Thinking out of the box | The Economist

Moreover, the designers are able to collect lots of information on exactly how users are playing the games online and can tweak them to suit the players? latest whims. ?You spend single-digit millions, work for six months, put your game out there, study the telemetry to learn very quickly what people like and what they don?t, and refine the product from there,? says Frank Gibeau, a senior manager at Electronic Arts. By contrast, a typical console game may cost $20m-30m to make and take several hundred people and two years or more to develop (see chart 2). For all the promise of the new, more casual games, the console-based ones still account for $28 billion of the industry?s global sales of $58 billion. But the balance is changing.