Okay, so those few of you who saw my blog a while ago and see that a post is missing, you're not hallucinating. There was a draft for a different post that I was trying to delete and due to lag, I accidentally deleted the post that came after Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae. And I've since forgotten what it was that was in that post and have decided not to re-make it. If that's something that bothers you, that's the reason.
Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about Budgets. Things that Businesses really can't avoid but that the average consumer knows almost nothing about. Let me give you the rundown.
A budget is, as you would expect, a designated amount of money that has to last a set period of time. This is something that a lot of working people already understand and, unless you're a child and have no concept of money, it's fairly obvious why you want to know about this. Namely that, if you have a limited amount of money, it's good to know where certain amounts of it are going so that you can limit spending and make the money last longer.
Something that a lot of people are aware of, particularly in the gaming industry and community, is that budgets have been steadily rising over the course of the last couple decades. Most people don't really understand why, which is what this post is about, but everybody seems to accept it as the way things have to be.
For those of you who don't know how fast budgets rise, let me give you an example. On the Playstation 2, the Average AAA game budget was around $6 million dollars. For a Playstation 3 game, however, the average budget was closer to $35 million. That's almost a six times increase. And that's not even accounting for outliers like Grand Theft Auto V, which had a budget of $500 million.
One thing that comes up in a lot of circumstances surrounding game sales is a discrepancy where a game can sell more than most and be deemed a commercial failure while other games can sell far less than average and still be deemed a success.
What does that have to do with budget? More than you likely think.
You see, a game, like any commercial product, is determined a success or failure depending on how much revenue it makes. Some publishers and studios have slightly different metrics on this: while any publisher will deem it a failure if it doesn't break even and a success if they make far more than they spent, the middle ground is a bit more of a gray area. Some studios will find that it's enough if they break even without making much more than they spent, others will deem that a flop. Others still will say that it is a failure if it makes more than they spent but not by as much as they were planning.
Suffice it to say, though, that budget is a key factor in the success or failure of a game because of its direct relationship with revenue. For those of you who don't know, let me define my terms. Budget is how much money you spend making a product, while revenue is the amount of money that product makes you when it's sold. So, in this way, it's generally a good idea to make certain your revenue is always higher than your budget. That is to say that, in the world of business, gaming included, you want to make more money than you're spending.
Here is where the issue lies: if one game sells more than another but the lower-selling game is considered a success while the higher-selling game is considered a failure, what does this mean? That might sound like a bit of a riddle but it actually has two answers. The first, and more logical of the two, is that the game that sold less had a lower budget and thus could break even more easily, while the game that sold more had a higher budget and therefore needed more sales to break even.
The other answer, which requires a bit more thinking, is that the game that sold more had a significantly lower price on it to the point that the sales it got wasn't enough to break even. This is usually the fallacious answer, though. Namely because if two games are sold based solely on price, the lower priced game will make more sales. And while a $6 game would need ten times the sales of a $60 game to equal the revenue, often that degree of price shift isn't necessary to boost sales.
Often times, dropping a $60 game's price down to $40 will double its sales, which will effectively make the revenue equal to an $80 game that sold the same as a $60 game based on pure numbers.
So the budget is obviously the bigger culprit and that's what we need to focus on. If more games are going to succeed at the market, we want to reduce their budgets. So, how do we do that?
Well, a big part of having a budget is not simply the overall amount of money spent, it's also where that money is going. You can try to reduce the budget in all areas equally but this generally won't work for two reasons: reason number one is that unnecessary parts may still be getting overfunded, and reason 2 is because parts that are necessary will be reduced in quality and make a lesser product overall.
What you want to do is, look at all of the areas that are taking up your money. For a video game, this will be graphics, animation, rendering, programming, sound design, music, cutscenes, voice acting, and optimization. Some of these jobs can be divided even further: programming can be divided into game design, system design, and bug fixing. Graphics can be divided into modeling, texturing, bump mapping, and level design. And it goes like that.
Well, several of these things you might be funding may not be necessary to the quality of the product. For example, if you're telling a story in the game, what you cut will be dependent on the focus. If the focus is the story, you want to make sure that that story is as good as possible and you would want to cut down on things that will get in the way of the conveyance of that story. Voice Acting is not always necessary to tell a story, Mario and Zelda proved that a long time ago. If you want to cut down on the music budget a bit, you can craft the music and sound in such a way that the game has no non-diegetic sounds, which can reduce the music budget. Cutscenes can be cut down in length or number so they don't cut into the budget as much. If you want to reduce the programming budget, you can cut features that aren't necessary for the game to function.
If you have a focus on gameplay, animation, programming, sound design, and optimization are completely necessary and shouldn't be corner-cut, but things like cutscenes, graphics, music, and voice acting can be dialed back or removed completely. In fact, reducing the graphics budget will also reduce the optimization budget because the lower quality graphics will generally run better automatically.
What you have in your game isn't really the entire story, though, the bigger issue is money going to the people who are making this stuff. Or, to put it another way, rather than focus on what you're making to reduce your budget, you can look at who you hired to make it.
What some people don't always realize is that more famous people in the industry will require a larger salary than those who are lesser known despite the fact that both can do the job equally well. Also, paying full-time employees will cost you a lot more money than hiring Freelancers.
What you might also not know is that some developers will be, if not paid more, then at least get more jobs due to their reputation. An example of this is Yoko Taro, who is good at writing narratives but not good at game design. Hideki Kamiya is the opposite, he's pretty great at Game Design but not so great at Narrative or Story Telling.
This is made more apparent in the games they've directed. In the time since the beginning of the PS2 era, Hideki Kamiya directed Devil May Cry, Ookami, Bayonetta, Wonderful 101, and Scalebound. Contrary to this, Yoko Taro directed Drakengard, Drakengard 3, NieR, and is directing NieR: Automata.
This is actually an interesting turn of events because both wound up working with Platinum Games albeit for different reasons, however, what these games are known for says a lot more about these directors than the games themselves.
Now, in defense of Yoko Taro, Drakengard 3 is a badly written, poorly optimized game with weird design decisions and schizophrenic tone, however, part of me wants to believe that the reason for several of these problems was the engine and porting decisions SquareEnix made.
Drakengard 3 is a PS3 Exclusive Title and, while that wouldn't be such a problem normally, the engine they decided to use was Unreal 3. Unreal 3 is a PC Engine that is used as Middleware. It isn't actual middleware.
For those of you who don't know what I'm referring to, middleware is a piece of software that is designed to create products for many different platforms. While Unreal 4 is definitely middleware at this point, Unreal 3 was a PC engine that was used as middleware until Unreal 4 came out.
Now, because Unreal 3 was designed for PC, any device that has parts that you do not find in a standard PC are going to have drastic detrimental effects on a game's performance. Unreal 3 works just fine for XBox 360 because that was designed to be similar to a PC. PS3, however, had a Processor Architecture that nobody outside of Sony's studios had any real knowledge of. Because of that, the use of Unreal 3 was a really poor and short-sighted decision.
That's part of the reason Drakengard 3's framerate is so garbage most of the time, and things like blood splatter on the camera and other things are artifacts of Unreal 3's design philosophy. So in relation to the discussion of Drakengard 3, I do not want to blame Yoko Taro for any problems related to the engine because that was probably an executive decision that he had no control over.
However, if we compare their corresponding titles, Hideki Kamiya clearly shows he's better at game design but Taro is better at Narrative. Just as an example, Devil May Cry vs. Drakengard, Devil May Cry is more noted for its combat system than anything else. It did have characters that were well liked and it did spawn a franchise after that first outing. However, this largely happened after Kamiya abandoned the series. Drakengard, on the other hand, is noted for stiff gameplay and weird controls but, everybody who loves this game, loves it for its dark method of story telling.
Whether one is better than the other is up for debate and will depend on why you play games, however, it's safe to say that these two titles have drastically different strengths.
On the other hand, we have Bayonetta versus NieR. Both are far better in their respective weaker areas but what their strengths are is still apparent. Bayonetta is a game you play for the gameplay, NieR is a game you play for the story.
Finally, we have Wonderful 101 versus Drakengard 3. Wonderful 101 is a bit of a turning point for Kamiya. Rather than try to develop a skill that he doesn't have, what he decided to do was take his weakness, that being story telling, and make it into a strength. Rather than try to tell a serious plot, he tells a story that is very Super Sentai in nature, which amplified the tone and narrative to unprecedented heights. Meanwhile, the combat was quite exceptional as well. The only real problem W101 had was its sales, and the blame for that falls on Nintendo for not marketing it.
On the other hand, Drakengard 3 was all over the place in terms of tone, and while the gameplay was improved in terms of the Musou aspects, a lot of things that made the previous two games as well liked as they are were either altered or removed. The saving grace Drakengard 3 has is expanding the lore and raising questions about the events of the first game. In a twisted way, it's like Devil May Cry 3 in the sense that it's a sequel that enhances the original with the way it portrays certain aspects.
And finally, we have a role reversal in the form of Scalebound and NieR: Automata. Now, at the time of this writing, Scalebound was recently cancelled and, while I'm not privy on the details, it would seem that Microsoft made far too many executive decisions that were destroying development. A priority on graphics and multi-player seem to be the two major points of contention, since Kamiya prefers single player games and 60 fps. Kamiya seemed to bend on the Multi-player aspect but the framerate was never solid enough to justify its release, which is why I think it was cancelled.
On the other hand, NieR: Automata is being directed by Yoko Taro, who is noted for his fantastic writing skills but now, he's working with Platinum games on the combat design and this seems like a match made in heaven. While the game isn't out yet at the time of this writing, and won't be for several months, it would seem Taro and Platinum really work together to make some really great looking experiences and, should this venture prove successful, I think Taro should consider moving to Platinum permanently.
While these two developers are great at what they do, Combat Design and Narrative Respectively, there are other lesser known but just as great directors out there you could hire to get a game out properly for less money. Or you could hire those same famous people on a contract that is more freelance than it is full-time, which will allow you to save money on pay and benefits in exchange for allowing your employee free reign to decide their hours, and come out with a product that's just as good or better.
However, that isn't to say that hiring more famous developers is inherently a bad thing as long as they don't waste the money they're given. Developers like Keiji Inafune who don't really know what to do with the budget they're given will give you a lower quality product for really high pay and others, like Hideo Kojima, will get you a really great product eventually but you'll never know when that is and by the time it's happened, it's cost you both arms and legs.
Often times, decreasing your budget can be a matter of your team size as well. Generally a team comprised of 12-30 people will give you a high quality product for reasonable pay. If you don't have enough money to pay 12 full-time employees, which is to be expected for an independent, you can do things like hire them freelance or remove certain people or benefits from the table that you would give if you had more money.
However, Grand Theft Auto V is an example of just how much money you can spend on a not-that-great product if too many hands are on it. As I stated, Grand Theft Auto 5 cost half a billion to make but it had 500 people on staff for five years. This amounts to $200 thousand per year per person on average, which isn't too terribly high for a single year, especially considering how much an average programmer can make with 6 years of experience. However, the fact that there were so many people on staff for that long meant that the money was going to drain fast.
Now, in defense of the game, it made back everything it spent in the span of a day. Grand Theft Auto V is not a failure in any regard, not even commercially or in terms of revenue. However, for a game of that quality, different business strategies, a smaller team, and perhaps a mix of young talents and experienced workers could have gotten out a product that's just as good in a smaller span of time. Or, alternatively, they could have removed a lot of the filler stuff. Not the skydiving game, that wouldn't put a dent in the budget because of how easy it would be to make but the other mini-games and side quests could've been toned down a bit to reduce the budget.
For a game like that, there's no one single strategy that's going to be enough to reduce the price, it's more so a collection of strategies that work together. However, Grand Theft V is an outlier in every single regard so it's not really fair to judge strategy viability based on it.
If you want to judge how well your game will do commercially, you'll want to see what your budget is, figure out how much you want to charge for it, and see how much the average game sells for that price and see if you want to increase marketing, decrease the price, or both, and by how much in either case.
Final Fantasy XV is probably just as big of an outlier as GTAV is, however, because Final Fantasy XV took ten years to make, yes, ten, I counted, and while I don't know its exact budget, I do know that it needed to sell 10 million copies to break even. If you assume this refers to regular purchases and not the more expensive deluxe editions, that will be $600 million after taxes.
I don't know the team size that worked on FFXV but considering how long it took to make and how many people swapped out over the years, it's likely that a similar number of people had their hands on the project. So, if we assume it's 500 people, like GTAV, that's $600 million after 10 years, which amounts to $120 thousand per person per year. Significantly lower per person on average but still an overall higher amount of money spent because of how long it took to make the game.
Hideo Kojima is notorious for things like this. Spending way too much time and money on a product that may not be all that good and, while Kojima's name will definitely move units by itself, what people don't often realize is that there comes a point where you spend so much money that brand recognition, credits recognition, and marketing the crap out of it are not going to be enough to make back what you lost.
Konami likely had this reason for severing him and his studio from the company and while I'm not taking sides, and I'm not saying that Kojima doesn't have a reason to be angry, Konami clearly didn't do this for no reason. Severing your best money maker just for shits and giggles really isn't a good business strategy and even the most delirious of businessmen with Alzheimer's know this. If he wasn't just as much of a liability as he was an asset, Konami wouldn't have had any reason to get rid of him.
So, those are the takeaways. Pick your staff wisely, choose your business plan wisely, cut the right corners, not all of them, and keep your team small. Have a wonderful day.
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