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What is Wrong With Game Development?
Warrior-GS writes "Seamus Blackley, who has done everything from work at Looking Glass Studios to evangelize for the Microsoft Xbox, sounds off on what's wrong with the relationship between developers, publishers and their audience. Also, as part of coverage of the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, GameSpy has chats with Miyamoto about The Wind Waker and Yu Suzuki about his gaming influences. Some interesting reading."
They put too much emphasis on advertizing it to death and not enough emphasis on developing a quality product. Advertizing is the scourge of the free market. It doubles or triples the price of many goods while contributing nothing to their value.
Repeal the DMCA!
Money is what's wrong with game development. Someone puts it in the head of the programmers' management team that every day they spend working on a game is a day in which they lose money amounting to both operating costs and potential profit.
In fact, they seem to think that if you release a game half-done it'll make more money than a game that's complete.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I found Seamus Blakely's remarks interesting but hardly exhaustive. It seems to me that the simplest way of describing the problem with the games industry is this: "Hollywood".
As computer games have become big business, the process of creating one bears a striking resemblance to the process of developing a film idea: no-one (as William Goldman famously said) knows anything, and they're all terrified of risk.
1) Avoid Technical Risk -- don't develop new game engines. Use an existing engine and plug new content into it.
2) Avoid Financial Risk -- sequels do better than new titles, so invest in sequels.
3) Aim for the lowest common denominator -- dialog needs to be localised, so avoid too much of it. Everyone understands explosions -- so do lots of them.
4) Spend as much on promotion as development. The key is to sell a lot of copies at full price really soon after release, because if you don't, people will figure out how unoriginal your game really is and you'll be selling at a tiny margin.
And as in the film industry, most of the interesting stuff is done by small independent developers on shoestring budgets. Of course, once they have a hit they get converted into a commodity product that spawns huge budget low innovation sequels.
I bet Doom 3 will epitomize what he said is wrong with the game industry, i.e. unimaginative sequels with little innovation.
I think he's saying (possibly poorly translated), that it's the controls, and how the user actually engages with the character(s) they are controlling. That point of contact is the key thing to get right.
That's one thing he's nailed beautifully in his titles, and it's probably one reason they're so well received.
I think maybe the companies put too much stress on the developers to create hits
I can't agree with this. Although, I would like to work on games purely for the sake of the art, or to build something my friends and I could play on weekends, the truth is that very few games make good money for the developers. The "hits" take the lion's share of the profit (more than 90% by most accounts) - so these are the games that keep publishers and developers afloat. If you aren't interested in hits, fine... just don't expect to be in the business of building console games for long. (Although I believe there is a market for cheaply developed PC titles)
Well, that's half right, he certainly does talk a lot. Honestly, I think the main thing that's wrong with the games industry is pricks like Blackley who are more interested in acting like rock stars than in making games.
Games should be released _when they're done_ and not a day sooner. Duh. It's not just an art vs. business thing either. Releasing a buggy or incomplete game is just a stupid business decision bent on making Wall Street's quarterly earnings targets- instead of improving the long term success of the company.
Oh, and people who have spent most of their lives passionately making cool games should realize selling out to a greedy, stupid and public company like EA isn't necessarily going to make their lives better- even if they are very (very) rich.
Finally, it's being said. I had time to play endlessly long games when I was in junior high, but now in college, I just won't touch the 30 hour game (let alone the 70-100 hour group!). I don't have that kind of time. Maybe the "no-life" crew still has that kind of time to blow, but I'd say a good majority of us have outside engagements. And what's more, I'd MUCH rather play 3 excellent 10-hour games instead of one 30-hour one.
2 - No change of the storyline. As soon as someone integrates diablo2 with doom3 we will have a game everyone can enjoy.
3 - NO FREAKIN COOP GAMES. I'm personally very sick of playing Quake1 coop over and over simply becuase its the basically the only one out there. I'm sure there are others, but they've hidden pretty well from me.
