Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - The Hollywood Game

my affiliations

Ian Bogost - videogame theory, criticism, design

about me

contact

Water Cooler Games

Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

You are reading an archived version of this article. The original URL was (loading...)

The Hollywood Game

by Gonzalo Frasca May 23, 2005

categories: Console & PC Games

The Guardian runs a story on the game industry's Hollywood envy. Well, actually maybe I should say "synergy" rather than "envy", but you get the message. The article quotes yours truly and features this noble website. My point, basically, is that the game industry may believe that its following Hollywood's steps, but that's simply an illusion. Hollywood is a far more complex and polished structure that is very well aware of the complexities of its market and niches, while the game's industry is fixated on the blockbuster. Even the downloadable market sees nothing but the blockbuster (repeat after me: "we need to kraft the next Kuma or Bejeweled"). Blockbusters are nice, but there should be a broader selection available. As I said in the article, Hollywood is smart enough to finance smaller, independent projects because they know that a single Blair Witch Project will make enough money to cover all the other independent experiments. Do you seriously believe that EA cannot spare 20 million bucks to fund, say, 5 wild pet projects a year? Well, after all, these are the people who almost failed to greenlight The Sims. The teenager-without-a-date mentality does not only set the content agenda in the game industry: sometimes I believe troubled teenagers are running their business department, too.

Comments (4)

Good comments. I'm always pointing out to folks how the film industry has managed to support indie films - in both funding and screens - in spite of the block buster mentality. It's a shame the game industry can't see that its the small fringe developers that are most likely to create the next innovative original concept.

I had a very high ranking person at Sony (who I'll leave namelss just in case I ever have the unpleasant experience of having to talk to him again) tell me that if I could guarantee that if they invested $100,000 in one of my projects and would see one million a year profit for five years that he would tell me that it would be a total waste of time. That unless it had the potential to net at least 8-10 million dollars, that it simply wasn't worth their time to even think about.

(He also told me that it wasn't possible to develop a game that "anyone" would even look at - much less play - with a budget of less that $4,000,000.)

Randy Chase on May 25, 2005 9:57 AM

It's worth reading Doug Lowenstein's State of the Industry Address from this year's E3. I thought it was actually very encouraging...

Ian Bogost on May 25, 2005 2:56 PM

The "State of the Industry Adress" link didn't work when I tried it, but I found another one. Thanks for bringing it up; interesting document.

Dirk Scheuring on May 30, 2005 7:37 AM

With huge success stories from the mod community such as Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Desert Combat - publishers that refuse to acknowledge independant game design are only hurting themselves.

Nate on June 3, 2005 5:59 PM