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."

Comments

Nothing's wrong IMHO

[$$$exy Gwen Stefani]

I've found the latest crop of games to be really great. For instance, Battlefield 1942 and Metroid Prime are probably two of the best games I've _ever_ played in my life.

I think maybe the companies put too much stress on the developers to create hits, but as a part-time developer, I think it's easier said than done to just create a smash hit out of thin air. Everything's already been done, or so it seems, so really original and entertaining gameplay+graphics is a tough combination to create.

Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO

[zwoelfk]

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)

Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO

[Doomdark]

Everything's already been done, or so it seems, so really original and entertaining gameplay+graphics is a tough combination to create.

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.

Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO

[SpikeSpiff]

Just because the products are good doesn't mean the process is good. Look at sausage.

I disagree. There are two perspectives here, and we are switching between them. As a gamer, I could care less how screwed up the development process is (barring major immorality/illegality) as long as they make good games.

Further, I don't care if 99/100 games suck. I'll depend on friends, slashdot, gamespy, and sales figures and so forth to screen the wheat from the chaff.

And there is plenty of wheat out there. Counterstrike for goodness sake. WCIII and Starcraft. Civ, Sims. Everquest and all the clones. More than any serious person can ever play.

From the perspective of the developers, I sympathize. But I'd be a lot more interested in hearing how the WCIII add-in is going.

Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO

[kNIGits]

I disagree; I think the idea of "everything's already been done at least twice" is a common phallacy.

No, a six inch penis is a common "phallacy".

Promotionalism

[Tuxinatorium]

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.

Re:Promotionalism

[symbolic]

This is actually a very interesting comment, since it relates to the very issue that's being discussed in the article. It seems that any industry that involves any kind of publishing entity, faces the same problems. Publishers are in it to make money, and they'll do what will make that happen - even if it means throttling back things like creativity and innovation. What I'd like to see (and quite frankly, what I'm surprised hasn't happened in a more visible given the presence of the internet), is for publishing companies to fall by the wayside, while the creative types establish either a centralized or easily-accessible e-distribution channel.

This whole publishing thing, it seems, is just BEGGING for a different, more efficient business model (both monetarily and in terms of intangible factors like creativity). Games developers who aren't with any of the 'big few' who make big bucks on a good release, are stuck with working with publishers. I get the impression that publishers often make the process more tedious, and are in a prime position to lower the integrity of the process by dorking around with royalties, net revenue figures, etc - all of which are used to ascertain how much the game developer gets paid. I'd love to see this process changed so that games developers, like music artists, get more of what they deserve, and and a lot less of the burden introduced by the current business model.

Re:Promotionalism

[sql*kitten]

Publishers are in it to make money, and they'll do what will make that happen - even if it means throttling back things like creativity and innovation.

You're confusing cause and effect. The way to make money - and the publishers know this - is to sell the market what it wants at a price it is willing to pay. Gamers as a group say they're interested in quality, but their actions tell a different story, as they rush out to buy the latest sequel. Guess which one, speech or action, actually results in dollars changing hands?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that any gamer who has ever bought any sequel, or any generic first-person shooter (or any game that fits easily into a "genre") is a part of the problem.

Money.

[Renraku]

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.

+5 insightful

[kingkade]

A quote from article:

Shigeru Miyamoto: For me, the most interesting thing about video games is taking the controller and using it to move something around on the screen.

Hmmm, indeed. Is everybody sure this is the actual genius behind the classics like SMB?

Re:+5 insightful

[tc]

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.

Re:+5 insightful

[igomaniac]

What do _you_ think makes a game interesting? The packaging? The scantily clad women? The fact that you get to be james bond? Please...

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...

Re:+5 insightful

[waveclaw]

Shigeru Miyamoto: For me, the most interesting thing about video games is taking the controller and using it to move something around on the screen.

Hmmm, indeed. Is everybody sure this is the actual genius behind the classics like SMB?

