Crackdown Only Broke Even, says Dave Jones

Dave Jones has quite a resume in the gaming industry, having worked on a variety of franchises from Lemmings to Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown. Speaking at the Brighton Develop conference, the designer said how he is a big fan of users creating their own experiences.

"There was a lot of hidden complexity in Lemmings -- we modeled collision detection down to the pixel," said Jones, according to Gamasutra. "Players only had to learn eight skills, though, so it was easy to pick up, yet our level design allowed millions of possibility from just those eight."

He is, in particular, proud of what Realtime Worlds achieved with the original Crackdown. “We developed the city to function as a platform game, where anything you could see you could climb or jump to," he said. "It had other aspects, too, such as light RPG trappings, but we began to realize that our main innovation was our drop-in, drop-out multiplayer that managed to be successful in an open world.”

“We saw that it’s wonderful to create these amazing worlds, but they’re better used as spaces for players to interact and create their own experiences," he added, “so we intend to provide them the building blocks to allow them to do that.”

Still, despite the game's almost unexpected level of success, the return on investment wasn't high. “With Crackdown we sold about 1.5 million copies, but even at that we pretty much only managed to break even,” he said. “It was due to the amount of factors that were out of our control as the developer, influences such as GameStop’s amazing used-game sales; we know 1.5 million new copies were sold, but it’s likely there were 2.5, three million sold when you include used.”

If a game like Crackdown can sell 1.5 million copies and only break even, that shows how tough it is to make a profit in this business. We wonder how many companies will be able to sustain themselves with these sorts of sobering statistics.