheaper for them and have an already established install base; they'd only need market it as they would the game.

Good points, but DLC also requires that the buyer already bought a Singstar game or else you can´t go to the singstore. Sony is also co-releasing a PS2 version just like the Abba, Queen, TT versions, (which of course have less songs on them, but still have a much larger market).

I guess shop exposure is also still a good channel for marketing the platform to new potential buyers. It will be really interesting to see how much attention this game will get at release. I recently noticed a new boxed PS3 bundle in my supermarket, a 250 GB PS3 bundled with Singstar Abba and wireless mics. Together with the Singstar Kent game it may be an attractive deal to quite a few, even if it´s twice the price of a 360 or a Wii.

 

[Rolf N]

The expansion of DLC probably is discouraging regionalised prints where regional content can be handled as DLC. SingStore has some native-language content for all sorts of language. Just checking now, there are 33 Swedish tracks including 2 Kent tracks. It's a shame it's so slow to get content up. I wonder if an artist could approach Sony to have their content made available? That is, instead of creating a Swedish Kent game for Sweden, the producers could create Singstar content to make available on Singstore? It'd be way cheaper for them and have an already established install base; they'd only need market it as they would the game.

Singstar is a unique case in that it is a content delivery platform itself. Interest in certain kinds of music built within the game can spread back outwards, beyond gaming, into other sectors. This is true of very few games.

You really want to do both: you sell the edition disc to rope in new customers that didn't previously pay attention to your platform, but come because they like the band; and you sell the same content as DLC to your already established base.