Can't be, everybody knows the most interesting thing is watching the characters play out a dramatic and artistic movie everytime something happens (a la Blood Omen 2, Final Fantasy 8.) Doesn't he know how hard it is to create a program that takes input from the player and actually does it on the screen!?!?

Furthermore, there is no need for the player to control his/her character (Myst, Riven.) They are just there to fork over the dough for our cheeply made, low budget movie clips! How dare he malign our marketing model.

Gamers *playing* games. Hummprf. The nerve...

Re:+5 insightful

[Azureflare]

Well, I feel it might be that Miyamoto is referring to the ease with which you control the player on the screen. SMB you had four buttons (start select A B) and directional arrows. The simplistic interface makes the game intuitive (at first) and easy to use (at first) though the game has a very steep curve towards the later parts of the game. You have to get really good. But the cool thing is, there isn't the mindless "point-and-click" It's more about timing. Modern console games have made it certainly more complicated (with a bajillion buttons) but there's still that synchronicity that happens that is very cool, and is very important for making a game fun. It's not the spiffy graphics that necessarily make a game fun. I found games like NWN and DS to be fun at first, but after the nth repetitive level with the nth repetitive bad guys, it lost it's appeal (also the fact that the games themselves were incredibly easy, IMO.)

Re:+5 insightful

[kingkade]

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.

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 :) 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.

Re:no requirements gathering phase!!!

[zwoelfk]

Typically, users are queried by publishers at different levels. Sony is especially keen on this. However, most Slashdot readers probably refuse to participate on principals of anonymity. Did you fill out your registration card and return it to Sony with the games you like and additional comments? Probably not. Have you logged on to Sony's site and returned feedback on what you like, want to see, etc? Probably not. But there is a large group of people who /do/ do this and they weigh heavily in Sony's conception of what their typical user is (Sony even has a lame word for them: "Imaginator") - and thus on what games they will push for development and advertising.

Problems with Game Development

[podperson]

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.

Re:Problems with Game Development

[zaffir]

Great, great points. Especially the lowest common denom one - big boobs, tight clothes, and lots of explosions sell. However, i don't see anything wrong with using someone else's engine. You don't have to reinvent the wheel (but you are allowed to tweak it to your liking), which means the company can spend more of its dev time making good content and not have to worry about completely designing and debugging and spending money on their own engine. That also leaves the engine work to the people who really know what the hell they're doing when it comes to 3D (it seems that FPSs are the only games, atm, that have liscensed engines). Engine liscensing allows developers who might lack the more advanced technical skill to still make a great game.

Games

[Selfbain]

Is it just me or does everyone else think that the older systems, like the atari and nintendo put out way higher quality games (as far as gameplay goes)than the modern systems seem to provide?

Re:What's wrong about the video game industry

[nomadic]

I bet Doom 3 will epitomize what he said is wrong with the game industry, i.e. unimaginative sequels with little innovation.

Gamer's know what they want!

[Metallic Matty]

Sometimes we'll sit around when we're bored and think of ways games could be better; different implementation systems and cool ideas that would just kick ass in games. Developers should just randomly show up at lan parties and ask questions. =)

Re:Gamer's know what they want!

[Karhgath]

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.

Game reviewers and the common man...

[SetarconeX]

I was happy to see that he pointed out that there is a fairly sizable difference between game reviewers, and the average gamer. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Gamespot and IGN as much as the next guy, and I always yank a few reviews before I buy a game, but most of their reviewers have a different philosophy than I do.

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.

But then, every once in a while, the normal non-professional movie fan just says "Fuck it," and rents Six String Samurai.

It's the same thing with games. I mean, I loved the depth and careful construction that went into the last Final Fantasy game. I appreciate the graphical detail in the last Warcraft game. But unlike a professional game reviewer, I'll occasionally just say screw it all and toss a quarter in the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the local arcade.

