Reading week 2

Creating a game is a fine process involving a lot of people, and where there are people involved, there is also room for errors, miscalculations and misinterpretation.

Games don't make themselves. Therefore the employees need to be paid. In order for a game to be profitable, it must first sell a minimum amount of copies just to cover the production costs. A lot of companies exceed their deadlines and overrun their funds because of non-realistic approximations of the production costs. A mistake made fairly often is implementing too many features, resulting in poor implementation to meet deadline expectation. Therefore many games end up being released too little, too late and fail to turn in profit.

An important part of the game creation process is is pre-production. Pre-production refers to the phase preceded by the actual developing phase, in which the ideas and concepts take shape, and decisions are made about every aspect of the game. The pre-production phase is materialized in a demo, that showcases the core aspects of the game like graphics, music, effects, and mainly gameplay and playability. Big companies like Microsoft and Eidos understand the importance of pre-production and pay their employees during this stage. Sadly, in most of today's games, pre-production occupies less than 1/4 of the production space it should, resulting in a large number of poor quality or cancelled projects.

Another challenging aspect of game development is the rapidly evolving environment. In relation to other entertainment industries, computer technology is one of the fastest advancing fields; therefore game developments need to find the right balance between meeting technology expectations, and compatibility with older users. Console games however do not have to deal with these variables, because the game is developed specifically for that system, and the developers know exactly what the system is capable of in terms of processing power and constraints.

Because of the magnitude of the process, game development is very risky and involves a lot of variable and factors that could go wrong, however this could turn out in a very profitable investment. There are some general guidelines, but I guess it's up to every developer to come up with his own methods and hope their game will be a hit. Unless however, you don't plan to make profit and make the game in your spare time as a hobby.