Lessons From The Game Industry : Innovation Fails
While I’m a programmer first and foremost, I’ve spent years working in small agencies where you need to find money or you’re out of a job. Now that I’m on my own as the owner of Techniconseils, I still love to analyze business trends and see where things are going. Today’s post is about the game industry and the lessons we can learn from it.
Just like anything else, that industry has been hit hard by the current recession but there’s something fairly interesting that’s happened over the last few years. In that industry, there are 2 huge publishers, Electronic Arts and Activision. For several years up until about 2 years ago, EA was known as the “evil” one because it kept rehashing game ideas and coming up with sequels years after years. About 2 years ago the John Riccitiello (a former CEO) came back and decided to change things around and make EA a more innovative company, betting that the new titles would outsell the sequels.
Around the same time, Activision decided to go the other way and pump out sequels at an alarming rate. Innovative games like Guitar Hero went from cool game to major franchise with 2-3 releases a year. Activision now treats any game as a franchise and if your game is not something they can pump out every year then it’s not a game they want.
As with everything, you have to balance the “right thing” versus the business decision. Today, after 2 years, it seems clear that EA’s strategy of supporting new franchises and new innovative games has mostly fail. Contrast the huge successes of Guitar Hero and Call of Duty with the very slow sales of EA’s Mirror Edge, Dead Space and Brutal Legend and you get a better understanding of why EA had to lay off 1500 people this year.
So what does that mean for us indie developers? Does that apply to the iPhone market for example? Well, it could be argued that coming up with Tap Tap Revolution 3 is probably a safer bet than a completely new game. As an indie developer, my first instinct is always to do the right thing, but there’s no denying that perhaps the right business decision is not always the “right thing” to do.
How do you balance your business decisions?