Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

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Despite the fact that Intel has discontinued its Intel Play (www.intel.com/
intelplay/) series of chip-based toys that includes a microscope connected via USB to
a computer, a virtual game system, a sound morpher, and a digital movie creator,
these kinds of PC toys have offered promise at several stages to game makers. It is a
market that has some serious challenges and stability issues, but many manufacturers
of PC toys continue to try to bring game and educational material into the home
this way.
One standout success story in this general category would be LeapFrog
(www.leapfrog.com). LeapFrog offers simple game-based educational content for
young children available on its LeapPad Learning System. LeapFrog has shown solid
success in building up a sizeable library of available content for young kids. The educational
side of the gaming market has always had the benefit of added educational
value, which many parents and purchasers find attractive, although, for many reasons,
it has been a bumpy ride for many developers who have crossed over into educational
content, or supplemented their revenues by working on education-based
content.
Each of these opportunity areas is mentioned to make the simple point that the
world of independent game development requires a constant search for new revenue.
Whether you are working on a state-of-the-art console title or not (remember that development
funding for these can be cut in an instant at a publisher’s discretion), as an
independent game developer, you often must find several revenue streams to keep
your development studio afloat. Many development studios simply do not find adequate
revenue streams. It is not uncommon for a development studio to fail within its
first two years. This is why many in the game industry are concerned with finding
new ways to apply game technology to a wide variety of industries that might benefit
from gaming technologies.
Challenges for PC Toys
There are some considerable challenges limiting the ability of game developers engaged
in such work to contribute game content to PC toy manufacturers. First of all,
PC toys are very expensive to design in research and development. Once designed,
they are expensive to manufacture. This means that it’s hard to keep the retail price
point low enough to sell large numbers of toys. This fact alone discourages many toy
manufacturers from even taking the plunge into trying to develop successful PC/
Game toys.
There are other limitations as well. Since these toys are regularly more expensive
than many other kinds of toys, you can’t serialize them easily and sell several characters
or toys in a series. Very few purchasers will pay for one of each kind of toy, especially
at the cost or price point of most PC toys.
Another interesting physical limitation and perception issue is the idea that mom
and dad don’t necessarily want Interactive Barney hooked up to their PC on their
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Getting Started in Game Development