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Why Do Games and Game Studios Fail?
LukeG writes "This new article discusses the reason behind games and their developers failing, noting the distance of those selling the games, from those that buy them as one possible cause. Doomed games such as Bablylon 5 come under the spotlight, while the ubiquitous Duke Nukem Forever is also touched upon." For me, this article brought to mind the twin disasters of Fallout Tactics and the Farscape based game.
When the programmers dont care. Too often people learn to program when what they really want to do is produce. Im not sure about commerical games but i know many times smaller games are messed up when everyone has i different idea or plan.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
But I think it can best be summed up with the following words:
Because the games suck.
You'd almost think a 'net company would know
Look at the technology and effort that went into Daikatana.... without anybody ever playing the game to see if it was fun.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
...But I thought Fallout Tactics was a great game. It wasn't exactly the same as FO1 & 2, but was a great game in its own right.
I agree with you about Farscape though, but I realize that other people may have liked it.
graspee
Why Websites Fail. It appears to be slashdotted already.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Why Do Web Pages and Web Servers Fail?
That's one thing we don't need an article for...:-P
After all the eye candy losses its novelty gamers quickly realize that the game plays counterintuitivly, and or the story is vapid, and lacking any depth.
Why do games and their developers fail?
All Images
It is a cold hard fact that the games business is just that, a business. When push comes to shove if you aren't making money then the game is over. There are times, however, when I begin to wonder if the people with the money actually know what's going on. I remember buying a DVD when the technology was just breaking in the UK and finding one of those stupid marketing research pamphlets on the inside. Glancing over the questions one has always stuck in my mind. The question was to tick what was the primary reason for buying a particular film over another and among the list was 'the studio'. I couldn't, and still can't, understand how someone would think "Oh, that film was made by Warner Bros, it must be good, I'll get it." What made it memorable was that some marketing monkey boy must have believed that to be case. To me it showed a complete lack of understanding between the people releasing the DVD's and the people buying them. It has taken years of marketing research by the studios to realise that the kinds of people who like to buy DVD's want extra features about the making of the films and interviews with cast and crew. If they had just asked me at the start, or any other film fan, I could have saved them time and a whole lot of money. I guess I've only myself to blame as I never did send back the pamphlet. In the same regard I often wonder about the people in charge of which games get made, and which do not.
Now, a lot of games companies don't succeed due to a number of reasons, but most fail because their games aren't particularly good. Corporate natural selection, as it were. There are two other types though, that make no sense to me. One kind that make or are potentially making great games, but still fade away. Then there is my favourite enigma, the kind of company that seem to be making a game that almost the entire gaming audience can see failing right out of the gate.
Let me talk about the first kind as a sort of epitaph to the death of a good friend. The most recent example of this was the tragic demise of Appeal, the Belgian developer that had made Outcast. Outcast was a tremendous game in so many ways. Graphically it was unique thanks to the voxel technology they used so well. It had extremely sophisticated effects for the time, including software bump mapping, depth of field blurring and even some screen anti-aliasing. It's soundtrack was an auditory masterpiece thanks to the Moscow Symphonic Orchestra. The gameplay a brilliant mix of adventure and action. Yet despite critical praise, and reasonably good commercial success, somebody somewhere decided that the sequel would not be.
In Appeal's case, one of the problems was the initial choice of using voxel technology. Whilst it gave the game a very organic landscape, the engine took a long time to develop. For the sequel they wanted to move to polygons and so it was a case of back to square one as they worked on a new engine. But from the screenshots that are still available on the website that sits like an eerie ghost town, it looked very advanced. By aiming for the Playstation 2 platform as well as PC it would have given them a more stable platform as well as a huge market. After all, more and more games are becoming more open and free form for the player. But what may have been a huge hit was cancelled so Cutter Slade, the saviour of Adelpha, is no more.
Another company that went under despite critical praise was Looking Glass studios who developed System Shock 2, and the Thief series of games. In their case Eidos Interactive's decision was very strange as many of the employees were rehired by Ion Storm to work on, Thief 3. So evidently someone inside Eidos believes in the title.
--Dave
You'd almost think a 'net company would know
The site is /.ed, but I noticed that you get a friendly message from IIS which tells you that too many people are connected- but have you seen the unnecessary bulk of the HTML source ? It would be funny if you had a really plain web site and "turning people away" like this actually used more bandwidth...
graspee
Not enough T & A in their games.
Why do games and their developers fail?
All Images
The Wing Commander games were going from strength to strength, a home-grown property within the industry so no restrictive licensing was applicable. Each title met with critical and commercial success. Then Origin just stopped making them and the final serving of that brilliant universe was the spin-off movie that left a bitter taste. One can at least appreciate that the game series went out on a positive note.
A game license that broke my heart when it was cancelled was the planned Babylon 5 game. It was in production during the height of the show's popularity. It was to be a space shooter with the unique ship handling that characterised the Star Fury's of the show. When the Star Wars games had been so successful why cancel this promising project? It's interesting to note that the great TV series suffered similar problems from the mysterious people in charge. J Michael Stratsynski was messed around as to whether the fifth series would be green lit. Thus the fourth series had the narrative crammed into it leaving the fifth with little to do, only truly reaching its high in the final episode "Sleeping in Light". Why was this series messed around with? Well, the powers that be wanted a spin-off series, too blind to see they were destroying the very thing they wanted to prolong. The spin off was an abysmal failure.
There will of course be information that we are not privy to in each of these cases. Perhaps the games were vastly over-budget. The games cancelled mid-development may have been further from completion than I believed or were over ambitious in their scope and rather than scale back, cancelling was preferable. Or maybe it was simply personal or creative differences. For whatever reason I certainly would have loved to see the games come to fruition and I wonder what inner politics during development led to their downfall.
Now we come to the second type of company and no matter how strange the first are, the second are even more curious. Their are a few examples that spring to mind in this category, from Eidos' impossible release schedule that destroyed the Tomb Raider series by not giving sufficient time for innovation, to the merciless march of the Army Men. Two prime examples stand out above all others, a lovely pair of double D's, Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever.
I want to make it clear that I am not out to vilify the companies or individuals responsible, far from it. I have the utmost respect and admiration for anyone who has the energy, enthusiasm and courage to go out and create a game and release it to the unforgiving public. For those of you not familiar with the story of Daikatana it was the brainchild of an id Software employee called John Romero. He left id to form Ion Storm alongside Tom Hall with grandiose ideas about big epic games, large teams, fantastic designs, plush offices and all the cokes you can drink. Back in the optimistic technology boom he got it.
The game was being developed for the Quake engine, then when Quake 2 was released they decided to switch engines to keep Daikatana looking competitive. This was not an easy move. The team suffered personal and technical difficulties and was burning money rapidly. The game suffered lengthy delays and when released was a critical and commercial failure. Now Daikatana had some commendable design elements that just didn't quite work together.
Gaming leaves so little time to browse Slashdot.org that I haven't touched Unreal Tourny in weeks.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
It is a cold hard fact that the games business is just that, a business. When push comes to shove if you aren't making money then the game is over. There are times, however, when I begin to wonder if the people with the money actually know what's going on. I remember buying a DVD when the technology was just breaking in the UK and finding one of those stupid marketing research pamphlets on the inside. Glancing over the questions one has always stuck in my mind. The question was to tick what was the primary reason for buying a particular film over another and among the list was 'the studio'. I couldn't, and still can't, understand how someone would think "Oh, that film was made by Warner Bros, it must be good, I'll get it." What made it memorable was that some marketing monkey boy must have believed that to be case. To me it showed a complete lack of understanding between the people releasing the DVD's and the people buying them. It has taken years of marketing research by the studios to realise that the kinds of people who like to buy DVD's want extra features about the making of the films and interviews with cast and crew. If they had just asked me at the start, or any other film fan, I could have saved them time and a whole lot of money. I guess I've only myself to blame as I never did send back the pamphlet. In the same regard I often wonder about the people in charge of which games get made, and which do not.
Now, a lot of games companies don't succeed due to a number of reasons, but most fail because their games aren't particularly good. Corporate natural selection, as it were. There are two other types though, that make no sense to me. One kind that make or are potentially making great games, but still fade away. Then there is my favourite enigma, the kind of company that seem to be making a game that almost the entire gaming audience can see failing right out of the gate.
Let me talk about the first kind as a sort of epitaph to the death of a good friend. The most recent example of this was the tragic demise of Appeal, the Belgian developer that had made Outcast. Outcast was a tremendous game in so many ways. Graphically it was unique thanks to the voxel technology they used so well. It had extremely sophisticated effects for the time, including software bump mapping, depth of field blurring and even some screen anti-aliasing. It's soundtrack was an auditory masterpiece thanks to the Moscow Symphonic Orchestra. The gameplay a brilliant mix of adventure and action. Yet despite critical praise, and reasonably good commercial success, somebody somewhere decided that the sequel would not be.
In Appeal's case, one of the problems was the initial choice of using voxel technology. Whilst it gave the game a very organic landscape, the engine took a long time to develop. For the sequel they wanted to move to polygons and so it was a case of back to square one as they worked on a new engine. But from the screenshots that are still available on the website that sits like an eerie ghost town, it looked very advanced. By aiming for the Playstation 2 platform as well as PC it would have given them a more stable platform as well as a huge market. After all, more and more games are becoming more open and free form for the player. But what may have been a huge hit was cancelled so Cutter Slade, the saviour of Adelpha, is no more.
Another company that went under despite critical praise was Looking Glass studios who developed System Shock 2, and the Thief series of games. In their case Eidos Interactive's decision was very strange as many of the employees were rehired by Ion Storm to work on, Thief 3. So evidently someone inside Eidos believes in the title.
The Wing Commander games were going from strength to strength, a home-grown property within the industry so no restrictive licensing was applicable. Each title met with critical and commercial success. Then Origin just stopped making them and the final serving of that brilliant universe was the spin-off movie that left a bitter taste. One can at least appreciate that the game series went out on a positive note.
A game license that broke my heart when it was cancelled was the planned Babylon 5 game. It was in production during the height of the show's popularity. It was to be a space shooter with the unique ship handling that characterised the Star Fury's of the show. When the Star Wars games had been so successful why cancel this promising project? It's interesting to note that the great TV series suffered similar problems from the mysterious people in charge. J Michael Stratsynski was messed around as to whether the fifth series would be green lit. Thus the fourth series had the narrative crammed into it leaving the fifth with little to do, only truly reaching its high in the final episode "Sleeping in Light". Why was this series messed around with? Well, the powers that be wanted a spin-off series, too blind to see they were destroying the very thing they wanted to prolong. The spin off was an abysmal failure.
There will of course be information that we are not privy to in each of these cases. Perhaps the games were vastly over-budget. The games cancelled mid-development may have been further from completion than I believed or were over ambitious in their scope and rather than scale back, cancelling was preferable. Or maybe it was simply personal or creative differences. For whatever reason I certainly would have loved to see the games come to fruition and I wonder what inner politics during development led to their downfall.
Now we come to the second type of company and no matter how strange the first are, the second are even more curious. Their are a few examples that spring to mind in this category, from Eidos' impossible release schedule that destroyed the Tomb Raider series by not giving sufficient time for innovation, to the merciless march of the Army Men. Two prime examples stand out above all others, a lovely pair of double D's, Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever.
I want to make it clear that I am not out to vilify the companies or individuals responsible, far from it. I have the utmost respect and admiration for anyone who has the energy, enthusiasm and courage to go out and create a game and release it to the unforgiving public. For those of you not familiar with the story of Daikatana it was the brainchild of an id Software employee called John Romero. He left id to form Ion Storm alongside Tom Hall with grandiose ideas about big epic games, large teams, fantastic designs, plush offices and all the cokes you can drink. Back in the optimistic technology boom he got it.
The game was being developed for the Quake engine, then when Quake 2 was released they decided to switch engines to keep Daikatana looking competitive. This was not an easy move. The team suffered personal and technical difficulties and was burning money rapidly. The game suffered lengthy delays and when released was a critical and commercial failure. Now Daikatana had some commendable design elements that just didn't quite work together.
How did this game ever reach the shelves though? In November 1998 the game was a year behind schedule and eight key team members, dubbed the "Ion Eight", walked out on the company. Surely that should have sent alarm bells ringing at Eidos that all was not well in the glass tower. I wouldn't advocate firing the personnel, instead why not take the talent and put them to work on other projects. After all, Ion Storm was also working on (in separate offices) Deus Ex and Anachronox. The fact that Daikatana was finished despite all the problems is a credit to John Romero's passion and drive for the project and I personally would like to see him return as a lead designer for PC games.
Finally though let us talk a bit about one of the most long awaited games ever, Duke Nukem Forever. As the saying goes, he who does not understand history is doomed to repeat it. And Duke Nukem looks a lot like Daikatana from where I sit. It has suffered huge delays. It has an ambitious design, probably unrealisable. It has a following whose hopes are so high that it could not possibly meet the expectation. Evidence of this point can be seen looking over the forums at 3D Realms website where one blind worshipper believed that once released Duke Nukem might destroy the games industry by raising the standard beyond everyone else. Has this fool been living in a dream world, has he not played some of the amazing games that have come out in the five years that Duke has been in development? Ironically 3D Realms made the decision way back in 1998 to switch to the Unreal engine to save time! How many other Unreal-powered games have been released since then?
I'm going to go further than 3D Realms are prepared to, and make an educated guess that it will be out by the end of the second quarter of 2003 or it will never see the light of day at all. How have I reached this conclusion? Well, given that the 3D Realms website contains no new information for that past two years about the game (and the movie/screenshots no longer cut the mustard) I base it on two premises. One, if it was going to be released for this Christmas we would have heard something, anything, about it by now. Two, if it is not out by the end of the second quarter 2003 then Doom 3 will be all too nigh on the horizon. And if the brief history of computer games has told us one thing it's that nobody can beat John Carmack on his own turf.
