What do films and video games have in common? Nobody really knows what theyâre doing.
A long lecture by film director Steven Soderberg has been making the rounds over the past 24 hours. Itâs an interesting read with some good thoughts on the film studio system, the idea of âcinema,â and the role of independent film. It should also sound really familiar if you follow the video game industry.
See, while reading Soderberghâs thoughts on Deadline today, I couldnât help but notice some blatant parallels between film and gaming. For example:
Speaking of meetings, the meetings have gotten pretty weird. There are fewer and fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies. There are fewer and fewer executives that know movies. So it can become a very strange situation. I mean, I know how to drive a car, but I wouldnât presume to sit in a meeting with an engineer and tell him how to build one, and thatâs kind of what you feel like when youâre in these meetings. Youâve got people who donât know movies and donât watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie youâre going to be allowed to make. Thatâs one reason studio movies arenât better than they are, and thatâs one reason that cinema, as Iâm defining it, is shrinking.
Sounds like the world of big video game publishers, donât you think? We hear so oftenâand this is generalizing, of courseâabout executives at big game companies who just donât play games. Replace the word âmoviesâ with âvideo gamesâ in that paragraph and it sounds almost word-for-word what some game publisher meetings are like.
https://lastchance.cc/we-need-better-video-game-publishers-472880781%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
So the obstacle here isnât just that special subject matter, but that nobody has figured out how to reduce the cost of putting a movie out. There have been some attempts to analyze it, but one of the mysteries is that this analysis doesnât really reveal any kind of linear predictive behavior, itâs still mysterious the process whereby people decide if theyâre either going to go to a movie or not go to a movie. Sometimes you donât even know how you reach them. Like on Magic Mike for instance, the movie opened to $38 million, and the tracking said we were going to open to 19. So the tracking was 100% wrong. Itâs really nice when the surprise goes in that direction, but itâs hard not to sit there and go how did we miss that? If this is our tracking, how do you miss by that much?
This might sound familiar to Square Enix, perhaps the most recent victim of tracking gone wrong. The Japanese publisher expected to sell 5-6 million copies of Tomb Raider; instead they sold 3.4 million. Their predictions were totally wrong (and rather unreasonable).
Go read all of Soderberghâs lecture: itâs fascinating, and the parallels really are uncanny.
