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Razor Blade Games?
Oxygen99 writes "There's a story on the BBC News website regarding the financial impact on game developers of the next generation of consoles. The article states that while the cost of producing games increases exponentially as new technology comes online, consumer prices stay approximately the same, leading to an unsustainable financial environment for many small developers. With many small development teams already hurting from the crippling costs of development for the X-Box, GameCube and PlayStation 2, what happens when the X-Box2 or Playstation 3 arrives? Are the days of small scale game development over? Will we ever see a new Jeff Minter? Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?"
When economic pressures like this get built up, that provides an opportunity for someone to deliver a solution to some of these problems that reduces cost and/or time of development. For example, rather than producing Hollywood-caliber graphics on a custom basis for each game, perhaps that function is better served by standalone companies that create characters and associated animations that game developers can license for use.
Bottom line is that the demand side will determine what happens here - if the market can sustain higher prices for games, the current trend could continue for a while. If a big-budget game flops dramatically, however, you'll see a restructuring of the process that could result in a major shakeout within the industry...
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It's too hard to make Beowulf clusters from old Gillettes.
Smaller shops will likely continue to innovate, especially in new markets like cell phones and PDAs, where compactness of code and short development cycles pay off quickly. You will not likely see Doom XXVIII on your Samsung NPH-3500 phone, but you might just see Bookworm coming soon.
Don't be fooled into thinking that consoles and PC are - forgive the pun - the only game in town.
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I doubt we'll ever see the day when something like the PS2 or XBox is given away alongside a game, at least during the period of prime profitability for the console. They're simply too expensive to produce to be given away.
Unless they're being obsoleted, I suppose, and then bundled into cheap bargain bin packs.
Increased maturity of a market => less place for little player.
I see the game industry moving along much the same path as the movie industry did. Today, independent films are still made, movie enthusiasts support them, and they are a great way for individuals or small groups to get noticed and get on large projects that make real money.
I am hoping that moviegoers are getting saturated by the overly formulaic movies they're being given, and will shift the focus back to smaller budget films that are more original. But I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the movie biz right now. For those that crave original, small-budget films, there's no shortage of them.
How much does it take to get started developing on these systems?
There will always be a high demand for the latest and greatest games/consoles from the pre-teen to the post-teen age groups. The thing is, we have gotten a taste, starting with Pong, and will never get enough until you jack us straight in, and get a virtual reality that is more than a messy abortion. Addiction is a word that comes to mind, and people will do anything to pay for their addictions.
"Sheep just follow the easiest path and run from scary noises and intimidating creatures." - Me
All video game consoles are sold at loss. The business is already exactly like the razor blade business.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Well if a company can't make a game profitably, then maybe they shouldn't make games.
Then some companies will go out of business, and we will be left with enough to supply the demand.
Myself I'm just waiting for torcs to evolve a little bit more, then I'll be happy.
The days of the 8-bit micro was the golden era when it came to small developers(otherwise known as geeks in bed-rooms/garages/basements). You'd have the same person doing the coding, graphics and sound and still have something that did n't look amaturish compared to the big guys. You just cant do that these days, and especially so because graphics and sound have much more prominence then playability did back in the day.
:)
I still remember those 1.99 games being available at my local newsagent. Ahh let the nostalgia begin
Just like everything else in technology these days, the answer is to send the development to India and have the salary costs, which are generally 90% of any technology company's expenses, decrease by 1/10. Or you can hire 10x the number of developers, take your pick.
games like counterstrike basically thrived because many people could make the game better, I think this is a model that should be embraced
Just look at printers. You can purchase a new printer for nearly the same cost or sometimes LESS then purchasing new ink cart.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
To me this is good news for gamers. True, it will result in a lot of lowest common denominator crap. But this analogy suggests a lot of positive aspects as well. For one, I personally happen to like blockbuster movies, and I'm glad that the market is such that someone can justify spending $300 mio or so on the LOTR trilogy (to name just one example).
At the same time, there is space for the little guy in the film industry to some extent. Innovative filmmakers can still make a name for themselves on a superlow budget (e.g. Clerks. In my view this applies even more to the gaming world, where a clever idea can be a huge hit without requiring dozens of programmers and designers to implement (consider Tetris).
Anything that makes really stunning high-budget output possible is more than fine by me.
Peer Pressure
Long live burned "demos"
And it rendered on, until the end of its days.
