14 DAY TRIAL // Christopher Kline, 2K Boston technical director and BioShock parent is one of those guys who, we all agree, knows a lot of stuff about games. However, as strange as it might sound, he doesn't believe that in today's games world there is any chance left for mid-budget developing and that the industry is turning into an "all or nothing" one.
In an interview with website gamesindustry, he said that companies have no chance to succeed in delivering new IPs unless they have a big budget, triple A titles or, on the other extreme, casual games. He admitted that this was the conclusion reached while planning Bioshock - and that's another reason to say that it was correct, since the game was such a successful one.
"I think what we realized, which really started that transition back at Irrational, we were doing games that I'd say were mid-budget - maybe USD 3-4 million - that there was no real market left," he said. "I think you can probably still get contracts for that kind of work, but there's not a lot of hope there for developers being able to survive - just not enough money to develop new IP and keep staff going."
Asked if this could be turned into a big problem for the industry, Kline said that one should be able to look into the future to give the correct answer but we tend to believe that it wouldn't be that great. It can't be just black or white. And, in terms of evolution, it would be pretty hard for a casual gamer to "graduate" to more hardcore games unless there were some titles to make the transition easier. So, all we can hope for at the moment is the fact that, ten years into the future, we won't be divided into two clearly delimited factions: the casuals and the hardcore, because we know from each game we play that whenever two factions are created, war starts.