Game development. Proses and Cons

The high cost of game development

All this leads to the fact that the cost of game development requires a serious investment. There are a lot of stories about "such-and-such team made such-and-such game in three months", but for the target audience of this article (newcomers to the industry or non-core investors) such results will never happen. Simply because making even a small game requires hard work, which only comes with experience.

Yes, the big companies can really rivet games in 3-4 months: they have all the processes worked out, selected and tested personnel, a huge amount of developments and blanks to use. Young teams don't have any of this. There may be some developments from past projects, but in most cases they will not fit with what you have in mind.

So even for small games, the time frame can be two or three times that of experienced teams. The longer it takes to make a game, the more it will cost to make. The high cost of development along with all the other high risks makes the threshold of entering the game development industry unacceptably high for most investors.

 

It's a tough market

What to do when the game is ready? How do you sell it? How do you make money on it? How to build PR and marketing, what data to collect and how to analyze it? What is good and what is bad for the game? How do you fight your competitors and seize your slice of the market? How do you recoup your money and turn a profit? How to extend this period? There will be a lot of questions. Industry leaders have enough experience, knowledge and analytical data to answer them. The newcomer has no chance.

If there is a competent producer - he will be able to bring the game to the right indicators, if not, then you just have to pray and look for partners. Another option - to create your own marketing department, which is also expensive. In addition, the market is divided into casual games, social, mobile, multiplayer, boxed, browser-based, cross-platform, console and so on. Each area has its own specifics and its own difficulties, of which newcomers do not even suspect ... and when they encounter one, they may not survive in such a collision without proper preparation.

 

Poorly predictable market

You have no idea how much you will earn. You have no idea if you will even make any money at all. If, for example in construction or trade, you can clearly calculate how much the business will bring, but in games you can only speculate. Even the leaders cannot guarantee the success of their games. So if they tell you that "the game will bring at least X, and a year later the income will be Y", send these guys as far away as possible (in space, in another galaxy preferably) and as soon as possible.

The right teams will tell you something like "our closest competitors have such-and-such audience, such-and-such online (or DAU/MAU), their average payment (ARPPU) is such-and-such, player lifetime is such-and-such; we think that our figures will be such-and-such because..." and then follow with analysis of your game target audience, profile of an average player, time he can devote to the game and so on.

And it will all be at the level of "we think that..." and "we're likely to get so-and-so under such and such conditions." To understand how sane the numbers are you can only do research or have experience/information on similar games, and then the chance of hitting the target will be modest.

 

Hitting the trend

If you don't know what the market will be like by the time you are ready to release the game you have a good chance to publish an irrelevant game which nobody needs. In order to get into the trend, you need to live and breathe the industry, or have someone who is part of it (a competent producer and/or game designer) on your team. You have to monitor the market and keep the project up to date, be able to make corrections in time, but not allow the project to mutate uncontrollably.

 

The Sweets of the Game Industry

Why go into the game development industry with so many risks and so many unknown, unpredictable moments, what's so tasty about it? Why do people make games, are they idiots? Or is it because there are perks to it? Of course there are. There are pluses, and for many game-developers (or investors) they completely and repeatedly compensate for the above described risks and drawbacks.

 

Highest profitability in case of success

Most games will go nowhere, not even a return on the money invested. Their small number will repay money and will bring a modest income. But if you're lucky and used a good game art services, you'll put together the right team - then the profitability can be incredibly high: for example, operating expenses + marketing monthly three million, revenue - twenty-seven.

 

Stable business

If you do manage to get to the point where your business starts generating revenue, it becomes very stable (in my opinion). Yes, like a shark, the game needs movement: if it doesn't grow, it dies. But if you do everything right and without unnecessary risky experiments, everything will be fine. What's more, the various crises in the entertainment industry are least noticeable. Games have always been in demand, even during wars, soldiers played and entertained themselves between battles.

Entertainment relieves stress, distracts from the problems - that is why the income of one company, where I worked during the crisis, increased during this time. I won't speak for all of them, for sure some teams died out at that time, but it's not a fact that the crisis was the reason for that. The problem, again, is only one: to get to that point where the game/project/team starts generating revenue.