Virtual Worlds & Game Development: Rise of the Indies
Is big videogame publishing destined for the same change-or-die creeping irrelevance that now plagues the music, film and publishing industries? Multiverse executive producer Corey Bridges held forth on this question and more in this morning’s SB/Interactive panel The Future of Virtual Worlds & Game Development: Rise of the Indies. After noting the well-documented floundering of the music industry due to downloading (”The RIAA has lost its mind. It’s spazzing. It’s now illegal to copy your own CD onto your own hard drive“), the deflation of movie theater revenue, and the struggles that even the most established newspapers now face to stay afloat in the digital age, Bridges forecasted that videogame publishing as we know it will be next on the chopping block. Though triumphant headlines (and numbers) from the past year have touted gaming as an unstoppable industry, Bridges asserted that traditional game development is already feeling tremors. The current game publishing model calls for at least $10 million (often twice that) in development costs to create a blockbuster–and the possibility of a Matrix Online-style flop with a $20 million price tag has made publishers risk-averse and forced into conservative choices. Meanwhile? The advance of broadband, the rise of middleware–especially indie-geared platforms for noncommercial use–and the growth of the virtual world industry stand to take a huge bite out of the videogame industry in its current incarnation. Noting the trend at this year’s GDC of stalwart publishers like EA following the lead of indies into Facebook-application development, Bridges predicted the next year will see a major merging of virtual worlds and social networks–and that “everybody will have an avatar in the next few years.” As new technology decreases the cost of making games, opening up opportunities (Xbox, anyone?) for more indie development and more genres, the results, said Bridges, will be “better design, fewer publishers and more millionaires.”
Image: Erin Sanders