4 - graphics card manufacturers. It takes much longer to port a game for multiple vid cards that it does for just one, and you get much more performance if it was just one. ATI and Nvidia need to agree on a set of standards - that would help immensly.
High-quality gameplay back in the old days was the sole focus of developing games. They didn't have the gimmicks of fancy graphics or the capabilities massive hard drives or even memory. It all had to be stored in a ROM that fit into a few kb.
The gamplay was great because it had to be. I recall seeing an interview somewhere with Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame saying as much.
The concept of FUN was a core idea. It sounds simple but the core idea nowadays is often COOL. What's cool is not always what's fun. That is a lesson that many producers need to learn. (I say producers because the developers are rarely in control of the games they work so hard to create.)
Just because you can use the latest eye candy it doesn't mean you should. I like great looking games as much as the next person, but I like great-playing games even more.
Games are about user interaction, that is taking the controller and using it to move something around on the screen. There are far too many game developers who forget the fundamentals. Actually it is a mark of a true professional that they focus on the fundamentals, this is why Shigeru Miyamoto has developed an unprecedented string of hit titles and is respected by almost everyone in the industry...
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
Saying that a 300 page game design stifles creativity is completely wrong, unless for some reason your publisher is requiring you to stick to the letter of it instead of being flexible. How do you think you get a team of 20+ people to produce a coherent game? Normally you can't see which parts of the game was made by which artist and so on, why? BECAUSE THERE IS A GAME DESIGN DETAILING HOW THINGS SHOULD LOOK AND WORK. Of course if something is not fun, you come up with a new design for that part and update the game design document accordingly.
He also seems to think that everyone can do business like Microsoft where it does not matter how much money you lose because there is always the operating system monopoly there to feed you... Saying that developers make bad games because they have to make them on a budget and a timeschedule is of course true, but not very interesting as this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseable future...
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
Blackley's comments are all well and good, but will someone tell me exactly what he's done to improve things? He's been directly responsible for 2-3 games in his career, none of which were particularly earth-shattering. He seems to be most famous these days for leaving Microsoft. Is this really someone that developers and publishers should be looking towards for inspiration? The proof of any theory is in the results, and so far I haven't seen Blackley's new company spewing out anything amazing that the world should be paying attention to. All I've seen is Blackley himself using his company as a platform to complain about the industry.
Meanwhile, guys like Miyamoto - working at the largest game developer in the world in terms of sales and the number of projects released yearly (yes, bigger than Microsoft) - keep on churning out games like Pikmin and Animal Crossing, which I would consider pretty innovative. Then the guy gets derided for saying things like "what I find most interesting about games is being able to push a character around the screen with a controller." Well hey, ever think maybe the guy's onto something? He's only the most successful individual game developer and producer in the history of video games, going back to the original Donkey Kong. Again, it's the results that prove the validity of a theory, and Miyamoto's theory has always been that simplicity and innovation are what count. He doesn't go around complaining that the publishing system is broken; he works within that publishing system and continues to make great games (and games that sell quite well - when less than a million is considered a "failure", you know you've set the benchmark pretty high).
I'm not sure the system is broken when we continue to get games like Super Monkey Ball, Rez, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Samba De Amigo, Dance Dance Revolution, and plenty of other highly innovative games that very often become popular without the name recognition that "branding" provides. And I don't see Seamus Blackley's name attached to any of these games.
I think we need to all finally agree that Blackley is not worth talking about. He's at best a footnote in video game history; one of the two guys who convinced Bill Gates to release the Xbox. But he's no longer involved with Xbox and didn't do much but evangelize it while he was. And I don't see him doing much of note since leaving Microsoft. Miyamoto, on the other hand, says lots of things that lots of people don't seem to "get" but has been directly responsible for 4-5 major hits and highly regarded games in just the past year, with an indirect hand in 20-30 others. Whose opinion counts more here?
Just because the products are good doesn't mean the process is good. Look at sausage.
Also, citing two outstanding titles doesn't mean anything for the industry as a whole. OK, so there's two great games. How many bad games are there? Are they worse or better than the bad games of the past? Are they more or less plentiful in terms of percentage of titles?
