Raph Koster to game biz: evolve or die

AUSTIN, Texas--For his session at the Austin Game Conference, Raph Koster used dinosaurs (and their eventual extinction) as a metaphor for today's game industry. He warned that a shakeout is coming, and it will select only those who evolve to suit the changing market.

Right off the bat, the former chief creative officer of Sony Online Entertainment noted that he wasn't suggesting that evolution and adaptation are inherently positive. He used his own business-casual wardrobe as an example that drew laughs from the crowd.

"These days I wear shirts with buttons on them," Koster said. "That may or may not be progress depending on your point of view. It isn't really from my point of view. It takes a lot longer to get dressed in the mornings and I can no longer obtain my wardrobe for free from conferences like this one. But it does permit me to move in slightly different circles and signals different things."

Getting into the meat of his presentation, Koster ran down the way the industry works today, in what he called the "pre-comet" ecology. He touched on funding issues and the role of the publisher in game creation. He also singled out sparse reuse of game content to benefit developers and lamented how a studio working on a game gets relatively few opportunities to move into other media.

The end result, according to Koster, is the current hit-driven state of the game industry, which focus on the top 20 percent of games. "The particular adaptation that we've made to this is to not bother making or stocking or selling the other 80 percent," Koster said. "So when you walk into your friendly neighborhood GameStop, you won't find the game that is 21 on the charts. Because of limited shelf space, they just don't want it around. It's just not worth having it compared to game number 20 twice, or better yet, The Sims and all of its expansions."

That has made publishers focus on creating blockbuster AAA titles from the get-go, Koster said, and the cost of developing games has been increasing exponentially in recent years as a result. According to Koster's figures, budgets have gone up by a factor of 22 in the last dozen years, with development teams creating 40 to 150 times as much content for a single game.

"The next spot on this graph eats the entire industry in one gulp," Koster warned. "It's not sustainable."

To adapt to the market, Koster said the industry has evolved a number of specialized adaptations, including 3D graphics cards, surround sound for desktop PCs, high-resolution graphics, single-player games, and heavy-narrative games.

"Those kinds of extremely specialized adaptations are the things that turn into vulnerabilities if the circumstances change," Koster said. "And it's fairly easy to run down this list and see where they turn into vulnerabilities on burgeoning platforms today. Look at all of these [in relation to] cell phones. I guess the single-player works. The rest of it? Not so good."

And while the industry has been celebrating a broadening cultural awareness of games, Koster doesn't think it's been due to gaming reaching out to the masses with its appeal. Instead, he suggested that it's more a case of broader culture cherry-picking what it wants from games.

"Our signature moments are things like The Drew Carey show reaching in, pulling out The Sims and putting it on a TV show, things like some psycho kid reaching in, grabbing [Grand Theft Auto], and turning it into a court case," Koster said. "Those are our signature pop-culture moments right now. The high-grade achievements of gaming are not the ones that are going out to the mass market, I'm sad to say."

On top of that, other media are sniping aspects of the game industry and throwing them into their own products. Television series like American Idol, Survivor, Lost, and Star Trek 2.0--a new interactive version of the original sci-fi show--all incorporate elements from gaming.

"We now have television shows with Easter eggs," Koster said. "In fact, they're putting Easter eggs in the commercials. Our best tricks are getting stolen."

Another group that Koster said will force change on the industry is the array of content aggregators, the vendors who offer the 80 percent of content that can't be found easily at retail. He noted the appeal of diversity for downloadable services like iTunes or Netflix that pride themselves on a huge catalog of offerings. Even if Netflix's sole copy of the 1987 comedy Amazon Women on the Moon gets rented once a month, Koster said, it's still worth it to have it offered to the few who want it.

"You want to be putting together as much stuff [as possible]--even if it is crap, even if the graphics suck, even if the interface is terrible--because somebody will download it, and disc space is nearly free," he asserted.

Koster predicted a shakeout for publishers who aren't able to adapt in time, but he sees some big players taking steps in the right direction. Specifically, he praised console manufacturers' advances, including Xbox Live Arcade, the Wii controller, and Sony and Nintendo's plans to sell older games through their upcoming systems.

"People are getting the picture," Koster said. "It's a question of how quickly it'll change. In this environment, digital distribution is the only logical play."

Wrapping up his prehistoric metaphor with a prediction of the future, Koster told the audience to envision a world without game retailers or publishers, just aggregators and portals. While that will enable independent developers and smaller titles to be distributed more widely than they are today, it will not necessarily result in an abundance of noise in the channel. To combat that, Koster suggests developers take a page from other media and cultivate their own celebrity.

"The only way that you will stick your head above the noise is to have a following. Your team, or you personally, or your brand, is going to have to be something that inspires loyalty to stick up above the noise," Koster said. "That's the only way to get through."