长篇分析：从历史演进角度谈研发成本和制作倾向调整

原作者：Raph Koster 译者：Vivian Xue

昨天我在阿纳海姆做了一个关于“产业生命周期”的演讲。我之前发表过一篇同名文章，这次演讲的目的是对那篇文章进行一个简要的总结，并引用了我最近的一篇关于游戏经济的文章里的材料。

那篇探讨游戏经济的文章引起了很大的反响。我数不清有多少个论坛对它进行了长篇讨论，但伴随而来的是对文章中数据和结论的质疑。如果你还记得的话，那篇文章的内容是原本是对一些网络评论的回复，并以Q&A的形式展示出来。它并非基于可靠的研究。

正如很多人指出的那样，获得游戏成本的硬数据是一件困难的事。我在2005年做“Moore’s Wall”演讲时，利用大部分公共成本数据做了一些基础研究，得出了一个游戏成本的指数曲线，并感到自己恐怕也难逃这一趋势。但是如今市场已经历诸多变化，尤其是在此期间出现了至少两个新的商业模式。

因此Casual Connect演讲成为了升级版的Moore’s Wall。通过运用行业人脉和网络调查，我收集了一组涵盖了过去数十年、超过250款游戏的数据。我将通过这篇文章与你分享我的发现，并且比我的演讲要详细得多，毕竟演讲只有25分钟。

这些游戏都有各自的报告成本，必须指出的是，这些成本不包括营销支出。因此主要包括薪水以及各种间接费用比如开发工具。当成本是非美元货币（欧元、日元甚至兹罗提）时，我按照游戏发行那年十二月份的通行汇率把它换算成美元，然后将美元价值根据通货膨胀率进行再次换算，这样我们将所有的成本都折成了今日的货币进行比较。

结果如下：

你马上会发现，想要读出图中的成本相当困难，因为大部分游戏的制作成本低于5000万美元。那些离群值是一些拥有巨额预算的3A主机游戏和PC游戏，鉴于惊人的成本，你可能已经通过新闻听说了它们。

如果我们把图表进行对数转换，会更清晰一些。在这张新图表中，成本纵坐标以10为倍数扩大。

3A游戏的轨迹非常清楚。你用肉眼就能看出主机游戏和PC游戏的成本每隔10年就上升为原来的10倍，这一趋势至少从1995年开始，甚至可能更早（早年数据点开始分散）。记住，这些数据已经根据通货膨胀进行了调整。

我们从图中同样可以清楚地看到独立游戏和手机游戏的表现。正如你所能看到的，这类游戏的数据点相对少一些，并且很多这类游戏在发行时基本无任何预算，不过他们绝大多数也都亏本了。我所选取的大部分数据来自那些至少名义上成功的游戏。

我取了每年数据的平均值，不过鉴于3A游戏把整体数据拔高了，这张图表所能反映的东西实在有限。因此，我将不对它做过多的解读，除了一点，即使缺乏早期和近期的数据，这张图仍惊人地呈现出了直线走势。我可以推断出近期的一些热门手机游戏的预算在500万到2000万之间——3A游戏的最低制作成本并不像人们想象的那么低。即使是PC端精致的独立游戏成本也达到了几百万。

总之，鉴于新闻报道总是偏爱那些高成本游戏（巨额成本总是有趣的谈资），并鉴于指数级别的成本差异意味着中端或“典型的”游戏绝无可能以相同的速率增长，再鉴于手机游戏和独立游戏数据的缺失，这条平均线绝对夸大了整个行业的真实水平。你或许松了口气，特别是如果你此刻正在做一个5000万的3A游戏。

从另一方面来说，这张图又太过乐观了：它并没有把营销支出考虑在内。按照经验推算，一款3A游戏的营销预算大概相当于开发成本的75-100%。因此3A游戏到达玩家手中时，它的成本事实上翻了一倍。在手游领域，一些大厂把三至十倍于开发预算的资金投入到营销中并不少见，因为市场竞争太激烈了。

让我们仔细观察这些数据点，手机游戏和独立游戏的趋势也是上升的。这并不奇怪，鉴于市场成熟了，制作成本自然也会提高。这引发了一个问题：我们是否可以通过某种方式进行一一对比，看看其中是否存在某些整体趋势？毕竟，如果收入和玩家数量相应地增加了，成本上升也很正常，不是吗？我们一定能找出答案的。