Should develop smaller games. For every Grand Theft Auto 3, there's a Tetris.
The Big Hollywood style productions can be handled by the huge companies, while the smaller companies can do innovative things like games that actually have gameplay value as opposed to eyecandy value.
Gameplay value is timeless and largely not driven by technology. If need be, license the high end graphics from someone else rather than reinvent the wheel. But someone should be working on making games playable, re-playable, and fun.
A prime area for small-time, moderate budget development? AI. *Good* AI, that learns and adapts, for example, is something I'd like to see. AI that gets lazy and complacent and forgets sometimes, for that human feel, and to prevent things from getting too difficult.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
But that's not what I really want to talk about - the supposed rising cost of game development. Making games like the games being made now, only bigger, will cost more. Making fun games which look good doesn't necessarily cost any more. On the newest systems coming out (arguably, on systems already out) you will be able to do amazing things with graphics without doing obsessive optimization. Also, since the platforms are in fact tending to converge on a single methodology, which is to say uniprocessor machines primarily using the C language for development, though you should be able to write Xbox games in particular with other languages. Still, you get where I'm going with this.
I'd say that the current generation of consoles is the last one at which the obsessive optimization for particular consoles will be necessary. Obviously your graphics engine will always be different, and always be optimized for a platform, but only part of it. The back side, that your games talk to, won't change all that much. And if people would use techniques like multires then a single game engine would scale through multiple platform changes, simply being ported from platform to platform. If code portability is emphasized, then this becomes a quite realistic scenario. We've seen many game engines ported to consoles already, like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, so this is more than just imaginings.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
things get bigger and more complex and so do the development environments. the big get bigger in this scenerio--for a while. there's almost always a new development--ie *nix--to bring things back to earth. in the end a good idea can overcome the cost of easy development.
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
Why do video game prices have to go up because the the technology is improving? Computers have consistently become more complex, but their prices have been going down. The number of people playing video games is also going up quite rapidly, resulting in more customers for video game companies. Maybe they have to do more development, but that is the same for all new technologies. If video game companies are losing money, it's because of nothing but a crappy business model.
(I think that the answer to this factoid observation is self-evident, but I'll post it anyway.)
The costs of developing large-scale games only affects the developers of large-scale games. As noted abundantly by others, such games tend to fit certain well-defined genres: RTS, MMORPG, FPS, RPG... indeed, the whole reason we even have and know these acronyms is because the styles of games have become extraordinarily pigeonholed.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Take Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - the game only works because gamers have been trained to go along with the scripting and accept the monolithic linearity of the missions. If you do, however, you get a pretty grand experience.
But the point is this: A few game niches have become so overproduced that independent developers can't hope to compete - but the rest of the market is wide open.
And what a wide-scale market that is! How many genres have barely been tapped, or not yet invented? How do you even classify something like Popcap's Insaniquarium? Or PaRappa the Rapper, or Dance Dance Revolution? Those are pretty easy games to design and develop, and they're fiercely fun. Window dressing is extra - but for these innovative games, window dressing is secondary to gameplay. (What a novel concept!)
Bottom line: Independent developers should not mimic Electronic Arts and try to compete in these highly stylized, overbudgeted affairs. But there's plenty of untapped gaming out there, just waiting for someone with a smidge of vision and a touch of imagination. Go get 'em, guys!
David Stein, Esq.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Oh, who am I kidding? Anything released to the console market without 3D graphics, genuine B-list actors providing the voiceovers, and 16.7 zillion colors is doomed to failure.
DecafJedi
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
Are the days of small scale game development over? Will we ever see a new Jeff Minter?
Oh no God! Please No God! No! Please God!
There never really was room for small players in the console market. Look at the old Atari days. You had Atari and Activision and them some other big compaines moved in. There where some little guys but not that many and they sort of lived in the cracks that the big boys did not want. Only home computers let little game makers live. Even then if you where a small company starting off you might do better starting with a less popular computer than the Atari, C64, or Apple. Writing for a getting a CoCo game reviewed might have been easier than getting an Apple II game reviewed.
There is room for small game companies. Just not on the Playstation or the X-Box.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Isn't this the exact reason why game mods are so popular? Regular joes with some creative talent (and a 3-D modeler) can enhance or completely rewrite a game using a commercial engine, letting someone else do all the non-creative technological development.
I don't think I could count the number of FPS/RPG games out there that rely on the latest Quake or Unreal engine to do the dirty work.
Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?
Given that MS, for one, is already losing money on each console they sell, I'd say we've *already* gone down that route. But since this means that the console makers are losing money if not for the collection of licensing fees, I wonder what more widespread pirating of games will do to the whole industry.
Firstly, Old games were easier to make in part because there existed a great abundance of tools that helped reuse. Tiles are one example, but they only the beginning. There's a concept called meta tiling, in which a set of larger objects are built from a group of tiles. Like in Final Fantasy Legend games, all the houses look the same, with different (or no) signs. This way is very simple to describe a town your adventurers visit. These sorts of things haven't yet emerged in 3d gaming.
Every few years we see a large spike in polygons availble for graphics in games, but we haven't seen much to deal with manipulating and creating these increasing amounts of polys. Sure, you've probably seen games for a while now that reuse game assets like trees, but the world geometry is far more complex. Another point to mention is that in the distant past of console gaming, games were designed in an incremental fashion. Megaman game controls got more complex/robust with each new game, and the graphics became further refined, although the same base character design was kept.
The other big outgrowth I see will be smaller games. Those times where buying a game meant 40 hours in a single play through are something of the past. Instead, you'll see shorter single player plots, more multiplayer options, and maybe even games that don't focus on the level progression method (i.e. I'm sorry, the Princess is in another castle!). They say that only 5 percent of game players today complete a game to a developer intended "finish." So clearly a change toward shorter games would be beneficial. It may be that trying to pidgeon hole story telling into game playing is not possible given in the play-cutscene/plot-play game style.
The final thing to consider is that raising prices may not nessecarily increase profits. It might be that a lower price would result in a far greater amount of sales.
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Open Source Sysadmin
People like their old games, and you can get them to buy them for the new consoles. I just bought Namco Museum for the XBOX. I paid $20 for a disc with 10 ganes that are all 20 years old.
Yes, I could run MAME on my PC, but this is less hassle, and it's legal to boot.
If Nintendo released a CD for GameCube with Duck Hunt, Metroid, Kid Icarus, and Super Mario Bros. on it, a hell of a lot of people would consider buy it. People don't want 6 console systems hooked up, but they want to play their old games.
If the games are good, people will buy them for a new platform, even if they are not the latest and greatest.
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
No new Jeff Minters?? What a shame.
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Hell.... we should all go back to playing Zork, Deadline and Leather Goddess of Phobos! I had more fun playing Adventure on the mainframe at Fermilab then anything that has come out recently.
I don't want to watch a mini-movie or blow up demons.... I want to get lost in the game and very few games hold up to that standard today.
Nintendo has feared that this was coming since they decided to create the Gamecube. They saw that more and more we are only getting sequal's and games with a Disney license since they are a sure fire seller. In response to this the former President of Nintendo (the mighty and wise Hiroshi Yamauchi) started a little project called the QFund. It has multiple purpose's, but one of them is to promote the idea of less expensive development (Nintendo has been doing numerous internal things to drop their production costs). The QFund has a few restrictions on it that help to this point. First of all any project gets money from QFund must finish the game in one year. If they go past that point they can loss funding. They also must use GBA connectivity. Some might claim that is a gimmick to get more people using that for Nintendo, but some of us believe this could actually lead to some real innovations :P
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I would like to see more development for classic platforms. Despite all the graphics and realism, new games are not neccesarily any more or less fun than games were in the early 90s. The development of emulators such as snes9x make it plausible for regular people to develop their own applications for the snes. It would be very interesting to see open source projects based on older gaming systems instead of the bleeding edge.
Let the large developers have their bleeding edge. There's no reason that smaller developers can't continue developing on an older system. Or is the gaming community really so shallow that it will always choose the shiniest graphics, and the most dazzling effects over the content and fun of the game?
rather than producing Hollywood-caliber graphics on a custom basis for each game, perhaps that function is better served by standalone companies that create characters and associated animations that game developers can license for use.
Licensing characters with animations? Movie license games are rarely[1] good games. Capcom and Virgin tried the licensed-character route in the 1990s, borrowing characters from cel-animated movies published by the company we love to hate. The games (such as Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers, Aladdin, Pinocchio, The Lion King, etc) turned out way too one-dimensional to have any replay value. Or just read the reviews for Enter The Matrix.