What is the cost of a game that flops? Is the risk taken by developers greater or less than in the past? What's required of the developers to overcome the obstacles? Long hours? Burnout? Taking safer risks and not innovating too radically?
There's a lot of questions that need to be looked at before you can say the industry has nothing wrong with it. I'd say the industry is healthy, and is even doing well, but that doesn't mean everything is peachy.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
OK, so as far as I know it's only available on the PS2, but Gran Turismo 3 is so realistic it hurts.
In GT3 you have to get different levels of licenses to drive in the different classes of races and even getting the early licenses is challenging. You make $$ from winning races (highly ghetto races to start with) and as you get enough you buy better cars and mod them. There are so many mods; I have no clue what most of them are, but the game handily gives you before & after horsepower figures (for the power related mods) in your current vehicle.
And the racing is awesome. Great graphics, great sense of speed, but most importantly every little thing you do with the controls has an impact. Some cars handle it better when you take a short cut through dirt and grass on the side of the road than others. The rear wheel drives are soo hard not to spin out. Each car is different in it's feel and road handling, etc.
Anyway, are there problems with the game industry? Yes, of course. However, it's preposterous to suggest that there are no good games out there.
And if you think there are no good driving sims, you must be playing the wrong ones. Unless you're looking for a good non-racing driving sim ("Supermarket & Back: Station Wagon III"). If that's the case I can't help you.
good point, well-designed controls can make it feel like the game character is an extension of the player, and movement of the char is practically second nature.
:) I always thought that was freaky, but cool sideeffect from these games, maybe from playing too much. but now i think it might be because of intuative controls.
The reason i say this: remember in some super mario bros boards, when your char is traveling along the top of the ceiling, just offscreen? when you move the character around and you jump over holes (to keep from falling down throught the ceiling, or whatever), you can actually *feel* where mario is going to land
why run from Vincenzo?
No they don't. Gamers only know about what they are given to play with, unfortunately. Gamers can only find ways of IMPROVING actual games, they know nothing about game design. When I say gamers, it means 'most gamers', including the casual gamers and deer hunter fans.
Gamers play game A, a FPS for example. He'll find a list of hundreds of items to make game A better if he's a creative gamers that cares, otherwise he won't even think about it. However, these are just additions and changes to a specific game, or 'genre'. Gamers are blinded by the games they play, the games they are given, simple. Gamers usually aren't creative enough to think about a new and innovation game. That's why good game designers exists. If people like Sid Meiers and Miyamoto never existed, and only gamers would make games, the industry would be in a lot worst condition.
This is the problem with the industry. They can only make 'game A, which is game B with better X, Y and Z.' Good designers are able to come up with new a fresh ideas. Not revolutionary or anything, but fresh and new. However, since gamers are blinded by what they play, and only want to improve the games they play, these games either sells poorly, or are smash hits. No in-between. Gamers either give it a chance and see how great it is, or they don't bother and miss on an incredible game.
Great designers are few and far between. Anyone can think about how to make product A better, whether or not it's a game. However, to come with the idea of product A, it doesn't take a consumer/gamer, it takes a great mind(or many great minds).
Consumers, which gamers are, simply don't know what they want. They only know how to improve what they are given.
That's why focus groups and surveys and such are just the wrong way to do it. However, since making something people 'want' makes money, that's what they do, simple. That's why you get cars like the PT Cruisers that is just a piece of crap, but hey, it's popular because that's what drivers wants. Same with SUV. You could extend this problem to Democracy as a whole, but I won't even try to go near there, hehe.
Designers should make a game for THEMSELVES, not for the gamers.
Look at Blizzard. They make games for the gamers. Sure, they are very polished and incredibly detailed games, but they are just more of the same. However, since they make games for the gamers, they make tons of money. I love blizzard games, but you can't say they are innovative or anything, just more of the same, but MUCH better.