因此我继续寻找其中存在的关联。比如，我猜测是一些硬件方面的增强导致了图表中数据的“攀升”，而我不太清楚究竟是什么。最终，我选择了一样简单的事物作为指标：字节。我回过头确定每一个游戏的实际安装大小，也就是在每一次完整安装后游戏占用的硬盘（或设备）体积，各种补丁（sideloaded, streamed或first day patches）也包含在内。

这张表格也必须要进行对数转换，因为早期的游戏大小只有几K，而最新的游戏达到了数GB。结果如下：

不用多说，字节数量是上升的。令人惊讶的是，它并没有随着平台的出现阶段性地上升，即使是在主机战争时期。早年在主机生命周期中期，提供额外存储的烧录卡（cart）诞生了，随后，新压缩技术使得硬盘能够容纳更大的空间。比如，Xbox 360升级后的NXE通过压缩技术把安装体积减少了百分之三十。鉴于其中很多游戏需要连接，连接后产生的额外缓存没有算入在内，这张字节统计表中的数据，与成本图表不同，可能比它们实际要低一些。

不管怎样，我们现在可以很容易确定一个基准了。一个开发者制作一个字节需要多少美元？我们都清楚自己想要看到的结果：成本下降。在我早期的Moore’s Wall演讲中，我已经调查过1985年至2005年的成本和每字节成本的情况，并得出了一个简单的结论（我在“Age of the Dinosaurs”演讲中多次重复过这一结论）：游戏的体积增长了122倍，成本提高了22倍，因此我们创作内容的效率比从前提高了6倍。

下图是每字节成本的对数转换图表。

突然间一个趋势显现了出来，大多数情况下，任何一年内的成本差异几乎都是10倍左右。分别观察这些数据点，它们大多可归为内容驱动游戏或者系统驱动游戏。一个基于故事的游戏，一个RPG游戏，这类内容丰富的游戏，成本自然会更高。这个点状图上还有一些遇到制作问题的著名游戏；它们毫不意外地处于所在那一年的顶端。

真正令人大开眼界的是，耗资500万的独立手游和1亿的3A大作的每兆制作成本是一样的。（事实上，他们只相差3/1000分钱）这很有可能是由薪水导致的，无论你在行业的哪一层，薪酬波动的幅度都不会太大。

更令我担忧的是惊人的平均每字节成本，看起来我们这个行业的发展陷入了停滞。

2004至2005年间，游戏开发引擎Unreal Engine 3和Unity发布。我本期待这两大惊人的工具的组合可以很大程度上帮助减低每字节成本。然而它们看来并没有产生什么显著的效果。

这使我们越发感到不安，这两大引擎成为主流开发工具的同时，它们是否有可能阻碍了进一步降低成本的技术创新？我不知道还有什么别的原因造成了曲线趋平。也许是因为Unity和Unreal是围绕静态内容（Static content，游戏预先设定的内容，游戏邦注）输送设计的而非程序化内容（procedural content，由游戏内的程序算法实时生成的内容，游戏邦注）？也许事实上这是一个好结果，并且成本将重新回升？不得而知。我甚至计算出每年的平均值并把游戏按照发行年份分类看看是否能得到什么发现，曲线趋平似乎是因为离群值的作用被削弱了。

数据的复杂性在游戏中是真实存在的，并且我认为玩家们经常大大低估了它。Steve Theodore在Quora上发表的一篇文章对此进行了说明。在文章中，他展示了一个1997年花了10天制作出来的人物，接着是另一个10年后花了35天制作出来的人物。他估计如今制作一个人物得花上一百天。过去分辨率为256X256的贴图如今变成了4096×4096的各种反射贴图，凹凸贴图、置换贴图等等等等。

然而如果我们回过头来看，最大的问题在于我们这些开发者能否负担得起这笔费用。因此我重新整理了数据，尽可能统计了这些游戏根据通货膨胀率换算后的建议零售价。对买断制的手游，我采用了它的销售价格，对于老MMO游戏，我大概计算了游戏本身的购买价格加上6个月平均订阅费用，并且如果得到了实际用户终身价值（LTV），我也把它加入进去计算。最终得出了玩家们为每兆内容所付的费用。剧透一下：他们捡便宜了。

