Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 11 August 2009 11:18
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
MB: Do you think development studios have had to “re-tool” greatly to that way of thinking, or are there parallel processes between the more complex and bite-sized games?
TC: It is more of a mind-set shift, certainly at Tantalus we’ve focussed a lot on hand-held, but more on bigger scale games, so games with a budget in excess of a million dollars, a big team working for a sustained period of time to produce something that ultimately sits in a box on a shelf, and you hope like hell that at least four hundred thousand people are going to buy it, otherwise everybody is losing money.
TC: That model compared to the digital distribution model works completely different, you’ve got fewer barriers to entry in terms of licensing costs, cost of manufacture and obviously distribution costs, but by the same token, at the moment the market is smaller. So you’ve got to weigh that up when you consider which horse to bet on. At Tantalus at present, and I know a lot of other studios are in the same boat, we are trying to put a fit in either camp, you want to continue making games for your core business, so the DS or PSP, but you don’t want to be left behind, so you want to be working on some iPhone titles and some digital distribution titles maybe for DS as well.
MB: Well even those traditional outlets, the new PSP Go! more prominently, but even the DSi with its DSi-Ware, think that digital downloads are the future, as far as distribution is concerned.
TC: Well I think we all know that it is the future, isn’t it? It is a matter of when; in the meantime you do the best you can in both spaces.
MB: The government’s proposed ISP filter is turning its eye towards, in particular, digital distribution and import sites for unclassified games. How does that idea sit with Aussie developers in particular?
TC: Well it’s a joke isn’t it? We are once again caught in this awful, ridiculous web of the antiquated classification system that we all have to endure. Here in Australia the sooner that changes, the better; it is obviously a battle to ensure common sense prevails. We will get there eventually, but in the meantime as gamers in Australia we suffer, and to be honest we are embarrassed at how backward our government is...
MB: Do you see any chinks in the armour there?
TC: Well the way I look at it, ultimately the war is won, we will get there in the end, and it’s just a matter of counting the days until common sense prevails.
MB: For those people listening that don’t understand the Australian game classification system, can you just explain what the problem is there?
TC: Absolutely, the biggest problem we have here in Australia is that we don’t have an R classification for video games. At the moment, the highest a game can be classified is M [MA 15+] which means you need to be 15 years or over to buy it. It’s ridiculous because it assumes that games are fundamentally different to film and outrageous in that it assumes that adults shouldn’t be allowed to access adult content in video games. And of course it is a fundamentally broken system in that games that should be classified R being shoehorned into the [MA 15+] classification, which means you get a 16 or 15 year old, who really shouldn’t be able to play a particular type of game actually able to play that game, under the age of 18.
TC: It is really because of complex constitutional reasons that this law hasn’t been changed, and ultimately it will, but it is the bane of our existence until the day it is overturned.
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