Comment Re:Ubisoft and PCs... (Score 1) 123
Sadly, those initial month of sales are the most important. Wait a few months and it's about the same as not even buying it -- Disappears into the statistical background noise of all the other back-catalog titles.
Unfortunately everything in gamedev is designed to squeeze the most effort out of the least advantaged: From chips to memory to humans. The publisher makes nothing, they add no real value to the product. The work to make the product is done, so they leverage artificial scarcity to recoup their losses -- Killing studios if they overestimated ROI. Quality isn't their concert, and won't be until players don't rush to buy shit, and the artists / devs / testers are treated well.
The silly thing is: The game developers could just work directly for the players. They could say: Hey, we want to make this game, it'll cost $PRICE. They can negotiate payment up front, do the work, get paid, and then "give the game away" to the players (since the work has already been paid for) just like they do working under a publisher. No need for DRM because you have an unlimited monopoly over your work before you do it. Can't pirate what's not created, so don't create what's not paid for. This has the interesting advantage that you actually waste less time making shit that no one will pay for. It's the same money as working under a publisher, just without the publisher driving up the cost. Games are cheaper to buy for the consumers, and so you can charge a bit more for the development to meet in the middle. Alleviate some crunch.
The only problem is: Kickstarter. This idea is fucked. Instead of asking for the full amount up front that you actually need, you ask the public to pay for a small portion of the funds, and then waste a chunk of the money on giving them "perks". Does your mechanic throw in perks for working on your car? Why the fuck should the over-extended underfunded game devs who are crunching like mad for you have to throw in perks for working on games? Also, design is a process, so being locked into following Kickstarter promises would limit the feasibility of completing a game. Doom would have had remained single player with character select screen, and RPG elements instead of fast paced frenetic deathmatches. Quake would have been an overly ambitious MMO that fell short of budget and died. Halo would have remained a Real Time Strategy game instead of becoming the Killer App for a console. Portal2 wouldn't have had GLaDOS, Chell or portal guns, and would have had to be canceled since F-Stop and movable terrain didn't work as a sequel. Tetris wouldn't have even ever been a game: It would have been an AI sim for packing shipping crates.
Clearly, markets are changing. There needs to be some form of middle ground. You don't want DRM? Fund the damn development. Don't want to take that big of a risk in case the game fails? Do it in installments, and have devs show progress. Allow features to get cut and re-designed, because that's how games are made: None spring fully formed from the design documents, those just provide a hopeful direction to proceed in, but there's no telling where you end up, especially if the requirement is to be "entertaining".
The publishers are spending several times more on Advertising than game development! That $60 game? You could pay $30 directly to devs for it to be made, and they'd STILL have MORE budget than what the DRM happy Publishers are paying out for the game to actually be made.
Any economist not hanging their head in shame at the current state of the information industries is a fool, and the players buying $60 games with DRM on them instead of having free copies of every game ever made for everyone by simply having the community fund the gamedev are just as ridiculous. Can't really blame the latter though, gamedevs still choose to work for Publishers and all-or-nothing "Crowdfunding" shite like Kickstarter is only partial funding with a bunch of additional constraints and burdens -- thus when the games are made, they devs have to try to leverage artificial scarcity, DRM, etc. to monetize the work since they're only able to ask for part of the funds.
You don't like DRM? IT'S YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT IT EXISTS. Sorry, it is. We have the technology to obliterate need for such artificial scarcity. We can get paid to do work once, like every other labor market. Folks like me want to end piracy by applying the FLOSS model to Gamedev, but we're ahead of our time, so we can't quit our day-jobs, yet. Someday it'll happen though. Market forces tend towards efficiency.