“慢着！”你也许会说。“我们花钱时才不会计较游戏多少兆！我们看重的是乐趣！玩法！游戏的价值！而不只是为了安装而买它！”没错，没错，但是在实际中，我想开发成本和游戏的大小有关，而不是某个网站的评分（这里我没有什么图表可以说明，但是这是一个非常明显的事实——一个再烂的游戏也是有成本的。）

很多人都会发现，从购买力方面来看，玩家们对于他们所熟悉的80年代游戏多半会复购。这多亏了我们的老朋友通货膨胀；还有一点，如果按字节来计算，数量可能远不止一半。

什么样的游戏具有高每字节收入呢？他们是所谓的“常青”游戏，高度依赖于：

·社区

·用户自制内容

·玩家技巧（运动类）

那些数值高的数据点大部分是MMO游戏和服务为基础的在线游戏。他们看起来可能并不具有那么高的每字节收入，因为这些游戏大多依赖于流媒体内容（因此游戏体积可能会很大，游戏邦注）——但是对于MMO游戏，我确实尝试了用游戏后占用磁盘的总体积进行抵消，因此这些数据已经是加入了缓存体积后计算得出的。

人们想不到的是，游戏价格的下降幅度远比这张图所呈现的要大，因为如今整个行业都在制作免费游戏。这些F2P游戏还在源源不断地为玩家提供内容，并且玩家不需要付一分钱。没错，一些重度付费玩家的消费金额足以抵消非付费玩家产生的成本。但是若想与一款体积相同的3A游戏的每字节成本持平，每位玩家至少需要在游戏中消费60美金。而F2P游戏一般是无法达到这个水平的（有一些确实可以，特别是在亚洲市场，无论你信不信）

我们甚至还没考虑一些其他的降价压力，比如折扣、捆绑销售或者Steam打折。

如今，我可以非常坦率地说——我并没有足够的关于成本、安装体积和手机游戏收入的数据。因此这一切到目前为止还是推测性的。但是我并不是很喜欢这曲线的走势，尤其是我把它和其他的曲线对比时，比如开发者成本曲线。

正如你所看到的，这两条曲线正在分离。更糟糕的是，这是一个对数转换后的模型，因此事实上他们每年分离的速度会更快。我们这个行业可以负担得起这些付费越来越少的玩家，只要我们能够得到更多的用户，你看，这就是采用“以量取胜”的一个经典情形。

但是，至少在发达国家，我们的市场事实上几乎饱和了。“可获取市场规模”（游戏邦注total addressable market）这个术语的意思是“任何你可以销售的对象”。“百分之五十的人是玩家”已经是八年前的事了。一个著名的基本营销原则是越远离你的核心受众的用户获取成本越高——换句话说，我们所接触的群体越广泛，我们的营销支出就越高。并且记住，这些表中的数据并没有包含营销支出。

下面是根据当前趋势生成的一些预测：

第一个预测：按照当前的速率，大部分游戏会在未来10年变成免费游戏，并且鉴于这组数据向3A游戏倾斜，是的，我的意思是大部分的3A游戏。一些游戏为了吸引玩家还会向玩家付费。这听上去很疯狂，实际上很多当前我们所认为失败的免费游戏赚不到钱就属于这种情况；我们花钱请开发者、花钱营销，你玩了游戏，而我们没能收回成本。

第二个预测：按照现在的趋势，顶尖3A游戏将带动3A游戏平均成本的疯狂上升。到2020时代，一个万亿兆的游戏开发成本将达到两亿五千万。

我们得记住这一切很大程度上是由技术的进步造成的。只要技术以指数速度发展，成本也会以同样的速率增长，特别是如果我们对于技术的应用不够明智的话。

我所说的不够明智是指人们专注于像素。

因为有很多其它的方式可以改善这条曲线。它们都不是容易的事。事实上，它们中的大部分并没有得到有效和持续地实施，我们事实上也并不擅长运用它们。但是某些离群值游戏证明了这些方式对于打破这一曲线确实起到了作用。这些方式的共同点是，它们降低了对字节的重视，更看重一些其他的内容。

1. 强大的社区能够有效驱动留存，而留存率可以提高收入。社区也许是开发者最应该积极开发并且也是最容易的一个渠道，但是它花费不小，实际上也并不容易。据我估计，一个典型的工作室需要大约3-5年的文化转型才能逐渐学会运用它。

