MTV’s Multiplayer ran a week’s worth of posts about the state of reviewing in the games industry. I feel like this is actually some good journalism, something I wish that there was more of in the gaming press.

Between the MTV stuff, and Level Up’s Reflections on videogame publisher and employer contempt towards the enthusiast press there’s a lot of very good material for people to think about the very broken status of the enthusiast press and review mechanisms of the industry.

When your industry is still in its infancy and at the same time in the midst of a distribution revolution, it’s worth casting your eye around to see how the others are getting along. I did it once already with the comics industry and now’s a good time to talk books.

David Edery (the Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner for XBLA) recently announced that he’s just about finished writing his first book. He paints a grim picture of his prospects.

From what I’ve gathered, less than 1% of published books turn out to be hits. The odds for a first-time author (who isn’t a big name, like Bill Clinton or Alan Greenspan) are so incredibly low that even if your publisher loves your book, your marketing/sales forecast is unlikely to exceed 20k copies at best. At that level, it simply doesn’t make sense for the publisher to do much in the way of marketing until the book has already proven itself.

The parallels (hit-driven) are as striking as the contrasts (so we publish a lot of books but only market some of them). It’s worth considering how publishers in the two industries might have come up with opposite solutions that to the hit-driven problem.

My working theory is that books are cheap to write but expensive to distribute, while games are expensive to make but approaching free to hand out.

So book publishers (or at least, ours) have adapted to their harsh reality, and have forced authors to be more self-reliant. We received a huge “marketing questionnaire,” with questions like “What is the big idea of the book,” “Why now is a good time to publish it,” “Why will people want to read it,” and “Who will buy it and why? Be realistic!” The questionnaire forced us to think about competing books and explain our points of differentiation. It forced us to think through every possible personal contact who could help promote the book, directly or indirectly, through coverage or endorsements, etc. We had to list every website, magazine, and journal that might be interested in the book. We had to answer a list of theoretical questions from journalists. We had to create sound bites. We were asked if we’d be willing to maintain a blog or podcast, and were offered help setting those up. And more.

Edery argues that every publisher of an indie arcade title should require their developers to fill out this type of marketing questionnaire. I’d take it a step further: if the services that publishers provide keep getting cut back like this because of the economics, why have a publisher at all? Developer royalties tend to be awful, but this makes a kind of sense if the publisher is doing the bulk of the heavy lifting with the financing and marketing. Without that support, giving away more than half of your income on the game makes very little sense.

The question as an indie that you need to ask is: will the boost in sales that having a publisher provides outweigh the cost in the portion of income that they take. If you negotiate 50% royalties with a publisher (how’d you do that?), this better be because you expect their support to more than double your sales. If you have a 15% royalty rate, then you are expecting the publisher to improve your sales nearly sevenfold. If your situation is “game gets a publisher or never gets to market” then sure, go for it. But in the land of indie downloadable games, we live in a era of abundance marketing, where publishing your work costs roughly the price of buying domain hosting.

Over at Game Career Guide Brian Nathanson talks about his struggle at breaking in to the games industry. Well, his failure to break in to the industry.

It’s a sad story. He doesn’t mention what school he went to, just an unnamed “game program in Arizona”. He only hints at the details but it seems like he entered a program with high hopes, took out massive loans and discovered at the end of the process that he wasn’t prepared for a job (he can’t even get a phone interview).

I am completely aware of how many people want to be a part of the video game industry. I will admit, openly and publicly, that I probably don’t have a very competitive portfolio.

When I was in charge of hiring at a video game company, I saw a tonne of applications like Brian’s. A lot of people have paid ridiculous tuitions for generalist educations and came out at the other end masters of nothing. It was heart wrenching, knowing how much these people had invested in their education and how little they got for it. They’d have been better off using the tuition money to pay for rent and food while they worked full time on a mod project.

I feel for Brian, but I also totally disagree with him.

Individuals with base skill sets and true passion are ready and waiting to be given a chance to shine. These talented and passionate people bring fresh new energy and commitment into an industry that seems to always be juggling profitability with volatility. New ideas, new game mechanics, and new appeal could be created by those who just want to make a game they would like to play. Smaller, more tightly focused, and perhaps less expensive games could be the result if the industry allowed more inexperienced developers to work while growing their skill sets.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful, we don’t lack for them. Nor do we lack for fresh young talent. This is an industry with an average age of 31 and an average career length of 5.4 years.

I’ve worked with newcomers and with hobbyists and and I’m here to tell you that inexperience does not lead to “smaller, more tightly focused,” games. It leads to sprawling, unfinished, genre-defying epic failures. We don’t need fresh young faces to reinvigorate things. We need old non-burnt-out faces to stick around and be the voices of experience and history.

Brian is right about one thing, it is very hard to even get a phone interview. It’s not because we can’t be bothered to talk to the passionate people who wish they were involved. It’s because there is something like a 60:1 ratio of applicants to job postings. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to call each of them.

Raph Koster’s post today got me thinking (again) about Danc’s excellent 2005 article about the touring band as a business model.

The thing about the touring band and about micropayments that gets everyone excited is that there is NO UPPER LIMIT to how much a devoted fan can spend on you. I’m embarrassed when I think about how much money I have spent on pretend Magic cards and judging by the evidence over in Korea, a lot of other people are doing the same kind of thing for all sorts of games.

There is another benefit to micropayments that I haven’t seen people talk about as often: it’s much easier for players to slip in and out of fandom. When I broke my WOW addiction, I cancelled my account, cutting myself off from play. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever return. Meanwhile, on some server in California sits my neglected Magic: the Gathering Online collection. Any time I want, I can drop back in and play a few games with my old cards. How many casual games can I stand before I break down and start buying packs again? I’m scared to find out. Free-to-play micropayment models allow the kind of “oh hey I remember this band” nostalgia to take hold more easily, dragging recovered addicts back in to the fold.

When it comes to talking about marketing, Seth Godin is one of my favourite speakers and thinkers. I honestly don’t know if empirical data matches up with his anecdotal evidence, but the story he tells of being able to distinguish yourself in the marketplace and carve out a niche for yourself is a compelling one when you’re a smaller indie developer, looking to survive in the same business where Halo 3 and GTA:IV are thriving.

He’s got a blog and in today’s post he throws up a graphic and an argument about appealing to a niche or going for the mainstream. There’s a parallel here to game development.

The reason you need to care is that gap in the middle. Every day, millions of businesses get stuck in that gap. They either move to the right in search of the masses or move to the left in search of authenticity, but they compromise. And they get stuck with neither.

I can’t find the reference, but at the GDC a few years ago, one of the speakers put up a graph of sales numbers and profitability for video games, indexed by budget. It turns out that games with budgets under $200,000 or over $10 million tended to do very well. The prospects for games with budgets in the middle (the vast majority of games that are put out every year) were awful.

In the context of Seth’s graphic, this trend makes a lot of sense. Games that have huge budgets are nearly guaranteed to be masterpieces. These are the games that get delayed to bring the quality up, with the team knowing full well that extra development costs will get drowned by sales when the game finally comes out. With a $10+ million budget you can afford to make the game good and you really can’t afford to let the game be bad.

On the other end of the scale, with a $200,000 budget, you’re so limited in your time and money that you can’t have any illusions about what you’ll be able to implement. If you’re making a sub $200,000 game, you have no choice but to make the game tight and focused. This is the realm of Everyday Shooter, N+ or flOw (note: I actually don’t know how much it cost of make any of these games).

Does budget automatically predict quality? Of course not. But if you are working on a $4 million FPS, you might want to sit the team down and have a serious conversation about the scope and character of your project.