I would like to believe that Duke Nukem Forever, or the next Tomb Raider, will be great. That they'll make me eat my words. But when these games come out, all I'll be able to think about is how great Outcast 2 or Babylon 5 might have been. I suppose I have the better of the two worlds in this instance. In mine I can pretend that Outcast 2 was a monumental epic game that rivalled all before it. In Duke's, the game as always, will have the final say and all the hype and expectation will only add salt to the wound.
Now I've had my say, I'd like to hear your thoughts. What do you think of those pulling the strings in the games industry, are they making the right choices and the right games? What about Duke Nukem Forever, a destined failure, or potential ground-breaker 3D Realms suggest. Use the comments form below to vocalise and discuss.
By Richard Clifford
Why do games and their developers fail?
All Images
How did this game ever reach the shelves though? In November 1998 the game was a year behind schedule and eight key team members, dubbed the "Ion Eight", walked out on the company. Surely that should have sent alarm bells ringing at Eidos that all was not well in the glass tower. I wouldn't advocate firing the personnel, instead why not take the talent and put them to work on other projects. After all, Ion Storm was also working on (in separate offices) Deus Ex and Anachronox. The fact that Daikatana was finished despite all the problems is a credit to John Romero's passion and drive for the project and I personally would like to see him return as a lead designer for PC games.
Finally though let us talk a bit about one of the most long awaited games ever, Duke Nukem Forever. As the saying goes, he who does not understand history is doomed to repeat it. And Duke Nukem looks a lot like Daikatana from where I sit. It has suffered huge delays. It has an ambitious design, probably unrealisable. It has a following whose hopes are so high that it could not possibly meet the expectation. Evidence of this point can be seen looking over the forums at 3D Realms website where one blind worshipper believed that once released Duke Nukem might destroy the games industry by raising the standard beyond everyone else. Has this fool been living in a dream world, has he not played some of the amazing games that have come out in the five years that Duke has been in development? Ironically 3D Realms made the decision way back in 1998 to switch to the Unreal engine to save time! How many other Unreal-powered games have been released since then?
I'm going to go further than 3D Realms are prepared to, and make an educated guess that it will be out by the end of the second quarter of 2003 or it will never see the light of day at all. How have I reached this conclusion? Well, given that the 3D Realms website contains no new information for that past two years about the game (and the movie/screenshots no longer cut the mustard) I base it on two premises. One, if it was going to be released for this Christmas we would have heard something, anything, about it by now. Two, if it is not out by the end of the second quarter 2003 then Doom 3 will be all too nigh on the horizon. And if the brief history of computer games has told us one thing it's that nobody can beat John Carmack on his own turf.
I would like to believe that Duke Nukem Forever, or the next Tomb Raider, will be great. That they'll make me eat my words. But when these games come out, all I'll be able to think about is how great Outcast 2 or Babylon 5 might have been. I suppose I have the better of the two worlds in this instance. In mine I can pretend that Outcast 2 was a monumental epic game that rivalled all before it. In Duke's, the game as always, will have the final say and all the hype and expectation will only add salt to the wound.
Now I've had my say, I'd like to hear your thoughts. What do you think of those pulling the strings in the games industry, are they making the right choices and the right games? What about Duke Nukem Forever, a destined failure, or potential ground-breaker 3D Realms suggest. Use the comments form below to vocalise and discuss.
Did anyone else notice this posted earlier today for about 2 minutes? It even had a typo in the headline.
(there was no "D" in "Do")
Too much product, not enough buyers. In addition, there's not enough playing time to play every freaking game available. It's as simple as that.
Can't read the article since it appears to be already slashdotted, but...
Most games that manage to finally get published are rehashes of already popular games, and often just a quick game version of something already popular in another medium already (tv, movies, books, etc.). For one of those to succeed, it has to *really* be well put together, with great art and marketing (like, say, Spiderman). It's surprising when a game like that doesn't fail. Hopefully the article spends more time discussing the whys and wherefores of games that aren't going to have an obviously high chance of failing (Black and White, say).
or this was posted earlier today, pulled and reposted.
If you remember this too, let me know. I wouldn't want to be the only one caught in a paradox of time and space.
then I wouldn't call that a failure.
Some of the best films are great because of strong plots, excellent storytelling, and good cinematography, without breaking any new ground. Is there anything really innovative about Ang Lee? Steven Soderbergh? Not really, but they utilize existing techniques well, and know their craft.
Same with games. It doesn't look like Doom III is going to break any new ground - just do a lot of things that were done before, better. But they are the *right* things - suspense, atmosphere, art.
Can you say IIS?
I knew you could.
the ubiquitous Duke Nukem Forever is also touched upon... This is the first time I've heard of something that doesn't exist yet, and that probably never will, being ubiquitous.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
is to add more frogs.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
It's because of the upper management that keeps trying to get a product out the door as soon as possible. Doesn't matter if the game is bug ridden, plenty examples of this, or has other issues that need to be fixed first. The folks at the top and the investors want to get their money as soon as possible. Problem is that it's pretty tough to produce a decent game (believe it or not) within one year most of the time. An example of a gaming company doing the right thing is Blizzard Entertainment. The folks that own them right now (Havas Interactive I believe) understand that Blizzard knows what it's doing. So when Blizzard says the game is not ready to ship yet they adjust their schedule accordingly. Blizzard will not ship a game until it is done, even if they could make more money by releasing it earlier. Sure their games have a few minor bugs, but I can't remember any major ones in them. And can you name one title that was a flop for them? Because I sure as heck can not. More game publishers should follow Blizzard's example. To quote an article from PC Gamer on Blizzard's 10th anniversary Blizzard's strategy is this, "The game comes first". Why more game publishers have not adopted this approach after the large amount of success that Blizzard has seen may never be known.
My guess is games and game studios fail because of something us in the industry call 'sucking'. This is a very hard to describe phenomenon, and can be caused by a number of factors. One common factor is the 'movie tie-in' in which a game is based on a (usually crappy) movie and thrown together in about 6 months. Examples of games which exhibit 'sucking' include:
"Daikatana"
"Blood 2"
"Disney's Lilo And Stitch Interactive Pop-Up Book" (or whatever the heck they call the tie-in for that movie)
"CowboyNeal, Space Crusader"
We here at the Fullashita University Interactive Media Department have devoted years of time and careful study to this phenomenon. We are currently in the process of developing 'anti-sucking' technology, based on a scientific phenomenon we call 'Gameplay'. This 'Gameplay' has proved to be extremely useful in protecting against 'sucking' in most of our tests.
- Kevin Gadd, Head Researcher, Fullashita University Interactive Media Department
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Always on the lookout for the dreaded /. effect, now we have 5 copies posted on the board.
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
The thing is, there are some absolutely brilliant games out there, that nobody ever hears about.
:). There was plot, humour, intelligence, and it took you back in time to interesting places. It was hard to finish. And you couldn't just look up on the net for cheats.
I remember the Journeyman Project II - I got number II as a birthday present - and I swear, it was the best game I ever played (along with Marathon... but that's another story
I was filled with the most enormous sense of satisfaction when I completed that game.
Then, I hear the news about a month ago that Presto Studios, the makers of the game, have just shut down. A real shame. I for one will remember and appreciate their work, if only on that game.
-- james
Daikatana used the Quake 1 engine, and came out long after Q2 (and 3?)
That was a case of a development company trying to behave like rockstars while they're supposed to be engineering software.
I think the competition is less there, so game makers should port to FreeBSD.
1)Money
2)Money
3)Money
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As in build a better mouse trap.
The release now patch later philosophy obviously doesn't work. Couple that with the extreme arrogance of some of the prima donna game makers and you have a disaster waiting to happen.
Marketing pushes these games so hard, nothing could live up to the hype. Why announce a game 4 years before release? Why announce it 6 months before release?
I'm not the biggest fan of Blizzard but at least they have cool beta programs and test their products. I can't count how many games I've bought over the years and had to toss in the trash because they were so bad (SIN comes to mind).
In the end it's developers such as Epic, Id and Blizzard who survive because they actually care about what they are releasing.
It's gotten to the point where I don't buy games until six months or so after the release when the first 3-4 patches have come out and I can read the reviews to see how bad it sucks.
I have bought $50 games on 6 CD's that have bored me to tears after a few hours. I often find myself playing real.com games like diamond mine and alchemy as opposed to the latest greatest bloatware on the shelves.
Perhaps if a company would attempt to actually make the game enjoyable as opposed to just pretty, the industry would be doing better.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
Games are just another market like many others, be it retail, anything. In order to sell, you have to have a couple of key components:
1. What it is your selling must be quality. If its a software game, people must believe that besides the graphic illustrious factor, the game is quality to play. Take the recent release of Battle Field 1942. Theres a game I have seen crash more people's pc's than most.
2. Attention to Multiplay. Developers out there are, and I can't quite understand this because its so BLOODY OBVIOUS, are continuing to develop games in single player, when it can be easily seen there should be a multi player aspect. Need for Speed hot Pursuit 2 on the Playstation 2 recently released, won't support online play, but the PC version does. If you want a game to succeed, MAKE IT MULTIPLAYER, at least then you can play humans.
2a. Now on the server side, one can learn a great deal from id here. Make it so the server binary is freely available, and can run easily on windows and unix platforms. The fact that quake3 and its off shoots are STILL going from (how long ago was it released?!?) demonstrates that this can definately be a factor.
3. Pride. Gamedevelopers: Stop projecting your point of view as if you thought it was the entire communities. It seems to be, that you are developing without listening to the community. There are certainly some development houses that are releasing beta previews etc...and this is a great idea, however make feedback interactive, get people INVOLVED in this, not just, send email here, we MIGHT look through it. Set up websites, with multiple answer radio buttons, so users who aren't terribly fantastic at communicating these things, can simply fill it out. You will retain a lot of players this way.
4. PRICE. Here in Australia, we pay up to $100 AU for a game. Work from the point of view that our average salaries might be the same in terms of figures to those in the US, now work with the fact you get 2 of our dollars to your 1. This is DEFINATELY a factor in Australia, I am not so sure about the US.
5. Poor programming. Some games I see developed, look visually stunning, but the attention has clearly been focused on 3dsmax side of things, rather than the actual coding. The responsiveness of an action game can sometimes be classed as worse than a dogs breakfast. Developers, CONSULT PEOPLE, I wonder how many games get released because the boss pushed the developers to get it out, and no one asked public gaming people to have a look at it. Now it fails, developers get fired...etc...
What do YOU think?
Since its an IIS server and it clearly can't handle Slashdot, could someone post the content here?
That is also very astute. When one console game takes up to 80 hours to finish, just how many are most people going to play in a year?
While I thought that this article was fairly nteresting, this conclusion bothers me. Did the author ever think about the possibility that the question was put on the survey with the intention of validating the accuracy of the survey? You need to put some bullshit questions on a survey to test if people are blindly checking off boxes, or are really answering truthfully and thoughtfully...
Every comment I've read yet examines the game design and execution to determine why games fail. I expect that this is only 50% of the story. I believe the other half comes from the publication structure in the game industry.
I am told it is hugely impractical for a (regular?) game compnay to finance its own games. This is partly because of the crazy amounts of Hollywood-style glitz and polishing that the market pays for these days. The result is that game companies get "loans" from game publishers like Activision or Electronic Arts to complete the games.
At this point, the publisher is more-or-less in control. The publisher can cancel the game or change its budget. If the game is released, the game company has to pay back the publisher. Part of the deal assigns some portion of the game copmany's royalties to publisher. In the end, the game company can have a very successful product but barely break even (remind anyone of recorded music publication, or book publication?).
And that previous paragraph described a "good" situation. Imagine that the game company has crappy management and doesn't handle the narrow margins well; that the publisher decides to cancel the project; that the publisher goes bankrupt; that the publisher doesn't effectively market the game. I'm sure there are many more bad scenarios than good.
-Paul Komarek
None of these links work when you first post them.
Please try to get it right! I hit this one and it says "The page cannot be displayed".
This happens A LOT on this site!
1. Deadlines.
2. Emphasis on graphics vs. storyline.
3. On pc games are underpowered.
4. On consoles games are overpowered.
5. Repackage an older game with crap.
6. Games that are trying too hard to be
interactive and movie like.
7. Next version of game is announced at release
of current game.
8. Bugs/Glitches/Low Performance.
9. Not enough marketing.
10. Not targeting the correct age groups.
How kind of someone to take the time to tell them that...
When I think about Duke Nukem Forever, the word "ubiquitous" does not come to mind.
The site is slashdotted, but risking redundancy...
It seems to me that the death of many a game (and many a young game company) has come about through the mistaken assumption on the part of its developers that the number of features in, and overall flash of, a title are primary to its success. This misconception frequently leads to overly ambitious, unpolished games, when it leads to a marketable title at all (e.g. Summoner). The sad part is that this usually comes about through the best of intentions. A new gaming company wants to make a big splash with its first title, etc. so, it takes on a project that ultimately proves too demanding, forcing the developers to either abandon the project, release a bloated title with a shallow implementation, or cut out features mid-development, leading to a disjointed end product. Ultimately, it's really the polish that makes a game great, and sacrificing implementation for features is almost always a mistake. I have NES games that would hold my interest for a hundred times longer than much of what's coming out for the newer systems, and it certainly isn't because of the breathtaking graphics. Better to follow the old developers admonition of cutting your drawing board feature-set in half, and concentrating on a top notch execution with what remains. At the very least, you'll end up with a "good" game if your development house has real talent. And that's far more insurance than the alternative strategy offers...
Why does the poster give Fallout Tactics as an example of a failure? I think that's one of the better turn-based action games I've ever played! If the game didn't do well when it first came out, that doesn't mean it was bad - if we're comparing the games biz to the movie biz, there are plenty of titles that bombed on release and found an audience later; Fight Club anyone? eXistenz? Repo Man?
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
Unfortunately, the very issue (corporate involvement) that seems to allow games to either become more complex or develop a better story/technology often end up screwing the whole system up. One only has to look at the history of Bungie. The had some great technology, fantastic story lines and overall killer applications. They had two programs in the works, Oni and Halo when Microsoft came calling. Once Microsoft bought them out and assimilated Bungie, Oni became a shadow of what it once was to focus all efforts on getting Halo out of the box. Halo also became more diluted in concept to fit in with the console paradigm Microsoft purchased them for (The X-Box). Additionally, Microsoft cancelled all development for the Macintosh and Linux at the time and only recently has Westlake Interactive Westlake Interactivestarted porting Halo, originally intended for the Macintosh to the Mac platform. Westlake by the way is an impressive little operation that has been bringing the best games to the Macintosh market for years now.