2. 设计系统化的内容而不是静态内容。这对于很多我所喜爱的游戏来说不是个好消息。我去年最喜爱的游戏是《艾迪芬奇的记忆》（What Remains of Edith Finch）。我认为它是一个叙事艺术和系统艺术完美融合的杰作。我好奇十年后我们是否还会认为这样的静态内容游戏能够发展下去。

3. 注重多人游戏，因为玩家们可以为彼此创造内容。但它和创建强大的社区一样困难重重。

4. 改变我们对F2P的重视，F2P游戏目前主要依赖于源源不断的新内容和向上销售（Upselling）。这样的内容负担总有一天会压垮我们。

5. 我们还可以让玩家用各种方式创造字节，通过UGC（用户自制内容），玩家模型，个性化定制或者其它的方式。

6. 算法和程序性途经需要得到更为广泛应用。幸运的是，学术团体总是在这方面总是走在你前面，并且已经出现了关于如何靠代码生成完整游戏的学术文章。从长期来看，这可能使开发者失去用武之地，但是至少发行商会继续存在，并且当他们把你的知识加入到AI机器人的数据库中时会举杯纪念你。

7. 提高服务器效率。以一个老MMO游戏的开发者的身份来看，你把太多的CPU浪费在程序库、容器、虚拟机、虚拟技术和效率超低的Web栈（webstack）上。

8. 提高价格是最明显有效的。没有人愿意这么做，但是它大概迟早会发生。另一个相似的方法就是，减少游戏的数量。

对于玩家们来说，我知道以上的一切都不是你们所希望听到的。相信我，其中很多连开发者们都不愿意接受。如果你想要保护你喜欢的游戏，你应该支持开发者们，而不是占他们便宜或者在社交媒体上攻击他们骂他们是懒惰的贪婪鬼，最重要的是了解当前的情势。

如果你是一个开发者，我能给你的最好的建议是——当下的趋势变化得很快，因此你必须要尽可能提升自己的技巧。把这个行业看做一个饱和的市场，几乎不存在任何新平台可以让我们重置成本。提高你的系统设计、留存设计、社区设计的能力；站在一个MMO开发者的角度思考，这意味着你得以一种服务思维去设计游戏；重视规则，但是同时也要重视品牌塑造和营销，在越来越狭窄的市场中，没有它你无法生存下去。

并且实话实说，我认为游戏的单独贡献者（游戏邦注individual contributor）也需要开始探索从老游戏中持续获得收入的方法，否则会面临被替代的风险。

这些数据现在可能还完全不充分。因此我希望获得更多（匿名提交）数据支持，尤其是那些独立游戏、F2P和手游。如果可以请向我提供游戏名字或者唯一识别码（我才能删除重复的数据），去除营销支出的游戏总开发成本，发行年份和发行平台，还有安装的总体积或者生成数据。

如果谁能够创建一个支持匿名提供这些数据的网站，还能粗略地生成这类图表以供行业研究简直再好不过了。这并不是为了挑起开发者和发行商之间的冲突，而是为了关心和保护我们所热爱的行业。

明确一点：如果有人能指出这些图表的错误我将十分高兴。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Yesterday I was in Anaheim giving a talk called “Industry Lifecycles.” It was intended to be a brief summary of the blog post of the same title, with a dash of material from my recent post on game economics.

Now, that latter post resonated quite a lot. There was lengthy discussion on more Internet forums than I can count, but it came accompanied by skepticism regarding the data and conclusions. If you recall, the post was originally replies to various comment threads on different sites, glued together into a sort of Q&A format. It wasn’t based on solid research.

As many pointed out, getting hard data on game costs is difficult. When I did my talk “Moore’s Wall” in 2005, I did some basic research using mostly publicly available data on costs, and extrapolated out an exponential curve for game costs, and warned that the trendlines looked somewhat inescapable to me. But much has changed, not least of which is the advent of at least two whole new business models in the intervening time.

So the Casual Connect talk ended up being an updated Moore’s Wall. Using industry contacts and a bunch of web research, I assembled a data set of over 250 games covering the last several decades. This post is going to show you what I found, and in rather more detail than the talk since the talk was only 25 minutes. (You can follow this link to see the full slides, but this post is really a deeper dive on the same data.)

