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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."
fp?
suck it
I have a younger friend who is considering some level of involvement in programming/designing games. Particular questions include:
- What specialized areas of knowledge will be most useful (math, physics, for example?)
- What's a reasonable expectation for an annual income?
- If one is using a pre-existing gaming engine, what exactly is it that needs to be programmed (he's thinking c++)?
Basically, he's wondering if he can turn his passion for playing games into one that involves creating them, but he also wants to sure he won't have to starve in order to do it.
I hope this isn't too far OT.
Fact: *BSD is dying
You must have missed the thread that is right before this one on the main page.
The same thing that's wrong with music development.
The fact that people are allowed to play/listen to or trade/buy/sell old games/old music.
This is being curtailed to SOME extent through copyright extention, which a company can use to make sure that if they don't re-release an old game, no one will, but the problem goes beyond this -- what about all those people who bought the games to begin with?
It's the same thing with music. There are lots of people who are willing to buy used music in a record store, and nevver buy the latest pop hit, even if it sells 4,000,000 copies in the first week (which obviously means it's really good).
The solution, of course, is more legislation.
Specifically, copyright owners should be able to "recall" old media -- remember, it's licensed, not sold, and that license is subject to federal law. Just change the law so that copyright holders are allowed to recall old games by offering a rebate in the amount of their fair-market value on new games instead, or a percent of their fair-market value. (Naturally, only a certain percentage of each of your percentage could be based on rebates in this way -- maybe 20% can be from trade-ins, so that if you have twice as much to trade in as you can use on one game, instead of being able to get a 40% rebate on that, you'll get a 20% rebate on two different titles instead).
In this way, we can make sure that there is a continual demand for new media -- essentially, this is what copyright extention does, but it simply does not go far enough.
Please note that I am being bitterly ironic, BUT: If the industry thought it had ANY chance of being able to legislate for that surreptitiously or in such a way that it wouldn't face immediate backlash from a million organizations, it would lobby its say into getting that.
Essentially, the most important part of this (infinite copyright) has already been attained, by basically Disney Corp.
Welcome to reality.
NOTE: Mod this post -1 off-topic but +5 fucking insightful.
I'm 50 years old, lots of disposable income, but I'm not interested in computer games.
When I want to play games, the wife and I go to Las Vegas. Nothing better than standing around a craps table, watching the giddy blondes spend their boyfriends' money. Then we have a nice dinner, wine, and we go back to our room and fuck each other brains out.
When a video game can do that, I'll buy.