I personally prefer to find the smaller game development guys who write quality stuff and provide them with my $$'s. Guys like Jesse Spears who is providing the world of naval simulation with Harpoon Harpoon3 Westlake also deserves many kudos for their dedication and quality of work.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I think one problem with current games is that their story lines are just lame. For some reason in my experience making a game for the computer is much different than a console. For a console having a simple side scroller where you just have to make it past the baddies and to the end is okay, but on a computer it is not.
:)
One reason is probably that a key board interface is much worse than a game pad and proportionatly very few computer game players own game pads. So on a computer game you have to have some type of good/unique interface, but that alone is not enough, you have to have an actually genuine story line. I would even go as far as to say that for most games you could put more necessity into the story than the graphics. It's the whole book vs. movie idea. The mind can make much more vivid images than a screen if given a good story. This is one reason that I think the Myst line made out so well. The interface was Ok at best compared to a lot of other games, but the visuals and the story really did suck you in. It really did become your world as the game tag line went.
I'm not saying that this goes for all games but it _definetly helps_. For instance First person shooters don't really require a plot, ie. Doom, or even much of an intracate one, i.e. Half Life. But a really nice one that has everything the other games has will do better. Marathon was this. It was an amazing game and I think one of the few reasions it didn't catch on quite as well as say doom is that it started out on the Mac.
It's like a really good movie. It isn't all flashy and smooth graphics, it's the good story along with all that.
Just my thoughts.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
And I mean REALLY bad movies. Movies so bad, they never made it to the theatre, despite their multi-million dollar price tag. Movies that went straight to video instead...
I guess it boils down to concept/script, and execution/production. If the concept sucks, it doesn't matter how nice looking it is, and if the execution falls through, it isn't worth even trying.
Lesson: producers are eternal optimists (and damn bandits to boot.) Before the hyped-up, money laden days of the dot comers, movie producers (and game producers by extension) had the shady accounting, super hype, sell the idea (instead of the product), raise and spend some else's money thing down pat. That they rise and fall on almost a daily basis shouldn't surprise anyone.
Games fail because the game buying public have failed,.. What people have supported with their $$$ over the years has led the game designers to have to put their investment into the flashy graphics using the latest 3D cards and such before gameplay and origionality,.. Before the age when 3D cards were the mainstay we get things like Star Control 2, Quest for Glory, Civilization and the likes,.. New and origional concepts were coming out all the time, granted you can do only so much new stuff it does not seem so much the trend these days,.. as for 3D over gameplay, look at what happened to Star Control 3, it was an absolubte joke, #2 is still playable now, #3 wasnt even fun when it first game out.
Fight Club broke records on release if I remember correctly. eXistenz sucked, i don't care how long after release you watch it. That was the worst sci-fi crap ever. I never even heard of Repo Man so I wont comment there.
The fact that games don't do well on release is a mystery. Games are announced years before release, where as movies only a few months unless you read all the rumor sites. If a game that's announced 4 years ahead of time can't succeed with it's built up hype machine then that burden falls squarely on the developers.
Are there sleeper titles? Sometimes but it's incredibly rare.
Now there's a game that lives up to its name.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I bet this will make all the gaming weenies cum their pants.
In my opinion, the most disasterous game ever is still E.T.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
"John Romero's Shampoo Budget"
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Of my vaporware-destined hopefuls, some crushed under internal pressure, and I wish I knew the details of the others'.
All the /.'ed article does is ask the question "Why do game studios fail?" and muse about possible reasons for a few specific games. The author's musings are those of an outsider and don't really provide any insight.
/plug For those wanting references, just check my link, or know that I programmed significant portions of all of the Age of Empires games, and my latest game, Age of Mythology, just hit stores this weekend. I've also spoken many times at industry conferences, written numerous articles, and had my writings on multiplayer cheating subject me to the slashdot effect on multiple occasions. Along the way, I've gotten to know many, many people in this business and see how a lot of different companies operate. /end plug
:)
I make this assessment as an Industry Insider and someone who helped build a very successful Game Studio from almost nothing, and has insider information on some the companies and games he muses about.
What that said to establish my knowledge, know that I would love to write my own version of the question with a detailed look at what I consider to be the real answers. However, that would take weeks and result in about a 20,000 word novella.
That said, there are a few big themes that loom over the industry that I can summarize. (This is not a complete list)
1) Production Values and feature demands for an "AAA" title in 2002. In a word: HUGE Moore's Law applies here too.
2) The large number of titles (PC and consoles) released that compete for the player's dollars and attention.
3) The cost of development. Because of #1 and #2, you get pressure to out-do your competition. This leads to #4
4) A "Tiering effect" of PC games (and console games). You have the "best" titles taking home the lion's share of the money, shelf space, review space, and mindshare. The majority of titles can't make money at the top level of production values leading to #5
5) A substantial (majority?) of game projects don't make back the money used in production. This means you either a) eventually close shop or b) have a system where successful titles subsidize the unsuccessful ones.
6) The side effect of 1 through 5, that causes publishers to be conservative in an effort to stay profitable. That leads to increased emphasis on franchises and less support for innovative and risky titles.
7) How talent is defined and treated. Many, many companies are created by their owners as vehicles to make wealth for themselves by most efficiently exploiting their workers. Game developers and programmers especially consider themselves to be more than mere assembly line workers. This is why you get a lot of churn of staff and people that consider themselves exploited. This is partially the fault of the employees because...
8) A lot of people get into the Game industry because they love games, and approach it as a passion, not a business. Reality (life, family, needs, mortgages, etc) intrudes with personal maturity. If the initial setup was exploitive, you see a lot of burnt-out, disillusioned people leave the industry.
9) The production demands of an extreme niche of the software industry on people. That is 90 hour work weeks as normal only to have something shipped despite your protests because to make a release date.
10) Equitable distribution of credit, recognition and compensation. John Carmack's Ferraris may have inspired thousands of dreams, but the state of the business has left a trail of broken promises of royalties, credit, recognition, or even a sane working environment.
11) Companies that believe that the games are produced by the top people; the C?O's, the management and marketing people, not the artists, designers, sound engineers and programmers. (*cough*) Believe that "Those people" are just there to mechanically realize the vision of the "creative" people, and they get what they deserve.
12) I'm getting tired of typing...
!!! Nothing in the above list is an absolute that can be applied to every single company in the industry. They just are general issues that push my hot buttons.
* The opinions expressed here are those of the Author and do not reflect or represent his employer in any way.
An observation from a casual gamer:
The sequence seems to be: (1) publish a game, (2) publish a "cheats" book, (3) watch the game's staying power approach zero.
My only serious computer games were Zork (I,II,III) and most other Infocom text adventures, Lemmings (I,II,III, Tribes), Doom, and Quake (with mission packs 1 & 2, I think). For one Infocom game (Starcross) I used a hint book... it was a total letdown. Why pay good money for a game then cop out by using cheats?
One cannot blame the publishers but their prefered sequence might be: sell a game, sell a cheatbook for that game, sell another game, sell a cheatbook for that game, and so forth to infinity.
Apparently, at some point the money stops flowing.
Look, the case of Fallout Tactics is a no-brainer:
1) It was a team-based strategy game. Turn-based, sure but still...the market is FILLED with RTS and turn-based strategy (TBS) games. GLUTTED in fact.
2) IT WASN'T FALLOUT 3. Seriously, this seems like a silly thing, but it is quite true...Fallout fans were NOT happy to be given a team-strategy game--they want Fallout 3, something Interplay has been extremely coy about. And if the FANS of Fallout didn't want Tactics--actually, there was a lot of HATRED towards Tactics, just because it wasn't Fallout 3--what was there to differentiate it from Warcraft, Starcraft and the like?
What does he mean by this: "For me, this article brought to mind the twin disasters of Fallout Tactics and the Farscape based game. " ?
and they've fucked their most ardent supporters (bnetd anyone?)
i've bought every blizzard game from blackthorne on floppy to starcraft to diablo but after what they did I did not purchase WarCraft III, yea I'm just one consumer and yea they dont' give a fuck about me but at least I make an effort to be consistent, where they do not.
This was nothing but one big giant rant. No inside information, no facts, no research, no speaking to people involved, no looking at numbers, nothing more than one guys opinions and complaints and armchair quarterbacking. How is this worthy of the front page, other than sheer gee-it's-long-enough-it-must-be-good?
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
You're an idiot. Can you say bandwidth, processor, disk I/O? Stupid fucker.
Its sometimes the publisher. They want to rush the game out to compete with other similar titles coming out around the same time. Then when the game fails the publisher blames the developer. Of course by then any and all support are gone and the devel team is disbanded. Thats why games fail.
yes but unless you're house is an arcade you won't see the #'s of people besides who wants to compete against a number like Dade when you can play against 31 angry aolers (bf1942, even the demo rocks)
The emphasis today is on special effects and graphics -- without 3D animation and full-motion video clips seamlessly (cough) integrated into the game play, the execs figure it won't sell.
We have PCs, NES, SNES, Genesis, PS, X-Box in the house, and my kids spend more time playing old FUN games such as Dragon Warrior IV, Solstice, Landtalker, Shining Force II than they do Final Fantasy XI or Baldur's Gate.
I still think Civ II is more fun than Alpha Centauri or Civ III -- I may later change my mind, but I still need more experience with C3 before it gets fun -- Civ II was fun out of the box.
Do games keep needing to get harder?
Design for Use, not Construction!
You're not alone. After what they did to bnetd, I threw my StarCraft CDs in the trash, along with Half-Life, since Vivendi owns Sierra, too. And since they fucked up mp3.com, I listen to the streaming radio there all the time even though I'm not thrilled about the music....at least I'm costing them bandwidth.
..a game is hardly the result of producers/developers; it's like humor, you can't have a recipe that works 100% for everybody. When there was passion and a few core geeks that developped games for themselves, the result had to be convincing. Now, with Hollywood budgets, planning, CG and all, how do you want a game to remain fun? Proof is, a lot of people still enjoy playing NES :-) As far as I'm concerned, "keep it simple".
have you been defaced today?
They suck.
Now go home.
Stevie Case isn't that impressive, but I guess stacked up against the other 2 nerdettes in the game biz, I can almost understand why some people would think she's hot. Plus, I finally met John Romero a few months back in Dallas. He's no prize (aesthetically or personally), so either he's hung like a bear, still has alot of dough leftover from the fiasco that was ION Storm, or she has no qualms about whom she beds down with.
Spread the RC luvin'
What I have noticed in any industry is how there are floods and fads that will bastardize and destroy the very thing that is driving the fad. This most often leads to a situtation of saturation, leading to 'teams' and 'board rooms' of people that make decisions based on canned methodoligies where once they [the decisions] where made by the creators and thus the ones with the passion for it. No, that never guarantees success, but I believe most can see how true from the gut dedication is ALWAYS more effective inch per inch than an institionalized bureaucratic redtape mess thinly veiled as a creative process. (for that matter you can substitute work, fighting, etc for 'creative')
Ever wonder why sequels of movies generally suck? Because usually they are less driven by the initial creative story telling desire than by a short termed quest for money. A good businessman will understand that get-rich-quick schemes are short lived and few to find. A good businessman is a facilitator that will put the right people into the right positions and then coordinate their activities while taking care to "protect" them from the outside issues that are distracting and unproductive. After all, imagine if a scientist had to do every single step of every test, observation, research, fund raising, etc himself? Not as much work would get done than if parts were handled for the scientist. Making games is becoming much more complex, but yet how much of that complexity is dealing directly with the technology and local process of making games as opposed to the "business" side of things? How many resources of a gaming company are spent on legal, marketing, general management and other support roles? Factor that in for small companies then the large behemoths. notice how efficiency of the business infrastructure drops (requiring more support) as the organization grows? Notice also how this is not usually policed, thus resulting in the stereotypical yet sadly accurate situation of budget cuts resulting in cuts to the workforce while keeping support? That is a bad business decision as much as if a fast food restaurant dumped all but 1 worker to man the friers, front registers, drive-through, cleaning/bathrooms, burger making, box folding, etc while there is a shift manager, assistant shift manager, night manager, general manager, etc. (this is assuming they are not doing the other tasks of course)
Basically the picture I am trying to paint here is one of chaos and gross inefficiency. When this happens you will eventually end up with two choices: produce crap that is highly candied and marketed, or produce good quality that sells itself. It is very hard to convince the army of suits that the latter is the best way as that would lead to their demise or being forced to actually work. (I consider producing something work, not creating a self perpetuating interchange of paper) Many people (especially irresponsible parents) will blindly buy anything that has the outward appearance of being cool (fancy box, neat commercials, etc) which is why those entertaining American beer/piss commercials are so successful. So, like with politics you can partly blame the company and then blame yourself and your fellow consumers. Stop being sheep as you must surely realize if you used some gray matter that money is the vote of business. If you buy some crap game just to fill your computer disk or to fill your empty life then you are really just telling the company that it is a good game. They will then rightly (based on your feedback) produce other such games.
So the monster of big business while annoying to all but the empty headed suit is a monster created by consumers actions. Stop being the stereotypical stupid spoiled brat American and show a little buying self control.
Oh and next time you get pissed at the price? See the above paragraph...
This process occurs in movies, TV, books, music, theatre, and, of course, video games. There are surprises both ways. The Blair Witch Project was a movie that was not expected to be successful, but was hugely so and has changed the movie industry. Citizen Kane was an important film (often considered the greatest American film) but a commercial failure. Yet Orson Welles was given unprecedented freedom from the studio to make the picture, not because they respected him as an artist, but because they thought he would make them a fortune.