Each game has a reported development cost which, importantly, excludes marketing spend. So this is mostly the cost of salaries and various forms of overhead such as tools. When costs were reported in currencies other than the dollar (Euro, yen, even zlotys) I went back to the year of release, and converted the cost to a dollar value using the exchange rate prevailing in December of that year. I then took all dollar values and adjusted them for inflation so that we are comparing actual cost in today’s money.

The result:

As should be immediately apparent, it’s pretty hard to read the costs, because the vast majority of games cost under $50 million US dollars to make. Outliers are AAA console and PC titles that have enormous budgets, and you have probably heard about them because costs like that tend to make the news.

The chart gets a lot easier to read if you plot it on a log scale; in this chart, each vertical box implies costs going up by a factor of ten.

The trajectory line for AAA games is very clear. You can just eyeball that the slope of the line for console and PC releases goes up 10x every ten years and has since at least 1995 or so, and possibly earlier (data points start getting sparse back there). Remember, this is already adjusted for inflation.

We can also clearly see the appearance of indie games and mobile games on the chart. I have a lot less data points for these, as you can see, and a truly staggering number of them are released with basically no budget whatsoever. But the vast majority of those are also done at a loss; most of the mobile figures come from games that were at least nominally successful.

I took an average of the data per year, but it only tells us so much given that the data is weighted towards AAA games, and they pull up the average so dramatically. So I wouldn’t read too much into this graph except to say that even with the lack of really recent data points and older data points, the line is shockingly straight. I will say that a couple of the recent top of the line mobile games have budgets ranging from $5m to $20m — the bottom end is not as low as people think, when doing “AAA mobile.” Even PC indie games with high polish hit multiple millions.

All in all, given reporting bias (crazy expenses are more fun to talk about), and given that exponential cost differences mean the median or “typical” game is certainly not climbing at the same rate, and given the lack of enough mobile and indie titles in the data set, this average line is certainly over-reporting for games as a whole. You may find that somewhat reassuring, especially if you’re working on a $50m AAA game right now.

On the other hand, this picture is actually far too rosy in another way: it doesn’t include any marketing costs. As a rule of thumb, you can say that an AAA game’s marketing budget is approximately equal to 75-100% of its development cost. So costs of getting an AAA game to a consumer’s hands are actually more like double. In mobile, it’s not uncommon to hear savvy shops set aside three to ten times the development budget for marketing, because the market is that crowded.

Looking closely at the data points, there is rather an upward trend to the mobile titles and the indie titles as well. This isn’t surprising, given that as markets mature production costs tend to go up. But it raises the question as to whether there is some way we can compare apples to apples and see if there are global trends. After all, costs rising is fine if revenue and audience rise to match, right? It all comes out in the wash.

So I went looking for something that would correlate. I expected something like hardware power and capability to introduce “steps” in the graph, for example, and I wasn’t seeing that. Finally, I settled on one simple thing as a proxy: bytes. I went back and for each game, I located the actual install size, space taken up on disk (or on device) after a full install and all sideloaded, streamed, or first day patches were applied.

Needless to say, this also had to be plotted on a log scale, because the earliest games on the chart were only a few K in size, and the latest were many gigabytes. The result was this.

So, needless to say, bytes go up. Surprisingly, they don’t tend to go up in stepwise fashion as platforms are released, even back in the midst of console wars. Early on, carts with extra memory were slipped into production midway through the lifecycles of consoles, and later on, new run-time decompression techniques enabled disks to literally just have more bytes on them. For example, the NXE update to the 360 reduced install sizes using compression techniques by up to 30%. Given the addition of various forms of streaming that aren’t cached, for lots of types of games that require a connection, and it’s likely that the byte count here is, unlike costs, rather under-reported.

Either way, we now have a simple way to baseline. How many dollars does it cost a developer to create a byte? We know what we want to see: costs falling. In my earlier Moore’s Wall talk, I had looked at costs and costs per byte for the window of 1985 to 2005, and had arrived a simple conclusion (one which I repeated in several later talks such as “Age of the Dinosaurs”): game size went up by 122 times, costs rose by 22x, and therefore we got six times more efficient at creating content.

So here is the simple division of dollars and bytes, on a log scale.