The average gamer often just wants something fun. Games that start as 300 page design documents just don't sound fun, no matter how much effort went into them. Now, maybe if the game started out as a 15 page comic book.....

designing games

[suhit]

I am taking a game design class at school and here are some readings that you all may find interesting. I wonder whether after reading the articles below and sticking to the concepts, will we become better game developers?

"Game Engine Anatomy 101" by Jake Simpson - http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,594,00. asp

"Formal Abstract Design Tools" by Doug Church - http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19990716/design_ tools_01.htm

"2000: Formal Design Tools: Emergent Complexity, Emergent Narrative" by Marc "MAHK" LeBlanc - http://www.algorithmancy.org

I'll tell you whats wrong with the game industry

[t0qer]

Lack of innovation, thats right, a serious lack of innovation, and too many "me too" games.

Waaaayy back in the day, the atari 2600 was the #1 console. It died a horrible death mainly because of all the crap "me too" clones of astroids, combat, and pac man clones (actually the 2600 pacman stunk like turds)

Later we got the nintendo 8-bit. OOh wow, easter eggs in mario, now every game has easter eggs and secret codes. Now everyone wants to program platform games because "If mario is such a popular platform game, mine should be too!"

Later we saw the puzzle game "me too" phase where everyone and their brother was doing some sort of "tetris" clone. Nintendo had Dr. Mario, Sega had columns, Atari came out with some shit game called "klax". For a while there it seemed everyone and their brother was trying to do some spin on tetris.

Now it's the same old crap, and game companies STILL haven't learned their lessons. Yay we have procedural textured mapped polygons on a box that can do 3gabillion vertices per second. Who cares about the game! Just look at those fill rates! Wow look it's tetris, but it's better because it's IN 3D WOW! Yeah i'm just lining up at best buy before they open so I CAN GET MY COPY TOO!

I suppose when they release the next generation of consoles, we're going to see the same old crap, but with more wizzbang graphics than you can shake a stick at.

In the words of Roddy Piper, "It's like putting perfume on a pig."

Half-right

[tc]

"Seamus Blackley is a brilliant man that's never at a loss for words."

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.

Re:What's wrong about the video game industry

[Selfbain]

Ya but it'll probably have some big fucking guns and lots of things to aim at.

Insane release deadlines?

[some damn guy]

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.

Video games are not just software anymore

[UpLateDrinkingCoffee]

Just like movies are not just pictures on film... they are a "production"...

Video games nowadays are becoming much more complicated beasts and require much larger teams... they are much more a product of their process and much less a product of the talent creating them. If the process is broken, you get crap no matter how good the individual developers are. All is not lost, though... Hollywood uses the same model. I think we will see the video game equivalent of a "Director" emerge... someone who manages the process to create something of quality. I think companies like Blizzard already do this well (although their "Directors" are fairly anonymous, I'll bet they are there).

Finally

[AvantLegion]

"Most gamers cite lack of time second only to social pressure as their reason for leaving gaming. Yet we make games that require 10, 20, 30, or more hours for the gamer to fully enjoy."

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.

I can think of a couple things of the bat

[Rooked_One]

1 - the developers don't really know how to cater to all of their audience. One person that likes HALO might not like C&C.

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.

Gameplay, Fun vs. Cool and Eye Candy

[securitas]

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.

Re:Gameplay, Fun vs. Cool and Eye Candy

[OblvnDrgn]

It's also nostalgia. Some of the games that you pick up on Atari and Nintendo are really good, and still fun if you get past the lack of graphics that we've gotten used to with today's games. But you know what a vast majority of them are? Absolute crud.

I can't believe you can say high-quality gameplay was the sole focus of developing games with a straight face. There were a slew of sequels and license tie-ins then too. I'd say there's an even greater signal to noise ratio these days, but we see all the garbage that gets published today, and forget all of the horrible things that came out back then.

Oh, and the other thing is that there is one key difference that made some games back in "the day" really fun, is that games never used to end. It was just a point race against yourself until you weren't good enough to keep up at that speed/difficulty. Things have levels and end these days. That's the only real difference that I've noticed.

