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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."
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.
31 people regularly point & click my G-spot
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?
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?
why run from Vincenzo?
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.
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.
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. =)
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.....
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
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?
. asp
_ tools_01.htm
"Game Engine Anatomy 101" by Jake Simpson - http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,594,00
"Formal Abstract Design Tools" by Doug Church - http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19990716/design
"2000: Formal Design Tools: Emergent Complexity, Emergent Narrative" by Marc "MAHK" LeBlanc - http://www.algorithmancy.org
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.
Ya but it'll probably have some big fucking guns and lots of things to aim at.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
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 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, 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.
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?
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.
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
Imagine all the people...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
You must think in Russian.