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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!
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.
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.
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?
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
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.