Sucking the RPG Genre Dry

Rampant Games’ Jay Barnson took the time to write an interesting blog post/editorial on what Mike Laidlaw – lead designer at BioWare – recently said on Dragon Age II and how they are addressing its feedback for future release in the Dragon Age franchise, titled “Sucking the RPG genre dry”. Jay notes on how he hasn’t played the game yet, but it’s still an interesting read. Here’s a sampling:

It’s been (thankfully) demonstrated that RPGs can still make metric crap-tons of money. But they still reach a smaller market than the best-selling action games, and they are more expensive to make than action games. Which means their ROI (Return On Investment) is lower they spend more to make less. So from a bean-counter perspective, it would be highly desireable to get a higher ROI by (A) Increasing the size of the market, (B) Decreasing the cost of making these games, or preferably (C) Both.

And if I were a big publisher / bean counter, I imagine I’d wonder, (Is it possible to do both of these while still retaining enough of the genre’s uniqueness to make it stand out from the ocean of me-too action games?) When trying to please the stockholders, especially after spending enough money to fund a third-world country for a year to buy a major RPG developer, this would be a question that an executive with hopes on keeping his job would have to try and answer.

And that is exactly what I think is happening, across the board. This entire dialog is basically Laidlaw trying to rationalize approach (C). They tried to make it more appealing to a wider audience. And they cut a lot of corners to get the game out more quickly and cheaply with apparently disastrous results in some cases. And they are trying to see if they can do this without completely whittling away whatever makes RPGs (special) in the eyes of their market.