Some cool general Games Facts
I've never been a 'games-crazed nut', I must say. However, by having a 12 year old brother and being close with a games-wizz cousin who recently moved to London to work for Sony on PS3 games, I have been extremely exposed to them and been taught some very cool little facts!
The games industry itself is considered to have started in 1971 with Pong, which is held to be the first widely-available computer game (there were games before that but generally not publicly available), and has grown to be worth about US$7 billion in the US alone in 2005. That's huge!
Microsoft's XBox game Halo 2 sold US$125 million worth of copies on only its first day!! That was higher than any film's first-day box-office takings, proving what was said in the lecture about the games industry out-selling the film industry!
What I thought was awesome is that the biggest-selling PC game of all time is The Sims, which has sold 58 million copies since its release in February 2000. The Sims is one game that I must say I did get addicted to for a while. Apparently it's considered to owe most of its success to its cross-gender and cross-age appeal, which makes sense I guess.
The game industry is said to be similar to the book industry in that the market is controlled by a number of large publishers, who control production and distribution of the product. Studios (which may be independent, signed to a publisher, owned by a publisher, or internal) produce games which are then produced, marketed and distributed by a publisher (or by the studio itself in the case of independent studios). Interesting stuff! Early games were made by only one programmer and progressed through small teams of three or five compared to today's 100+ people teams, haha.
A single top-tier game typically takes between 2 and 5 years to develop with teams ranging in size from 20 to 100+. the team is diverse, comprising programmers, artists (characters, environments, visual effects), animators, producers, designers, AND sound engineers. A significant number of new titles are based on popular movies (e.g. Shrek), books (e.g. Harry Potter) and tv shows (Dragonball Z, etc etc etc), as most of us know. This is all attempting to "cash-in" on the success and marketing of the other formats, similar to the DVD special features etc discussed last week!
A significant market also exists for so-called 'casual' games, which are generally designed to be simple, fun and appealing to the mass-market. Often made by "indie" developers, these are fast to produce and generally have lower production values, but emphasise the fun factor over hyper-realism. The market for games consoles is currently dominated by three large companies - Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Each has a so-called "next-generation" console either recently released (Microsoft's XBox360 and Nintendo's Wii) or coming soon (Sony's Playstation 3). Sony is largely held to have been the "winner" of the previous generation of consoles with its Playstation 2 as it significantly outsold XBox and Nintendo's GameCube. As my cousin mentioned above will never let me forget!
The games industry itself is considered to have started in 1971 with Pong, which is held to be the first widely-available computer game (there were games before that but generally not publicly available), and has grown to be worth about US$7 billion in the US alone in 2005. That's huge!
Microsoft's XBox game Halo 2 sold US$125 million worth of copies on only its first day!! That was higher than any film's first-day box-office takings, proving what was said in the lecture about the games industry out-selling the film industry!
What I thought was awesome is that the biggest-selling PC game of all time is The Sims, which has sold 58 million copies since its release in February 2000. The Sims is one game that I must say I did get addicted to for a while. Apparently it's considered to owe most of its success to its cross-gender and cross-age appeal, which makes sense I guess.
The game industry is said to be similar to the book industry in that the market is controlled by a number of large publishers, who control production and distribution of the product. Studios (which may be independent, signed to a publisher, owned by a publisher, or internal) produce games which are then produced, marketed and distributed by a publisher (or by the studio itself in the case of independent studios). Interesting stuff! Early games were made by only one programmer and progressed through small teams of three or five compared to today's 100+ people teams, haha.
A single top-tier game typically takes between 2 and 5 years to develop with teams ranging in size from 20 to 100+. the team is diverse, comprising programmers, artists (characters, environments, visual effects), animators, producers, designers, AND sound engineers. A significant number of new titles are based on popular movies (e.g. Shrek), books (e.g. Harry Potter) and tv shows (Dragonball Z, etc etc etc), as most of us know. This is all attempting to "cash-in" on the success and marketing of the other formats, similar to the DVD special features etc discussed last week!
A significant market also exists for so-called 'casual' games, which are generally designed to be simple, fun and appealing to the mass-market. Often made by "indie" developers, these are fast to produce and generally have lower production values, but emphasise the fun factor over hyper-realism. The market for games consoles is currently dominated by three large companies - Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Each has a so-called "next-generation" console either recently released (Microsoft's XBox360 and Nintendo's Wii) or coming soon (Sony's Playstation 3). Sony is largely held to have been the "winner" of the previous generation of consoles with its Playstation 2 as it significantly outsold XBox and Nintendo's GameCube. As my cousin mentioned above will never let me forget!
posted by Anonymous at 12:06 am
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