Seamus Blackly is a complete tosser...

[igomaniac]

And I don't know why anyone bothers listening to him. I've been making games for 10 years now and I have seen quite a examples of how not to do development...

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...

... And on the matter of Focus-group driven design, well I've tried it and I can tell you that there is a reason you don't hire 13 year olds to write your game design. You can see if they like the game or not, but if they don't like it they will not be able to put their finger on _why_ they don't like it -- there's always something to critizise, some dodgy texture or some little glitch. One game I worked on had a bug in the collision response code used for one of the focus groups and they came back with lots of critisisms, but all of them missed the real reason the game was crap. When this was fixed, they came back with positive comments instead...

Ok...

[badasscat]

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?

Re:No.

[Wyatt Earp]

Doom 3 and Id's idology, as well as the problems with SimCity 4 are illustrations of what is wrong.

Id has indicated that no matter what hardware the gamers have will not be enough for Doom 3, while I understand that games have pushed hardware upgrades in the past, usually it was due to new technology in the game (3D engine changes, multiplayer, etc) Id is simply making a game that is going to overwhelm almost everyone's hardware and they think that is cool.

SimCity 4 was shipped and it's slow as crap on machines twice the recommended hardware on the box because they put too much crap in there going on.

Game designers have a case of the God-complex in many cases, and I say that's what is wrong in the industry.

Don't Be a Pro, then

[Sloppy]

Quoth Blackley:

"The number one problem we have with design is that we don't know who we are designing for. Are we designing for ourselves? Are we designing for publishers? Are we designing for EB salespeople? Are we assigning for reviewers? Are we assigning for the audience? The problem right now is that we're designing for publishers and not the audience. Designers are thinking about what will look good to a publisher and this is just remarkably stupid because designers have no idea of what publishers are actually looking for and why."

I knew this guy in highschool, and we sometimes worked together (loosely) on amateurish, juvenile, but fun games. It was fun, because we were doing it for ourselves. The only limitations to our creativity were 1) technical limits (e.g. a VT100 doesn't display naked chicks very well ;-) and 2) our own minds.

Now he has a Master (publishers, the market, whatever) and it's not for himself anymore. That's the problem with turning pro: in the end, the only thing you really do for yourself, is get your paycheck. I face the same problem in my job; I don't always get to do what I want. That's why it's called "work" instead of "play."

Don't like it? Quit working 16 hour days, and save some of that passion and energy for your amateur projects after you get home. The market never shares your values. If they did, they wouldn't have to pay you.

He seems to think the problem is with the middlemen, though, and that he would be happy to serve the end users (the "audience"). I'm not convinced this is really the way to happiness either (ahem, I said: the market never shares your values) but I guess he disagrees. I guess it is a fairly decent compromise to have at least a little fun, but still make a buck.

No realistic driving sim?! Heard of Gran Turismo?

[coneal]

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.

The value of publishing

[dspeyer]

While I'll grant that adverstising is a waste of resources on the grand scale, and probably harmful in any context, that's not the only thing publishers do. Nor do I mean boxing and pressing. The primary thing publishers do is sort through to find what's worth publishing.

I'm sure I'm not the only slashdotter whose written games for personal amusement. Nor am I the only one whose distributed them to friends and gotten positive responces (I think honestly, but they might have just been being nice to me).

Now picture all those games coming unsorted through some sort of web portal. Combined with buggy games, games which only run on an SGI mainframe, games with trojan horses, over-used joke games (thermonuclearwar, the game that just pops up a dialog saying "You lose") and downright trolls (a game built around goatse.cx).

Now, I'm not saying publishers are the only way to strain this down to something acceptable. Gaming magazines can give reviews (though less than 1% of games would ever get reviewed at all); players would have favorite game authors; there could even be something like slashdot moderation (we all know how well that works -- actually, IMHO, it's one of the better forms I've seen).

I'm just saying that publishers can't just "get out of the way" -- they can only be replaced by something better.

