Slashdot Mirror

If I remember correctly the guys that use to make the UK version of Next Generation ended up becoming Edge Magazine. I'm not totally sure though, my memory is a bit hazy. But yeah, Next Generation was by far the best video gaming magazine the industry has seen. It's too bad the Imagine Media guys were a bunch idiots.

I worked for a game developer (Kesmai) that was bought by EA in early 2000 (the buy was announced in late 1999).

A couple of links from around then will tell the tale:

EA From the Inside I/II (LtM - I is a couple of entries below II. Sadly the links to the actual scanned memo are no longer extant, it was a stunner.)

EA harassment lawsuit (Fatbabies)

EA has been about maximizing profit and minimizing expenses first, and customer satisfaction second, and the health and well-being of its employees almost dead last, for a long time now.

Fatbabies speculative post here. Company press release here.

Having worked for a game developer for a bit (but not any more), I can vouch for the sad state of software engineering, project management and management generally in at least one company. Talking to peers and browsing the likes of Fat Babies indicates that if not the norm, it's certainly wide spread.

We made a great game, but it was in spite of, not because of, the engineering and management practices. It is worth noting that every employed programmer from that game has since left the company. Good people, but bad practices. I still hope they can turn things around, but I'm not holding my breath.

Please tell me again how Fat Babies -- a gamebiz rumor site -- is off topic in this discussion about a new gamebiz rumor site?!

Some competition for Fat Babies then...

somebody is going to turn sour in the fatbabies.com forum !

Check out FatBabies before deciding on a career in the game industry. There are pluses, but there are a lot of minuses. For one thing, when you look at game companies and see a bunch of programmers in their 20's your first thought might be that that's a good thing because everyone is fresh and excited, but then you start to realize that a lot of people get burnt out of the game industry by the time they are 30. It's hard to find anyone over 30 in game companies, and most of them are pretty cynical.

And forget about games as an artform -- game publishers are the most conservative businessmen on the planet. Not conservative in the sense of right-wing christians, but conservative in the sense that they will only back a game that they know will make them money. That's why out of the hundreds of games that come out every year, only a couple stand out as unique. If you go into the game industry, you will most likely be putting out one of the hundreds of clones (assuming your game isn't shit-canned before release, which happens to about half of them).

But if you want to know how not to develop games, check out Fat Babies. It's game industry news and rumors from actual industry insiders. Sort of the fuckedcompany.com of the gaming world. --Shoeboy

Games programming is one of the last bastions of 'pure' code;

don't believe the hype, I had fairly recently a short stint at a games development company (whom I will not name) and nowadays pure coding doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

I should know, we had to use an IMHO sucky gaming engine just because our publisher wanted us to, and we wouldn't have offered a contract if we offered to write our own engine (which IMHO would have been a zillion times better than what we were forced to use).

Nowadays games programming is getting closer and closer to assembly line programming, it's all milestones, milestones, milestones, using pieces that you can buy off the shelf as much as possible to minimize publisher's exposure (your team tanks ? who cares, the publisher still has the license to the engine you are using, while if you were developing from scratch, they wouldn't have anything).

IMHO (again) games programming used to be fun and 'pure', now for many developers it's as rewarding as sucking rocks through a straw, I mean, to get into games programming (I wanted to see it first hand) I had to take a significant pay cut, work nearly twice as many hours, and have far less freedom in my technical decisions than I had at any other company I worked in: after a while I figured it was not for me, and found a much much more rewarding (financially and professionally) job elsewhere.

Before buying in the hype, please do yourself a favour and research how the games industry really is nowadays. While there are some fun software houses to work in, the likelyhood you're going to end up in one of them (especially as your first job) is not that high.

While some of what's posted there is mostly flames etc. reading Fatbabies will give you at least an idea of the flip side of the coin.

Quoting:

No IT-Manager with a half a brain would frown upon buying new machines every year (or even every few months) for budget reasons, while losing thousands of $ because the programmers aren't working at top-efficiency on computers which don't support the best development tools.

(Two years since working for that company, and still bitter! On a possibly unrelated note, check out fatbabies for game industry goss.

Here's the deal - console games used to have a 6 year lifespan. That's shrinking to 3 years. This basically halves return on investment for new console systems.

There are 4 major players in the console war now.
Sega, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony - all are trying to get exclusive development deals so that hot games only come out on their platforms. There's not that many good titles, some platforms are going to get screwed and all will have to pay for exclusive development.

A lot of the major game houses are struggling - see fatbabies for the industry gossip. This means even fewer titles and thus less profit for the console makers.

Consoles don't turn a profit - as ESR likes to remind us, they sell below cost and make it up on game sales. The current shortage of parts will exacerbate this problem.

Console launches are expensive - it takes a lot of investment capital to launch a new platform. Microsoft is avoiding this by using off the shelf technologies, and it looks like nintendo is doing the same, but that leaves sony and sega in the cold.