Sometimes the alchemy of commercial appeal and artistic daring produces a wonder. Sometimes they fight, and the result achieves neither ver well. But there is no formula -- there can't be, because every work changes the landscape, and the bigger the work, the bigger the change. And of course, originality and formulaic are opposites.
The games industry produces games for gamers, instead of expanding their market - they are restricting it. Even though the graphics are usually 3d the majority of games are very one-dimensional. Why do games companies fail? Because the games are derivitive, too dificult for casual gamers and too easy for the pro's. Like the music industry and hollywood, they look to former glories for innovation instead of breaking the mould and experimenting.
DOOM 4?
TR27?
Games fail for the same reson records fail.
Some of them are mass market crap following a formula... First person shooters are the boy bands of the computer gaming world.
Some of them are from small companies that don't have the money to break into the market, so many games die a poor death as shareware.
But I think the reason most games fail is because the board room mentality that builds them. Why take a risk on something new and untested, when you can slap some new graphics and tweek the engine on the old game?
It happends with music, movie, beer, etc. The board room mentality will be the death of them all... Creativity is dieing because of meetings where people are afraid to take a risk.
okay, back to drinking my microbrewed beer... made from people more concerned with making the best beer possable, instead of making the most profits.
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
The slashdot effect
The thing to wonder about the game industry and OSS is, would making the game engines open source and selling the artwork and models, reduce the "suckiness" factor by allowing more energy to be devoted to what it needs to be devoted to.
Hey!
The first part the problem comes when these companies set completely unrealistic goals for themselves.
I mean, look at Daikatana!
The second is when they lose the balance between skill, knowledge of the platform, and enthusiasm for the product.
IE:
For the skill and knowledge, it's usually either they don't have enough, or go ultra-anally in the opposite direction, to the detriment of the gameplay.
For the enthusiasm portion, it's much the same. They're either so OD'ed on their own hype that they lose perspective, or they simply lose interest and are only going through the motions of creating a game.
Now take a look at Rock Star Games and see what they're doing RIGHT in the console arena!
GTA3 was absoloutely INCREDIBLE!
GTA:VC is even fscking BETTER!
You can tell that they're putting out product they'd actually want to play! And I don't think anyone can fault the skill with which they're doing it.
And while the game is not completely new or horrendously revolutionary, it's still kicked up at LEAST a couple notches from it's already excellent predecessor. In multiple ways no less!
It's unlike UT2K3. While UT2K3 is visually quite nice, when I first began playing it, I could have sworn I was playing a game of Q3 for the way the gameplay reacted. It no longer FEELS like UT.
So, basically, the game is prettier, but less playable. And MUCH less replayable.
What's the Skaarj term for "fuck that noise"?
Well, I'd been waiting on UT2K3 for a while now. Too bad it's such crap. Ah well. At least I didn't pre-order it. So I won't waste my money on it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
That way, we can actively reflect upon games that suck and games that don't by playing something fun that only took about a day to code rather than five years.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Really this isn't any different that the rest of the entertainment industry. Maybe not different that any industry.
If you focus on any industry to the point where you follow the preproduction and production of games that won't be released years from now, you should expect a low success rate.
At lot of movies make it to various stages of development and die. The same is true in every industry from cereal to music. Really you should be shocked when any particular studio keeps cranking out hit after hit.
I would surmise these successful outfits all follow a common strategy of exploiting a niche they dominate or remixing past products to save development and advertisment costs.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
The reason most games fail is becuase of the people developing them and who they develop them for. The thing is that I know a ton of talented programmers, and they all love games. Some would love to program game, others love the engine but ultimately they love the technical side of it but don't have a handle on the not non-technical aspects of creating a game.
You could probalbly break games that fail into one of four categories,
I think the most common item of failure would be Lack of marketing, there are some people that can make a good game but lack the backing of a distributor. This hurts alot of small game developers and caters to large developers. A good example is GameSpot, any game that they follow and cover is Always given a good score. They are also the games that have the most marketing power. A good example is the Age of Mythology, they had been covering and hyping that game for almost a year, you think that the score for that game was even going to approach less than really good? Other games that they review are more objective, so they have good and bad ones in there but a good scoring game is far from proving it will get good sales. An example was a game I loved which was Kohan. Great game, no marketing so did not do so well overall in sales.
The second biggest killer is game instability. I cannot count the number of games that have just been crappy, not ready to be sold but pushed out the door anyways, just to make a few bucks. I can only assume that these games are pushed out too early and that they programmers for these games are not just bad, but considering the number of people who are interested in making a computer game, this also a realistic possibility.
While some people don't care if a game has a story line, if the game play is shallow you are going to need a story line to draw a person into the game. Like a mentioned before, alot of programmers would love to make a computer game, the problem is that they want to program a game, not a story. They don't have writing skills to develop a good story.
Unbalanced game play. This also another big one, alot people know how to play games, it is another thing to fine tune a game. Most people are not able or not willing to make the time to balance out their games to make them interesting which always result in games that become dull once you find the "Secret".
Another thing that I want to include but that is not on the list is that programmers will often program something for themselves, and totally disregard everyone else. This can result in a poor overall gameplay, or documentation for mods. This is often a complaint about some open-source projects but I think it really comes down to human nature. When making computer games becomes more accessible to those people who are not as technical, game quality will improve. When you limit the number of people, you are ultimately limiting the talent pool of potentially good game makers.
I remember getting JourneyMan Project Turbo as a bundle with an old PackardBell 75MHz computer... It was quite fun, and at the time I was too young to figure out how to get through it.
Sadly, we had to return the comptuer (guess why, packard bells's suck) and with it wen JMPT and I never played it again, although i'd like to.
Megarace also came with that packard bell, megarace ruled.
The Raven.
P.S. The ability to manage people has nothing to do with one's school or even GPA.
The Raven
I used to work in games QA (quality assurance).
/rant
Lemme tell you: nobody pays any attention to the testers.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen the words "not a bug" "not a defect" or "will not fix" (!). Seriously, if a team of people are spending 60 hours a week (yeah, 60) on average playing your game, you might want to listen to what they have to say.
If we say the enemies sometimes see you through the walls in a level where being seen means game over, then LISTEN you %$#@ stupid programmers/VP/marketing drones!
Seriously, the testers can tell you if the gameplay sucks, we know, we spend a lot of time playing it. If any part of it sucks, we'll notice, and you should listen.
I'm ranting, I know, but serioulsy, developers, listen to your testers.
And, also, try to schedule enough time for testing. Giving a week, a single week of testing time, is not smart. Not smart at all. Finding bugs is one thing, fixing 'em is another (and fixing a bug will very often create 2 new bugs).
I used to love testing game (I was good at it), but there's so many times a guy can be blamed for someone else's mistake before he's had his fill (testers are the bottom of the barrel, guess wich way the shit goes when trouble brews).
You can't take the sky from me...
Well it seems funny blaming the customers and their desires. One the one hand you get games that are mostly flash and little play. On the other hand because of the same demands you have video cards that can push polygons like no ones business. Imagine a world with games that were more play like old-time games, and less glitz. The video card industry and their products would be a lot more sedentary, and games would be better.
Guess you can't win'em all.
If you look at some of these sales, the GameBoy Advance is selling literally hundreds of thousands of copies of their games *easily*. Everyone is all on the lame 3D bandwagon. If people would just focus on making GOOD games, then it would probably be better. I mean really, look at Castlevania .. They made it 3D and it sold terribly. The 2D versions on the PSX and the GameBoys are selling like CRAZY. THERE IS A HUGE MARKET FOR GOOD 2D GAMES FOLKS - QUIT DEVELOPEMENT ON YOUR LAME 3D SHOOTER AND MAKE A ***FUN*** 2D PLATFORM GAME. ! Sometimes you gotta go back to your roots to really appeciate GOOD games. I've been digging up all my 2D games lately and franky, they STILL blow away 90% of the lame 3D console games I own.. Blegh. Yes, Super Mario Brothers is *still* fantastic to play. Good grief, use some common sense, devs!
Civ2 is also a LOT less resource-hungry then Civ3
What you describe would almost fit any software product lifecycle.
I think game developers - like any software - want to deliver all the cool features they can dream of. They want every module to be fully exploited... but more features, no matter how much you want them, mean more complexity. More testing, more bugs, more documentation, more confused customers, etc.
Another issue: Most games are released like movies - big introductions, everyone wanting to unpack them and know everything in the first day of play.
Anyone who does even basic business programming should recognize the crazy complexity of these games. The amount of data, the amount of input/output devices you have to deal with, etc.
Oh yha, kids who are high on soda are also not the best customers to provide error details and help track down code problems. And those release schedules - you sell 5 million copies in the first week, that means 5 million newbies all wanting support at one time. That is NUTS!
I don't work in the industry, but anyone who does software should be able to look at the mess these people deal with.
The good side
==============
The programmers are often given recognition, and they can often make big money.
Games are one of the few areas that a software developer, working like a "Movie director" could actually think of getting $1M or $5M for a project!
Most independent game studios live from milestone to milestone while making a game, even with royalties. If a studio can't sell an idea to a publisher, they usually can't pay their staff to develop the title.
This means that every single title the studio does must be enough of a hit to convince the publisher (or other publishers) to work with them. Most game developers are also much more hardcore game players than their fans, which makes it hard to design a game with broad appeal. Unless you're id software, you can't design a hardcore game and expect it to sell well. Even id's sales have been progressively declining from Doom through Quake 3. (Should be interesting to see how well Doom 3 does, but that's another matter entirely).
So basically, independent game studios are in a position where if they fail once, they go bankrupt. Studios can fail even through no fault of their own, ie, they make a critically acclaimed game that isn't marketed much and doesn't sell well.
You can't get the noobs off the cs server long enough to install another game.
Development studios fail when they are poorly run, not because of the quality of their games. Have you played Harry Potter? Derivative piece of crap. You don't see Argonaut going bust though do you? There's a lot of companies churning out crap on the strength of an expensive movie license, and we the decisive games buying public lap it up. Developers (usually) get the smallest percentage of the sales income, with the Retailers and Publishers/Distributors taking the most. Residuals and royalties tend to be between 1-3% per sale, and only after development advances have been recouped and usually then only after sales over 500,000 - 750,000 copies have been reached. The publisher and retailer on the other hand take a slice of EVERY sale. The point here is the developer seems to have the least potential to make money from something that has been mainly their effort..
One major factor that contributes to a game's quality is based on how easy it is to mod. A lot of times, game companies do anything possible to keep people from tampering with the game, as if the coders believed that their creation should not be tarnished by some snot-nosed 15 year old punk who wants to put flying nuns into his WWII FPS. If people can't mod the game that easily, then its shelf life will be drastically decreased. Don't believe me? Look at Total Annihilation; that game is what, five, six year old, and people are still cranking out new maps, units, mods, etc. for it.
The only reason I keep my Windows partition is so I can mount it like the bitch that it is.
For a broad, insightful comment, see The Optimizer, about 100 comments from the top.
But there is one that he, and many other people, have missed: an effective marketing system. I don't mean just a way of convincing the magazine buyer that the main character has a big sword, but a system by which a person without a desire at this moment to find out about games, can find out about games. In a month everywhere you turn will be filled with images of the Lord Of The Rings, from books to TV to Instant Messengers to billboards to "news" programs, a media saturation that no gaming company can hope to achieve. The best our game recieved was a mention on Sports Center.
Perhaps without this notion that any random company that catches the magazine's fancy can become a AAA title, we will see fewer titles given development hell-sized budgets and more innovative, cheap, existing-technology titles created. Perhaps then more AAA titles will break even, and developers will appreciate those who come to them with sub 10-million dollar size aspirations.
Of course, all of this involves gaming coming out of the shame closet that this culture holds it in... That will come with time.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
Yep, the marketroids have a lot to answer for. I've seen countless trailers for Neverwinter Nights, and it's been out in some places for months. And yet, in the shop this afternoon here in the UK, was it on the shelves? Nope. (And not just because it had sold out, either.)
The other thing that always amazes me is that games makers always target the latest and greatest hardware. That makes sense to a point, but in reality, most potential players don't upgrade to the latest Geforce 4 Ti 4600 or Radeon 9700 as soon as it comes out. Hardcore games players probably do, and geeks buying/building new machines will have that sort of kit at present, but no-one else will. Hell, I'm a build-it-yourself geek, and I'm planning the next box right now, but at present, I'm using the trusty PII/350 I built around four years ago. It still runs my favourite games of all time (Quake, Total Annihilation and the Baldur's Gate series) and all of these had years of replay value thanks to on-line play, the community effect or just sheer scale in the case of the BG series.
That's true to a point, but alas, even great companies who really make an effort can fail. Cavedog were obviously working really hard on Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. (For those unfamiliar, that's the successor to the original TA, but a very different game, set in a medieval world rather than a futuristic one.) It wasn't a bad game, but somehow it lacked the magic of TA. Unfortunately, that was enough to sink them.
As for Bioware, in spite of producing some of the best RPGs ever, they nearly couldn't carry on because of rights over AD&D things, for goodness' sake. I'm very glad they made it through, because I've enjoyed playing several of their titles over the years: if you want great gameplay, and you go for sword and scorcery things, this is the place to look.
Now if only someone would sell me NWN in the UK, so I finally have a good reason to buy that new box and a Radeon 9700...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Now today, most development is done by comittee, with the only "rock star" development house left being ID. There is such a focus on technology, that most games tend to fall into spefic types, ie if you've played one FPS you've pretty much played them all. With gameplay becoming a after market add-on, a mod or some such. It is closer to the movie industry, or rather the crappy summer action "blockbaster" movies that play at shopping malls.
So I blame large companies for the current state of video games, such as EA, Sony, M$ what have you, before those guys came on the scean, video games where a form of art, now they are just a impluse buy you make to kill a rainly weekend. IMHO once you turn things into a business then no one does it for love, and you get things like hype and vapour wear.
Pianist : Some jerk whos taught themselves how to type in rhythm
There is truth in what you saying. However, you need to remeber that it is a liability as well as an advantage, because all that marketing and promotion costs money. Big money.
If a game sucks as a game but is heavily promoted, it will suffer a backlash of bad word-of-mouth and review publicity making it harder to recoup the money spent on the marketing. It also does damage to a franchise's reputation.