Look back at Looking Glass. They really created innovative games, for themselves and not the gamers at all. System Shock 1, Thief, Terra Nova, and some more. They created some new 'genres' themselves. The company failed, despite the critical aclaim and incredible games. Why? Simple, it wasn't 'more of the same', it wasn't what the gamers were feed with. Gamers didn't bother to try. Now, tell me capitalism doesn't have problems with innovation?
Back in the days, gamers would try new things, gamers were really all-around gamers. Today, we have gamers who 'camp' genre, who only buy type A games, like FPS, RTS, etc. They won't even bother to try other games, and won't give them a chance if they do try them.
So, the problem is as much with the gamers than the developers than the publishers.
Same as with everything else. It's hideously bloated and aiming for shareholder value rather than doing the creative fun stuff in between once in a while.
Look at ID Soft, my favorite example: I don't like their games very much nor are they extremely innovative, but they've remained the same 15 head team since god know's when and something like twice a decade they release a game they like and their fans like. Just like it should be.
The counterexample: Dynamics and their last hit Tribes2. Great game. Best Multiplayer only game out there. I LOVE it. It rocks and still kicks UT2k3 and whatnot around the block fun and varietywise. UT2k3 will take another 2 years till they've patched the server overview to meet T2s standard.
Yet the fan base built up to slow for the VCs so they shut them down. That's what happens when you get greedy. Game developers should do just that without getting greedy: Develope games. And nothing else. Then their products would be better, they would be fewer, they would make a fine living and I as a gamer would be happier and have to spend less money on crap. And I'm shure they would be happier too.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Story = How many games have a story tacked on ~just to explain~ why you're shooting at people or aliens or terrorists? It's not length of story, but quality of story.
Interactivity and joint Story Telling with other living people in a virtual environment. MMO'a remind me of table top pen and pencil gaming of the early 80's. Mud's and dungeon crawls dressed up in fancy gfx, but little more. Sure, there are RPing guilds in EQ, but that's not what i'm talking about.
How many game designers have stopped to actually read Aristotles' Poetics?
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
I disagree; I think the idea of "everything's already been done at least twice" is a common phallacy. Some people claim that all good music has already been done, or all good movies, or even all good paintings.
And yet amount of permutations for basic components of music (melodic, harmonic, rhythmic), literature (themes, characters, time, style) or, computer games (ones similar to literature), is pretty much infinite. There will _always_ be room for new things in any of above-mentioned forms of art.
I agree with the article. Lack of innovative games has more to do with business objectives of predictable revenue than with not having room to explore that limits original games. 20 years ago technology was limiting things much more; nowadays it's almost a moot point, at least from game idea point of view. Any interesting non-novelty gameplay idea can probably be implemented on standard gaming system of choice. But since coming up with a new idea IS more difficult than refining an existing idea (I'm not arguing otherwise), the risks associated just make it so much more compelling to "just write yet another sequel of a hit".
Funnily enough, this is just one of those problems with short-sighted businesses. Without new innovative hits, there won't be chance for new predictably profitable sequels. You can only do so many sequels from a certain theme, with lowering profitability... and then have to move on.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Games these days cost millions to develop.
Because of this, they have to appeal to the LCD of the computer game public.
This means they have to be very dumb, at all levels. 90% of people won't "get" a smart game.
Back in the day, a game could be wildly successful with a small niche audience, because production costs were so low.
One of the big problems is that people (mostly really just hard core gamers) want better and better "quality", which really means graphics and sound and everything BUT gameplay. But making the highest quality stuff is quite expensive - motion capture is not cheap, and developing the code to support it takes time and money as well. Original music for the soundtack? Also potentially quite expensive.
Small independent developers just can't afford these things. Those Madden games cost millions to make, but bring in tens to hundreds of millions. Only the big players can really sink that kind of cash in development.
I've heard many in the game industry say that production is moving to Hollywood style, with huge budgets, fancy graphics work, entire fresh musical scores, the works. And that's just darn expensive to do.
Government IS the problem.
It is interesting to see that many of the best games out there (Half-Life comes to mind) are games that were not subject to milestones or budget limitations or skew schedules. Games that developers could develop on their own terms.
