With digital sales and Kickstarter, it’s getting easier for smaller game developers to sell their own games. To Mark Kern, CEO of Red 5 Studios, this spells trouble for publishers.
“Who needs publishers any more I certainly don’t. I couldn’t care less about them at this stage,” said Kern. “You’re either an indie game or you’re a massive AAA, IP-backed sequel with derivative game play that’s rehashed over and over again as it’s the only safe bet you can make when you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars. The failure is that there’s no middle ground. All the games in the middle that could have been made but have been squeezed out and we’ve seen all these independent studios get closed down over the last few years.”
The rapid hiring/firing process of the industry also drew fire from Kern. “In Hollywood they work on contract – it’s very different. They expect only to work from A to B. In games, these big publishers are hiring swathes of people expecting to have jobs long-term but then lay them off at the end of a project because it doesn’t quite deliver. This is unsustainable.”
Kern also said that the current state of console gaming doesn’t encourage innovation. “It takes billions of dollars of investment to create a console and then you have to milk it for five to seven years in order to get your money back,” he explained. “So something has to change. Consoles, I believe, are dead. There’s no incentive for me to be on console. I’m more interested in getting onto the Mac OS or even iOS in some form. That’s what’s more interesting to me.”
Source: Eurogamer
