How do you make an innovative, single player new IP sell in 2017?

So all the news at the moment is how games are becoming a 'service', stuffers with loot boxes, microtransactions and season passes in order to milk the customer for every last penny they have. It's ruining going as we know it. But....

Think about it from the games publisher's perspective for a moment. They're offered two options, one of which will guarantee them a shedload of cash and the other which may get critical acclaim but fail to turn a profit. You can't really blame them for taking the easy option. We're in an age where companies around the world are squeezing the life out of every industry trying to make a fast buck. Retail business are turning to self scan shopping so they don't have to pay till staff. There are job cuts across the country. Zero hours contracts are the norm. It's a money driven world unfortunately.

So yeah, I guess what I'm asking is, how do we take the idea of a single player game, the kind that everyone is asking for, and make it guaranteed to turn a profit. We've been over the idea that these loot boxes or 'game enhancers' are ruining titles left right and centre, but where else is the money coming from? I'm assuming obviously that your game isn't GTA 6 and selling billions of copies.

Thoughts?

Please, Please, Please don't make it crushingly hard just for the sake of it being crushingly hard so some elitists can say I need to "Get gud" just to be able to see level 3 of a game I've paid good money for.
By all means have a balls to the wall hard mode for the ultra hardcore who can then boast about how hardcore they are but for us mere mortals make a mode we can at least have some kind of chance at beating.

Last edited by Peter Crisp on Wed Oct 18, 2017 3:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I may be in a minority here and this may be a terrible idea but I'd like an upgraded version of the settlement building idea from Fallout 4. Having a nice relaxing town builder with some real effort and love put in by the developer could be a real time sink but on the other hand don't end up going down the road of having tilesets held back for future DLC or lootboxes.
I'd honestly pay £40 for a full fat town builder with loads of building options and large building spaces.

I think this topic deserves a sticky as it's a pretty great space to just fling about ideas.

more heat than light wrote:They're offered two options, one of which will guarantee them a shedload of cash and the other which may get critical acclaim but fail to turn a profit.

Not guaranteed in the slightest. You don't have to look far for clear failures - look at Battleborn in contrast to Overwatch as an example. There are also successful singleplayer games.

I don't think we should conflate this with new IPs either. New IPs being riskier than established franchises is a separate discussion.

I think what we need really is a resurgence in mid-tier games. Lower production costs, and combine that with a longer tail in game price drops. Launch at £40 but stay at that price point longer, rather than launching at £60 and dropping to £10 within a few months.

I definitely agree with lower launch prices, although that can often have an air of 'we're sending this out to die'. I'd certainly be happy with a two-time pricing structure, bigger AAA titles with massive campaigns and extensive multiplayer modes coming in at a higher price and more innovative shorter experiences launching at half the price. If that became the norm I think it might make people more likely to give something different a try.

It would be interesting to know how much profit games like Zelda, Mario, Tomb Raider, Horizon, The Last of Us, Far Cry, etc make. It has to be still worthwhile, otherwise we wouldn't see these games released, but I accept some of them are more the exception than the rule. The 'problem' comes when you see just how much money can be made if you go down the micro-transaction, 'game as a service' model. Some of the figures are insane. I think now that side of it is really taking off, we'll see a glut of games try and shoehorn the model in, but not everything will work well with that model, and not all of the games will be successful. There'll always be a market for quality single-player titles, but they may become fewer and further between, at least while developers (and moreso publishers) experiment. Good single-player games don't have to be big budget either, as many indie games and smaller-team games have shown. Budgets and team sizes can't just keep growing, so there'll be a tipping point somewhere with that, but it hopefully comes at the expense of fewer 'AAA' games (i.e. fewer and further between) rather than pumping them out quite so often or cutting jobs/closing studios.

I hope that the techniques for indie games gets cheaper so that we can get immersive experiences at that level. I love a point and click adventure and the fact that they are relatively cheap to make means that the past few years have seen more of them since the LucasArt heyday.

Gemini73

For a start they could actually put more effort into single player campaigns with engaging story telling and design rather just focussing on games that are nothing more than "'service stuffers with loot boxes, microtransactions and season passes" dressed up in eye candy.

