How Sales Stop Progression

Written by Ned on Sep 14, 2011

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That seems to be the general attitude of gamers and developers alike for the last several years. The cost of development has gone up, as well as the number of ignorant buyers. Are you going to get the next Call of Duty game fully aware that the game engine has hardly seen a tweak since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare? Making a few map variations, weapon adjustments, kill streak additions, and periodically adding zombies seems to be the formula for creating the number one selling franchise worldwide.

Call of Duty is just one example. Rather than updating their engines between games, the majority of companies seem content to fall back on their original engines for each sequel. For a large part, Epic’s Unreal Engines seem to be the gaming standard for this generation. Not that incredible games can’t be made this way, but relentlessly pushing the available hardware to its limits has become a rare aspiration.

Another, albeit small reason, is that developers fear a lack of sales when pushing content past the volume of a single disc, or adding features that could only be available on one competing console. Microsoft’s demands state that “Should content not be shipped simultaneously with competing platforms in all regions where the content is available, or should the content and features available on the Xbox 360 not be in parity with versions on competing platforms, then Microsoft reserves the right to not allow that content to be published for Xbox 360 or released on Xbox Live marketplace.” One of Microsoft’s fairly strict retail policies for independent and some major companies is that if content arrives on a Sony platform first or has more content on a Sony platform, Microsoft won’t publish it. Of course, there are exceptions, but this is just another example of how developers are limited to the confines of one console at the risk of losing well over half of their potential consumers.

This isn’t a bash on Microsoft, it’s just a rant about common sense and dollar signs. It does, however, break my heart a little as each sub-par game is released, proving each time that most developers have no reason to try their hardest to bring us the highest quality entertainment this generation has to offer. As consumers, it’s really our own fault.

14 Comments

Responses to How Sales Stop Progression

Clark on Sep 14, 2011
I love how liking Call of Duty has become somewhat of an insult amongst gamers. Any time somebody rags on a different franchise, the retaliation is, "Go back to your Call of Duties, loser."

The thing is, Call of Duty is still an impressive technical feat, and I'm sure updating it involves more than just changing a few lines of code here and there.

Every game company is guilty of milking a franchise, though, and releasing too many sequels too soon. In the same console generation, we're seeing three Gears of Wars, three Uncharted games, and three Mario & Sonic at the Olympics. And these were supposed to be new, "revolutionary" IPs! But nobody's complaining about them. Well, Mario & Sonic, maybe...
Ned on Sep 14, 2011
No one said any game is not a technical feat. Just that many game's engine's aren't being updated with completely revamped graphics, environmental interactions, and the more lifelike effects that can now be achieved. Gears of War, Uncharted, Crisis, and Battlefield are examples of the few games whose developers keep pushing the bar as far as they can.
Clark on Sep 14, 2011
But you're suggesting that Call of Duty's game engine never gets updated. In actuality, it looks like Call of Duty's IW 3.0 engine was used for three games, IW 4.0 was used for one, and IW 5.0 will be the basis for Modern Warfare 3. So it's getting updated. They just happened to get a lot of mileage out of 3.0.

I have no problem with developers reusing a game engine, though, if the content of a game is different enough to set itself apart from its predecessors. I don't play Call of Duty, so I can't speak from experience, but I would imagine that if the sequels were really that minimal, people would have caught on by now and stopped buying them.
Ned on Sep 14, 2011
I wasn't aware of IW 5.0, so we'll see how that goes, but IW 4.0 wasn't special enough to use in Black Ops. Companies that use the same engines to cash out are lazy (and rich) suckers. It's insulting, and it holds the industry back.

The point is that it takes a constant effort and major upgrades to consistently squeeze the capabilities out of current generation hardware, and developers have no reason to put forth that effort.
Clark on Sep 14, 2011
Asking a company to redo its game engine for every sequel is a pretty steep demand. That's got to be costly. There is a lot you can change within the same framework to make a sequel different, anyway. I mean, how many unique games have we seen that use the Unreal engine? Are all of them lazy, because they didn't build it from the ground up?
Ned on Sep 14, 2011
I think competition should result in increasingly technologically advanced engines, yes. The competition is just too dry right now. Why try when only the minority are doing it and their games don't sell any better? It's a stale period for games technologically.

