After GDC in March 2003, Greg Costikyan ranted that the videogame industry, specifically publishers, were becoming more conservative and stifling creativity. In particular, licensed games and sequels seem to be the safest bets for revenue and therefore truly novel games were less likely to be developed, much less published. Consequently, the internet self-publishing techniques seminar at GDC was packed, indicating to Costikyan that a change was coming, and soon.

At the time, I was intrigued, but other than the anecdotal observations I could make at the game stores around me I had no evidence that licensed games and lack of novel games were so prevalent. However, I recently decided to look into the question for myself: Just how many novel, original games are being published? To that end, I have attempted to collect some information on a single, well-established platform: Nintendo's GameBoy Advance and the games released for it from its launch at the end of May 2001 up to August of 2003. That's a period of 27 months, during which I have catalogued 374 games from over three dozen publishers.

[Note: This article has been and will be revised as readers suggest refinements.]

A Definition of Originality

First, I'm going to state a criterion for a game to be original, one which I know others will find too restrictive, but it serves the purpose of this study. In particular, I'm looking at how much games are built completely from scratch, including artwork, characters, story, and so forth. The following groups of games (not mutually exclusive) are not original: licensed games, sequels or franchise games, remakes, or retrofits. A licensed game is built upon trademarked properties from a real-life sports organization or other media; for example, games with NFL licenses or based on television or movie characters are in this group. A sequel game is a natural successor to a previous game while a franchise game is built upon characters, settings, or specific ideas of a previous game; Advance Wars 2 is a sequel while Konami Krazy Racers is a franchise game built around Konami game characters. A remake is when a game is reproduces closely the essential experience of a previous game; Defender of the Crown for the GBA is a remake of the 8-bit game from the 1980s. A retrofit is when a game on one platform is reimagined for a different platform, possibly removing elements and adding news ones while retaining the essential mechanics; Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is a retrofit on the GBA.

Again, for the sake of this discussion, any game which is licensed, a sequel, a franchise, a remake, or a retrofit is not original.

Of the 375 games catalogued:

• 200 (53.3%) are licensed games
• 170 (45.3%) are sequels or franchise games
• 58 (15.5%) are remakes
• 28 (7.5%) are retrofits
• 31 (8.3%) are original

Sadly, most of the games which are truly original are not very well known. Here is the complete list:

• Golden Sun (Nintendo)
• American Bass Challenge (UbiSoft)
• BackTrack, Hardcore Pinball (Telegames)
• Blender Bros., Zapper (Atari)
• Boxing Fever, Dark Arena, Denki Blocks, F-14 Tomcat, Fortress, Iridion, Turbo Turtle Adventure (Majesco)
• Pinball Tycoon, Super Drop Zone: Intergalactic (AIA)
• Dual Blades, Gem Smashers (Metro3D)
• X-Bladez: Inline Skater (Crave)
• Hot Potato!, Star X (Bam!)
• Karnaaj Rally, Sea Trader: Rise of Taipan, Super Bubble Pop (Jaleco)
• Lady Sia (TDK)
• Mech Platoon (Kemco)
• Monster Force (Vivendi Universal)
• Ninja Five-0 (Konami)
• Planet Monsters (Titus)
• Punch King (Acclaim)
• Tang Tang (Take 2)
• Car Battler Joe (Natsume)

Of those games, only Golden Sun, a Nintendo game, is widely known. It is also a fairly highly regarded game, something which doesn't seem to hold for the majority of the other original games. Using GameRankings as a measure, only Ninja Five-0 and Denki Blocks, with average review scores of 85% and 84% respectively, are in the same league as Golden Sun which has an average score of 91%. Excluding Golden Sun, the average rating of all the others at GameRankings is 66%. Note that Gem Smashers does not have a score on GameRankings from media outlets, but does have a high user rating of 9.5 (an averge from the reports of four users of that site).

Other Aspects of the Market

With the information I've collected, one can also look at two other facets of the GBA market. Afterward, I will return to the issue of original games. For now, we can examine which publishers are putting out the most titles for the GBA, and how the market is divided among those publishers. This can be seen graphically in the following figure.

(Click thumbnail image for full-sized image.)

