The Development of The Gaming Industry

Indie Games, AAA Producers and Digital Distribution

Indie game developers has been around as long as since the 1970’s but sometime around the mid 80’s it became increasingly hard to develop and publish games due to the rise of multiple platforms with high licensing fees and requirements of advanced equipment and programming skills. 6^th of August 2009 a famous game by the name of Braid was published on the Xbox 360’s Xbox Live Arcade and less than a year later on PC for the Windows OS. For many developers, the success of Braid is considered to be the reawakening of indie games development and soon it would turn out that indie games definitely were profitable. Minecraft would become a prime example of how latent the market was for indie games, having sold impressive 33 million copies across multiple platforms worldwide made the Swedish creator Markus “Notch” Persson well-off to say the least.

  Picture: Minecraft

The growing trend of indie games has become a profitable industry while the situation is almost reversed for some of the AAA developers where sales of game franchises is decreasing and performing below expectations. Ubisoft reported that both Rayman and Splinter Cell sold below the sales targets in 2013. There is however some exceptions to this theory, GTA V reached an impressive 1 billion US dollars in retail sales within three days. So the triple A producers is far from bankrupt yet.

Another debate is whether or not game developers should throw themselves into digital distribution as services like Steam, Good Old Games, Desura and so on. Ubisoft launched their own digital distribution platform Uplay in the end of 2012 to counter the growing competition and to regain the profits lost by selling through third party distributors like e.g. Steam.

Development of AAA games is also becoming more costly since the equipment and workforce needed has vastly increased. The game developer companies have challenges ahead in terms of generating more profit from their games and reducing costs. Outsourcing parts of the development progress to third parties in India or China might be a more common solution in the future.

Smartphones and tablets have also become a huge market for free-to-play games with micro transactions. Developers are fighting to get a share of that market and more and more players are using smartphones and tablets instead of investing in portable consoles and in some cases household consoles. A trend I fear will create a paradigm shift over the next couple of generations where around 10-years into the future handheld smartphone/gadget devices will have replaced consoles as a gaming device. I would not mind this development if the quality of the gaming industry for computers and consoles was adapted to the handheld devices/gadgets, but that’s just wishful thinking.

So what is the future of the triple A producers? What are they doing wrong? Well for starters, personally, I think that the industry is focusing too much on technicalities rather than gameplay. Of course, having some graphical improvements over the course of gaming history is crucial for the development of games, but the gameplay should always be the main focus. Franchises like Call of Duty have seen a decline in sales, most likely due to lack of innovativeness in their newer titles.

“You don’t change a winning team”, is a common saying in sports, but some changes is definitely needed for the triple A producers to stay on top of the gaming industry.