On the other hand, it can really help a great game from an unknown source.
It's not that a random company can't make an AAA game, its just that for *anyone* to do so these days requires spending a lot of money to make competitive content. If they are going to spend serious bucks, then you can assume some of that will be spent on marketing and distribution, making it sort of self-fufilling.
I have seen many games have pretty pathetic controls, Urban Chaos is a fine example. If Urban Chaos would of had better controls, better graphics, and a bit more promotion -- it would of been a huge hit.
Since I am, much to Carmack's chagrin (ha ha), in possession of the Doom3 alpha leak, I can tell you this: the only thing that Doom III has going for it are the models -- with normal maps, they look fucking amazing -- and the real-time lighting on the worldmaps, a leap forward for rejecting built-in lightmaps.
Even on a Radeon 9700, 20-40fps is the best you will get save for a few scenes which are the rendering equivalent of looking at the ground.
The rest is just a blatant ripoff of Resident Evil with a bit of Half-Life thrown in.
People buy games mostly out of brand loyalty, advertising, and especially, especially, especially HYPE.
Serious Sam 2 still kills UT2k3 in gameplay, innovation, AND graphics, but no one will play a game made by some little guys called "Croteam."
I have a million ideas for fun games, but no one hires me. I played games all my life and even almost coded the first MMORPG solo.
Current budgets for an major game title today are in the $10-20M range. That's a lot of money to risk, considering that a large fraction of titles don't make that much money. It's inherent in the cost of the production values people now demand that many games will fail in the market - there's only so much money people will spend on games. Movies have the same problem.
Did you ever pay 50 bucks for a game, only to find it in the closeout bin next to Mohogany Rush a few months later? Of all the comments I've read, including the industry insider, none mentioned piracy. What is the impact of those who play for free?
Don't forget the mmorpg. Once people start playing these games they tend to not play any other games at all. Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online. These games are getting so popular that I wonder how much they end up hurting the rest of the industry...
are not ambitious. They decide to do what current games do but do it well. Take Half Life, most popular FPS ever. Sure, most of that is due to CS but why can a game then be rereleased in three different iterations and still do well? I mean, c'mon! Valve Software has released one product!!!
And why was it successful? It was neither too complex or too simple. It was rewarding at introductory levels yet, as your skill improved, you could find new avenues to challenge yourself on (i.e. downloading CS and playing it). Basically everything said on Dave Sirlin's site.
Most innovative games are forgotten. Die by the Sword? Killer UI for 3rd person sword fighting... yet the rest of the game was lacking. Dozens of other games can be listed that fall in the same category.
Unlike music or film, games are much more of a... viceral form of entertainment. A strong, ground-breaking element cannot make up for piss-poor gameplay (unlike making up for a bad story in movies or bad musicianship in music). How often would you play a game that looked photo-realistic yet crashed every 5 minutes and corrupted your HD?
The best games are focused. The worst ones try to be the omni-game. The be all and end all.
What is music when you despise all sound?
John Romero!
This is a perfect question for him!!
Anything in a creative industry is either going to succeed immensely, break even or flop. If someone isn't fulfilled by something that is meant to entertain them then it they're not going to like it, and if this happens to the majority of ppl then it is bound to flop. Sometimes it's just a small thing, like this bit of the game or movie just made me totally not interested. Ppl are also looking for something new, when a once winning formula is applied over and over again everyone gets bored. How many wolfenstein type games are there ever going to be made or big budget movies with no story line but millions of dollars worth of special effects? Then there is the new idea product that is like a double or nothing scenario, either we're going to hit the big time or we're going to be bankrupt.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
nobody fucking care about the failure of games and game studios
Excuse me sir, what is a stoot?
Don't let them Hose up DOOM.....Not to throw rocks at RtCW, but it just totally was, "EH"....
Maybe I've just made it out to more than it was but it seemed like just plain FUN, so few games have been able to capture that...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The other points apply just as much to many other places in the IT industry, except for the fact that you get less attention (and a higher salary instead) - I work 80-100 hours/week too and we're shipping every day. :-/ (btw., I have had some insight into the game industry - I even almost signed a contract to join an EA subsidiary in 1999 ... Hey, they expected me to work only 50 hours/week ;-)).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I just witnessed my first /. - ing of a site... Reading through the article... click the next page, and bam! Access Denied: Too Many Users Connected...
Or did i help in some way???
I think someone said that by observing an event, you alter the event... Ooops 0_o
Insert Sig Here
"like the Final Fantasy Anthology for PS2"
It was for the PSX, actually.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Oh sure you start out all in love and shit and fucking on the kitchen table and calling each other 10 times a day. Then one day you wake up and you remind yourself to buy that handgum you're gonna use on both of you that day.
Well games are the same. Assuming that they are even worthwhile at all - which is a crapshoot, a good game has a low burnout factor. You don't get sick of playing it faster than the level of your satisfaction decreases. That is, a good game is always less frustrating - it's hit a sweet spot of difficulty vs. reward. Plus they're not dull.
Every day's a new sex trick until it falls off.
I don't know if this is a 'standard', but on FreeBSD section 4 is for describing kernel subsystems/APIs, section 6 is for games, and section 7 is for "miscellaneous" stuff (usually documentation on things like the ASCII character set and writing manpages).
.. I guess)
Additionally, FreeBSD adds a section 9 for kernel/FreeBSD specific programming functions which don't have a BSD 4.4 legacy.
Lastly, in other systems, I have seen man 'subsections' such as '3n' or '3t' (n for networking, t for threads
Daikatana!
That's too close to an answer the company would like to see to be bullshit. You'd be surprised how naive non-technical types are about new technology and/or mediums. A better bullshit answer would have been something cute like "My wife made me" or "The cover was pretty"
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
This most certainly is not limited to games. The majority of software projects fail. It's a simple, sad fact. Why? Programmers play hero and intentionally, or ignorantly, underestimate the task. Managers think that by "pushing hard" for the impossible that they can actually achieve it. Upper management fails to give proper support and the project is waiting for D day. Etc.
The game industry actually has a very good success rate compared to the general software world.
ego's, mismanagement, unreal market goals and shitty games...
too many programmers with too many egos
a couple of programmers who start a company often don't know squat about management or hiring it
games marketed to platforms that aren't large enough to support them are bound for failure
"Only people of the press say my game isn't good, their opinion isn't important anyway"
i'll let you put 2 and 2 together.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
That's not really such a problem. I'm much more likely to buy a string of really good RPG's in a year (were they to be PC-available) as opposed to 3-4+ shooters. There are only so many ways to blow somebody into kibbles, while an RPG with a good storyline is like a playable book. Cost is also a factor though, with big new titles coming in the >$60 range...
Mind you, I am looking forward to doom3 and new kibbles, but that's probably not for a little while yet.
They both let the users exercise their "god" complexes. Control a virtual family, or take the power of life and death into your hands. It all plays into people's craving for power and control, something we lack in our daily lives.
If your game lets people do things they can't do in their real lives, it will be successful.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Really, If we all bought all the games we love, they'd probably do better.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Other day, I was babysitting for a friend
and the kid wanted to play some games
he's 4
I burned thru shockwave, found squat
went to nick.com, found lots to keep him busy
I can totally see, renting a movie unknown to myself
based on the studio, in certain circumstances
(disney)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Secondly, he can't say that it has suffered huge delays because 3DR has never set a release date. The 'delays' are only in the perception of the waiting public.
Thirdly, there's no real correlation between a game taking a long time to develop and the end result being a poor quality game. Logic dictates that the game will have more features, be larger, and be better tested, which doesn't strike me as a recipe for a poor game. You could argue that an inexperienced team of developers could have problems if they were continually adding new features and making changes, to the point that their game took 5+ years to develop, but again you have to look at who you're talking about and 3DR are clearly not inexperienced.This is one of those bizarre theories that exists within the games community, generally goes unchallenged, but isn't supported by reality. True, most big PC games come out when there is little competition, but often you have several big console games that come out around the same time and the good ones sell well.
Games are purchased largely by two groups of people: Enthusiasts, and those with a reasonable amount of spare cash. If it turns out that DNF and DOOM III come out at around the same time, and they are both good, then they'll sell. One may sell slightly slower than the other but in the end they'll both do good business.
Games fail when the designers start to think they're making movies. They're not very good at making movies, and even if they were they wouldn't be worth $50.
You know the games I'm talking about... Where the story is king, the plot is linear, and the game play is really just an interlude between expensive cut-scenes.
Game studios fail when they start to think of themselves as studios. They're not studios. They're not entertainers. They're computer programmers first and foremost, and when they forget that they "produce" crap.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
When programers don't give a hoot. Too often people learn to program when what they really want to do is produce. Im not too familiar with large commerical projects but I've seen often where smaller games are bungled up when everyone has a different plan or idea.
Games are TOO expensive to make anymore. In the last 4 years, dues to increases in technology, people want games to look cutting edge. Now you have three times the number of staff working on content and you're selling the game for the same price you did three years ago. When you did 2d, you had a cell animator to make a character. Now you have a texture artist, a 3d modeler, and an animator to make a character.
So all the publishers have consolidated down to four, half the dev companies have gone bankrupt, and the only games publishers want to make are sure-fire hit sequels. Innovation is too risky, that's why presto studios quit even though they were ahead.
You guys can talk about bad ideas and programmers until you're blue in the face but the real truth of the matter is that it takes too long to make a game anymore and the chances of making the money back on it are getting slimmer. Game developers work on average 70 hours a week and make less than equivalent jobs in the IT field. I'm not kidding, go ask a few.
Why do game companies fail?
When you go to the electronics store, how many companies are represented by the TVs sold there? Probably less than ten.
When you go to the supermarket, how many companies are represented by the laundry detergent sold there? Probably less than ten.
When you go to store and buy beer, how many companies are represented by the beer sold there? Probably less than ten.
When you go to the store and buy video games, how manyt companies are represented by the games sold there? Probably more than 30 and as much as 50 or more.
My question is not about why so many game companies fail, but how it is that so many succeed? It's a major production to build a large A-level game these days and it's surprising that so many weaker companies (in terms of finances and management quality) can get a shipping game put together at all.
It is relevant to mention that Vivendi recently purchased Blizzard (afaik), and hence could have been behind the bnetd issue. If that is the case, Blizzard still holds a high rank in my eye. Yes, I did purchase Warcraft III because I like Blizzard, even though I don't like what they (Vivendi?) did to bnetd.
From the web site:
"The release date of this game is "When it's done". Anything else, and we mean anything else is someone's speculation. There is no date. We don't know any date. If you have a friend who claims they have "inside info", or there's some game news site, or some computer store at the mall who claims they know - they do not. They are making it up. There is no date. Period."
Yep, "there is no date. Period." The project has been dead now for about a year. I know an artist who was on the project and was moved to a advance project. It's over man.
I'm so sick of reading posts on slashdot from websites that then get slashdotted to death. It's been four years now? Why not do everyone a favor and either 1) let the potential victims know what's coming BEFOREHAND so they can be ready or 2) cache the freaking pages. This is getting OLD!
The first is obvious: the investors' terrified greed. When you throw a minimum of $5 MILLION dollars at a project, you get real conservative -- you want your money back, with interest. You only go with projects you KNOW will succeed, and so we get stuck with tired-out versions of InitiallyAmazingGame XVII.
The second reason is more insidious: Walmart. If Walmart won't carry your product, you LOSE. Period. They're the biggest chain around; most of your sales will come from your average American family browsing through Walmart. That means Walmart gets to dictate what's on the cover, how much it costs, what 'rating' it has, etc. Walmart doesn't care about innovation or game playability any more than the investor does; they both just want to make their money back, and then some.
Couple those two ball-and-chains onto any bright young company trying to make a new or innovative game, and it's no surprise computer game companies keep failing.
Firstly, game journalists are mostly adult males in their 20s (or even older these days). They probably get to see real women's breasts every so often (and if not, can download all the porn they want without Mom finding out) and are thus being slightly less impressed with Lara Croft's than your average teenage boy. Being required to be at least semi-literate, they may have even read the odd book and seen one or two movies and grown to appreciate a little bit of intelligent plotting and stuff. (Yes, this is a gross generalization).
More importantly, though, these guys (and they are mostly guys) play a *lot* of games. They all tend to blur into one another, so any innovation would tend to stick out like a sore thumb and be rewarded, whereas for the more casual gamer innovation might not be as important as it's all new to them anyway.
Frankly, in the cases where I've played games that reviewers have liked but the market hasn't, I've agreed with the reviewers nine times out of ten.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Mr. Prichard has most of the bases covered but I thought I'd quickly share my very recent and personal experience in the matter.
September 18th, 2002. 9:27 am:
Payday.
I'm standing in front the office rubbing my sleepy eyes and dimly wondering why my key won't open the door. The thought that the locks have changed does not cross my sleep-addled brain. Leaning forward to find a glare less angle, I pause to consider the Kinko's-printed canvas sign leering down on me.
"Tremor Entertainment."
The logo is a dingy red Blizzard facsimile, poorly conceived and executed.
The door opens. I nearly tumble backwards in surprise. Grasping at teetering iron I manage to steady myself. The railing below has rusted out at its bases which are now milling with fire ants.
Karen, our CFO, is standing in the doorway, flanked by armed guards. She is wearing an expression of practiced concern and, oddly, poorly-masked triumph.
"There are no paychecks. The company has been shut down until the contract is renegotiated with Microsoft." Her first performance of the day.
We're told to get a few of our personal things, whatever we'll need or want while the company's on hiatus. I don't realize that I'll never see my Mr. Coffee, Thinkgeek caffeine mugs, and Rage Against the Machine CDs again. "I know it's not your fault," I tell the surly guard "but this is really insulting." He nods: a solemn, practiced, patronizing nod. Karen returns, this time demanding our now useless building keys.
"Do I have to turn in my hall pass too?" No response. The guard tells us to leave. Karen's told him we're not to touch the computers and he's getting jittery. His hand slides involuntarily to the holster on his belt. This is fucking ridiculous.