• The publisher with greatest number of titles is THQ, with 53 titles or 14.2% of the current GBA library. This fits well with the observation that a great deal of THQ's revenue (relative to other companies) is derived from GBA games; see my post on game company finances for more detail.
• Konami is the second most prolific publisher with 32 titles, or just under 8.6% of the GBA library.
• Nintendo is the publisher of only 1 in every 20 GBA titles and ranks fifth in total number of titles published.
• Seven publishers (THQ, Konami, Activision, UbiSoft, Nintendo, Bam! Entertainment, and EA) have collectively published over 50% of the GBA library.
• The total number of publishers is 41. Most of those are very small players, many having less than one percent of the GBA library.

(Click thumbnail image for full-sized image.)

• As one would expect, there is a spike in releases October through December each year to capitalize on the holiday season.
• Comparing May to December 2001 with the same period in 2002, there was a year-on-year increase of 39% in the number of new titles released.
• Comparing January to August 2002 with the same period in 2003, there was a year-on-year decrease of 21% in the number of new titles released.

Back to Original Games

Now, with these observations in mind, what can be said of the originality of games in the GBA market? Well, for one thing, the crowd of publishers is huge: 41 players in all, and that just counts those in the U.S., not Japan or Europe. Since publishers want a good return on the products they do bring to market, titles will need to be quick and easy to produce while still noticeable in the crowded market. So licensed games with familiar formulas or sequels to successful, established games will be more likely to produce a sizeable return, and thus GBA owners are presented with dozens of games based around Disney's movies and Yu-Gi-Oh! cartoons. If the market really can't sustain the number of titles currently being made, then this can only get worse, as publishers will be less likely to take risks on original games when the licensed money makers aren't making enough.

Perhaps even more depressing is that those games which are not licensed, sequels, remakes, or retrofits are still not entirely original nor are they very good games. Take Majesco, as an example. They have published seven original games on the GBA, the most of any publisher examined here. Yet, the games themselves are derivative: a first person shooter (Dark Arena), a boxing game (Boxing Fever), a flight simulation (F-14 Tomcat), and so on. Denki Blocks, an original puzzler, seems to be the only really bright spot in their line-up. (Even Nintendo's Advance Wars, a game which seems legitimately original, shares features with Military Madness (Nectaris), a TurboGrafx 16 game from 1989 and is in fact part of a series known as the Wars Series.) Majesco is not alone, as most other original games show great similarities to earlier games on other platforms. This points out a weakness of the definition of originality used here: it does not take into account original gameplay, but rather focuses more (perhaps too much) on the source material used around the gameplay. However one defines originality, I believe one might well have difficulty making the argument that the GBA has been a platform on which creativity and innovation have flourished.

Of course none of this discussion measures the amount of money made on these games, and there is surely a whole different story there. After all, Nintendo may only have 5% of the titles out there for the GBA, but with Pokemon, Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda, and the rest of their franchises their revenue from that 5% probably dwarfs that of a company like Activision which has a larger number of titles released. And those unoriginal games in Nintendo's line-up make it into the top 10 sales lists regularly. In May 2003, NPD reported that the top 10 selling GBA games included two Pokemon games, Golden Sun, Zelda: A Link to the Past, Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland, and Hamtaro: Heartbreak. The four spots that weren't taken by Nintendo went to a Yu-Gi-Oh! game, a Castlevania game, a Disney-licensed game, and a Sonic the Hedgehog game. This lineup epitomizes the definition of an unoriginal game: except for a retrofit, all the categories are represented.

Frankly, I've found the results of this research a bit depressing, since it really does make me realize how much I myself settle for unoriginal games. My collection of GBA games includes Monster Rancher Advance 2 (a sequel), Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (part of a franchise), The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (a remake of and SNES game), and on and on. Under the definition above, there isn't one original GBA game in my home. Which brings me to the question I raised in my Aria of Sorrow first impressions: are we, the gamers, ultimately to blame for the type of games we are getting? I didn't think twice about buying Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, even though it is as close a straight copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (a game I finished years ago) as one could squeeze into a handheld. The same goes for most of the other games, so it seems as though gamers like me are partly to blame for the lack of originality reflected in the games on the market.

Caveats

I've tried my best to get all the games I could find published in the U.S. since May 2001, along with release dates and publisher names. You can download a spreadsheet containing this data, along with my annotations on originality, if you'd like to examine it for yourself. In particular, I'd be pleased to receive corrections, additions, and information on any other mistakes I might have made.

The spreadsheet is in OpenOffice format; if someone really needs it, I can attempt to provide the data in CSV format for use on other systems.

References

In compiling the above data, I used the following websites for various information:

• GameFAQs
• GameSpot
• GameZone
• MobyGames
• GameRankings
• GameStop/Funcoland
• EB Games
• Wal-Mart