Handy Vandal's Almanac

Above: Laurentius de Voltolina meets Pac-man

Students who may have been scolded by their parents for spending too much time playing video games are turning their passion into a promising career, thanks to more universities offering degrees in video game design and development.

The Entertainment Software Association reported last week that 300 American colleges and universities are offering courses and degrees in video game design, development, programming and art this academic year, a nearly 20 percent increase over last year.

– Johanna Thompson @ Ashland Daily Tidings: August 24, 2010

Images:

• Liber ethicorum des Henricus de Alemannia, Einzelblatt, Szene: Henricus de Alemannia vor seinen Schülern by Laurentius de Voltolina
• Pac-man

Slashdot recently posted On Why Making a Blockbuster Game Is a Poor Goal.

From the comments:

What I take away from the article is that Bioware can make games like that because they have a proven track record of making games like that financial successes, but that a development team with a less powerful resume probably couldn’t get it done. Not because the team wouldn’t be up to it creatively or technically, but because in the current market, management/investors wouldn’t have enough faith in an unproven team to let them take the time to do it right.

– Mongoose Disciple

And:

Of the games that try to be the biggest, baddest, most epic ever, only the top X will be making a profit at all. Most will actually make a loss.

And that is something that seems to escape most people, sad to say. From people going into making games with delusions of being paid a million like Carmack, to kiddies who think that pirating a game is some kind of act of resistance to some uber-rich fatcat who’s only charging 40$ for it because of greed, to people starting some monumental epic as some mod and expecting to finish it with 5 people in a few months, to fanboys arguing that a publisher is the incarnation of pure Evil if they had an upper limit at all for budget and didn’t give the team an infinite limit on money and time to produce the perfect game, to ultimately the devs end publishers who increasingly compete only in that segment. The fact that there’s a finite amount of money to chase in that segment seems to be genuinely news to most people.

It’s not even a matter of “get off my turf” as some other poster made it sound. We have the equivalent of, say, 90% of the car makers deciding they want to compete only at the Bugatti Veryon end of the market. Or 90% of the computer manufacturers deciding they want to make only supercomputers. Sure, it’s great if you do manage to sell the next Bugatti Veryon for 1 million a pop, but there are only so many buyers who will buy at those prices. If actually all major companies, from Ford and Fiat and Volkswagen to Bugatti and Ferrari decided to make only supercars in that segment, that most _will_ make a loss. Same here. There simply isn’t enough money in the market to cover the costs of _everyone_ who wants to make the next super-game.

– Moraelin

This is interesting news: tax breaks for the videogame industry:

The government has finally recognised the importance of the games industry as a revenue generator for the UK. Surely the fact that everyone’s a gamer now must have helped….

… After months of persistent lobbying by the industry’s trade body Tiga, the government has agreed to work out a range of tax breaks for UK games companies.

… But is there more to this than economics? Does the government’s shift in stance symbolise a fundamental change in the perception of videogames, away from a demonised social scourge and toward a vital cultural force?

- Keith Stuart @ guardian.co.uk

“Talent Agents a New Force in the Video Game Industry”
– The New York Times

It happened to the motion picture industry in the 1930s and the music trade in the 1960s. Talent agents, initially brushed off as nothing more than opportunistic middle men, succeeded in making themselves vital parts of the machinery, helping the fast-growing but messy businesses mature.

Is it time — finally — for the same thing to happen with video games?

Agents have been trying to plow this turf for over a decade, succeeding with helping industry giants like Electronic Arts navigate Hollywood. But a deep cultural divide between the slick, Armani-suit-wearing agent crowd and rumpled computer-code-writing gamers has proven difficult to bridge.

… With the $46 billion worldwide video game market in upheaval — budgets are soaring for console titles even as free online games sharply cannibalize sales — agents are suddenly awfully useful: finding the right talent to complete increasingly complex titles, structuring deals across media, bringing in third-party financiers. And more agents than ever are looking to make a name for themselves in video games and new media, a consequence of layoffs after the merger last year of the William Morris and Endeavor agencies.

… Video game agents come in two distinct varieties. On one side are broad Hollywood agencies that extrapolate their movie and television approach to the pinnacle of the video-game business. United Talent spends most of its time working with prominent game writers like Susan O’Connor (BioShock, Gears of War) and the top echelon of publishers. Ditto Creative Artists, although it is also trying to cultivate a handful of promising young designers.

