The Growing Behemoth

The gaming notion has certainly changed in such a short amount of time. Before, computer games were aimed at young geeks and nerds, now everyone is now able to join the fun. Such changes are the result of a successful and growing industry, which now joins the ranks of the other large media industries: film and music.
As mentioned before in the blog post about the history of games the very first few games never were intended to be sold commercially, they were just small fun experiments. Only around the 70s games were seen to have good commercial value as they became culturally popular as home computers just began to become widely available. The industry established itself and grew along with the advancement of computing technology.

It was in these very early days development costs were low, thus video games could be quite profitable. Games developed a small team could sell hundreds of thousands of copies each. Many games only took a few months to develop, so developers could release several titles each year. As computing power increased, so too did the size of development teams, as a larger staff was needed to address the ever increasing programming complexities. Now some games cost millions to develop, even when middleware and pre-built game engines are being used. It sometimes several years to fully develop a game.

As we all know the video game industry is a juggernaut, however it is still maturing. While it may sound fine and dandy to some the video game industry is riddled with problems. Video game industry practices are similar to those of other entertainment industries, but the video game industry in particular is often accused of treating developers poorly. Typically, developers receive a royalty of around 20% of the sales profits, and the rest goes to the publisher. For some publishers instead of dividing royalties they buy out the development studio. This often leads to some developers to leave and form a new company and then work independently, only to grow and get swallowed up by a publisher (the nasty cycle repeats).

Just thinking about it is scary considering it is only a matter of time before I end up working in the industry, but that's what you get in a capitalist society. As Mike has accurately put it, at the end of the day we're just going to be 'industry fodder'.