P1 - FBY JORDAN MOORE

THE ‘TENT POLE’ BUSINESS MODEL

• This is when the publisher releases at least one big-budget blockbuster game and then uses the money that they make off-of this game to invest into riskier and more creative projects.

• An example of this is the Grand Theft Auto franchise which brings in a lot of revenue for Rockstar which allows them to invest in smaller games such as ‘Bully’, ‘LA Noire’ and ‘Agent’ which in-turn allows them to diversify their content.

• A disadvantage of using this method is that the developers are gambling on the big –budget game that they have released to be a success. An example of this method turning out badly was when EA released “Spore”. The game sold 1 million copies in just 17 days but due to the development costs being so large; EA didn’t make its money back for another 5 years.

THE HOLLYWOOD MODEL

• This is when developers will actually contract out parts of the game (i.e. art, car physics, quality assurance) to rival companies in an attempt to lower development costs.. This means instead of having a permanent full-time development team of 50+ people, they will instead only need a development team of around 10-20 people who will piece the work together that is under-taken by specialist external teams.

• This development team would need to include specialists such as programmers, game designers, script writers etc.

INDEPENDENT GAME DEVELOPMENT

• In the past; the game development industry was a tough business which would usually require developers to have a publishing contract in order to publish games so that they could pay the licence fee for releasing a game. However, in the modern era of gaming a new sector of games has risen; indie games (thanks to things such as the App Store and the Xbox Live Market Place). The term “indie” is short for independent as these games are fully independent games that are usually only created by small studios with a small amount of employees.

• An example of an indie game that has done extremely well in recent years is Minecraft. The game is an open-world sandbox and was made by a small studio known as Mojang and the game quickly rose to become one of the most downloaded games on Xbox, PS4 and PC.

DEVELOPING FOR THE IPHONE

• In February 2008, Apple released a software development kit known “iPhone SDK”. This is a free download that is targeted at third-party developers so that they can upload apps onto the App Store. However, they must also be enrolled in the iPhone Developer program which requires a monthly payment of $99 a year which allows you to upload your apps to the App Store via iPhone SDK.

• A prime example of this is Doodle Jump which was released on both iPhone and Android in April 2009 and currently has over 4 million downloads worldwide. The developers of this game would have had to pay a monthly fee of $99 a year to upload their game to the App Store.