Mike Bantick
Saturday, 22 November 2008 03:18
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Having attended a number of presentations over the past three days at Game Connect Asia, there are some trends emerging in the game development industry, with a focus on garnering future markets. In many ways traditional hard-core gamers might be upset.
Over the course of the past days I have attended many discussions about the business of making games. Attending Game Connect Asia Pacific in stormy Brisbane, with an international and local group of game developer hard-hitters has seen a definite trend emerge.
Mary-Beth Haggerty, senior industry manager from AutoDesk, gave a buoyant, possibly slightly misguided assessment of the industry as it stands today. Quoting US figures of 43 percent growth in 2006-2007 as well as a 104 percent increase in the last five years, the game industry, financially, is booming.
Even recently during October Haggerty quoted how retail sales had actually dropped 5.6 percent in the US year over year, yet for the same month, gaming sales rose by 18 percent, bucking the general trend.
Speaking about the recent history of game development, Haggerty dragged up an example of Unreal tournament on the three PlayStation platforms, On PSOne a character consisted of 561 polygons, on PS2 2500 polygons and on PS3 2 million poly-mesh on a 12 thousand poly base. “I don’t know how many of you are artists in this room, but this has got to be frightening for the next one” Haggerty said to the audience.
Of course this is a good trend for a company like Autodesk whose, almost monopoly of the 3D graphical tool market would benefit from further expansion of graphical requirements.
It’s not all good news though; game development costs are beginning to eat into the revenue. As game development scales up, costs increase and time to market becomes an issue. Developers need to outsource much of their work to external companies, causing further complexity.
Continued on PAGE 2
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