There aren’t many of these high-budget games,” he said. Only about 60 games sold more than 1 million units last year, according to Cerny, and a game produced on a relatively thrifty $20 million budget has a much better chance of being profitable in that environment. But he’s not sure publishers can staunch the spending spree.
“There’s no intrinsic value to a $50 million game,” Cerny said. He likened the situation to Hollywood, where the cost of making summer tent-pole films has spiraled upward in the last decade. Waterworld was widely mocked for its $175 million budget in 1995, but that kind of money is routinely spent on big films today.
The trouble, Cerny said, is that the games industry has learned how to spend big gobs of money just like those movie moguls.
“In 1994, if someone had given me $20 million, I would have had no idea how to spend it,” he said, but game teams have become bloated with superspecialized jobs these days.
To pare these groups back to only the essential members would be a daunting task, he said, but there’s a silver lining: The rapid advance of game console technology seems to have slowed down. New game machines won’t materialize for a while, and anything that comes out probably won’t be as radical a leap in power as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were over the previous generation of consoles.
“We can take time now to learn our craft,” said Cerny. “To learn what is important to spend money on, and what isn’t.