May Contain Nuts

I wonder: what sort of technological, marketplace, or other financial innovations would make it possible for “cult” franchises like Firefly and Uru to be more financially viable in the future? Both have large fan bases, and both have seen, as far as I can tell, remarkably marginal returns in the market despite the rabidness with which their constituents adhere to them. These products contain content that is by no means inexpensive to produce. In the case of Firefly/Serenity, there’s actors (not quite big-time ones like Harrison Ford, but certainly able to command sizable salaries), writers, camera crews, set builders, support staff, marketing, effects shops full of their own staffs… that’s a metric ton of money to be throwing at something like this. In Uru’s case, you’ve got artists, animators, programmers, designers, concept artists, story writers, marketing, customer service staff… again, loads and loads of money that needs to be spent for this sort of content. The sort of money that, when not made back quickly, makes investors or other financial buoys (like publishers) nervous.

Niche markets are getting harder and harder to tap, it seems, despite the increasing interconnectedness of experiences that one would think would make it easier to reach those niches, and the amount of money required to create high-quality entertainment capable of not only attracting but retaining the people who make up that target market is ever-increasing. You can’t make a Firefly or Uru with $50,000 in the bank (which by itself is a rather substantial chunk of change), and you certainly can’t sustain it that way. These are multi-million-dollar products, and you need to find a market for them quickly, and be able to hold onto that market, or you’re screwed, no matter how many loyal fans you have who will follow you to Hell and back if you promise them a fruit cup.

It’s incredibly frustrating to see quality franchises suffer at the hands of the Almighty Dollar just because not enough people are interested in it to make it financially viable. Not only is it frustrating, it’s also rather scary, speaking as someone who wants to do this sort of thing for a living before I die. Especially in the case of video games that don’t find their market fast enough, it’s ridiculously frustrating, because video games are themselves still a niche market (I think the biggest reason games cost $40-$60 a pop is because of their limited market… though as it expands and the prices fail to drop, the industry has managed to overtake motion pictures in revenue… go figure). A product like Myst or Uru that has the ability to break out of the traditionally-held limitations of the gaming industry’s demographics should be able to (and did, once) make substantially more in sales than products like Call of Duty, or even Halo, which has of course proven to be more popular than God. And yet, such products languish in obscurity, attracting only a niche group of an already niche market dominated by a demographic more inclined towards faster-paced, more aggressive gameplay, and failing to reach those who decry video games as nothing but murder and “virtual orgasmic rape” simulators (not so much NSFW as just incredibly, horribly frustrating).

There’s something about this whole situation that makes me wish that there were some way of more cheaply developing quality entertainment products that only manage to appeal to a narrow cross-section of the market (or that only manage to reach a narrow cross-section of the market that you know would find it appealing). Whether it’s through something ridiculously socialist like subsidies from whatever governmental organization could be seen as supporting this sort of thing (or, ideally, just making Blizzard share some of the billions of dollars in revenue that WoW generates… no, I’m not bitter, shut up), or through some other innovation in the market itself that makes these sorts of products available to anyone at reasonable prices with the majority of the revenue going to the developers and not the distributors, I feel that something needs to happen, especially in the video game industry, whose generally-accepted concept of innovation seems to be “Mario64, but in space”, “Like Halo 3, but with chainsaws”, “WoW 2″, and “System Shock 2: Underwater” (shocking). I may be watching a bit too much Zero Punctuation…

It could be (and certainly has been) said that as far as something like Uru goes, there was more in play than just lack of audience, and I think I’ve got a whole post full of things to say about what I’ve learned from Uru as a developer, but despite its numerous setbacks, cancellations, and stutters, it’s still a unique approach to interactive entertainment, and I wish there were more people willing to throw copious amounts of cash at it to make it what it really could be. And maybe that’s the solution to this whole thing in the end: finding people with plenty of money to spend funding crazy-awesome ideas that may not be the most wildly successful product in history, and hooking them up with people who have crazy-awesome ideas for niche products in need of said cash.

Now how the hell do we do that?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 11:21 am and is filed under Computing, Game Development, Movies, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.