The Difficulty of Design, Funding, & NFTs In The Games Industry
On September 17th, 2020, Polish game studio CD Projekt Red released the long-awaited title Cyberpunk 2077. At release, the game was hated and made a laughing stock as the product was shipped as a buggy mess. Vehicles would just drive through buildings and other cars with no collisions. People would walk around in loops like some sort of “ant death spiral” accompanied with clones of themselves. You couldn’t go a minute without experiencing a graphical bug. And hundreds of other hilarious glitches that you can find on YouTube in compilations. At the time of writing, CD has made improvements, but they are still not near where they should have been on release. Of course, Cyberpunk is not the first title to be lampooned for its technical problems. It will not be the last, but it really calls an important message for the sake of giving some sympathy to CD Projekt Red. Game design is a challenging and rigorous endeavour. Perhaps the hardest out of any other art form to pull off right. It really says something that after ten years of development, multiple delays, and millions of dollars in development later, one of the greatest game studios on the planet can still fail spectacularly at delivering on their promise.
The famous game director Hideo Kojima once described games as being like that of a museum. A collection of different forms of mediums all in one package. It is then the sole job of the game developer to be the curator of this collection. From this, a hurdle can be seen. Game developers are required to have the largest set of artistic and technical skills out of any other medium. They’re often required to be animators, project managers, illustrators, writers, 3D modellers, musicians, audio engineers, world builders, and so much more. This is all in tandem with the gruelling process of actually programming and designing the game. The many sleepless nights involved in the near-endless process of fixing bugs, resulting in the creation of yet more bugs. From this, Kojima’s analogy could be stretched further. Not only do game developers have to curate a museum, but they have to build the building itself and hope it doesn’t topple down. Even if developers try their best to balance all the elements and deliver an engaging experience, failing on a certain aspect could ruin the whole game. Studios also have to deal with the bottomless stomach of the market, which constantly demands better graphical fidelity and more in-game content, ballooning the development process even further. By saying this, game design is an incredible skill, time, and resource-intensive process. Game developers, especially independent developers, need all the help they can get.
Of course, this is why the majority of games are made in teams to distribute tasks but a team often needs capital to make their game a reality.
Ultimately, game design is a business venture like any other, and therefore a considerable source of funding is required for teams to function. And seeing how designers have to juggle multiple artistic mediums and deal with the unique challenges of game design and software engineering as well, games can require relatively more money than other older mediums. The more traditional way of acquiring funding has been video game publishers. This is a safe bet but it can come with its own downsides. Firstly, they take a considerable portion of your sales which can be really frustrating. Especially if they are not following up on their side of the deal.
This is because games are the passion projects of developers, but in the process, their vision for their game can often be altered by the publisher to make the game more marketable. Publishers are also very rigid. They can set strict due dates which can lead to the dreaded “crunch” period. If the project falls behind schedule or something unexpected happens they can often be put in this position. On top of all of this, publishers will certainly have lawyers and you may not. So if you happen to work with a particularly bad publisher that gives you the short end of the stick, you’re screwed. Of course, the times have been changing and with the internet, there are plenty of ways for independent studios to fund, publish and market their games independently without the help of larger powers.
The biggest cause for this change in direction is Steam, the largest video game digital distribution platform ever made. Previously studios would have to work with publishers to get their games on physical CDs but now anyone can release a game without requiring to work with a publisher. Developers are now given many tools to get money from their followers such as crowdfunding sites and sites like Patreon which provides a subscription-like service that funds a monthly income to creators with the potential for exclusive perks and bonuses. All of these methods require a following of some kind which is why social media has allowed game developers to advertise and self-promote through creating posts and word of mouth. These tools over time have allowed independent developers to stay independent. The newest technologies are now cryptocurrencies and NFTs and these have the potential to be the newest tool for developers. This is where NFT marketplaces like Altura come in.
Altura allows the creation of in-game video game items in the form of NFTs. This allows users to fully own their items, while still being able to use them in their assigned game. Additionally, you may be able to use these items in other games if it is supported.
For small studios, it can be impractical to set up a market, let alone an NFT market. With Altura, the work has already been done for them, allowing them to sell their in-game items as NFTs for an additional source of revenue. With this, game companies can sell NFTs before the game is released to help pay for production. They could even sell a limited amount of NFTs to really drive hype. Models like this have worked in the past and NFTs only work to improve on it. Star Citizen is one of the most successfully crowdsourced games of all time. It made 2.1 million dollars on Kickstarter alone but also made hundreds of thousands of dollars from selling spaceships for the game before release, where the profits would go to development. Altura could also work in tandem with crowdfunding and monthly income creator sites by having in-game item NFTs as exclusive rewards for pledging money. This technology has so many applications and we cannot possibly imagine all the new ways it will be used by developers and gamers in the future. Ultimately, Altura provides another revenue stream to developers to allow them to make the games they want to make. Nobody can predict the future of gaming, but if the future is NFTs then it is bright.