We need to rethink how we handle the cost of game development as an industry. At the moment we have small teams making indie games with low development costs, and very large teams making very expensive AAA games that need abusive practises like microtransactions to drive a level of profit that is acceptable for the size of investment. Outside of perhaps Nintendo (I'm thinking of the groups they have making stuff like Captain Toad), where are the medium-size teams making medium-budget games for modest returns?

Be responsible with a budget. Before you even get to the game itself, you have to consider the size of the studio and even where that studio is located, as that will be a driving factor behind how much it can cost to make and adjusting the budget responsibly. From there, have some restraint. If the idea is SP, keep it SP, don't shoehorn in some co-op or multiplayer stuff that will only add to costs and hinder development. Frankly, I believe a huge part of making something a 'success' begins well before a concept is even decided on. Poor business management is the silent killer here.

It's simple. Games should be more expensive. I'm not even joking.

How did Horizon: Zero Dawn do commercially? That's a new IP single player game that was released in 2017. Did it have lootboxes or season passes/DLC?

Preezy wrote:How did Horizon: Zero Dawn do commercially? That's a new IP single player game that was released in 2017. Did it have lootboxes or season passes/DLC?

It did well.

It didn't have lootboxes or a season pass.

DLC is out in a few weeks.

jiggles wrote:
Preezy wrote:How did Horizon: Zero Dawn do commercially? That's a new IP single player game that was released in 2017. Did it have lootboxes or season passes/DLC?

It did well.

It didn't have lootboxes or a season pass.

DLC is out in a few weeks.

Interesting. That was the only game I could think of off the top of my head this year, I'm sure there are other examples, but I guess it shows that it can be done. Probably helps that it had major backing from Sony and was advertised all over the place, their marketing budget must have been huge. Not all studios have that sort of help.

Wouldn't describe Horizon as innovative though.

Lotus wrote:It would be interesting to know how much profit games like Zelda, Mario, Tomb Raider, Horizon, The Last of Us, Far Cry, etc make. It has to be still worthwhile, otherwise we wouldn't see these games released,

Worth keeping in mind that some of these games are not free from these other practices. TLOU has multiplayer with loads of DLC tat. Zelda has its amiibo support and season pass. TR had pre-order bonuses, outfits, instant unlocks to skills and gear upgrades and map packs and characters for multiplayer.

Peter Crisp wrote:I'd honestly pay £40 for a full fat town builder with loads of building options and large building spaces.

Isn't that basically Cities: Skylines which has come to consoles this year?

Karl wrote:We need to rethink how we handle the cost of game development as an industry. At the moment we have small teams making indie games with low development costs, and very large teams making very expensive AAA games that need abusive practises like microtransactions to drive a level of profit that is acceptable for the size of investment. Outside of perhaps Nintendo (I'm thinking of the groups they have making stuff like Captain Toad), where are the medium-size teams making medium-budget games for modest returns?

I'd argue quite a few already exist. Studios like Paradox and chums, Larian, Obsidian (now that they're going it alone) and Tripwire. They all make polished, full featured games that you wouldn't really consider 'indie' in the modern sense (even though most of them are). I suppose what you'd call A or AA games. They just all seem to be very PC focused companies, and none of them really make traditional single player games. They all cater to niches that for the most part only exist on PC (or wouldn't be financially viable on console).

I don't know if there's a place for games like that on console. I guess Hellblade was a recent example of a studio trying something exactly like this, but I don't know how well it's done. It's just a shame that no matter how well they did licenses like Star Wars are never going to go to such teams.

HSH28 wrote:
Peter Crisp wrote:I'd honestly pay £40 for a full fat town builder with loads of building options and large building spaces.

Isn't that basically Cities: Skylines which has come to consoles this year?

Nope.
Cities is a city builder while the settlement building in Fallout 4 was about building unique individual buildings and furnishing them to create a small settlement fit for maybe 50 people at most. Things like castles or pubs can be created but it's nothing like Cities: Skylines.

Mafro wrote:Wouldn't describe Horizon as innovative though.

Massive Dinosaurbots aren't innovative? Heretic.

How do you make an innovative, single player new IP sell in 2017?

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