Suddenly what become apparent is that there’s about 10x variability in costs within a given year, most of the time. Looking at the specific data points, I can tell you that most of this can be chalked up to whether the game is content-driven or system-driven. A story-based game, an RPG, something with tons of assets, will just naturally have a higher cost. There are also some famously troubled productions on in the data set; no surprise that they tend to sit towards the upper end of the range for their respective years.

The real eye-opener is that the $5m indie mobile title and the giant $100 million AAA cross-platform extravaganza cost the same to make in terms of megabytes. (They were actually off by only 3/1000’s of a penny). That’s likely because salaries are salaries, and don’t move that much when you change segments within the industry.

More troubling to me was that eyeballing the average cost per byte, it looks like we have plateaued.

Unreal Engine 3 and Unity both launched in the 2004-5 window. I would have expected these two amazing toolchains to have hugely helped the cost per byte. Instead, it kind of looks like it went flat.

It raises the disturbing possibility that maybe standardizing on these two engines has actually blocked faster innovation on techniques that reduce cost. I don’t know what else might be contributing to the flattening of the curve. Maybe the fact that Unity and Unreal are designed around static content pipelines, and don’t do a lot more with procedural content affects this? Maybe this is actually the good result, and costs were going to boomerang back up? There’s no way to know. I even unrolled the yearly average and simply sorted the games by release year to see if I was seeing things, and if anything it looks flatter because it reduces the impact of those outliers.

Data complexity in games is a real thing, and it is something that players, I think, routinely hugely underestimate. This post by Steve Theodore on Quora is illustrative. In it he shows a 1997 character that took ten working days, then one from ten years later that took 35. His estimate for a character today is a hundred days. What used to be one 256×256 texture is now authored as many 4096×4096 textures, for specular maps, bump maps, displacement maps, etc etc.

If we take the step back, though, the real issue here is whether we can, as developers, cover that cost. So I went back through the data set and where I could, plugged in the retail MSRP in inflation-adjusted dollars. For mobile games that were pay-once titles, I used the price; for older MMOs, I ballparked it at box cost plus six months subscription on average, and where I had actual LTV for users, I plugged that in. The result told me how much players have paid for a megabyte of game over the years. Spoiler: they’re getting a deal.

“Wait!” you might say. “We don’t pay for megabytes! We pay for fun! We pay for gameplay! Not raw install! We pay for value!!!” Yeah, yeah. But in practice, development costs are correlated with bytes, not Metacritic, I think (no graph for that, but it was an easy eyeball test, plus it makes obvious sense — a bad big game still costs).

Lots of people have made the observation that in terms of raw purchasing power, players pay around half of what they used to in the 80s. You can thank our old friend inflation; I particularly like the chart here showing the effect. Well, in terms of bytes, it’s way more than half.

What are the games that poke out at having high revenues per byte? They are “evergreen” games that rely strongly on

community
user-created content
player skill (sports-like)
Unsurprisingly, most of the high data points are MMOs and service-based online games. They’re probably not as high as they look, since these are also the games most likely to rely on streaming content — but for MMOs I did try to compensate by using the total space on disk after play, so any streaming caches are included.

The kicker on this is that this hugely underreports the fall in game prices because whole segments of the industry give away the games now. Those free to play games are still delivering that many bytes to users, who just don’t pay. And yes, some whales then pay enough to cover the free players. But for the resultant data point to be equivalent to the cost per byte of an AAA game of the same size, you would need every player to have a $60 life time spend in the game. On average. Needless to say, free to play games do not tend to hit $60 average for every player who enters the game (some do, in Asia especially, believe it or not).

That’s not even mentioning other aspects of downward price pressure, such as discounts over time, bundles, or Steam sales.

Now, I’ll be totally upfront here — I don’t have nearly enough data points on costs, install sizes, and typical revenues for mobile games. So this is all sort of speculative at this point. But I don’t like the shape of this curve, especially when I compare it to the other curve, on developer costs.

These two lines are separating, as you can see. Worse, this is a log scale, so they are separating faster every year. This is a classic “make it up in volume” scenario, you see. We can afford, as an industry, for players to pay less and less as long as we can sell to more and more players.

But… at least in developed countries, we are actually close to market saturation. There is a term, “total addressable market,” which means “everyone you can actually sell to.” We crossed the “50% of people are gamers” line almost eight years ago. It’s also a well-known basic rule of marketing that users who are farther away from your core audience cost more to acquire — in other words, the farther into the world’s population we go, the more marketing money we have to spend. And remember, marketing money isn’t in these charts.