Standing in the parking lot an hour later, beer in hand, I realized that it was over.
As it turned out there were no 'renegotiations with Microsoft'. The first they heard were our frantic cell phone calls. Our Floridian CEO took the payroll money and ran. All it takes is one A-Hole.
The Tremor team included a number of brilliant, talented individuals; all of them underpaid for their dedication. The team was there for each other and for the project, not for money. This team included the Lead Designer of Starcraft, designers and artists from Warcraft 1& 2, Diablo and Sacrifice (among others.) The project, The Unseen (irony: located), was unassailably special both visually and in terms of gameplay. The contract was with Microsoft, a first-party development contract: the holy grail of game contracts. (I'll save the story of how Microsoft later rammed us in our collective cornhole with a red hot poker for tomorrow night, kiddies.)
In the end all it took was one man to destroy what so many had struggled so long to create.
Currently, the displaced employees of Tremor are involved in a civil lawsuit to recover unpaid wages. CEO Steven Oshinsky is under investigation by the FBI. He looks like Joey Buttafuco. www.tremor.net is still active, it appears.
The short answer is, because the market is oversaturated with many many games of roughly the same genre and level of production values. I think actually that eventually we'll see a Hollywood type of mentality come to the fore and studios will favor the creation of a handful of megalithic blockbusters since getting the attention of a fickle public is no trivial task. The issue with transferring this mentality from Hollywood to games is that an overly ambitious game project can easily run into problems in execution.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods
Good to see a retard who doesn't know what "redundent" means got mod points.
This statement right here:
"I couldn't, and still can't, understand how someone would think "Oh, that film was made by Warner Bros, it must be good, I'll get it." What made it memorable was that some marketing monkey boy must have believed that to be case. To me it showed a complete lack of understanding between the people releasing the DVD's and the people buying them."
shows me that the author of this article is completely out of touch with the gaming public and consumers in general. People do buy things based on who made it.
How many people buy EA sports games BECAUSE they are EA sports games? Or Sega racing games, or Nintendo platform games, Square RPGs, ID FPSs, or even (insert favorite brand) pick-up trucks?
Better yet, to stick to the movie format, if you go into a movie store and you want to buy/rent a low-budget action film, and between two unknown movies with unknown actors and unknown content, you can pick a movie by Cannon Video, or one by Full Moon Video (known for horror films)... let's see, chances are you're going to take home the movie by Cannon because they are well known for making action films.
As for the rest of the article...
What a pretentious prick...
with big new titles coming in the >$60 range...
This is actually not that new. I remember World of Xeen for the Mac running about $75. Also, around the time the "multimedia PC" was all the rage, there was a tremendous amount of interest in "interactive movies". The genre mostly flopped, but it put out a number of quite pricy titles.
May we never see th
just how many are most people going to play in a year?
This depends tremendously on your target audience. Doom sold zillions of copies to young teens. They have tons of leisure time, not enough money to buy games in a constant stream (so they want to get a lot of play time out of any given game), and are interested enough to keep going.
I've noticed that most games aimed at adults have a significantly shorter intended lifespan -- adults place higher requirements on how much new material they get every minute of the game. There are, of course, exceptions -- Tetris and Zangband are good ones -- but in general, this is what I've seen. Cost, OTOH, is less of an issue.
Also, games adults like are frequently "easy to get into and out of". If you have a job and a free hour a day (and this adds up -- 7 hrs a week), you don't want to spend half your time re-establishing the context. That makes RPGs a bit less appealing. I know that I used to play RPGs quite a bit, but the amount of time they consume and the fact that it's difficult to "dip" in and out of them has made me move to FPSes and similar with a job.
May we never see th
the programmers don't care
I really don't think this is the case for most games (obviously, it is for a few).
The problems you cite are mostly with the AI. The AI coder has to wait until most of the rest of the game is in place. He has to frequently be modifying the AI in parallel with people who are tweaking the game to provide play balance. He has the tightest schedule of any of the programmers, usually has a rather small amount of CPU time alotted him (at the AI point, profiling and optimization on other parts of the game are probably underway, or will be soon, so everyone just wants to get the graphics engine running at a steady clip).
Another problem is that AI is very open ended. You can make incredible AI systems, and throw as much CPU time as you want at them. So you get programmers with grandiose ideas of what they're going to make. Then their time-to-work shrinks smaller and smaller, and they have to keep cutting their plan until they can just manage to squeak out their AI.
I agree that game developers in the PC world put out their games too early. This is, however, partly fueled by the lemming-like behavior of users to the latest and greatest. Everyone always wants "new releases". I never understood that. By buying right away, they experience the full brunt of the bleeding edge -- bugginess, patches to worry about, having to pay ridiculous amounts of money for top-of-the-line hardware to run the game at a decent clip...I don't buy any game that's less than a year old. I get better prices, better stability, and don't have to throw insane amounts of money at my hardware.
Just remember-- just because some developer puts a game out on the shelves and their publisher's marketing department is pimping it all over -- you don't have to buy it.
I agree with you on the abusive and frusterating harassment Viviendi did of bnetd. That's just as frusterating as the DVD Consortium going after Linux DVD players and MS trying to stop the NTFS and CIFS support in Linux.
May we never see th
Tactics was not made by the original team.
I liked the earlier Fallouts quite a bit, but I wasn't as impressed by Tactics.
May we never see th
Marathon was a truly incredible game. Bungie getting purchased by Microsoft was a dark, dark day in my book.
Bungie is so incredible that even today, *a decade* after one of their earliest games was released, posts are still being generated analyzing the story.
May we never see th
/EM raises a wine glass in a toast to one of the greatest game companies to ever go down in flames thanks to budgeting errors of it's parent company.
They fail when they're run by theiving assholes like John Cooney.
Now there was a game that was great in almost every aspect. Used some of the mac-specific hardware very well. I remember friends being amazed by the fact that you could use your microphone to talk to the others in a network game. This was in a time were most peecees didn't even have proper soundcards.
Atmosphere, excellent original graphics and sound and a great story line made it perfect. The love for detail was present in almost every aspect of the game.
I havent played any of the recent Bungie games, but Marathon etc. were close to perfect.
beauty is only a light switch away
i agree with all that you have said, and i cant help but think that a lot of games (for example deus ex and MOHAA) would greatly benefit from a co-operative multiplayer aspect. this probably isnt as relevant to making games suceed as it is to my own personal tastes, but the amount of times you just have two computers together in a LAN and are struggling to find stuff to play because either bots are retarded or one person dominates the other in DM, when all you want is a kick ass co-op experience ... like system shock 2 ... if the saves hadnt have kept crashing on us, that would have been the Best Thing Ever (tm).
Anymore, I simply weed out certain developers and I buy far fewer shit games this way.
Acclaim, anything they make is automatically going to be worse than horrible. Sometimes there are exceptions, and their quality containment people actually let something half way playable slip out, but that doesn't happen too often. Their QC people are pretty good at making sure only the biggest piles of shit see the light of day.
EA has a pretty good QC department as well. They immediately let out any new sport-game title which of course is going to suck completely by default, but they refuse to try anything new. It's a well known fact that EA loves to cash in on tried and true titles. Still, sometimes even their played out lines sneak a good one past the QC.
Infograms is a bag of dice. Some of the developers they publish are really great, and some of them are real crap-shots.
When it comes to buying GOOD games, I don't just stick to the tried and true studios, though there are a few that are good bets. Bioware, Rareware, Nintendo, Sega, DMA Design, Capcom, Activision, etc. I like to get a good mix, but I'm very quick to eliminate pure shit sellers, and they're easy to spot (just look for the ones that do movie titles or sports games with a year in the title).
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I'm reminded of that Farside cartoon - the one where a band is recording in a studio and the technician is reaching for the 'Suck' control on the mixing desk.
Hang on...
# cd daikatana-src/
# grep CFLAGS Makefile
CFLAGS = -O2 -suck
Ah, here's the problem.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
should be how do some games studios succeed.
Consider how hard it is to build a game.
Firstly you must come up with the concept. It must be sufficently original and innovative that your not dismissed as a clone but not so innovative or original that nobody is sure whether they'll enjoy it or not. Then you've got to build proof of a concept for stage two...
Begging for help. You must convince other people your game (which currently consists of a design plan) will be seriously sweet, will sell like hotcakes and will have manageable costs (people with money usually like money and if they give it away, they want to see it come back).
Thirdly you must find developers, artists, programmers, etc who are willing to work on your game for the money you can offer (which will probably be meager unless your idea is one of those mythical "guaranteed sell-outs") and who are capable of doing the job. Consider how high some of the studios have set the bar and that's a hell of a job.
Forthly you have go though the development phase without having your game managled by the development phase. As well as the regular dilbertisms you've also got to avoid many truisms unique to game development and avoid having your product adjusted for political reasons (censorship, sensitivity to minorities, new management doesn't like old management's projects on the priniciple, funding runs out and nobody wants to give you more) etc.
Finally you have the game and it's all that you hoped for, your set right? Well no. Marketting has to spread across the world and convince geeks with money that they want to shell out for your game. If you lucky the marketting department will put out a somewhat accurate image of your game, game reviewers will be having a good day and enjoy it when it reaches their magazine/web site and people will have the spare cash to buy the game.
Then you can still get screwed should say your game not appeal to enough people, be overshadowed by another game of similar type (let's face it, if you release a first person shooter in the same season ID does, your going down) or by a totally different type (if everyone's buying the latest FPS by ID they're going to be playing it instead of your neat, low violence RPG).
So really, even if you have the idea of the century and you get support from other people the chances of you finishing up with a decent quality game with good marketting and high enough sales to generate a notable profit (to be distributed among all investing parties) is pretty damn slim.
Quite frankly it's a miracle any studio stays in business for more than one production run. It is most definitely no business for the faint of heart, the dispassionate or those who need a realiable income.
NetTrek, definately. I used to spend hours and hours blasting the crap out others on the LAN.
I'm not the only one that remembers that game, either, so I believe that qualifies as a memorable, lasting game.
Video Gaming income is starting to compare with Hollywood.
Actually, console and PC gaming combined have surpassed the movie industry. But as with movies, games have become formulaic, and every hit game subsidizes 19 stinkers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Oh please... this is a joke. 99.9% of Blizzard's customers have never even heard of bnetd. Furthermore, Blizzard is one of the best companies as far customer response. Back in the day when games could only be played over IPX networks, the biggest IPX over TCP program was kalled Kali. Blizzard went out of their way to make a binary that optimized for this game service (war2kali.exe). I can't think of any other company doing something similar. To this day, WCII and SC users can still use such programs (Kahn, Kali, etc) to play multiplayer net games that completely bypass battlenet. I don't see how anyone has been "fucked" as you put it. Finally bnetd became a haven for people playing illegal betas for WCIII. Notice that they let the whole thing slide *until* that happened. A few people (probably a lot more) playing pirated games ruined it for everyone. Blame the people playing the WCIII betas, not Blizzard.
maybe the GBA is selling games left and right because there's no other handheld on the market
Palm? Pocket PC? The rumored Pocket PC based "XBoy"?
and certainly none that have the horsepower to emulate such games.
Anybody tried VisualBoyAdvance (GBA emulator) on a Tablet PC?
Will I retire or break 10K?
As an "Armchair Game Designer" (akin to an Armchair Quarterback), I think the most important attribute for a game designer to have is flexibility.
You're right, a lot of people enter the business with passion and a vision, but reality (and money) dictates that you can't always fufill your vision; at least not right away.
If I was a game designer, I'd see bizarre and unworkable ideas from management as a personal challenge. "You want an RTS/RPG game based on the Three Stooges license? Sure! My Little Pony racing game? Don't make me laugh."
Of course, IANAGD, so I probably don't know the first thing about suceeding as one.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
At last one story that doesnt blame recession or H1Bs.
Tat Tvam Asi
Normal software development follows these three qualtities: Good software (ie less buggy), Cheap software (ie didn't cost too much to make), and fast (ie the development cycle to release wasn't too long),
Game companies also have to follow this axiom. A lot of smaller game companies make software that is cheap to produce (relatively) and has a fast development cycle - as a result the products they produce are bad. Movie tie in games I would normally classify these under. Although there are exceptions.
Other game companies make software that is good (art, content, gameplay) and cheap (mostly in relatively few programmers and artists) - but by no means is their development cycle fast.
Then there are the game companies which are the innovators. They truly understand what it takes to make a quailty product. They too follow the axiom, but with a new twist. The product is good, not cheap, and not fast to market. Those are the companies that consistently produce games worth playing. It costs tons of money, they have some of the most creative people in the business, and they have the right project managers that understand what motivates those creative people. Another way to say it might be 'the end justifies the means".
Too bad those type of game companies are few and far between.
-FlynnMP3
Anybody remember the old Duke Nukem 3d? The monsters were sprites, you couldn't mouse aim, you couldn't have floors on top of floors (unless they were sprite walkways above sectors.) Every piece of scenery was a sprite.
I rememeber it well. It was FUN. Everything sprite could be shot and would explode. There were exploding fire extinguishers, exploding walls, mirrors, PIPE BOMBS, TRIP BOMBS!! Shrink ray, a freeze ray, teleporters, jet packs, trains, conveyor belt systems... A duke nukem death match (even though only supported 4 players) was FUN. It was so much fun.
I remember i used to play that with my friends over a modem all the time. It was great.
We all waited for the day when quake came out. I remember using an email FTP client to get quake when it finally came out.. and it came to me.. in like 40 uuencoded attachments that i downloaded individually and decoded.
Quake was amazing. The graphics were so good. It was spooky.. great atmosphere. Truly a work of art.
But stuff didn't explode. there were no jetpacks. No pipebombs or shrink rays....
So even though quake was far supierior as far as graphics go, it was a long time before we ever deathmatched with it. Probably not until the internet gaming community formed and great mods were available. Because as far as gameplay went, duke nukem blew quake out of the water (imho).
Of course, i guess i don't know much about games, because i enjoyed duke nukem more but I am pretty sure quake sold better.
