The Future is in Game Design houses.
I’m seeing the separation from designer and implementator strongly in the animation/film business and believe that the game business will follow suit. What this means is we will have “game design houses” that specialize solely in creating new game ideas, mocking them up, and finally passing them on to development studios to fully implement.
So instead of publisher + developer we will have publisher + gameplay/art/sound design studios + developer (probably overseas)… a natural progression in our specialization crazy world.
For example, the ad business you have AKQA:
Why will this happen? Because of two reasons:
- It’s cheaper to hire a developer overseas in Eastern Europe or Asia than one based in North America (for publishers it’s about the bottom line). The entire animation business went this route about 30 years ago and has never looked back.
- Many North American development studios are horrible at game design even though they are fantastic at the implementation aspect(high polished art + amazing tech). Design has become as important as the implementation aspect. No longer can studios just be a collection of great artists and great programmers, there also needs to be great designers which are in short supply. In animation you can spend more time in pre-production than actual production due to the sheer volume of decisions that need to be made early on.
For indie game studios there are three paths to take:
- Become cheaper than others so the shift overseas does not adversely affect you.
- Produce higher-quality games – either better game design or better tech (or both)
- Transform into one of the specialized game/art/sound design houses.
Add comment December 20th, 2008