Publishers don't like to let developers develop on their own terms, even though the best games are done that way.
They need to be more venture capitalist minded - sure, 10 out of 12 will go bust, one might break even and the 12th one will be a big hit that makes more money then was lost on all the rest.
But they are too risk averse, so we get crap.
*sigh*
Government IS the problem.
They sit there and carefully and systematically work through each game, taking notes on the sound, music, graphics, etc. They evaluate the game the same way Roger Ebert carefully picks through a movie and sees it's good bits and bad bits.
That's only one thing that a game reviewer is supposed to do. They are also supposed to review the game as a whole. More often than most would care to admit, there is nowhere near that level of attention to detail when conducting a review. How many times have we seen so-called reviewers exposed for being nothing more than fanboys on the take from publishers (bribes, junkets and payola)? Or even worse, how often do they write reviews without ever seeing or playing the game in question (fraudulent reviews)?
As long as the publishers know that they can manipulate reviewers by the carrot --bribes, junkets and payola-- or the stick --threatening no review copies of games or no access to staff for interviews-- they know that they can get away with just about anything when publishing games. Is there any wonder why 95% of games published don't make a profit?
At Geartest.com we have faced the latter problem, where publishers will not send us the actual products, even when we occasionally request them.
They send us press releases, screenshots, more PR about promotional offers, bundle discounts and contests, but they rarely send the software.
Maybe it's because we have repeatedly told them that we won't publish non-news, and we won't publish features without direct access to the game in question and/or the staff who made the game (in the case of interviews/features).
Meanwhile, you get self-proclaimed 'journalists' like Marc Saltzman who carve out a cottage industry for themselves while doing nothing to advance serious, legitimate, journalistic or critical coverage of games.
There are an endless number of Web site and so-called 'game press' that are happy to publish PR and advertising and call them articles or features. As long as there are gamers who give these sites and magazines their traffic and pay for this type of PR content, the game companies, their marketing agencies and the publications themselves have no incentive to stop pimping, whoring and publishing lousy games.
And somehow gaming mags and people are still wanting to actually TALK to him. Go figure.
Blackly said:
Though design documents can be useful tools that help organize a team's efforts, Blackley feels that often times they're a hindrance to creativity. Design docs help publishers set milestones for the developers, which shifts the focus from making a novel game to reaching a milestone to ensure payment. He also noted that the documents themselves have become bloated pieces of work that inhibit innovation. "A 300 page design document is not a very good way to be creative. Design documents actually discourage quality," says Blackley.
What a load of crap. I would think just about _every_ project has milestones...it's the damn _schedule_ that forces early shipping, kills innovation, etc.
As for discouraging quality...if the document includes QA design, then it is quite the opposite.
What a moron this guy is.
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
The two games that illustrate the differences the best (IMO, that is) are Descent and Carmageddon.
In the case of Descent, you had an original game good graphics and exciting game play and well balanced weapons, tactics, and phenominal AI.
Descent II came out and was heavy on the "WOW" factor, despite growing pains with places to get stuck and problems on 1 or two boss levels, but the result was a much Improved game, despite dated graphics (why they never put out a 3dfx version I'll never know).
Descent III: Modern graphics, excellent game play, better AI, more interesting enemies and levels that were just plain awesome.
The formula stayed the same, and the gameplay as well with improved graphics/AI.
Not much changed, but it is the reason I'd probably buy Descent 4 when/if it comes out.
Now, Carmageddon OTOH is a slightly different story.
Carmageddon I was *truely* original as well as *shocking* when it first came out. Running ppl over? Smashing into other cars is ?allowed?, nay, **ENCOURAGED**?
Know what? That game fscking ROCKED!
Hours and hours of mindless fun, mayhem and high speed.
Carmageddon II (carpocylapse now):
Better (much better) graphics, same gameplay, and a little bit better AI. But, the introduction of special missions annoyed me to no end.
If it were not for a skip level code, I'd probably never played the rest of the game.
Not much changed except for every four levels was and annoyance/inconvenience/challenge.