On current trendlines, here are some naive forecasts generated by the simple expedient of overlaying a ruler on my monitor:

The first forecast is that at this rate, the average game will be free in about ten more years. And given that the dataset tilts towards AAA, yeah, I mean the average AAA game. Some games will be paying you to play them. Lest this seem crazy, that’s actually already the case for any free to play game we currently consider a flop that doesn’t make back its money; we paid dev and marketing cost, you played, and we didn’t cover the costs.

The second forecast is that the way we’re going, top end AAAA productions will drag the average cost of AAA into the stratosphere. We’re talking one terabyte games that cost $250m to develop, by the early 2020s.

We need to remember that a lot of this is simply the price of advancing technology. As long as technology advances exponentially, so will costs, especially if we keep using it naively.

And by naively, I mean, focusing on pixels.

* * *

Because there are some things that may ameliorate this curve. None of them are easy. In fact, most of them have not been executed consistently and effectively over the history of gaming, and we’re outright not actually that good at them. But specific outlier games have proven that these things can work and break these curves. The thing they all have in common is that they de-emphasize bytes in favor of other types of content.

Strong community drives retention, and retention drives revenue. Community is probably the easiest thing that developers should aggressively pursue, and it’s not cheap and it’s not at all easy. I estimate typical studio learning curve on doing this to be around 3-5 years of culture change.

Designing for systemic content rather than static content. This is bad news for a lot of games that I love. My absolute favorite game of last year was What Remains of Edith Finch. I thought it was a 10/10 masterpiece marrying the narrative and systemic arts. And with my business hat on, I wonder if in ten years we will see static content games like it as viable.

Focus more on multiplayer, since players are effectively content for one another. See the “community” bucket for the difficulties here.

Shift our F2P emphasis, which currently depends on trickling content and upselling it. That content load is exactly what may kill us.

We could also embrace users generating those bytes in various fashions. UGC, using player models, customization, whatever.

Algorithmic and procedural approaches need to become dramatically more widespread. Fortunately, the academic community is way ahead of you on this one, and there are already academic papers out there on generating entire games with code. Yeah, over the long haul, that may render you the developer obsolete, but at least publishers will live on and raise a glass to your memory as they feed your brains into the training data set for their neural net designer AIs.

Speaking of which, your servers are horrendously inefficient. Speaking as an old MMO guy, you are probably vastly underutilizing CPU simply because of libraries, containers, VMs, virtualization, and hugely inefficient web stack stuff. Try pretending that you need to host 5,000 instances of your online match-3 RPG on a Pentium box from 1999. It can be done. It might bend the curve.

Raising prices is the most obvious. Nobody wants to do this. It will probably happen anyway.

The other, similar, thing to do is make less games.

* * *

To the players out there: I know none of the above is stuff you necessarily want to hear. Trust me, a lot of it is not stuff developers want to hear either. If you want to preserve the games you love, you can help by not pirating, by supporting developers, by not tearing them down on social media and calling them inept greedy bastards, and most of all by just understanding the landscape.

And if you are a developer, the best advice I can give you is this… this world isn’t fully here now, but the trends are pretty dramatic in my opinion. So you should do some skill-building while you can.

Think of the whole industry as a mature market. We’re running out of platforms shifts that reset costs.
Get good at systemic design, design for retention, design for community. Basically, think like an MMO developer. Yeah, that means designing everything as games as a service.
Embrace procedurality.
But also embrace brand-building and marketing, because you ain’t gonna survive without it. This market is going keep getting more crowded.
And frankly, I think individual contributors need to start finding ways to get on-going revenue from older games. Because that world is also one where individual contributors become more and more interchangeable.

Now — it may well be that this data set is utterly inadequate. I invite more data points (submitted anonymously), especially from indie, free to play, and mobile. I’d need game name or unique identifier (so I can de-dupe), total development cost excluding marketing, year of release, and platform. I’d like total size of install or data generated and delivered to player as well.

Of course, this would be better if some web wizard built a website that supported anonymous submission of these data points as an industry service, and generated these graphs on the fly. Because this is not an issue that should pit developer against publisher, publisher against player. This is about the sustainability of the hobby we all love and that pays bills, keeps us sane, and sometimes drives us a little crazy.（source：Gamasutra  ）