During his talk, Why Great Games Don't Always Sell, at the Develop conference in Brighton yesterday, Gareth Wilson drew on his time as design manager of Bizarre Creations and his background in economics to give a fascinating assessment of why new IPs are struggling at retail.
Wilson, who since the closure in February of Bizarre Creations has joined Sumo Digital as chief game designer, said: "Today's industry is a pretty worrying place. It used to be if you had a decent budget and your idea wasn't too mental, there was this middle ground.
"Games would tend to make their money back. Now there are well-rated games that just aren't selling at all."
As we reported yesterday, Wilson used consumer theory to describe Blur, the game that ultimately brought Bizarre Creations to its knees, as "like bacon with cornflakes", its mix of licensed cars and Mario Kart-style weaponry scaring off would-be customers. Despite positive review scores, the game failed to meet its sales targets.
Yet as Wilson points out, it was far from the only game to try to do something different in the racing genre. Modnation Racers, Split/Second and the Motorstorm sequels all struggled with only one - Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing - succeeding. Sega's racer benefited from being based on several established IPs, and has now sold almost two million copies.
Recent history is littered with new IPs that have been reviewed and marketed well, but simply not sold: the likes of Vanquish, Singularity, Bulletstorm, Alan Wake and Enslaved. Why?
"You can't have a comprehensive answer for it, but something's going horribly wrong in the UK game industry," he said. "We're having a massive shrinkage of triple-A development in the UK. Are [developers] just thick? I don’t think so."
Much of it comes down to timing. Drawing on his experience of economic theory, Wilson looked at the business cycle, which runs from creation to growth, to complexity and maturity, to chaos, dropping off and dormancy, then back to the start again. With the current generation of consoles more than five years old, Wilson believes the industry is currently in dormancy.
"Companies are getting ready for the next big push," he explained, "and any companies that have survived [to this point] will probably last until that push." A further complication is that console cycles overlap: Wii sales dropped off much earlier than those of its competitors, and the rise of mobile and social games has complicated that further.
It goes some way to explaining why so many developers and publishers are now eyeing digital, but Wilson urges caution: "Lots of people are opening mobile game companies at the moment. I hope you've got something in your back pocket."
Blur's problem - breakfast analogies aside - was its muddled message. "Confused messaging is a real problem for new IPs," Wilson observed. "The marketing guys need a clear message; they're not game developers, they may not know much about videogames.