Tenebris Play Asks: Why Does Triple-A Need All The Money?

The Unending Spiral of Triple A Game Costs

We live in a world full of amazing and interesting gaming experiences. The indie market is booming and the 'Triple A' sector, whilst mired in duplicitous micro-transaction bullshit, is still making good games.

So why does a game need to make such a huge amount of cash in order to be successful? Not enough to cover it's costs and to make a healthy profit – all of the money seems to be necessary. The reason is actually pretty simple, the game business costs money, “business” being the operative word there. Let's take a look at my hypothetical game , “Pleading Poverty”. During the games development, lets say I needed to build, from scratch an engine for it, even though there are many brilliant and cheap engines available, I chose to make my own. So rather than footing the cost of buying a Unity Professional license for everyone who was developing the game at the cost of a few thousand, I spent a good few thousand or million on a platform from scratch. Well, that's into the game costs already but the companies hope is that this engine can be re-used on other games and products and perhaps even sold on to other teams. At this point I look into shareholder payments and, as I'm a shareholder myself, decide that they need to take a large cut of profit from the game. I can, I assure them, get back some of the costs by reducing staffing levels to small teams that can hotseat from place to place and by focussing on the digital market far more than the physical one. I decide to add an online, multiplayer option on and this adds to the costs negligibly but we get a server cost kickback from online players via PSN Plus and Xbox Live so we're doing okay. As the game nears completion we need to advertise, so by teaming up with another product we can reach a nice big audience and get extra money. Even if we end up paying for the advertising, the legion of advertising moguls and social media mouthpieces (which we pay for) will saturate the market with our product. This alone runs into the millions. We have to pay for our building and program use, our insurances and also staff wages for the devs. We'd be paying this regardless because we need somewhere to work from, insurance protects us and the staff need to paid or they'll walk but it gets tacked onto “Pleading Poverty” costs regardless, letting our parent company have a nice loss for their taxes. And that's before we get to really tiny build-up of ongoing minor costs.

It's more than just the games development costs and shipping costs, it's payments to shareholders, advertising (which often nets the publisher some sweet tie-in moolah – Mountain Dew, anyone?) and wages for the staff who weren't directly involved in the game but want their cut anyway, often on top of high wages that the actual development team can only dream of. Extra costs with building use, travel for research and build engine costs all get added on.

If you're new to gaming this is pretty prescient, if you're old to gaming it's a case of “same shit, different arsehole”. A game needs to cover all of that and make a profit on top. The costs of game making have gone up, but in a huge number of ways those costs have actually plummeted. More people have learnt to make games, design games and manage game teams than there was in the 80s and 90s so wage costs have actually dropped, not risen with inflation. I tried to figure out why, when the means of delivery and often the means of creation are costing companies less video game execs are pleading poverty to the general public, expecting more cash for less content and adding additional paywalls and difficulty in getting a hold of a full game experience. I did manage to come to an answer, at least of sorts. I may know how we got to this point and why and it lies in the idea that this is a marketplace, not a service spread out but a marketplace where product is haggled for. If you're working in a market you need to stand out or people may just walk by.

So, how do you make your game stand out? You use the prettiest, most graphically impressive technology that you can, knowing that your marketing team can leverage the games looks into parting people from their cash, irregardless of how incomplete the purchased product is. Does this work though? With a large enough group, yes, but after Aliens: Colonial Marines, Watchdogs and a whole slue of Fable games the gaming public has become much more suspicious and far savvier. A huge number prefer a good experience. You would think that the retaliation against micro-transactions, on-disc DLC and with pre-orders starting to drop on most game series, publishers would change their behaviour, instead they fall back on what they know has worked before.

This behaviour isn't new. It may have come to the forefront of game journalism now but the cycle was present decades ago. Personally, I think it came to be the standard behaviour in 1995. May I present to you Phantasmagoria.

Phantasmagoria is an FMV point and click adventure game. I reviewed it. I didn't like it much for multiple reasons (take a look at my review if you want). It was published by Sierra On line, who regularly published adventure games, most of them pretty bland. Phantasmagoria is a prime example of what would become the norm for games in the future so a bit of development backstory is useful here. Roberta Williams, joint CEO of Sierra and one of the writers for Kings Quest 1 – 8 started to write a horror based FMV game. It was released in 1995 after costing nearly
US$5 000, 000 in development costs alone, primarily due to the huge amount of studio time and the pixelled backgrounds. The original budget was US$800,000. Panicked, Sierra pushed at advertising how “mature” the game was, emphasising it's gore and sex, most of which doesn't actually further the story and is pretty childish. They garnered a huge amount of interest by being shocking, particularly by including a rape scene and built on that interest and the ensuing furore. Newspapers and magazines, TV shows and Churches were up in arms, telling people they didn't want to see the sick game. Something similar happened with Driver 3 and with the same result. At no point in human history has telling someone they don't want something worked. It did, of course, the opposite. Even prior to the games eventual release Sierra found that they were making money off the back of Phantasmagorias notoriety. Stock climbed from US$3 to US$30 and sales in their other products went up.

The game industry, in 1995, learned that shock and indignation moved units and that you need something visually arresting to garner interest. These things cost money.

After Phantasmagoria came out it sold a record number of units in it's opening weekend. 300, 000 units in 1995 was huge. It went number 1 for sales for several months and was still in the US top 10 games purchased a year later. It made Sierra more than US$ 12 000, 000 in spite of having generally mediocre reviews with some mixed outliers. Not as mixed as Sierra would have you believe in interviews however. There was a general consensus that it was easy (occasionally to the point of being insulting), poorly paced and that the story was extremely hackneyed. Music was very good though.

And this is the game that made Sierra it's cash.

So the spiral began, a mediocre game experience made money by trading on peoples shock reflex and by spending far more cash than any game of its type before. The warning signs and voices were there all along, Gamespot even noted that this behaviour could set a horrible, dangerous trend.
It did, we see it all the time now, publishers and devs alike constantly playing follow the leader, begging bowls in hand.