Following up on my recent blathering-on about the Wii and about LiveMove, Patrick over at King Lud IC scratches his head about the business case for casual games on the Wii. I'm about as far as one can be from a casual games developer. I think the kinds of numbers he's talking about are close to what the teams I'm used to spend on dinners at the office over the course of production, and if that's the case, then hell yeah, there's a huge pile of money to be made there.
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October 22, 2006
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Every hardcore developer is a casual developer trying to break free, or not, there's definetly a place in the world for Splinter Cell and Elder Scrolls.
The key to lower budget/higher margin is twofold:
- emphasize highly modular art assets which relate empathetic feedback to the user (the empathetic part is what many unsuccesful casual games miss, but which the likes of Diner Dash don't)
- organize production around contracts with independent professionals based on material delivered, not time
With no regular burn rate and tight, mildly scale-able, iteratively evolving design goals, you can compact the budget of a game and deliver something that shines. That goes for really dark, hardcore games just as much as quirky, colorful "casual" games.
I also believe that model is scalable to AAA levels of production, but that hypothesis is as yet untested.
Posted by: Patrick | October 23, 2006 at 01:48 AM