[1] There is of course the occasional exception such as Goldeneye for Nintendo 64.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Game programers should stop re-inventing the wheel and use common game engines, at least for the graphics. I realize that lots of games have been made by liscensing the Quake 3 engine or Unreal engine, this seems like a potential way for smaller developers to have access to reasonably good looking technology to drive the PS3, xbox 2 or N5.
One of the real problems is that there is little room for games with lower expectations. I'd be really happy to buy a bunch of ten hour games that had less technical wows but much heart, especially if their retail price was reasonable.
How many gamers do you know that buy the latest games at $50? Most games sold at $50 are the blockbusters that sell to the general public rather than the hardcore gamers. But it's the hardcore gamers who buy more than 1 game every few months. I buy a ton of games but I've learned to be patient and buy games a month or two or even 12 later than the release date, simply to get the game for $20 or less. There is a big market for new games at lower prices that is not being tapped.
Not everyone has 40 to 80 hours to sink into the latest rpgs and not every game needs to be Final Fantasy VII. I really love the Ikaruga's of this world. Final Fatasy VII cost $35 million to make and had a staff of over 100 people. On the other hand, 95% of Ikaruga was made by THREE people. (For instance, the music was written by the same guy who did the game's background art!)
I kinda get the feeling that the industry might be heading towards another major evolutionary period, similar to the market crashes of the late atari era... I'm just not sure what it will look like.
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That, and now we realize how badly we were getting gouged paying $49.99 for E.T. on the 2600.
We'll start seeing more and more product placement in the computer games to offset the cost of the games, and for the companies to improve their bottom line.
(advertisements in the background, as in sports arenas; billboards in the background of driving games, and then they'll start working the occassional coke or budweiser can in the hand of one of the main characters).
Sooner or later, I wouldn't be surprised if more and more non-game companies start getting into the video game business to push more product. Right now, the only one that I can think of is Lego, who has quite a variety of games out there, and from what I've seen, some of them are quite decent. [Didn't Six Flags do a tie in with Roller Coaster Tycoon? I envision more stuff along those lines...]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
"Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers..."
and secretly embed RFID tags in all the games? Um, no... not as far as you know.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
When's the last time you played an indie console game?
Exactly.
For now they're still feasible to produce for "antiquated" platforms like the GBA (this being the only place I've seen them), but once even those catch up, the situation will be hopeless.
As with all these things, I dont expect we'll see a resolution anytime soon, third party printer manufacturers have a hard enough time operating with all the varied chips in the cartridges these days (smart chips in cartridges are incidentally being banned here in the uk by 2007 or so). Could you imagine any court or government ever ruling that the mechanisms which prevent unlicensed 3rd party software being run on say a PS2 should be removed in order to allow free competition and stimulate lower prices?
I don't think so, in fact I'm pretty sure they can't (IANAL).
Extended Warranty? How can I lose!
What is needed is for game developers to stop throwing money into the photorealistic hole. Anime is a perfectly acceptable graphic style designed for mass production. By reducing the amount of "detail" using artisitic license you can focus more on game play, scripts, and quality assurance.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The cheap razor / expensive blade analogy is often used with respect to game consoles, but there is an important difference: A razor (without the blade) really is just a cheap piece of plastic (or metal) with a clip on the end.
So in the razor industry, no strange or clever marketing is going on. The manufacturers sell cheap-to-manufacture holders for cheap prices, and expensive-to-manufacture blades for expensive prices. That's all.
With game consoles (or inkjet printers, for that matter), the situation is a bit different. The makers can choose to sell consoles or printers at loss leader prices, and games or ink cartridges at inflated prices, but they must then keep on guard against third parties taking advantage of their loss leaders by undercutting the consumables, which is a familiar story to us.
It is already rare enough that game companies invest time and resources into Linux ports for popular games, and a constant increase in development cost is only going to further discourage the practice.
Bioware's Linux port of Neverwinter Nights is going to become a thing of the past when game companies can't afford to put the time and resources into such a very small market share.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
...rather than games with better graphics.
Something that irks me about recent games is that many of them are unoriginal, have worse-than-average gameplay... and a huge graphics budget.
For instance, I find that WarCraft III gameplay is much, much worse than StarCraft (could just be my low-end machine with a crappy graphics card), and the heros and other additions don't make the game much more interesting.
Similarly, Diablo II was probably the most unoriginal RPG I've ever played; the graphics are excellent but the plot is thin and the gameplay is mediocre. (It's damn addictive, tho). Compare the Baldur's Gate series, which has worse graphics and decent gameplay, and a better plot.