A lot of the ideas here are based on an essay of Eric Flint's. He expounds in detail.

.sig: We go to war with Iraq to prevent them from building nukes and using them against us, destabilizing Pakistan, allowing Al-queada to get nukes, and use them against us -- oh the irony!

Hear a gamer: It's bloated.

[Qbertino]

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.

Large corps buying independent studios...

[SvnLyrBrto]

What is wrong with game development?

Microsoft, and even moreso: Electronic Arts.

Both are large corperations that don't practice much innovation (Honestly... Madden 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003???), but since the mid to late '90s have been running around buying out smaller developers, milking whatever profits they can out of the franchises, and letting the studios wither on the vine.

It was only a few weeks ago that it was announced that Westwood (now a subsidiary of EA) was closeing up it's Las Vegas development offices. When WAS the last time anything good came out of the C&C series? I bet it predates Westwood's fall to EA.

Westwood in particular stings ME hard, because, before EA, they used to do some REALLY cool games outside C&C. Remember the Blade Runner "adventure" game? That was one of my faves. Do you think that, under EA's flag, we'll EVER see anything from Westwood but more played-out C&C's?

Or take microsoft's assimilation of one of my other previously-favroite game developers: Bungie. I STILL dig out Marathon and Myth every so often. And who else remembers all the previews of what Halo was going to be before gates had it stripped down to become the Xbox's flagship yet-another-generic-FPS.

Back to EA... Remember Origin? Remember Autoduel and Ogre? What about the Wing Commander series? Crusader? BioForge? Remember the excellent storytelling in the old Ultima series? I sure do. What is Origin all about NOW though, under the stewardship of EA? Ultima Online, Ultima Online expansions, and a sequel to... Ultima Online!

Remember "Jane's"? Remember the excellent military simulations of the '90s. 688i, in particular, STILL has quite a following. Quite an achievement for a game released in 1997! Where is Jane's now? Electronic arts. What has Jane's done recently? Nothing since 2000.

Remember when Maxis had a sence of humor? Remember when they released some really WIERD sims? Remember Sim Ant, Sim Earth, and Sim Tower? NOW what does Maxis do? Well, they just released another Sim City... one which I'm told is STILL not as fun as Sim City 2000 was. Oh, and they do expansion packs for The Sims. Quick check of EA's site to be sure.... yup.

I'm sure there are MORE game studios that others could name that have been assimilated by microsoft or EA. The above are mostly my pet peeves in the "large corperations buying and destroying small game studios" world. But I think THAT is the problem with game development. In my experience as a gamer, studios have been so much more creative, and... well... FUN when they were independent. The big corperations seem to forget that games are supposed to be FUN. They just see a trend (FPS, RTS, MMRPG, etc.), and want to milk it dry.

cya,
john

Why you aren't playing Infinity

[infiniti99]

I have first-hand experience here, working on Infinity for Gameboy Color. Sure, GBC is obsolete, and we really should nuke that web site right now, since it isn't going anywhere, but a few years ago it was hot stuff.

The GBC glaringly lacked RPGs. At the time, I could safely say that the best RPG for the platform was Final Fantasy Legend 3, and that was for the monochrome GB! Infinity was going to change that. It was a game SquareSoft would have made, had they stayed around to make GBC games. Our game played a little like something between FF2 and FF3, with a full 25,000 word story. No real innovation here (except for maybe the battle system), we were simply trying to fill a nitch on the platform. For that reason, we got so many emails from gamers wondering when this thing would be released. After all, their only other choice was Pokemon. Many of them wondered if we would face a similar fate as Mythri, another GBC title that you never saw (both games were highlighed on RPGamer).