Carmageddon TDR 2000 (CIII, essentially):
OMFG!! What did you *DO*!?! It's ruined, totally ruined. Yeah, you can run ppl over (no points/time awarded), yeah the same powerups are present with some slight differences, some better {coff*NOT*coff} graphics.
You wan't to know what made me uninstall it after 40 minutes?
Suddenly Carmageddon was about *racing*.
(insert choking sound here)
What bright bulb thought *that* was a good Idea?
I doubt I'd ever buy another game of the Carmageddon series unless the only improvement was graphics/gameplay/weapons/enemy AI.
What I honestly thought the next step would be, was, the ability do disallow/remove some powerups (the annoying ones) or more level variety.
I suppose it is sort of like coming into a position of responsibility/power;
Rule one: Don't change too much.
Rule two: Don't change too little.
Speaking of game development, how's Duke Nukem Forever coming?
(I'm gonna burn for that one)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
The biggest problem with the game industry is that it harbors many phonies, who in turn hire other phonies. By "phonies", I mean people who are unqualified for their job titles. Because game's sucesses and failures are essentially unpredictable, when a game becomes successful through a combination of luck and hard work, the politically aggressive people are the first to take credit and get promoted into positions of higher power by executives who are not quite sure why the product was successful and are too lazy to dig into the details. Once you get into the "senior executive" title, it seems like no amount of your own incompetence can dislodge you.
...as a VICE PRESIDENT for XBox marketing at Microsoft!
A case in point is Sega's former executive, Peter Moore. Moore was a former professional soccer player from the UK who got an MBA and worked at the athletic shoe company Reebok. When Bernie Stolar was CEO at Sega, he hired Moore as the vp of marketing. In a political fight just before the Dreamcast launch, Stolar got thrown out for insisting on the inclusion of a 56K modem with the console. With Bernie fired, Sega filled in his position with a "temporary" executive from headquarters in Japan. All eyes were on the advertising campaign Moore had put together up for the launch date called "Inside the Box". Dreamcast sold very well in its first few months after the initial launch -- thanks to the groundwork that Stolar had laid down before. Flush with the huge sales, Sega promoted Moore to President.
This was the moment where higher executives demonstrated that they had no idea why the initial Dreamcast sales were successful, and promoted the wrong guy.
As the year went on, the Dreamcast sales flagged. Despite Moore's best marketing attempts, which were ill aimed and ineffectual, the numbers grew bleaker and bleaker. Moore spent money like water, creating elaborate sets at E3 where professional roller skaters did tricks on ramps to promote "Jet Set Radio", renting out the entire Great America amusement park for one day for the Game Developers Converence attendees, and getting Sega to sponsor the MTV Music Video Awards to promote "Space Channel 5".
All for naught. Within a year, sales were so bad that Dreamcast was discontinued. Despite all of the failures, Sega allowed Moore (clearly out of his element) to stay on as CEO, as Sega branched out to support other platforms.
But look what happened: Last Christmas, Moore thought that Sega's football game could beat EA's football game if Sega continued to throw money into advertising. It was once again Moore's theory of spending money like water.
How much money? Almost all of the entire allocated budget for the year 2003! Moore's plan failed badly, which punched a huge hole in Sega, a hole so large that the company began looking for a buyer. Eventually Sega wound up with Sammy, the Korean pachinko manufacturer, which was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago. Moore announced his departure from Sega, and three days later, he resurfaced again...
If this story doesn't illustrate the illness of the game industry, I don't know what does.
Yeah, who knows, maybe we'll do that. Unfortunately, there are still some final touches to be done before it is releasable. After the whole Crave incident we just completely dropped the project, and since then it hasn't been touched. We might get the team together again just to put out a ROM, though we've been saying that for awhile now...
Yes, there are some good games. But there could be a lot MORE good games if the system for making them weren't so broken. Let's face it, for every really good game, there are 20 mediocre games and 10 really bad games.
..."
In my opinion, the fault lies 90% with the publishers. Most games that get published *could* have been a lot better, and *would* have been a lot better, if it weren't for interference from the publishers in the development process.
