A Risky Business

 "A Risky Business" is an essay I wrote in 2006. It is here to complement the blog post above, "Move Over Innovation." Click 'read more' to access it.

A Risky Business

  

            In today's commercial society, it is difficult for publishers to support games that may not sell to the target audience.  Instead of supporting new and innovative styles of games and gameplay, publishers often encourage tried and tested formulas for selling games.  In 1997, 80% of the top 20 titles were well-known brand names, sports or character licenses, or sequels.  Consumers are partly to blame.  Most companies have difficulty finding support from gamers when they introduce new styles of games.  In order to make a profit, game developers produce numerous sequels to bank on the success of any popular game.  Many companies make a serious profit from games that have little or no innovation whatsoever.  This trend has impacts on the number of quality, innovative games being produced. 

            Risk aversion is the term used to describe companies’ production of a series of sequels or similar games (such as, first-person shooters and sports games) in order to lower production costs and thus increase profit.  With risk aversion, companies produce games with well-known characters and/or style of game that both casual and hardcore gamers can easily recognize and enjoy.  Companies benefit because they make profit, stay in business, and thus are able to make more games.

            In many respects, the effort to make money through risk aversion has gone overboard and hindered the gaming world.  For example, the Tomb Raider series, with the famous female hero Lara Croft, has had numerous instalments and sequels.  Yet, despite the fact that the original game was highly acclaimed from video game reviews, the many sequels have been less enjoyable from a ‘gamers’ standpoint.  In fact, since the release of the original Tomb Raider, with every sequel the reviews from several Internet gaming sites have slowly gotten worse.

            In other cases, publishers have bought the rights to certain recognizable characters in order to produce games already well recognized in the gaming community.  An example of this could be shown with the success of the James Bond 007 first-person shooter series.  The breakthrough instalment of Bond games was Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64.  This highly-reviewed and very popular game brought the publisher, Rare, a large revenue and acclamation in the gaming world.  However, after the publisher Electronic Arts (EA) realized the popularity of this game, the Bond name and series was purchased by EA so that only they could make Bond video games.  Most of the casual gaming audience is unaware of the producers and developers of games, so the many Bond sequels put out by EA, have sold very well for the company, despite not being as highly reviewed,  thanks primarily in part to the success of Rare. 

Rare also produced a sequel to the genre, Perfect Dark, which, despite being highly reviewed, did not attain the success the company had hoped for in terms of sales.  Many of the members of Goldeneye 007’s development team have now begun a new shooting series called TimeSplitters.  This game now has three instalments, but the developers had to work hard on the gameplay in order to make this series popular among the gaming audience.

            The most notorious genre of gaming that lacks innovation is the sports genre.  This genre, dominated primarily from Electronic Arts and their EA Sports franchise, is often critiqued for their lack of innovation from year-to-year.  In spite of this, sports games are among the best-selling games every year.  Fans buy them primarily in order to have updated rosters of their favourite teams.  The gameplay itself, however, remains unchanged.  In fact the best-selling football, basketball, and baseball games produced by EA Sports have not changed their primary gameplay of these games for over a decade.  With the games easily updated every year and sales never decreasing, publishers understandably choose to maintain the style in which the game is played.  In the end, customers get only a slightly improved version of the same game purchased the year before.

Another means of minimizing the risk of lacklustre sales is to put well-known characters into a game, where the development companies initially didn’t plan use these recognizable characters.  A recent example of this is StarFox Adventures for the Nintendo Gamecube console.  This game was initially to be released on Nintendo’s previous console, the Nintendo 64, under the title Dinosaur Planet.  However, Nintendo decided to delay the game for the release on their newer console so that the company could take out the initial cast of game characters and put in the characters from the popular StarFox franchise.  StarFox games initially involved action among fighter planes and air combat, but this game was an adventure game with the action consisting primarily of puzzles and hand-to-hand combat.  Still Nintendo decided to put recognizable characters into the game to increase revenues based on the success of the previous instalments of the series.

            Changing characters is not uncommon in the gaming world.  Popular games from the early Nintendo era were similarly changed due to risk aversion.  Most notably, the North American version of the popular game Super Mario Bros. 2 was an entirely different game in Japan, but Nintendo put the figures of Mario, Luigi, and others in order to make the game recognizable to Americans.  In fact, Nintendo produces the largest number of games under their mascot, Mario, in order to increase sales.  Nintendoland.com has estimated that Mario has been put into nearly 100 of Nintendo’s games the past two decades.  Mario is put on the cover of Nintendo sports games, board games, and other games that are completely different from the original Mario platform-based games.

            A similar trend can be seen in the production of videogames based on movies in theatres.  Frequently, companies will develop very poor games in order to capitalize on the popularity of certain movies.  The synergy, created by the game and the movie, allows both to make increased revenue with this marketing strategy.

            An emerging new trend in the gaming world is retrogaming, where people play classic popular titles from past decades.  Publishers are very pleased with this trend, because they can resell games that involved no work to produce.

            All this being said, it is not true to suggest that there are no innovations in the world of video games today; however, publishers are less likely to support innovative game designers that may have little success at first.  The game designer Atsushi Inaba, for example, is one of the most innovative developers in the past few years.  His most innovative production was easily the mech-fighting game Steel Battalion for the XBox console.  This game was packaged with a controller that had over 40 buttons, 2 joysticks, and 3 pedals.  Inaba’s goal was to make this game as realistic as he could, and in this respect he was successful.  However, due to the size of the controller, the cost of the game was too much for most of the hardcore gaming audience.  After the poor success of this franchise, Inaba started in entirely new action-fighting franchise called Viewtiful Joe.  Upon the release of the game, Inaba actually begged the gaming world to purchase his game, otherwise the publisher Capcom would no longer support his innovative projects.  This game did receive a large amount of support and from that, Capcom has already produced several sequels to earn profit on the success of this new franchise.

            Risk aversion results from the profit a product makes.  As a result, the game culture receives games within the same genre that are almost identical; in fact, there is often little to differentiate one game within a genre from another.  The positive aspect of risk aversion is that games are produced that are recognizable to the casual gamer.  In addition, companies that want to produce a new series of games are forced to maintain the highest quality if the game is to succeed.  However, from today’s standpoint, publishers are quite content to produce similar games with recognizable characters in order to make money.  Their goal is not to produce enjoyable, innovative games.