Unfortunately, Infinity never saw the light of day because we couldn't land a publisher. We sent a letter out to nearly all publishers, but in only three cases did they contact us back: EA, Nintendo, Crave. I actually flew to Washington to meet a guy at Nintendo (pretty cool place, looks just like the stuff in the pictures), only to be denied an offer. He did, however, show me a GBA prototype with Mario Kart. Sure, Mario Kart is a cool game, but I wanted to play an RPG. On the first day we met with Crave, the guy asked if we could substitute the characters with some from a movie. We tried to get them to go along with the game as-is, and we had a long negotiation period, but they ended up just stringing us along with no result. At one point, their plan was to show the game at E3 2001, but we were denied that also (I even have the 1 poster of the game we had made for the occasion, hanging on the wall behind me right now).

What I learned from all this is that publishers generally only want to take safe bets. Why go for a risky RPG when you can just make Men in Black 2? It pained me to walk down the GBC isle at stores and see something featuring the Olsen twins. How on earth do these games get published, but ours not? It is the sad state of the game industry.

Blackley produced the Trespasser disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Shaumus Blackley is notorious in the developer community as the guy who screwed up Trespasser, the Jurassic Park game. They had it all - years of schedule, plenty of money, the full backing of Dreamworks, and direct support from Steven Speilberg. But read the reviews: GameSpot says "Trespasser is the most frustrating game I have ever played. Of all the games I have ever reviewed, this one has been the most disappointing. Of all the games I have played, this is the one I am most adamant about never wanting to play again. I don't want to sound mean-spirited, but all gamers should know that Trespasser is a frustrating game, filled with boring gameplay and annoying bugs. It is not fun. It is monotonous and tedious to the point of nausea."

Blackley was the "producer" for that game, and also wrote (unsuccessfully) the physics engine. "Why did physics code that was barely usable actually ship?" says Game Developer's postmortem, which names Blackley as the major problem with the project.

Blackley has since turned to evangelism and punditry, at which he's better.

Re:Sometimes, it really has all been done.

[Squareball]

Quote:"There is only so much one can say"
Really? Obviously you haven't met my girlfriend! ;)

Game Reviewers - The Problem

[securitas]

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.

I am so out of touch

[thasmudyan]

Wow, a lot of that stuff is just the opposite of what I like in a game:

He feels that more of a focus should be made on the mass-market consumer ...
So, basically we already have the entire entertainment industry boiling products down to the *lowest* common intellectual denominator, and this guy proposes that games design be further trimmed down and be based even *more* on more consumer polling data??? Great.

Yet we make games that require 10, 20, 30, or more hours for the gamer to fully enjoy
And I thought that we already live in an instant-gratification culture that has reduced our average attention span to below 10 seconds! And now we need more ego shooters and mario clones that don't require your brain to be used *at all* because having something esoteric like a story line (or any kind of in-game development process, for that matter) is taking away too much of our time?

Well, that's all not what I think the direction of games development should be. Computer games are becoming a more important social factor every year. Soon, they may take the place of television in the areas entertainment and education, especially for children. I don't care what marketers say, the nature of the games we play *does* reflect and even influence the state of our society. And please, I'm not talking about sex and violence here. But we should think hard about if we want to align our entire society by the lowest common denominator. I think not.

A sick industry

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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...

...as a VICE PRESIDENT for XBox marketing at Microsoft!

If this story doesn't illustrate the illness of the game industry, I don't know what does.

I used to edit a UK videogame mag...

[payndz]

...and at the time I took over, I thought, "How cool is this? I get to play videogames - *for a living*!"

Three years later, frankly I wanted to kill myself - or never play another videogame as long as I lived, whichever was easier. Luckily I got the chance to move out of games and into movies (but that's another story).

I'd been playing arcade games since the Seventies, had most of the computers that were around in the Eighties and the consoles in the Nineties. And as I got older, I realised that the more advanced the technology became... the less fun the games were.

Don't get me wrong, there have been games I've enjoyed playing in the past few years - Halo, the original Tomb Raider, Goldeneye, Crazy Taxi, MGS, Unreal Tourney (once all the Futurama mods are put in). But these days, the 'big' games just require too much of an investment of time for too little reward to be worth it. I was talking to a guy I used to work with who's now on an Xbox mag, and he told me that a senior designer at one of the majors had admitted that his company doesn't bother spending too much time on game ending sequences "because hardly anyone can be bothered to play that long". Chicken or egg?

