oxymoron wrote:You have to step in the big studios shoes more a moment. If you were going start a project why would you aim to make a BBB or "medium" game? You'd want to use all the resources you have to make the best game possible as well as make a lot of money.
There are many, many reasons to diversify your portfolio.
- Medium-sized don't carry as much risk. If you spend two hundred millions making a game and it bombs, the entire company goes bankrupt.
- Medium-sized games have very good ROI ratios. In bussiness it's not a matter of making a lot of money, it's a matter of making proportionately more money than you put in!
- You can't sell too many blockbusters. First, the market doesn't allow it. Second, no company has enough liquidity to make many of them at once.
- Smaller games allow experimentation. If you only make blockbusters, you have to play it safe, which means you won't find new talents or have breakout hits. You can only do more of the same and that doesn't build a brand or create new markets.
- There's a lot of money outside of the blockbuster market. You can make a lot of money making fighters, platformers, or graphical adventures but those genres are niche and unfit for a blockbuster approach.
- It allows for prestige games. Right now this doesn't matter as much as it does in movies because game criticism is pretty awful but sooner or later we will see our own kind of Oscar-bait.