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Who let John Romero at the research budget?

Dear Lord, I googled off to find out how long Daikatana took to make, and discovered there is a http://www.planetdaikatana.com/! There are user created levels and everything!

I'm guessing this is Mike Montague.

Where do the new ideas go if we can't have games like...Shenmue...?

In the case of Shenmue, hopefully into the garbage. Someone at Sega seems to have confused "innovative" with "boring," "pointless," "repetative," "plot-free," and "wildly unrealistic."

Anyway... back on topic...

The editorial is off base. As any creative industry grows the core of the industry becomes conservative, unwilling to take the risks necessary to create truly innovative work. But just because the core does doesn't mean that everyone will. Some companies will realize that you don't need to sell millions of copies to be successful and will happily make modest profits with smaller markets making truly innovative games. The original Counterstrike was just such a case, it popularized the modern SWAT style game and refined into the basis of many multi-player games. Pop Cap Games has done phenominally well with their little games, most notably Bejeweled Something genuinely original? How about surprisingly addictive game about building bridges, Chronic Logic's Pontifex . How about a hard to explain that can only be inaccurately described as action puzzle play matched with turn based stategy, Moonbase Commander . Check out the Independent Games Festival for bunches more of genuinely new and interesting games.

Of course, certain genres are completely unreasonable for small publishers, like massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Or are they? How about a MMORPG without any combat? A Tale in the Desert . A puzzle based MMORPG? Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates .

Thanks to internet distribution, it's becoming more and more economical for a smaller company to reach out to a global audience.

So, there is lots of great new game ideas. Sometimes they even escape from big, conservative companies. So why don't we see them? Why aren't more people aware of them? The problem isn't that a lack of new ideas, the problem is the journalists themselves! By focusing on the big budget rehash games, spending time giving us pointless "preview" coverage over and over ("We still haven't actually played the game, but boy, it sure does look neat. We look forward to its release in forty-eight months") instead of seeking out and publicizing great stuff from small companies. It wouldn't take much to get the general public looking for these games, helping to encourage further innovation. Because the journalists hype them so, the game industry is still stuck in the idiot "Big budget, big payoff" gamble that the movie industry is. With a few small budge success stories we could see big companies realizing that quarter or half million dollar risks don't have huge rewards, but they also lack the possibility of becoming catastrophic failures.

If you're worried about the lack of innovative games, go looking for them, they exist. Point them out to your friends. And if you're a journalist, don't just bitch, tell your readers about what gems you do find!

good thing for Nokia that Romero is doing an adaptation, we all know what happens when he decides to make something of his own. :)

Mike

Microsoft is responsible for making sure that only quality software (err ... let's ignore stuff like Kabuki Warriors, eh? All consoles have to have their share of stinkers ...) is released for their console. Otherwise, we'd be right back in 1984 and the last video game crash. A major contributing factor was Atari's lack of certification for games, and the subsequent glut of pure crap. Do we want to go back to that? I know I don't.

Egad, hopefully that won't happen. Picture what would happen if there was a successful gaming system that anyone could write games for? What would that be like? Oh, yeah. Just like modern PCs. Sure, there is a lot of crap, but it is ignored and the good stuff rises to the top.(Obviously good marketing can help a good game, but ultimately crap sinks, and quality succeeds.) The PC game industry seems to have done pretty well given that it really demands at least a $600 "console" to play and only caters to people willing to purchase a $1,200 "console".

No, Microsoft's only interest in restricting who can publish is based on simple greed. Microsoft makes money from publishing their own games and from licensing fees from other companies. Microsoft isn't going to be interested in companies making games without paying them. Microsoft doesn't really care about "quality software" for the X-Box, but they are interested in controlling the market and limiting their own competition. This is an old console-monopolists trick (Nintendo regularly delayed approval on competitors games so that their in house product could be on shelves first). This is a stunning example of the dangers of a monopoly and why console manufacturers work so hard to keep monopoly control over their systems. The fear becoming the PC game market, where games have to succeed or fail on their own strengths and they have to compete fairly.