I think if ID hadn't made the game so easy to modify and play on the internet, it may have flopped. I think the best part of the quake experience has always been the multiplayer aspect. The single player aspects of them have always left a lot to be desired , IMHO. And it was pretty amazing to go and deathmatch with 8 other people over a modem internet connection....
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
IMO only two or three games out of the some odd thousand that come out in a year are worth the time to play. Game designers need to stop working on pushing out the door a (insert latest popular movie title here) game (god damn that lord of the rings game was terrible) just to make a quick buck.
Also the game distributers are a problem as well, a lot of games are forced onto the shelves way before they are ready and subsiquently fail horribly.
Won't you be my my neighbor?
The many reasons posted so far make sense; but most of them are either a symptom, such as the game sucking (why did they make a game that sucks?), or reasons why a game company fails (which is really just one of the many ways a company in any industry can fail).
With almost a decade of experience working in the game industry, let me share my theory.
A game itself fails because it is a piece of art, and good art is very difficult to make. It requires focus and direction; it requires a visionary who imagines an end product which will communicate something unique to the audience. Normally this is done by a single person, and in other types of art (painting, photography, music, writing, etc) one person can create a finished piece themselves. But modern games cannot be made by one or even just a couple of people; most often it is a team of 15 or 20, and you have people joining and leaving the team throughout the project. Oftentimes the team is completely different at the end than it was at the beginning.
So how the heck can you have a focused piece of art when you have so many people (many of them just drifting in and out of the project more or less at random) working on it? You don't see novels written by a team of 15 writers, or songs written by 15 musicians. (Go look at the writing credits for your favorite band's songs; in most cases, they are all written by one or two key members of the band.) But games simply require too many elements, both technically and artistically, to be done by a single person. They are highly interactive, compared to other forms of art which are generally not even slightly interactive. So you have a catch-22 - they need the direction and focus of a single person's work, but require a huge team in order to produce the required art and technology.
There are two ways to do it. One is by dumb luck (this one rarely happens). The other is by having a dedicated leader who puts his or her heart and soul into directing the rest of the team, picking a chosing the art and gameplay that fits with their vision and throwing out the rest. This method is how most good games are made. However, it has many production-level downsides; everyone on the team will hate them (because they throw out 90% of the art that is produced) and the management/investors will hate them (because they throw out perfectly good work, causing production of the game to be 10 times as expensive as it would be otherwise).
There are a variety of factors which determine why a game fails to come to market, or why it comes to market in a fashion that makes people shake their heads and go "why did they even bother to make this piece of crap?". But the main reason is the the development cycle and how well the team making the game adheres to it.
A lot of teams suffer from a lack of ability to scope their project appropriately. They try to make "ubergames"; games with every possible feature imaginable or desirable, and the feature lists for these games often have their fanbase drooling for it's release. These teams tend to take the attitude "we will ship when it's done", and in doing so they lose the focus necessary to actually ship the game, because at no point do they stop making changes, because they can always see ways to "improve" the game. At that point, many things can happen that result in a failed game. The publisher may get sick of hearing their requests for more time, look at how much money they've spent on this unfinished game, and either cancel the project because they can never hope to recoup their investment, or force the team to wrap it and ship nearly as is, which means that the game will be buggy, unpolished, and missing a lot of the features that were promised. A good example of this was Sierra's Outpost; a planetary colonization sim that had a HUGE list of innovative features, which shipped buggy and with a README on the disk explaining that 2/3 of the features in the advertising were not in the game.
Alternately, the publisher may continue to have faith, or they may have a lot of money on their own, and they just keep working on the game ad infinitum (Duke Nukem, anyone?)
It's fine to make a game that is ambitious and takes longer than the 18-24 month standard development cycle; but it's critical to success that you set milestones and some form of schedule; but most importantly that you know when you need to stop adding stuff and bring the game to a finish.
-marsh
Does the word nethack ring a bell?
You don't own ownership of how people should respond to posts. There is no active ban against this. There's nothing you can do to prevent it, so keep on getting upset about it, or deal with it. It's never gonna stop. In fact, I'll make it a personal point to respond on your posts in the same manner should the occasion arise again, just to piss you off. Either way, I win, whether it upsets you or not.
Re: both the article and the /. commentary fluff
The article is pedantic, and tries vainly to plea to some naive audience that there are higher reasons for failure. The article isnt even about game start-up failure, its about select PC game title failure.
1) Outcast- An adventure game on PC. An adventure game on PC. Is there such a thing as a successful adventure game on PC? Not only that but the game had zero hope of a smooth console port because it uses Voxels instead of triangles. Is there any wonder it failed?
2) Daikatana- The game was a joke from the start. Did it have an innovative idea? (NPC bots?) No! It was all hype (and YOU would have bought it if it came out 2-3 years earlier), and it might have been successful if anyone on the team cared about making it instead of pushing snow up their noses.
3) Duke Nukem 4ever- No one can consider this game a failure. It isn't even out, put on hold or cancelled. Bioware took 5 years with NWN, and its success is blinding.
The PC Games market is totally hit and miss for most companies, because they tend to make either derivative product ( |takes a hit| its like this FPS set in WW2 but your weapons malfunction realistically |cough| |cough|) or they tend to focus on such a small niche that it is impossible to break even (of COURSE our FPS/MMORPG/RTS/Scifi/Sims/Fantasy hybrid appeals across all barriers...how could it not?).
Take a hint from the japanese. Consoles are where the money is, and the japanese are kicking the crap out of everyone else in that department. Have none of you noticed that all the best console games (and most of the best GAMES) come from the land of the rising sun? Why don't any American developers wake up and realize that the japanese are stealing our lunch when it comes to games? Why doesn't anyone ask why, and attempt to learn from the experts overseas?
Probably they are all like most American techie types I have met....know it all a$$holes, who like to fall back on the time honored "if only our dam publisher put more money into marketing" excuse.
I could go on about the incestuous nature of the US game industy, the MTV culture effect, and the fear of TV and Movie execs, but probably the only people that have made it this far down the forum list are afformentioned a$$hole know it all tech types.
Here is the opinion of someone who has worked in the industry for a few years.
I've worked on many titles - some good, some bad, some commercially/critically successful, some not.
The article that spawned this discussion wasn't terribly informative. The author shows very little understanding of how the games industry works, and thus achieves very little insight.
As an aside, I'll lump the nostalgic "good 'ole 2D days" and the "there's no innovation anymore" people into this category as well. They are suffering from selective memory. If you are one of the above, please take this little quiz:
1. how many derivative 2D side-scrollers, fighters, and lame movie licenses were developed in the 80s for the 8/16 bit consoles? (answer: seemingly billions)
2. how many of these games sucked? (answer: most of them - not unlike today, no?)
Back to the topic at hand.
A lot of things have to happen to create a quality, successful game. Some of these things are within an average (that is, not swimming in an ocean of money) developer's control, some not. When it all comes together (the concept, budget, team, marketing, implementation), it is a truly great thing, but it doesn't happen often. Here are some realities of the business:
1. Game development is usually date-driven not quality-driven. Games have to ship on the contract-agreed completion date, not when they are ready from a quality standpoint. A publisher will rarely fund development much past the X-mas buying season and developers can't afford such things.
2. Games are hard to make. We usually have to ship our successes as well our failures. Some games will never be of high quality regardless of how much effort is spent to improve them, but most of those will be shipped.
3. Games are expensive to make, margins are razor-thin, developers don't have much money in the bank.
4. Contracts are usually front-loaded, which means developers base their revenue on shipping the game, not on its success in the market. This does not incent quality. Game companies can choose to operate under a riskier back-end revenue strategy. That is, the developer funds the game out of their own (or a bank's) pocket, hoping for a bigger cut of the sales royalties. This is great if you can create a hit every time. See point 2. It doesn't take too many failures to kill a developer under this model. See Looking Glass for an example.
Most game company eek out a living by shipping the best game they can make under the 12-18 month contracts offered by publishers. Sometimes you can make a good game under these circumstances, sometimes not. Whatever the case, the game is going to hit the shelves no-matter-what.
Unless you have tonnes of cash, you can't operate a company like Blizzard does.
Catch-22? To some degree. Eventually, a well-run developer can put enough pennies in the piggybank to to develop a title on their own terms, spending enough time to "get it right". Alternatively, your founders can be independently wealthy (see Valve). Ultimately, it's just another brutal business, where many of us that actually care about what we create stick around hoping that we'll get our one shot to hit one out of the park.
Everyone seems to quick with the flippant "they failed because they suck" comments. If you take a look at sales figures, though, you'll see that quite often some really good games end up with dismal sales figures. I'm not talking about infamous flops like Daikatana or Tresspasser, but pretty much any good game that isn't a mega-hit like Roller Coaster Tycoon or Age of Empires.
It is common for a game to get good reviews, good word of mouth, and then sell a mere 30,000 copies. You can't keep a game studio afloat on figures like that. Why do good games sometimes do that poorly? Often it is simply because everyone gravitates toward the same games.
Let's say you just bought a PlayStation 2 and go to the store to buy some games. Odds are you'll buy mega-hits like Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy X, and so on. Or maybe you'll go for titles in the $19.99 "Greatest Hits" lineup which you probably recognize. But would you take a chance on any of several dozen other games that don't have the mega-hit buzz? Probably not. And most people won't either.
Leaving aside the politics (!) one big issue about developing a fresh new original PC game is that there's a very small sweet spot for games developers. They have to be experienced enough that they don't burn all their time learning how to develop a game, but still young and dumb enough to dedicate their life - utterly - to developing the Next Big Thing.
I'd put that sweet spot at maybe two years for an average games developer, out of a career of forty plus years. Some people peak early, some late, but the basic problem is this: if you don't know how to develop a commercial game, you'll fail the first time you try. If you do know how to develop a commercial game, you're probably old enough to have a mortgage and a family and a life outside of games, and that pretty much precludes you giving over the necessary 70+ hours a week and working for a pittance and the glory of getting your name on a box.
Make no mistake about it, games developers are uber geeks, and I don't mean that in a good way. You have to be very lucky indeed to be able to find and hold together a team of such people for long enough to get an engine done, and in time to get it to your content team while you still have a budget left. Sometimes I'm amazed that any revolutionary games ever get made.
Contrast that with console games, which are evolutionary, not revolutionary. They rarely start over, but build on a previous engine instead. It's low risk, but not lower reward, because people keep buying the games. How many versions of soccer and car racing games are out there now? We're seeing that development technique bleed into PC games now. For all the sound and fury about Doom 3, the engine is just Quake 3 with a new renderer. Big whoop.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
And I owned a percentage of a small game company.
Here is why I think most games suck.
1) A great programmer can make a bad game playable, a poor programmer will make a great game suck. Too many gameprogrammer suck. But, then what do you expect from people who will put up with being treated the way producers treat game programmers? (Yeah, I used to be a game programmer so I know what I am talking about. I still have the scars.)
2) No planning. Everyone seems to think that the rules of normal project planning don't apply to games, so they change them and change them and finally ship something. You could save half the cost of all games by firing the designer after the game is designed and firing ANYONE who tries to change the design after production has started.
3) Design for you market. Game designers mostly design for other game designers. Real people mostly don't want them.
4) Make games that cost less. Me pay $50 for a game? Are you nuts?
5) Design for computers that people have. I will not buy a new computer to play a game, neither will most people.
6) You want me to spend how much time learning to play this game? I game is a diversion, like watching TV. I will not spend 2 hours learning to play the game and then spend 80 hours playing it.
7) No, I can't hit that combination of buttons in that order that fast. Which means I can't play your game, doesn't it. This is another case of game designers designing for other designers. Real people won't spend hours learning to do that and we don't brag about it at work.
8) Real people have lives. We like to spend some time playing games. But, games are not our life.
9) The computer game market would be 100 times bigger if games cost $10, took less than 5 minutes to learn, and could be replayed a few times. Think Tetras and Sim City, not Quake III.
Stonewolf
Understanding why game companies fail isn't going to be explained in this article. It's something you could probalby write your economics doctorate thesis on.
Now, I'm not directly involved in the Game Industry although I have some pretty close ties with people who do. And I can't claim to be a game developer unless you count the one time I helped a friend with some coding on a crappy BBS version of PimpWyld. But still, I've been gaming for a *large* part of my life - not just computer games but tabletop pen-and-paper games, dice, card, miniatures, wargaming, role-playing, live role-playing... anyway, I've noticed some things about gaming and what makes game successful and what companies "have it".
First: we call it the Computer Game Industry, and this tends to give the impression that there is one single market for computer games. There isn't. At best, there are at least two Computer Game Markets and probably a whole lot of different sub-markets and segments and whatnot similar to the problems the Music Industry grapples with. At the top of the discussion, there is the Casual and then there is the Hardcore.
The Hardcore is the easiest to define. The Hardcore is devoted to buying and playing games. They read game-related news. They swamp servers downloading patches and demos and leaked alphas and all sorts of stuff and they fill chat rooms with inane crap that make Gabe and Tycho's comments at Penny Arcade look like wisdom. The Hardcore buys multiple game platforms. When I think of the Hardcore, I think of, well, some of the people on Slashdot. And some of my friends. We own lots of games and we come home from work and play games and then we go to each others houses and have small LAN parties and so forth and so on. We complain at the number of games we've bought and not finished, but I bet that every truly hardcore gamer has at least one title that he/she forced their way through to the end at the expense of almost all other considerations (work, sleep, sex). We proabably represent the majority of the money pumped into the game industry and we chuckle at ourselves for spending so much for this odd hobby. Of course, there are some Hardcore gamers who take the whole thing *too* seriously and bash PC vs.Console, somewhat remenicent of emacs vs. vi.