Anyone here ever played Liero? An ancient, free 2d Worms-but-realtime shooter? That game was more fun than many of the FPS games I've played. The graphics were shit, but the controls were responsive, the weapons were balanced (and numerous, and MODable), and the modes were fun.
I think this article nicely pinpoints the problem with many games today. The graphics teams soak up all the budget, and the guys that write an actual plot into the game, balance it, and adjust the gameplay don't do anything. They add in an assload of really cool spells/weapons/whatever, but then nobody actually uses most of them because a few of them are overpowered.
Maybe I'm just like those oldtimers ranting for a return to the "good old" days, but I'd like to see creative new FPS, one with nontrivial tactics (haven't seen one since Counterstrike), and for once a well thought-out TBS game. Alpha Centauri was close, but like many games, they put in too many features. The features ended up unbalanced, buggy, and their interactions were poorly thought-out. As a result, play didn't scale well and the AI sucked.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Is the next PlayStation still going to be called the "PlayStation3"? Or is it simply going to be the "PS3"?
I heard a while [months] ago that the name "PlayStation" was already trademarked by some other company so Sony had to call their future game consols somthing else.
Anyone know anything about this? Or was it strictly a rumor and nothing more?
Karma: NaN
I've been programming for many many years on many different platforms, I'm an expert in C and x86 assembly and I've done a lot of stuff with OpenGL and a good amount with DirectX not to mention being proficient in just about any area of programming you could think of. The problem is that a game engine like DOOM 3 is not a stand-alone work. It is rather the evolution of the first DOOM engine through all the iterations of Quake. I could write the first DOOM engine. I could probably even write something like Quake 2. But as a small developer, I cannot possibly break into this market when I'm competing with people who are evolving and reusing code that they've had for years. They just keep making it a little better. I can't do that because I don't have years and years of succesful 3d projects to draw from and improve upon.
No small developer can jump 6 levels of technology to get to the current state-of-the-art and compete with large developing firms. Programming, like everything, is an iterative process; so as games get larger(code-size) and more complex with more and better technology packed into them, it will be harder and harder for small developers to break in the market. Most of them end up buying a decent 3d engine from someone else. And with faster graphics cards and games like Warcraft 3 and PlanetSide, all games are beginning to rely on evolved technology. A small developer's game (whether its an FPS or an RTS or an MMORPG) can't compete with the beauty and speed of a large company's engine that has been revised and rewritten and composed of a multitude of high speed algorithms and computing tricks that have been drawn from a large code base. Which relegates us all to the realm of shareware...or, on the bright side, perhaps open source community projects.
More/cheaper Linux boxes for everbody!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Snood is a nearly-exact knockoff of Taito's Puzzle Bobble: Bust-A-Move, played only by players who are unwilling to either buy a console or install an emulator to get the Real Thing.
But yes, I get your point that simple games such as Bust-A-Move can be fun without requiring too much of a budget. The problem here is finding that killer game formula, a needle in a haystack.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The N-Gage phone platform is a good example where they help and encourage small developers.
were they giving this guy when they took this photograph and where can I get some? I don't care how good Spider-Man on the Xbox is; it isn't that good. I doubt there is a game on the market on any platform that is that good.
" The article states that while the cost of producing games increases exponentially as new technology comes online, consumer prices stay approximately the same, Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?"
The so-called razor model exists because there is a large profit model on blades, but not razors. This is an exact reverse. I am used to inaccurate statements on slashdot, but this kind of idiocy sets a new standard.
consoles publishing is very similar to that of mainstream movies, print, and pc gaming. (independent pc gaming is fairly healthy now, but is about as 'popular' as art-house movie theatres)
a console has a barrier for entry - just like getting your film into a loews cineplex, getting your PC game into CompUSA, or getting your book into Barnes and Nobles.
-developers- can remain small - but small publishers evaporate.
this is not a new twist in gaming, it's an emergent trend from the last 10 years. certainly, it's a market that costs money to break into. you either have it independently, or you pitch for it.
what does it mean for the industry?
well it nearly guarantees that games will continue to be as derivative as hollywood, and the ny times fiction list.