On the other end of the spectrum are scrappy, under-the-radar companies like Digital Development Management, or D.D.M., that focus solely on video games. Founded in 2006 by Jeff Hilbert, one of the first agents to specialize in the genre, D.D.M. is finding success catering to teams of developers — the movie business equivalent of an independent production company versus one superstar producer.

- Brooks Barnes @ New York Times: March 26, 2010

This New York Times article confirms what I have been saying for years: that movies and games are merging into a new hybrid phenomenon.

Gaming is big business — bigger than movies, worldwide. Item, this recent business news:

Gameshastra opens 1000-seat facility in Hyderabad

Game outsourcing services provider Gameshastra on Tuesday opened a 1,000-seater game design studio in Hyderabad to cater to the growing demand for its services worldwide including from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

The 50,000-sft facility will focus on a full range of game development, game art, animation and quality assurance services for console, PC and online gaming platforms.

“We are currently 220-people strong and expect to reach 1,000 headcount by the end of this year to support new projects,” Prakash Ahuja, chief executive officer of Gameshastra, told mediapersons here.

Stating that Gameshastra had invested $7 million (approximately Rs 33 crore) in its operations over the last three years, Ahuja said the company was developing an Indian mythological game, Ekalavya, for Sony Computer Entertainment’s PlayStation3 (PS3) platform.

- Business Standard: February 24, 2010

“Shastra is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘Science’, which also indicates specialized knowledge. And true to our name, we are specialists in the domain of game services.”
– Gameshastra.com.

Over at A Year of Frugal Gaming, board game designer Jackson Pope of Reiver Games talks about quitting his job in order to make games for a living:

The amount of a working computer game you can make in your own time is about a thousandth of a working computer game, whereas I thought I could make a boardgame and get it be a finished product. Over the next three years I worked on a game which eventually became Border Reivers. I was very happy with it but I put it in a tupperware box and left it on my shelf.

A couple of years later I came back to it and thought ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got a working finished game here so I might as well do something with it’. I worked out I could make 100 copies, largely by hand, and sell them over the internet and hopefully make a little bit of money, so I did and 11 months later I’d sold them all! During that time someone else had sent me another game, which became It’s Alive. I made 300 copies of that by hand and sold them over the internet in 11 months, at that point I took the mad decision to quit my job and try and do it full time.

- Jackson Pope @ A Year of Frugal Gaming

Reiver Games

Pope adds:

“I’ve been blogging on Creation and Play for three years now, most people initially heard about me on there or on BoardGameGeek, publicising my game. I’ve now had 150 submissions; some good, some awesome, some not so awesome.”

Interview posted by Dave @ A Year of Frugal Gaming

At the Austin Indie Summit, game designer Colin Northway — author of the remarkable Fantastic Contraption — outlined several key principles for aspiring designers:

1. Make your game in Flash

Northway draws a fine distinction between ‘Flash games’ (games where you “launch kitties into a spiky thing”) and ‘games written in Flash’, but he’s an evangelist for the platform more than anything because “the content discovery problem has been solved” compared to consoles, the iPhone, etc. Forums, emails, all pre-existing internet communities will do the work of keeping your game’s name in front of other people, whereas, say, with the iPhone, “making money is hard to do if Apple doesn’t spray the money hose on you.”

2. Make your game “live online” …

3. Leverage “pride based marketing” …

4. Make a free game that gives players ‘a tote bag’ if they pay …

Via Offworld.

Now this is a beautiful thing:

Computer Space, the world’s first commercially-sold coin-operated video game. Recently for sale on Ebay!

Don’t you wish you owned one? I know I do!

Via BoingBoing.

See Computer Space @ Wikipedia.

I don’t believe I’ve ever actually seen Computer Space. I suppose it’s possible — I haunted more than a few video arcades, back in the seventies — but I’m certain I never played it.

“One of the areas that I am super interested in right now is how we can do financing from the community. In other words, ‘Hey, I really like this idea you have. I’ll be an early investor in that and, as a result, at a later point I may make a return on that product, but I’ll also get a copy of that game.’”

– Gabe Newell

Over at IGN, Rus McLaughlin takes this idea gives it some kick:

The idea of gamer community-funded game development interests me, sort of like PBS with more headshots.

- Rus McLaughlin