The Hardcore is growing, but not as fast as game studios want it to. In fact, the Hardcore grows pretty slow because you end up having to get directly involved in the Game Industry, or you have to get a (real) job and get sleep and get laid and all the rest of life. The vasy majority of the actual *people* who buy games are the Casual Gamers>
The Casual Industry / Market is the larger of the two in terms of population. The Casual Computer Gamer might have twenty or thirty titles to their name, sure, but the important difference is they consider gaming to be secondary (or tertiaty or quatenary...) to their other intrests. They don't *want* a new game as often as the Hardcore does. The Casual Gamer is responsible for the high sales of Buck Hunter, and also for the high sales of Diablo and Diablo II. When I think of a Casual Gamer, I think of my brother. He's got a lot of games but he only really playes about two or three of them, and I think he hasn't bought any for a year or two. Most of the others were gifts. He has a console system (an N-64) and he's considering an X-Box and his computer is an old P200 without MMX. He doesn't understand computers very well but he does like playing games.
Note that I said "like". Casual Gamers don't *love* games the way the Hardcore does.
Don't confuse "Casual Gamer" with the "Mass Market". The Mass Market are people like soccer moms and inmates and construction workers and politicians and teachers and thousands of people who don't buy enough games to keep the Game Industry going. The Mass Market is unattainable to Game Companies. Need proof? How many people in the American Mass Market still care who Lara Croft is? The movie and the TV commercials and the some from U2 couldn't make her popular or give her any staying power. Eidos would have been better off designing a better Tomb Raider game and marketing it to the Casual crowd.
So, why do game companies fail? Well, in a large part because the company is conflicted and ambivilent about who it's trying to please. Some companies don't have this problem. For example, Looking Glass made games for the Hardcore. My brother *hated* Thief; I thought it was a brilliant game. Eidos is a company in trouble because they can't make up their minds if they're trying to sell games to the Hardcore or to the Casual crowd. And, yes, Eidos is in trouble. I wouldn't be suprised if we didn't see Eidos sell off or close a studio or two in the next two years. They've got a lot of intellectual property, sure, but nobody can really convince me that the money they're dumping into Tomb Raider is going to help their bottom line. If anyone from Eidos is reading this, my advice is to stop it with the Croft-crap, release the game, and if it tanks, move on to something else. Lara is not going to be the kind of attention-grabbing mascot you want her to be.
OK, enough picking on Eidos. What about Blizzard? Why are they successful? Well, a couple of factors. Not only do they know exactly who their audience is, and have a frickin' huge company backing them now, but they also have the guts to drop a project when it's not any good. Does anyone remember "Warcraft Adventures?" It was fetured extensively in the trade magazines and the Blizzard site had screenshots and even the execs were saying the game was as good a finished.
According to the people I've spoken with (no, I don't have leaks into Blizzard) the game was complete, but it wasn't fun. So they axed it. Good riddance.
If a smaller game studio tried that, they'd probably fail. Most studios are running on a game-by-game basis. Frankly, I don't know if we should care. A lot of studios produce crap games and it's a good thing they go under. Those few studios that produce crap and stay in business havn't figured out how to sell to the Mass Market, but they have found an audience with the last group of consumers we'll deal with here, The Ignorant/Uninformed.
There's a lot of crossover between the Mass Market and The Ignorant. Thing is, The Ignorant are just people who are interested in becoming Casual Gamers but either don't want to read up on what games are coming from the developers with reputation (not likely) or they just don't know where to look. And, frankly, it's a pain to keep up on all that gaming stuff, especially if you're not really interested in making gaming a big part of your life.
It's a tough business. The Game Industry is so filled with talent and there's so many people churning out stuff that it's difficult for the Hardcore to support so many companies and developers and tie-ins and action figures. And it's also filled with confused people, bad coders, impossible deadlines, spotty QA, whiny consumers, politicans with and axe to grind, and shitty ideas. Still, thank god that you can make an independent game, even if it is crap. The barrier to entry isn't as high as the pundits claim; look at people who write game mods. It's still a pretty chaotic industry, even if media giants are buying intependent studios and filling Frys and Wall-Mart with schlock.
Sure, you get massivly popular hunting games that fly off the shelves for a couple of months, but that ain't going to last and what's the real harm to society? The people who buy that kind of game represent a market segment that saturates so quickly, it's just about impossible to make a follow-up hit.
Game companies and game critics that really know what they're talking about all agree that capturing the Hardcore gamer is essential to the survival of your company. If I may bring Eidos back as an example, that is (I believe) the impetus behind Deus Ex and DX2.
Deus Ex was a fantastic game. The developers concentrated on great gameplay and a wonderful plot that would have made a good movie or sci-fi series, but the Casual Gamers didn't pick up on it until the Hardcore played it to death and raved and raved and got their friends to play. And it still didn't sell as well as Myst, but that's ok because if you plopped out another version of Myst, it couldn't sell like it used to. And they tried to anyway and it didn't sell well.
I've gone and identified at least four different types of game consumers. The market's so fractured, so indivisualistic and almost tribal in tastes that coming up with a crossover hit is just tough. That's the nature of the game. Sure I was pissed when Looking Glass closed up shop, but I get more pissed when I see high sales numbers for Pro Buck Hunter, because I know that there's going to be something like a million dads complaining to their *kids* for crissake that this game stinks and no, don't buy me another game.
Now, if there's something that the game companies aren't doing enough of and that they should be, is doing some serioud research into what people actually find *fun*. And I'm not asking for some customer survey on their website. I mean real, honest-to-god scientific methodology int what people find fun in computer games. Too many times I buy games that just didn't have enough thought put into what makes the game fun, or worse, what somebody in MarCom thought would e fun "because these elements were present in last year's Game Of The Year".
Like I said before... computer games are a tough business to be in. At some level, I'm glad for the competition. I'm glad for the "churn". Because I've played some great games in the last few years that I had only hoped for. Deus Ex, Ghost Recon, Morrowind, Baldur's Gate series, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Max Payne, Starcraft. Anyone who says that the Game Industry is stagnent and uninteresting is just stupid. Sure a lot of games are crud. "90% of everything is crud". It's a fact. Making something that's good is tough and making something that's good and sells well is tougher.
I just want more good games
Everything I ever needed to know about computer games, I learned from Penny Arcade
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At least that's what killed off my favorite game (which I won't mention because I really don't like the way it ended up).
It was in a stage of perpetual 0.9 beta. Whenever they redid and fixed something, something else had been outdated, and they never got around to fixing everything at once, ship & sell (though it finally shipped, but it was more because it slipped towards 0.8 beta...)
Granted, it depends on what genre the game is in. But consumers today expect much more graphics, animations and sound than they used to, which makes the minimum requirements for making a game, any game, much higher. While I don't have any numbers on it, I think the balance/gameplay/story to engine/network/gfx/sfx/music ratio has changed vastly.
Bigger projects (in same marked) = Fewer projects. And the higher the stakes, the less likely are you willing to bet on something radically new. Not to mention that the sheer size of it restricts it to a few big companies.
Oh and one thing some people seem to forget. It's reasonable that there won't be that many new genres to explore as time goes by. While there are notable exceptions, in the end it will all have been "done before". Up till about now, remakes can be done by simply improving the graphics and sound. But with something like Morrowind or UT2k3 I really can't think that would work, they'd have to innovative to make a sequel sell.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
While it's true they did shut it down mainly because of the people that play the betas, the bnetd staff was willing to work with Blizzard on getting a proper CDKEY check in there, yet Blizzard refused.
It's economics, dummy.
The same as with almost any product - games fail for a range of reasons. Some obvious ones:
1. No customers. Design for hardware that people do have. Not the hardware that they might have. I bought 3dfx kit when I last built a PC. I might buy a GeForce card now, but it's unlikely that I will buy a card to play a game that I can't testride without a GeForce. Doh!
2. No coherency. If you don't meet the minimum requirements in terms of plot, gameplay, programming, visuals, price, then you are doomed. You can trade off one for another, but if you fall below the minimum acceptable standard on any of the important metrics then you've got a dud, regardless of how good the other metrics are.
3. Lack of marketing. If the public don't know about the game then they won't buy it. Technical prowess is not enough to bring masses of customers. (That may be quite surprising to all us technerds, but it's true.) It's a surprising but true fact that a crap product can be rescued by good marketing, but a good product is amazingly unlikely to succeed without marketing. (If you develop then learn to love those people who want to gush to the world about how your product is 'REVOLUTIONARY!!!!!') Marketing is often more expensive than the cost of development.
4. No channel. If you can't get the game into the hands of your customers, then you don't have a product. Building a channel is usually more expensive than building the game.
5. Bad management. It's the job of management to make sure that all the bits of the puzzle fit together. Forget just one and the game can fail. So you'd better be able to juggle well, love people, find technical problems fun, enjoy budgeting and project planning.
Products succeed because:
1. They address the needs of those that play them. They mix the plot, gameplay, programming quality, visuals, price elements so that there is a very attractive package. The more attractive, the more likely that they will be bought. Perhaps the gameplay is brilliant despite the visuals, perhaps the gameplay is quite dull really (first person shooters) but amazingly interactive. It helps to have one or two people who share a vision to bring this one off. It also helps if they can adjust their ideas in the light of circumstances. And committees don't work too well at making fun things.
2. They address the needs of a diverse audience. Your audience is more than just the buyers. Frinstance, you need the press on your side too. You need to be able to give marketing people hooks. You may need to address parents' concerns if they are likely to provide the money. Omit a key target audience and you'll likely fail. The needs of the different audiences are different. A journalist might not play your game at all, but might write about it - they need interest factors in an easily digestable way. If a journalist does play then they may only play for 5 minutes, so those minutes had better be well thought out, easy and exciting. If three of them are dull then you've lost your chance. And the needs of different sorts are journalists are different - for instance a good TV report needs some stunning visual elements.
2. They are the right thing at the right time (and luck). Because the bar on plot, gameplay, programming, visuals, price are constantly rising, you'd better meet the demands at the time you publish, and not at the time you start developing. It's tough, but you can make a brilliant game that's at the wrong time too. Games that have elements that involve crashing planes could come in for massive knock in the aftermath of a real plane crash. Perhaps a much bigger competitor releases a brilliant title 2 weeks before your game goes on sale - you'll probably take a hit because you can't afford the level of marketing they can. Or perhaps you make a shooter just as the shooter market tanks.
Most the ones that fail are the ones that don't understand that they work inside a larger world and plan accordingly.
Now, did you notice that I didn't even use the word 'engine' in here. That's because it doesn't matter. Gasp! The greatest engine in the world makes stuff all difference if the other elements aren't in place.
That's enough - back to programming...
this is a joke. 99.9% of Blizzard's customers have never even heard of bnetd.
Yeah, but I'm willing to bet that most of that 99.9% aren't "their most ardent supporters".
Blizzard is one of the best companies as far customer response
Correction: Blizzard WAS one of the best, until they were bought by Universal.
Back in the day when games could only be played over IPX networks, the biggest IPX over TCP program was kalled Kali. Blizzard went out of their way to make a binary that optimized for this game service
Yes, and how many years ago was that?
And (since we're talking Kali) what happened to future support for that? Oh yeah, Blizzard killed it - and sent C&D letters to Kali threatening them...
bnetd became a haven for people playing illegal betas for WCIII.
Ahh.. no, it didn't.. in fact bnetd NEVER supported WC3, and when the bnetd maintainers refused to add support for it, the people asking forked it.
Blame the people playing the WCIII betas, not Blizzard.
You (and Blizzard) seem to be blaming the bnetd people. So why aren't YOU blaming the right people?
In true Universal fashion, Blizzard focused their wrath on the wrong party, just because they could.
What is your point? No company can ne expected to cater to .1% of its audience, no matter how "ardent" they are
Yes, and how many years ago was that? And (since we're talking Kali) what happened to future support for that? Oh yeah, Blizzard killed it - and sent C&D letters to Kali threatening them...
Kali is still available and usable, for anyone who cares to look. As for cease and desist letters, I googled around and didn't find any mention of that, only a summary of the case that says that Kali never did receive such a letter. See also this. Make of these what you will...
Ahh.. no, it didn't.. in fact bnetd NEVER supported WC3, and when the bnetd maintainers refused to add support for it, the people asking forked it. You (and Blizzard) seem to be blaming the bnetd people. So why aren't YOU blaming the right people?
Yes, thats Blizzard's point - even if the bnetd people were totally scrupulous, other people can swoop in, modify the source, and create servers for illegally obtained clients. So what is Blizzard supposed to do? Turn their CD key validation code over to the public? Then what is the point of having keys at all? It ridiculous to expect Blizzard to do so. As I said before, it's exactly the same thing is requiring Microsoft to turn over their Office CD validation code to the public. What is your solution to Blizzard dilemma, simply trust that people won't use illegal clients and beta leaks? Oh wait, they already tried that one didn't they... The sad truth is that it really does only take a few morons to ruin it for everyone. I don't know if Blizzard has a legal leg to stand on, but I really don't think they have a choice.
Furthermore, I have yet to hear a single reason how or why that the "ardent supporters" are "fucked". Because they have to use Kali (which is currently free and support up to Starcraft Brood War)? Because it takes them an extra 10 seconds to set up a game on Battle.net? As I said, its a complete joke.
Hacker's Guide To Cooking: /etc/food, right?
2 pkg. cream cheese (the mushy white stuff in silver wrappings that doesn't
really come from Philadelphia after all; anyway, about 16 oz.)
1 tsp. vanilla extract (which is more alcohol than vanilla and pretty
strong so this part you *GOTTA* measure)
1/4 cup sugar (but honey works fine too)
8 oz. Cool Whip (the fluffy stuff devoid of nutritional value that you
can squirt all over your friends and lick off...)
"Blend all together until creamy with no lumps." This is where you get to
join(1) all the raw data in a big buffer and then filter it through
merge(1m) with the -thick option, I mean, it starts out ultra lumpy
and icky looking and you have to work hard to mix it. Try an electric
beater if you have a cat(1) that can climb wall(1s) to lick it off
the ceiling(3m).
"Pour into a graham cracker crust..." Aha, the BUGS section at last. You
just happened to have a GCC sitting around under
If not, don't panic(8), merely crumble a rand(3m) handful of innocent
GCs into a suitable tempfile and mix in some melted butter.
"...and refrigerate for an hour." Leave the recipe's stdout in a fridge
for 3.6E6 milliseconds while you work on cleaning up stderr, and
by time out your cheesecake will be ready for stdin.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...