Shadowlessness

I attended a conference yesterday which ended up being about the game industry in Iran (the title of the conference was not even close to that.) Of course, there is no game industry in Iran, and all the participants and presenters agreed with that, and they discussed some of the real problems on the way of making games and even some solutions to them. Here’s my 2 cents (or 2% of whatever monetary unit you’d prefer.)

First, let me talk about what I perceive as the biggest misconception about IGI(!). People (mostly those who want to look knowledgeable and informed and “in the know”) always talk about how there’s a great potential for making games in Iran. It almost never happens for one to have a discussion with an official or a CEO or a civil servant about making games and not hear them refer to the untapped sea of talent and potential and great human resources that we have in this area. I have never been in a situation to ask them: What talent? What potential? Where’s this sea of unused abilities? Where are these great opportunities to forge a game industry in Iran?
I believe it is a valid question to ask and that it doesn’t have a satisfying answer. Here’s why:

1. First and foremost, there is no investment in this sector. There are no venture capitalists standing in line to finance game development projects. There are no government funds to be had like those given to making other types of “cultural” products along specific lines.
2. Making a game is a costly endeavor. It usually takes a long time and a not-small group of people and some rather expensive equipment. It’s almost not possible to create even a handful of games with a small investment.
3. Making serious games take a long time, usually more than a year to a few years. It’s not a quick buck for the investors.
4. Making a game costs more than it should, these days. This is true for more or less any young industry, but there are other reasons at work here. Although games are mostly software products and therefore, the major part of their budgets are the salaries, and because of our relatively low salaries making games should be a cheap and competitive business in Iran, it’s regrettably not so. Since there is no game industry, the infrastructure (laws, support industries, distribution network, etc.) is mostly non-existent or even in conflict with making games. And the game developers themselves are unfamiliar with the processes involved, so their methods are wasteful, low-productivity or even outright wrong.
5. Game prices are completely artificial (and low) in our market. Usually, the cost-price relationship of a product falls within four categories: either the price is a function of production cost and demand (which results in a free market that usually helps governments, the industry and the consumers) or it is subsidized by the government and therefore the price is artificially low (which benefits the consumer and the industry at the expense of the government,) or the competitor products are import-controlled by the government and therefore their prices are artificially high (which helps the government and the industry but hurts the consumer) or there’s a piracy or trafficking problem, which makes the same product available with a very low price (which hurts governments and the industry and may or may not hurt the consumer (lack of support or responsibility?))
   Obviously, the game market in Iran is in the fourth category (the worst one, anybody surprised?) Iranian games are retailed at 25000 to 55000 Rials (around 3 to 7 USDs) which is not comparable to the prices worldwide (20-60 USDs) because of the low price of the pirated games.
6. Bootleg (and cracked) copies of all the games released worldwide are available in our market (with the exception of a handful of consoles which are not freely copyable just yet,) for prices ranging from less than 1$ to around 5$ (or more for the consoles.) Obviously, this is one of the factors that forces Iranian game makers to sell their games at the said prices.
7. Our games are far inferior to the games made even 5 years ago around the world, not only in terms of graphics and sound, but (sadly) in terms of gameplay and story too. It is a fact that we make bad games and people only play them out of curiosity. I have never even felt a little bit compelled to finish an Iranian game before, or indeed, I have never wanted to play more than a few minutes of them and even that much out of professional curiosity.
8. Of course, we make bad games because we haven’t learned to make good ones yet, and in the current sate of our game business and even the world market, the people who make even one bad game either go bankrupt or get no more sponsorship deals.
9. Another avenue for revenue from games would be making online games (competitive casual games or MMO games.) Even forgetting about the technical challenges in making such games, the state of the Internet services available to general public makes it hard to even conceive of such a business model, let alone actually implementing it. The maximum bandwidth that the law permits for home use in Iran is a preposterous 128Kbps. And most people don’t even have that (they still use 33.6Kbps dial-up!), because they either see no need for more, or the price is too high for them (30$-65$ per month for a decent ADSL service at 128Kbps,) or simply there’s no broad(er)band service available in their area.
10. At the moment, it’s not even profitable (not even in theory and on paper) to make serious games over here, let alone being so profitable to attract investment.
11. Almost the only kind of game that is currently profitable for the developer is the kind that is sponsored and paid for by a government organization or a wealthy company beforehand. Since he who pays the piper selects the tune, the game becomes one lengthy ad or manifesto. If that was not enough by itself, since the developer is now certain of its income, it will care far less about the quality of the game and it will almost certainly become devoid of any artistic or technical value.
12. In spite of all the financial difficulties in making games, all of us (game developers) want to make games like of God of War, Crysis, Oblivion or Company of Heroes. We don’t realize (or believe) that we should cut down the scope of the game and concentrate on quality (mostly in gameplay) to win the market. As a result, our game projects are either shut down, or their quality suffers in the worst ways. Some of our games aren’t even playable in the widest possible interpretation of the term.