PC's are top of the line technologically speaking - a 1.2ghz athlon with a gf2 ultra packs a lot of horsepower combined with a lot of excellent libraries and developer know-how. The PS2 is quite advanced but hard to code for. Since nintendo's PowerPC comes from IBM it probably doesn't have altivec and that leaves it depending on the (for a risc chip) weak FPU powerpc's are known for. The dreamcast uses PowerVR - a tech that was way to shitty for the PC platform - oops. The X-Box is sound here since it basically is just a PC with parts removed.

I don't see room for 4 companies in this market, and I don't see how Microsoft (with the best outlook) can sell a stripped down pc that is limited by TV set resolutions.

Consoles are in trouble.

--Shoeboy

I am an artist working for a major video game publisher. I've been in the industry since, oh, about the time the CD-ROM appeared on the scene. When that happened, intro movies and "in game cut-scenes" became the standard, and almost all high profile games are compelled to include them to this very day.

I've noticed something about all the cutscenes and intro movies. They all have two things in common- they are all very expensive to make, and they are all crap. With a few exceptions (fer instance the stuff from Starcraft), I've never been moved to admire any of that effort. The stuff is always too stiff, phony looking, poorly written and cornily voice-acted.

IMHO, this has proved to be a big problem in the industry, I'd even venture say that 'cinematics' are ultimatly the number one reason so many game companies fold. See, these cut scenes end up accounting for a huge chunk of a games budget. It generally takes 8-10 people a whole project cycle to wrangle these movies together, sometimes as many as 15 or 20! That's translates into 18 months of paying those big salaries, buying all that 'bitchin' equipment, office space and outrageously expensive software packages.

But that's just where the trouble begins. Due to the commitee-like arrangement of a software project, work is slow and prone to revisions. Several months of work can be undone in one email from marketting. Imagine how it is to be the executive that makes the decision whether to delay a game because the cinematics have fallen a bit short of spectacular, to pay that much more while going that much longer without revenue, because some primmadonna (that btw isn't 'hot' enough for pixar, disney or real films) insists that just a few more weeks of rendering volume search lights on the Nebulon Battle Cruiser will make or break the game? Of course your going to let crap out the door at that point.

Stress really begins to mount towards the end of a project. ship date begins to really loom on the horizon. maybe a competitor beats yoou to the market with a similar game, but then it flops! People are always saying very mean things about you at places like Old Man Murray and Fatbabies and there's the almost ever-present threat of the numbers just not adding up this month. And cinematics are taking half the entire budget!?!!

I hate to admit it, especially since I have a professional interest, but I almost always click through cinematics after I've seen the first couple. I am always eager to get back to the action, in my mind, like a real gamer. I am rarely hooked into the story, almost never interested in the setting enough to sit idle for 2-3 minutes to see obscure details. I'm satisfied with the gameplay I guess, and maybe I'm soured to them by the process- but I can't think of many games that would have been lesser for their lack of cinematics...

Great change is always rocking the industry. But there has collected a sediment, an entrenched school of thinking that is slowly entrenching itself out of business. This school of thought that says that 'cinematics are in' also says that 'consumers like crates and jumping puzzles' and 'let them eat bugs'. The industry is crowded and stuck, everyone is chasing the sequel, (franchise), investor dollars and the reviewers. (The PS2 is promising a sort salvation for all (in that the sales will be high enough to support even the gluttonous lifestyle of a contemporary software studio) though it is a shaky bet at best considereing the N and X box/cube FUD and all the negative PS2 info floating around...)

Which all sorta leads me to my point: A fantastic thing is happening to videogames lately, and it has almost nothing to do with the industry. Level Designers, Artists and Programmers are all creaping out of the woodwork, out of the nooks and crannies of the Internet. The game industry is headed back into the garage, at last, though we may as well start calling it the 'bedroom' as that's where most people keep their computers AFAIK. They are putting together some great stuff- just think of all the mods and skins for UT and Q3a. With the adoption of the term 'machinema', another crucial element of gamemaking has reverted to the hands of the ameteur. With half a gig of warez audio and graphics apps, an open-source engine and a little bit of scripting magic, a near-professional quality game can once again get hacked together by a couple of geek comrades-in-arms on their summer break from High School. It is only a matter of time before machinema and all the other elements come together and spontaneously create the next Doom2 or even a Final Fantasy and capture the attention of the gaming public in a #1 hit kinda way.

And I want to participate! I will begin browsing heavilly after I post this. Hmmm, I wonder if I can participate in something like this. I signed my name to an awful lot of intimidating legalese during the course of my rather short career, I imagine I could get fired or sued for something like this. All the [free software] triumph in the world isn't going to pay for my Dual P4 or 60" HDTV.

:)Fudboy