Gal Civ 2 is a great game and continues to get great reviews. In GameSpy, there is a interview with Sid Meier and Soren Johnson of Firaxis about the state of PC gaming and Soren, the lead dev of Civ 4, mentioned Brad and the gang at StarDock:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
GameSpy: Soren mentioned limited developer resources, which brings me to my next question. Games are costing more and more to make. Every year developers are getting more and more worried about this. At Firaxis, are you feeling squeezed by that? As designers, do you feel constricted? Do you ever have ideas and then realize, "That would cost $100 million, we can't do that...?"
Meier: Well, I'm not personally dreaming of building $100 million games. They [bigger budgets] allow some of the more creative artists and sound people, etc., to really express what they can do with today's budgets and technology. But personally, as a designer, I'm not, well, anxious to do a $100 million game. I'd rather do a smaller game.
We've talked about the possibility, with Xbox Live Arcade or other channels, to do smaller games. Because once you've finished a game like Civ, you kind of want to... well, you don't want to step right back into the fire...
Johnson: [Chuckles]
Meier: We've got a lot of game ideas [at Firaxis] that we think are cool, but wouldn't justify a ten or twenty million dollar investment. And if there were another channel to work with, to do that, well... We're fortunate in that we have some franchises that have somewhat of a track record so people are willing to invest the money. But certainly it's a lot harder for startups and new folks to get involved and to get that up-front investment for their games.
Johnson: I'm really interested in how much you can do with less. Guitar Hero is this great example to everyone in the industry. Everyone's saying, "Wow, they're going to make a ton of money!" If nothing else, it's inspiring to think of the fact that games are dynamic, you can make these really interesting games that are actually just very small pieces. That often gets forgotten.
People need to accept the fact that the more money you ask for for a project, the more that's going to be placed on you in terms of expectations. The more pressure you get: "This has to be like something we've seen before..."
It's interesting to me, Brad Wardell of Stardock was talking about Galactic Civilizations II, and he talked about how that game has a $300,000 budget. Which is just ... incredible to me! It's clear, it's not a game that has a huge budget, but it looks good, it's gonna play good--
GameSpy: Strategy games generally don't cost a lot of money to produce.
Johnson: Sure, but from a user's perspective, it's fun. It may not have all the bells and whistles, but that's a significant difference. When you're talking about a budget of that scale, you can really make whatever type of game you want. Assuming it's going to be a fun game that people connect to. You can't say, "I want a ton of resources to make the best quality game in the world, and I want to make something that's never been made before." You need to accept that.
