Between big budget and casual titles, there’s no room for anything else, 2K Boston developer Christopher Kline says.
“I think what we realised, which really started that transition back at Irrational, we were doing games that I’d say were mid-budget – maybe USD 3-4 million – that there was no real market left,” the technical director with the studio behind BioShock (pictured) asserted.
Kline said independent developers are “squeezed out of the middle” because all the money is in the casual market or hotly anticipated triple-A franchises.
He added that mid-budget work was still technically feasible, but wouldn’t finance a development team’s ambitions to create new IP or sustain staff members.
He also said he wasn’t even sure whether the market bifurcation was necessarily negative: “It’s curious – I’m not sure it’s the natural evolution of things, that there are two markets that are now just separating, whereas before they were just muddled, and this is a good thing – or if people have been left out in the cold.”
Source: Gamesindustry.biz
