I was listening to the 17th Nov HotSpot, where Brendan & Co were lamenting EA's decision the week past to trim down development work on new/experimental IP and focus on annualized franchises instead. It was argued this is understandable considering how the core gamer market that could actually nurture and support such innovation and risk-taking has shrunk to a really small slice of any "game" company's overall revenue pie.

While that is (sadly) true, how is it different from any other media or forms of entertainment?

Works that push the boundaries of an art-form or medium get noticed only by a select few, even fewer of whom are able to give the work or its achievements historical context. The kind of big-names that get covered on the evening news for making a gazillion dollars are most often just HEAVILY-promoted remixes of old hits, with of course certain notable - but extremely rare - exceptions like 'The Dark Knight' or 'Modern Warfare'.

BUT then, even these 'exceptions' were basically established franchises that corporations were willing to pour their money into!

So be it movies, or games, it seems like revenue is only directly proportional to the marketing spend and pre-established brand (recall) value. EA's move thus fits perfectly in line with how a publicly listed corporation is expected to work. But when did that really stop any art-form from moving forward?

That said, games ARE a different equation from movies. You can make a low-budget film with not-so-great production values and get praised to hell and back - it is the sensibility that matters.

But games are by-and-large EXPECTED to have a certain level of polish visually, apart from in the gameplay or story-telling. Bugs and crashes are mostly inexcusable. And polish, testing all that costs a LOT of man-hours. A LOT of initial investment.

Games are longer, sell in much smaller numbers and are pricier to 'experience' (esp. if you factor in the cost of a console + any subscription). Harder to reach. Cinema tickets are usually cheap enough for most. Movies also air on TV, for free (pretty much). At festivals, you can catch a large number of obscure movies and spread word about them. You cannot experience a whole game at E3, just a sample - which may even turn out to be a 'best-parts' collection of the game. It is much harder to get excited about that, and to KEEP that product in memory until the time it releases.

Then there is the fact that films are recognised widely as art, which by itself creates a separate market and SPACE for consumption and discussion of bolder films. But the fact that video-games are still seen more as entertainment than art, means that there is practically no separation in the dialogue on 'commercial' and the more 'artsy' games..also perhaps because it is much harder to define what makes a game 'artsy' (other than the obvious, like quirky art styles and the absence of usual progression incentives), and more troublingly perhaps, if this new game or idea is even GOOD for the medium and whether it expands the medium's scope or reach.

So it does seem difficult for innovation in games to survive for too long or to be meaningful without active, committed publisher support. Intrinsic problems with the format make it even harder - even in the age of the Internet - for whatever innovation does manage to come through, to be spotlighted and adequately appreciated. Maybe we should accept that these problems ARE simply intrinsic to the medium, and the current innovative-to-derivative ratio, while perhaps not being comparable to other media, is OK for games anyway. It could be that all these questions are simply signs of the teething troubles faced by any new art-form/medium that has yet to find a strong identity or language and we should quit comparing the game-evolution-arc to that of movies. Or maybe that comparison is not too far off. I don't know how exactly movies were perceived in the 30's/40's, but I DO know we have come very far in the art. And I sure would like to hope the same for games.

What do you think? Leave your comments below...