Twenty years ago, when SSG vice president Gregor Whiley began developing games for Apple II and Commodore 64s, a really complex game may have required the luxury of two developers, working part-time on the project while they kept their "real jobs" on the side.
These days, according to Whiley, the games industry does not allow any room for nostalgia or sentimentality. Games mean business, in no uncertain terms, and staying in the games business means taking the business of games very seriously.
"When you are dealing with publishers you are talking about very large companies, they are not in the slightest bit sentimental and the corporate graveyard for games developers is pretty chock-a-block," Whiley said. "Publishers will do everything they can to reduce their risks, they need to know the new game will look every bit as good as its competition and they want to know the developers will actually get the job done."
According to Whiley, most games don't make any money whatsoever, with publishers and distributors betting on the spectacular success of one or two to pay for the development of the rest.
Hence the tendency to compare the games developer business with certain aspects of the entertainment industry, rather than other modes of software development.
"We use technology to deliver it, but we are really in the entertainment business," explained Whiley's long time counterpart Adam Lancman. "We are competing against music and movies, it is all about predicting trends and staying in tune which what is happening in popular culture, securing licensing rights to movie titles and so forth."
Like Whiley, Lancman has spent more than 20 years in the games development industry. He began under his own Beam International brand in 1980, and after attempting to bridge the divide between publishing and development for seven years he sold off half the business and began to focus wholly on the latter. In 1999, Beam International was bought by French publisher and distributor Infogrames, and Lancman stayed on to head up their Australian operations.
"Infogrames are hungry for content, now we have four teams of people developing on the next generation platforms," Lancman said. "The next generation platforms like the X Box and PlayStation II take teams of around 30 people and can run for anywhere up to 18 months, we are talking about investments of anywhere up to US$6 million or more."
And if pundits' predictions are right, the games developer industry in Australia is in line for continued growth.