Anything remotely 'new' will get beaten into the ground in long-running strings of sequels (gta, doom, die hard, and Tom Clancy novels are not so different)
Innumerable 'knockoffs' will get published to try to ride the wake of what is 'new', and maybe once every 4 years something really cool and different from the norm comes out.
but it will quickly be emulated, immitated, and desecrated.
will it go the razor blade sales model?
no. that's ridiculous. the razor-blade sales model relies on producing inexpensive pieces, and packaging them as an expensive whole. (even with 4 blades in a refill, gilette is making money hand over fist - even on the cute handle)
Nintendo has shown that using your console as a loss-leader is not necessary (they make money on each console as well as each game) their lack of market share in the US and Europe is more directly due to nintendo's tight control over game developers, and their resultant small selection of games. microsoft and sony resorted to dumping, to try to capture large chunks of the market. with the new consoles becoming more and more complex, and incorporating more and more general functions - they most certainly will -not- be 'given' away. (xbox2 and ps3 almost certainly will carry pvr functionality)
they may be sold at a marginal loss, so long as there is healthy competition in the market, but it would never come down to handing someone a console. primarily because there would then be no 'attachment' to the title. everyone would own every console in short order. What xbox/ps2 owner would pass up wind waker or sunshine if they didn't have to pay for the GC? likewise with ps2 owners buying halo, and xbox owners buying gta:vice city. and if there's no brand loyalty - well then who's to say that MS will -ever- get their money back from game sales to support eating the cost of the console? particularly from the 'casual' gaming market - who would buy maybe a half dozen games. (and most likely, the 2 best from each main system). 2 games does not cover MS loss on the xbox, or Sony's on the ps2.
so what -does- this mean?
it does mean the end of originality on the store shelf - but that's been not-so-slowly happening since the early 90s.
perhaps if electronic distribution catches on, then this trend can be avoided - but i'm not holding my breath.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Game industry, movie industry, both just part of the "Entertainment Industry", and if there's one thing we've learned from the entertainment industry it's bigger budgets don't always equal better entertainment. Speed 2, high budget film, crap for entertainment. Enter the Matrix, high budget game, also crap for entertainment. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, low budget, high entertainment. If you want low budget games, just look at the mod community, thousands of people making fun games that don't make a dime.
How do you even classify something like Popcap's Insaniquarium? Or PaRappa the Rapper, or Dance Dance Revolution?
Simon, Parappa, Beatmania, DDR, Guitar Freaks, Pump It Up, Pop'n Music, Space Channel 5, and the like are called "rhythm games." A good rhythm game requires good songwriting, and that can be difficult to impossible to come up with on a tight budget. I can't afford a PS2 and thus haven't tried Rez, Frequency, or Amplitude, but those seem to be rhythm-shooter hybrids.
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Poor michael, he's being screwed around by his DSL provider... JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE DOES!
The price of hardware is rapidly approaching zero. Labor costs are not (or are approaching zero much more slowly. Overseas jobs exporting actually is dilluting programmer income, but that's another topic.)
The end result is that the cost of hardware becomes trivially small, games production continues to become more expensive. The only possible outcome is for games to be produced only by the mammath companies who can afford to produce them.
If open source is to work in the field of games, either we'll have to convince a lot of people who are not yet familiar with the concept to donate their skills, or convince everyone that games are too complex to be fun anymore, and train the industry to accept the simpler, less complicated games.
For open source to compete with the complex games, we'll need to convince musicians, graphic artists, sound effects engineers, maybe actors, directors, animators, and voice players, etc, to understand and accept the "give it away for free" mentality.
To really make a quality game will require cinimatographic efforts, and programmers alone simple cannot do that on a shoestring buget and compete.
For the small time developer to produce games, we have to get back to our roots and start produing less complex games that may not have such a gee-whiz factor to them (graphics, sounds, etc) but have more of the simple fun that old games used to capture (which, sadly, seems to have been lost.) Tetris is a simple yet fun game, as well as most of the Atari 2600 games. They HAD to be fun, because graphics were NOT the selling point!
Gamers need to remember that beautiful graphics are not the only important part of a game. But until they do, the cost will be prohibitive. And the love of the simple video game will be lost entirely in a few years. As fewer game developers exist, innovations will cease, and we'll be fed formula after formula, nobody willing to take a risk on a new idea due to the cost of possible failure.
Games are expensive only if you need to have latest graphics engine.
Best and most original games were made with quite small budget.
I think that M$, and now the Phantom console have both taken a theoretical step in the right direction by making it easier to move games developed in their environment to the PC, creating a greater audience for a lot less work than developing a game across consoles.