The comparisons between the game business and the movie business are striking. Game publishers make exactly the same mistakes movie studios make:
1) Just about the only thing they ever want to make are tired retreads of genres that have been done to death. Bring a new, fresh idea to them, and they run in horror, screaming "No one's done it yet!!!" Game publishers and movie studios have a "dual personality" problem in that they are always looking for the smash hit, but refuse to fund anything that hasn't already been done ten times before because they don't want to take any risks.
2) In the game business and the movie business, the biggest hits are nearly always created by development studios and movie production companies that have the cash to go it alone, to make the thing themselves the way they want to make it and tell the publishers and studio where to stick their tired old crap. Take a look at the list of the top 10 bestselling games of all time and count how many of them are sequels or even fall in any genre that existed before - precious few. If anyone but Will Wright had suggested to a game publisher to make a game where all you do is make little computer people eat, sleep, and poop, he would have been laughed out of the office. And now The Sims is the best-selling game of all time.
3) Game publishers and movie studios are filled with middle managers who are nothing more than frustrated "wannabe" creative people. They didn't have the talent to make it in a creative field, so now that they have power over the creative people, they think that qualifies them to stick their grubby fingers into the creative process. In the movies, it's focus groups and script doctors. In the game industry, it's "producers" who have never designed a game in their lives but insist on making changes to the game design which the developer has to include if they want to get paid. They think they're qualified to "improve" a game design that's been created by a team of experienced game designers. If the "money people" would just step back and let the creative people do their jobs without second-guessing, the end product would be much higher quality and make a lot more money.
The most amazing thing about both businesses is that the people who own the big game publishers and movies studios are constantly having the above two point proven to them in very clear financial terms, and yet they still Just Don't Get It. Even though it's been proven time and time again - on the bottom line - that the more they interfere with the creative process, the less money they make, they still seem to think that since they are paying the bills, that makes them smarter than the creative people and thus they feel entitled to put their grubby paws all over the product.
In short, game publishers are just as stupid and shortsighted as movie studios. They constantly reject any idea that has the smallest amount of risk associated iwth it, and then they cry because people get tired of buying the same old games over and over again with different graphics. Then, when someone finally manages to make a new and unique game, and it sells millions of copies, do they learn from this? No, they go right on doing business the same way they always have, assuming that the successful game must have been a fluke. They figure "well, we are suits working in a big company with lots of money, so that makes us qualified to judge what will be a hit."
Most people assume that there aren't more good games because "it's all been done" or that there's some kind of shortage of great game ideas. Work in the industry for a while and you'll find that great game ideas are a dime a dozen - every designer has at least one, or maybe a dozen, ideas for games that would sell very well if done right. The game industry is busting at the seams with great ideas. But those ideas will most likely never see the light of day because game publishers simply reject any game proposal that does not start with the words "This game is just like
So thanks to the shortsightedness of the publishers, we're stuck in a Catch-22 situation where the only way to make a truly great game is to pay for it yourself, and the only way to be able to afford to pay for a game yourself is to make a truly great game.
But that's the way publishers want it, because it gives them 95% of the revenue.
Always those evil publishers, eh. I don't know if I read the same article you did but what I thought it said was that publishers wanted repeatability and therefore prefer sequels and license games. Developers who want to create great games should not develop what they believe that the publishers want, because the publishers are trying to solve a completely different problem than the game developers.
Not even Miyamoto is infallible - I couldn't be arsed to play through to the end of Ocarina Of Time, simply because I got caught in a die/retry loop and decided I couldn't face playing through the same section yet *again* just to reach the next checkpoint.
The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time is widely considered to be the best videogame ever made. It remains ranked at #1 among all videogames at Gamerankings to this day.
Fine, you didn't want to finish it. However, suggesting that somehow it's the game's fault seems a bit childish. It's impossible to please everybody, and I hardly think the fact that Miyamoto's masterpiece failed to please one random Slashdot poster should count as a failure on his part.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck