Time to get back in the swing of things with an article regrettably cited by Kotaku and GameSetWatch entitled, “Does Portal’s Success Presage Game Industry Shift?” In this bizarre piece, a writer on the game industry admits he has no sales data, cites no budget information, then suddenly makes the claim that Portal's “profit margin is easily better than AAA hardcore titles that require tens of millions to develop...” Huh?
How could this person, a writer who has supposedly been covering games for years, make such a startlingly baseless assumption? As he points out, Valve does not release sales information from Steam. Furthermore, the budget of the title is undisclosed. And what is the profit margin of the average “AAA hardcore title”? I doubt most developers even know that. With every single point of data critical to this analysis completely unknown, he triumphantly concludes that “it’s a smart, economical business model”.
We can quickly and easily take things further– much further– than this writer did. According to the postmortem published in January 2008’s Game Developer Magazine, Portal’s project scope included eight full-time developers working for a total of twenty-six months. Valve pays anything but low salaries, so, doing some back-of-the-envelope math allows one to realize that Portal, while certainly cheaper than the biggest blockbuster titles, does not necessarily mean it is the “low-budget” game the author of that piece imagines it is when compared to its scope versus that of other games.
Portal was one of my favorite games of 2007. Its best feature is its smart writing; how unfortunate that the writing about the game cannot be of similar quality.
Comments (2)
Well, I'm going to assume that you'll gladly include me in your list of bad writers who opted to report on Wagner James Au's optimistic prediction for the industry.
I decided to cover Au's piece largely out of hope. No, we don't have any concrete information to support his prediction, but man alive it would be nice if he were right.
Personally, I'm anxiously awaiting a shift in industry perspective, where the 10-hour gameplay experience becomes the ideal, and a game doesn't necessarily have to justify its cost with 40+ hours of gameplay, or the shiniest graphics. Au's a respected journalist in the field (granted, his forté is normally online worlds), and it's exciting to hear someone you respect echo those same naive sentiments you rant about to your friends and write about on your blog.
I reported it because I wanted to spread that innocent naiveté (hell, let's just call it optimism). Maybe if enough of us cover it, it'll pull a Tinkerbell and just become true.
Posted by Scott Jon Siegel | February 4, 2008 1:42 PM
Posted on February 4, 2008 13:42
I understand the spirit of the piece, which is admirable. But the people who cover this industry (such as a “respected journalist in the field”) should not be sloppy like this. There’s an important difference between optimism and simply making up facts out of thin air.
Posted by Matthew | February 4, 2008 3:35 PM
Posted on February 4, 2008 15:35