I think we can look at the music industry as an example of what could happen. Whether we want that or not is debatable.
The games market is heading in a similar direction as Valve, NCSoft, Blizzard, and other studios are developing their own distribution systems to publish their games and get rid of the middle man who often creates a lot of the drama in the cycle. The downside to this model is it requires significantly more capital to get established and you need to find the customers yourself. That puts additional pressure on each project to succeed. If it's not a smash hit out of the gate, the studio often folds because it cannot recoup its development costs. Here at Carbine, we're owned by NCSoft but we're still working on our first project. It will enter its 9th year come April. From the outside it sounds like stability, but internally it's a lot of hard work that comes with a lot of risk as we've accumulated 9 years of development costs and expenses that need to be repaid at some point in time. If a project drags on long enough, showing up to work can become very stressful because of the weight of needing to succeed. Some people can't deal with that stress and move on. Another aspect to consider. Matt -----Original Message----- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Andy Nicholas Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2013 1:53 PM To: Sebastien Sterling; softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Industry Solidarity... I agree that the key word is "distribution". That's ultimately where the money is coming from and it's a tough market out there. Unless the front cover of your film packaging looks like Die Hard 7 then you're gonna have a tough time of selling it. It's literally as shallow as that. You don't think they do something as clever as actually watching it before they decide whether to buy it do you? ;) There may be new ways of distributing films in the coming years, in which case the game will change significantly for the benefit of independent productions. Maybe that's a good thing for us, or then again, maybe it isn't. It could really open up the market for low budget effects and that's when jobs will really start going to Asia. On 26 February 2013 at 21:23 Sebastien Sterling <sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com> wrote: > It would be great if Europe got its own feature film industry, at the > moment i'm working at a feature film company in belgium tailoring its > product for an American audience (setting humour narrative structure), > they don't get it, you don't sell America to America, i understand why > they want to do this, its the best market, its the widest > distribution, one language one set of codes and regulations. Europe on > the other hand is loads of different languages ideals histories, you > can't homogenise a product as easily. France has some of the best and > most prominent animation schools in the world, but no feature film > industry, remarkable studios like Nest make amazing pitches for films > that seldom seem to go beyond the pilot stage, England is the VFX > backyard of the world. there is amazing potential here for such an industry, > i feel that having an overseas competition would be a good thing to vitalise > the industry. > maybe i'm being naive or idealistic :) >