Certainly, the only big game I've played through to the end in the last few years has been Halo, and even that had some infuriating bits where I was very close to putting it down forever. FFVII I gave up on when I got stuck fighting Barrett's ex-mate and had to keep sitting through five minutes of exposition before getting killed again. MGS - getting blown up by Metal Gear Rex for the fiftieth time was just too much. Even something like Jet Set Radio Future's skyscraper stage... life is just too short!

I actually get more fun out of a quick blast on MAME or Frodo or Spectacle, or Robotron on GBA, or 30 minutes of Crazy Taxi on DC, than any of the so-called megagames of the moment. I have no interest in committing 70 hours of my life to some game (which I know is going to frustrate me with the die/retry trial-and-error loop that designers still think is *soooooo* clever) when there are other things I could be doing.

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 idea of the 'short, sharp shock' seems to have all but disappeared from modern designers. But right now, those are the only kind of games that I have the time (and patience) to play. I've seen everything already - there hasn't been a new gaming genre for years, and nobody seems to even be bothering with new twists on what's already been done. (After three years on an N64 mag, I'd rather eat my own toenails than play another 3D platformer with a cartoony hero. Oh look, the ice level! The volcano level! The minecarts! The jungle! The haunted house! FUCK RIGHT OFF AND DIE, YOU UNIMAGINATIVE SHITEHAWKS!)

The only problem is, nobody's developing games that are designed for a quick 10-15 minute blast, because the focus groups want FMV and level bosses. I couldn't care less about FMV if the game's playable, and I *hate* level bosses, so that's why the big, bland game companies that thankfully I don't have to deal with any more aren't getting any of my money...

Re:I used to edit a UK videogame mag...

[egomaniac]

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.

A chance

[Tyreth]

Everyone seems to be saying, what we need is truly original games designed for the player. Instead we have redesigns of the same concept, over and over. There are very few games that I actually bother to play now, there is nothing new to excite me.

Open Source developers unite! We are not bound by the $$, so we are free to create any game we wish. Forget about cool programming techniques, think about a great game idea - the game you've always wanted to play - then check out sourceforge to see if anyon'e building it. If they are, join them. If not, start it yourself and finish it.

Then we can see if we can produce some unique, high quality games.

Article title not quite on target

[grimsweep]

The real title should be along the lines of what's wrong with Non-Sony game development.

I'm not talking about PC vs. Console flame wars, nor PS2 vs. XBox, but it is important to point out that the first article mentions NOTHING about Sony and it's relationship with developers. Or, for that matter, the sales of PS2 gaming consoles and games vs. those of X-Box and Nintendo.

It's not contested that Microsoft and Nintendo need to get their act together. PC makers have it the hardest, given the wide variety of hardware out there (and the combinations thereof).

But Sony isn't exactly hurting in this economy. In fact, they quadrupled their profits just last year.

Plus, Sony wants to eliminate any charge for development on the PS3, adding a freedom that PC developers have enjoyed for some time.

The Playstation 2 is technically inferior to the GameCube, XBox, and most modern PCs, yet it continues to net a more than substantial share of the market. This alone, if anything, is a sign that graphic/hardware superiority in games isn't "all that".

All rebuffs/criticism welcome.

Re:What's wrong about the video game industry

[Jagasian]

I still play the original Quake, on a daily basis, 6 years after its release! I think that Quake is a great game! It added true 3D gameplay to the first person shooter genre, in addition to multiplayer over the internet. No other first person shooter, to this day, offers the fast and furious deathmatch gameplay that Quake offers. Just hop onto a server running "The Bad Place" map, along with 15 other people. Its a blast!

Those things might seem common today, but then everything that The Legend of Zelda does is common today. Is it a bad game?