Perhaps this is an ominous sign for the industry – someone has recently released a book entitled Creating Casual Games for Profit & Fun. (Amazon link). This is the first I’ve heard of any books specifically aimed at our little corner of the games industry.
I haven’t read the book, so I have no idea if it’s any good.
Very simple game here. See if you can beat 27.314 seconds…
I took some time the week before last to play around with Flash some more. Specifically, I ported one of the mini-games from Banana Bay to Flash, to be played in a browser.
You can try the result here:
While it’s probably on par with a lot of other simple Flash games out there, I’m not entirely thrilled with the results. I was porting relevant sections of my C/C++ codebase into Flash, but some paradigms didn’t translate well (graphical effects mostly). While I went out of my way to implement a few things in alternate ways, overall, I simplified the graphics and sound, and cut out the music, so the resulting mini-game feels a little flat to me. Note that this is NOT the main Banana Bay game, but rather, one of the 7 mini-games that I implemented in Flash.
Overall, it took me about 25-30 hours to take it to Flash, but I probably over-engineered the framework, and my Flash knowledge starting out was pretty limited. On the other hand, I was taking an existing game (mostly) and existing artwork, so I economized on actual design time.
A pretty lengthy, and solid, article on the casual games biz, here.
Some interesting excerpts:
The sequel to one of PopCap’s popular word puzzles, “Bookworm Adventures,” is expected to be the most expensive title produced for the casual game genre. PopCap, which has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Ireland, spent $700,000 over 2 1/2 years developing the game. It’s set to debut online Tuesday at $30 per download.
$700K is a lot to develop a casual game. I’m anxious to take a look at this one when it comes out. (I don’t see it on PopCap’s site yet – sometimes they do limited releases a week or so before doing a general release to the public…)
Research group DFC Intelligence estimates that revenues from casual games worldwide will grow to $953 million this year, from $713 million last year. They were $228 million in 2002. Those numbers don’t include casual games played on handheld devices.
That’s pretty significant – a quadrupling in revenue in 4 years. Also, the last time I saw, traditional (non-casual, non-subscription) PC games were at about $800-900 million annually, in the US. You can probably assume the world-wide totals for traditional PC games are about twice that (probably a bit under $2 billion). Taking the analyst’s estimate and my guesswork at face value, casual games are now about half as big as traditional PC games, and growing much faster.
Of course, console gaming dwarfs both of the above sectors…
There’s been a lot of industry speculation that Sony is losing a lot of money with each PS/3 sold.
This article claims the the total cost of the main unit alone, EXCLUDING controllers, cables, packaging and any profit margin for the retailers (i.e. Wal-Mart’s gotta make money to sell these things), is $805 to $840 (for the low and high end PS/3’s respectively). Shipping cost to the retailers is also apparently excluded. Adding in these costs, (even with a very modest assumed retailer markup) and you get to about $900-$950, which, with the current retail prices at $499 and $599, implies a $300-350 loss per unit.
I’m not an expert in component pricing and manufacturing costs, but still, I’m skeptical.
Let’s look at some specific prices in that cost estimate:
Manufacturing Costs: $40
Really? Assuming the components come pre-assembled as modules (very likely), then assembling the parts is sort of like putting a Lego toy together – plug everything together, screw a few things together, and done. I’d make a wild guess that a trained worker could assemble 2 units an hour – that’s probably very conservative. The units are apparently being manufactured by a Taiwanese company (Asustek). By my wild guess, that would seem to imply labor costs of about $10/hour, or roughly $5/unit. If Asustek in turn pushes the manufacturing to a plant in South China, it would be even less. Note that in the second table, they estimate XBox 360’s manufacturing cost at only $6.10 per unit. No explanation is given for the enormous discrepency between the systems.
Enclosure: $31-33
Really? The plastic/alloy box around the PS/3 costs $31 in million unit bulk order pricing? I doubt it. Considering you can buy computer cases, at quantity 1, at retail price of $15 after rebate from NewEgg, I doubt Sony is paying more than $10-15 for the enclosure
Power Supply: $37.50
Hello, I’d like to order 5 million power supplies – how much will that be, per? $37.50? Wait a sec – I can buy a SINGLE 400 watt power supply at NewEgg for $20. You’re telling me my five million unit order is at almost twice that, per unit? Yes, I know the unit in the PS/3 is a ‘slim line’ power supply, but I hardly think that accounts for this price estimate. Thanks, but I’ll find a different supplier.
Other Components and Manufacturing: $148
Weren’t we already charged for manufacturing? What are these ‘other components’? The table already appears to list all the major chips, memory, hardware, optical and hard drive…
Combined price of 4 primary chips (graphics, CPU, I/O, ‘Reality Synthesizer’): $305
OK, here’s the deal with technology – I think it applies well to these chips, and to a lesser extent to the other items above.
Chipmaking has 3 main costs:
1) R & D – How much to invent it? This is basically a single large lump sum invested up front.
2) Manufacturing ramp-up – Initial yields are low and it takes time and money to figure out how to manufacture items in bulk. Again, this is basically a single large lump sum invested up front.
3) Per unit costs – Once you’ve got it developed and you have your manufacturing going, how much does it cost to stamp out each chip? This cost declines slowly over the life of manufacturing, but is much more stable (per unit) than the first two costs.
Now, a chipmaker has to make a profit per chip. Clearly, that entails charging more than the per-unit cost in item 3, but it also involves making enough money over the life of the chip run to recoup (and hopefully make a profit on), items 1 and 2.
I have no doubt that it cost Sony and their partners an enormous sum to develop these chips and their manufacturing processes. But I really doubt the true per-unit cost (i.e. item 3) is anywhere near $300 for the lot of them. Perhaps whoever created the table in question tried to amortize a significant chunk of items 1 and 2 against the first few hundred thousand chips off the line. But that just seems wrong to me – Sony, internally, is probably amortizing those costs against a projected run of 50-100 million PS/3s, lifetime (maybe more). Taking a very wild guess, I’d say the $305 figure is off by a factor of 2 or so.
To repeat, I am NOT an expert in these things, and may be wildly wrong. But it seems that analysts are applying cost pricing roughly equivalent to building a single machine with parts from NewEgg or Fry’s, rather than bulk pricing, bulk manufacturing, and amortizing R & D cost over 50-100 million PS/3s that will likely be built, lifetime.
How much money is Sony really losing, per unit? I don’t know, and perhaps Sony doesn’t really know either. Computing a per unit cost on the first batch of PS/3s is a bit of a silly exercise anyways. They’ll probably lose money in the PS/3’s first year, due to all that R&D, low software sales to a small initial base of PS/3 owners, and declining PS/2 sales. But my wild guess is that Sony will make a lot of money over the course of the PS/3 generation, and also will likely make more money than Microsoft.