13. Games are getting more feature-rich and more complex by the week, which further increases their cost and raises the entry barrier into the game development business. Again, we are not phased one bit in our intention of making our games on par with the AAA titles of the world market.
14. Computer games are software. We don’t have a software industry to speak of (anyone disagrees?) There are very few companies in Iran that can make software on-schedule and on-budget. Why do we think that we can make games (which are among the most difficult kinds of software) with the projected features and the projected money and within the projected period?
15. The closest thing to the game industry is the film industry, and our film industry is not doing well at all. I can’t consider myself familiar with the movie business in Iran, but as a consumer I don’t see much action around here.
16. If there was really potential for making great game in Iran, we would see at least a handful of good indie games, or amateur games or mods. These don’t constitute a game industry, but they are those who will become the designers and creators of the future serious games.
17. There are no publishers and no distribution networks for domestic games who understand this business. The distribution channels that are in place are for the pirated games and expect a hefty cut of the retail price (I hear between 30% to 80%, the wider the reach of the distributor, the higher its percentage.)
18. There’s no demand in our market for Iranian games. Everyone is happy in the current state of the market because of the high quality/cost and gain/effort ratios, from the duplicators, to the distributors, to the retailers, to the customers. There are no worried parents and no concerned politicians. Of course, there is always talk, but no real will and movement.
19. This is perhaps not a worry for a long time to come, but there are no companies to provide middleware or services for game developers. Come to think about it, there are no middleware providers to speak of in our software industry as a whole. Middleware (game engines, mission-specific software, etc.) helps cut the costs and team sizes and development time, at little or no quality loss. Services (motion capture, professional writers and actors, experienced PR people, game publishers, professional testers, etc.) are essential to a game “industry”. We won’t have an industry until we have these.
20. Again, games are not entirely unlike a special kind of interactive film (or animation if you will.) Experimentation with form and storytelling in cinema can lead to concepts being transferred into the game medium as a better tool for the job. But I don’t see any young creative minds in cinema experimenting in breaking the boundaries of these two media. (A note of caution: thinking of games as just a form of interactive movie leads to only a small subset of what can be done with games as a medium. However, this subset seems to be rather popular.)
21. This is perhaps the most dire of our problems. We produce hardly any novel and original content. We don’t write much great fiction, drama, sci-fi or fantasy. We don’t make much engaging, enthralling or thought-provoking music. We don’t create much comic-strip or animation. Why do we think we have real potential for games?
22. There is no enforcement of international copyright laws and treaties and only rumors and hearsay of our own laws in Iran. Although there is no problem of pirated Iranian games yet (that I know of,) but it is bound to happen sooner or later as the number of Iranian games (and hopefully the acceptance of consumers) rises. There is no doubt that this is an unavoidable requirement, and the sooner the policies and procedures (legal, law enforcement, etc.) are defined and put in place the better. Of course, this can be viewed like the sword of Damocles because we the game developers don’t usually pay for our software tools either, which we would have if the software copyright laws would have been enforced. But I don’t believe it to be a major hindrance since there are a multitude of great free and/or free tools to work with (and we are better than most people at pirating software and getting away with it anyway!)
23. I don’t have any proof for this (except the fact that everyone seems to think so, which I admit, is not very convincing) but since when have we Iranians been able to do teamwork? The work that medium to large teams manage to get done over long periods of time is occasional at best, or rare and even non-existent most of the time. This is perhaps a defining feature of any unhealthy and government-driven economy. In a free market (with evolutionary and emergent behaviors,) the weak and the unequal-to-the-challenges quickly die out and the quick and the strong and the able remain (supposedly.) Extinction and survival in our market seems to be mostly defined by other factors (which I am not qualified to discuss.)
24. Predictability and planability are two major requirements for any product to come out of its academic or lab stage and transition into the industry (or indeed, “an” industry.) The little experiments the Iranian game developers have had would hardly give them any comprehensive insight into the process to allow them to plan their mid-to-long-term course predict the course of the market and industry.
25. I have a final point to make. Some people (specially those in civil service sector who control the funds that might be directed into game development) are very much concerned with the “message” the game bears or the “cultural content” that it delivers. Of course, it’s their money and therefore it’s their right to control what is said in the game they are paying for, but I believe that at this young a stage in development of Iran’s Game Industry, it’s of utmost importance to make the games, and make games that the consumer wants, not what we think that they should want. After all, if there’s no game to be the vessel of the message, there can be no message delivered. Don’t you agree?

Admittedly, there are exceptions to almost every item above. Let’s not forget the brave people who are making games in this flea market of ours!