I do see a change in the wind starting this fall, hopefully.
Joe on Sep 14, 2011
From what I understand a game engine is just code on how things work in a game. How the characters walk, look, move, etc. While the Unreal 3 engine is one of the most widely used, it hardly makes or breaks a game. Nor does it denote similar games. The Bioshock series, Borderlands, Arkham Asylum, and the new Mortal Kombat game all used that engine. IMHO, those are A+ games and all different Rewriting a game engine every time you want to make a game isn't lazy so much as it is efficient and cost friendly.

There are different attitudes with using a written engine. One is to not have to reinvent the wheel every time so that the developers can focus on making the gameplay more unique rather than making sure the characters don't glitch and fall through invisible holes in the floor.

Or it can totally be a cost issue, especially in the case of movie games (like Wolverine: Origins) where the games have expected low sales, the point it to make money for the publishers.

While some of the best games out there that I love have their own engines, I hardly think that is what makes the game good, bad, innovative, cookie cutter, lazy, or a masterpiece. I would like to think that developers are using premade engine code so as to focus on making new experiences better.
Joe on Sep 14, 2011
But in the end the industry has seen massive layoffs in the last few years and many, many developers have had to complete shut down or sell-out. There is a lot of risk in trying something new and innovative. Sometimes it pays off extremely well like with Dark Soul's and sometimes it can cause companies to shut down like with APB. Most publisher's don't allow developer's to make whatever they want. It's the same reason producers and movie execs make most book and video game adaptation movies suck hard. They change them to make them more generic to appeal to wider audiences to make the most money possible. Blockbusting Video games don't have as much freedom as we would like.
Ned on Sep 16, 2011
I fully agree that fantastic and fun games can, and are, being made on existing engines in a very cost effective way. And it's a shame that innovative games get shut down.

This article is about how high game sales, and business sense are keeping developers from "relentlessly pushing the available hardware to it's limits." You made some fine points.

Let's hope that the more sophisticated engines showcasing over the next several months start a bit of a revolution and developers as well as consumers realize that it's time to take things up a notch. Let's push these technological boundaries all the way and see what these devices can REALLY do.
Ned on Sep 16, 2011
@Joe, I should have put your points in the article as well. Layoffs and designing your own engine are huge expenses. As you said developers "don't have as much freedom as we would like."
Joe on Sep 16, 2011
As most big game companies have several developing teams, I think it would be cool, or perhaps it is this way, if there was always a team dedicated to exploring and pushing hardware limits without regard to commercial success, which I believe is what you were getting at. Maxing out the consoles'. If it is just about making new and unconvential games, I'm pretty sure that between Steam, XBLA, and the PSN, the indie game developers covering that nice rather well.
Clark on Sep 17, 2011
I get the point of your article now. I think the problem is that this console generation has lasted too long. Not that I'm complaining. I'm happy the 360 and PS3 have seen so many games. Kinect and Move have especially helped these consoles extend their lifespan. But I wouldn't be surprised if some developers already have their hands on early builds of the next hardware and are hard at work creating new engines for them.
Ned on Sep 23, 2011
I love Naughty Dog and what they've done for the industry. I look at the progression between each of their engines and it blows my mind. Wind, rain, waterfalls, pools, splashes, drips, flames, dust, sand, snow, etc. There seems to be no end to how far they will push the graphics on "living" elements. Lighting, shadows, reflections, depth, the list goes on. The E3 demo of Uncharted 3 showed objects rolling in real physics in relation to the waves beating against the sides of a cruise ship. Even the water in the swimming pool rushed back and forth realistically. These physics would also respond to objects as you or the NPCs bumped into them. A swinging chandelier bounced light and bent shadows off the environment with each crashing wave. That was all shown within just a few minutes of a game that will actually be set in a desert.

If Naughty Dog can squeeze such sweet juice from the current consoles, surely others could too.
Joe on Sep 23, 2011
I don't know if you are interested in Skyrim at all, but you should see the leaps and bounds they are making over Oblivion. It's kind of insane.

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How Sales Stop Progression

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