While I am not suggesting that Sony & Nintendo move to a Windows based OS anytime soon, maybe persuing a framework based on Linux could yield similar results for them without giving M$ a hand up.
I also think that the Xbox Live service is a good thing for smaller developers. With online play such an important part of a game players decision to buy now, the Live service allows the smaller shops to facilitate online play without incurring the cost of hosting facilities for the online componenet themselves. I don't know if M$ biases the bandwidth given to large v.s small developers on the Live service (it wouldn't suprise me if they did), but at least they provide it.
Free features & functionality provided by the platform will help level the playing field between large and small developers.
What about the twinkie? - Dr. Peter Venkman, PHD
Perhaps Linux can jump into the niche? It already runs on the Xbox. When Xbox games run on the Xbox Linux, we could port Linux games to the Xbox. So you don't have to buy any SDK or let it test from Microsoft, Sony, ...
There would be an console OS, which runs the native games and brings other native games as well.
If someone manages to run Linux on the Playstation, you could even play Xbox games on it!
michael... wow... like we really care about your DSL problems.
go to hell. fag.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
...for smaller developers, at least. Consoles are the playground for big developers, for quite a few reasons - they're technologically often very different to PCs (PS2), expensive to get development hardware for (but illegal to chip), expensive to license, hard to get publishing and distribution. So, smaller & independant developers/companies should be targetting computers instead. Download SDKs for free (including things like SDL, DirectX, whatever), low-cost development hardware, and easy, independant publishing and distribution via the internet. As consoles get bigger and scarier, game developers will need to focus more time, effort and resources to capitalise on them. With home computers, at least you get a head start...
Game dev and music blog
Consoles will always have a high barrier to entry (e.g., just having to set up disc/cartridge distribution is pretty big).
PCs and PDAs, however, will always be accessible to anyone who has one and can download and SDK (stir in a bit of creativity, and voila!).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
On the one hand, developers these days have far more resources available to them. Unlike the old days where you had to write games in assembly because the machines couldn't handle the overhead of an interpreter, now developers have high level languages and can structure their code with OOP. They have extensive API's they can make use of, libraries to build upon, existing 3D engines to work with, and can rely on the OS and device drivers to provide functionality that once required reinvinting a lot of wheels.
On the other hand, customer expectations are higher. A LOT higher. While at one time, a little side scrolling and a few sprite graphics could be the mechanism for a successful game, now nobody would play it except on their cell phone. People these days expect immersive environments, theatrical quality soundtracks and voice acting, beautifully rendered graphical models, a slick interface, full network support, and so on.
And through it all many of the things that make for a great game like a good plot, creativity, interesting game mechanics, appropriate difficulty balance, and so on remain more or less constants.
So how do these factors weigh out against one another? Do all the tools available to developers now, undreamed of by the programmers of yesterday, make producing a good product an easier task overall, or has the expectations bar been raised high enough that fulfilling those expectations becomes a daunting task, more akin to producing a movie than to a typical software project?
Are they trying to say that $50 a game is too little? I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure most teenagers don't have $50 lying around all the time for every game they want to buy.
You are right, the primary reason that game development is more expensive is because the tool tech has not kept up with the hardware. It takes a long time for an artists to generate a high polygon 3d character.
The rest of your post is not correct.
The most likely way developers will deal with the problem of generating increasingly complicated worlds will be to create tools that do more of the work for them. More of the task will become procedural. Part of that will be using fractal algorithims to generate large terrain and and textures. Other parts of it will just be the general improvement of tools like 3d Studio Max and Maya. Also, the use of middleware in game development is on the rise. Take a good look at many of the games out there, many are using Renderware's engine on the Ps2, Gamecube, and X-box.
Also, regarding your comment on long games going out the window is wrong. The typical gamer does not care if a game took 4 years, or 4 hours to develop. If it is not fun, he wont play it. The reason that so many people do not finish the games they play is that many games are not good enough to warrant it. Its one thing to sit through 2 hours of a bad movie. Its quite another do so for 40 hours. Another thing to consider is how many games do you rent once and never play again?
END COMMUNICATION
They should go back to developing for x86/Linux, to stop the console manufacturers from eating their lunch. In fact, some enterprising game developer should also come up with a stripped-down Linux boot CD format, so anyone with an x86 PC and a decent video card would be able to play their game, no matter what OS they run on their machine -
Wait, didn't someone else come up with idea like 5 years ago?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What's wrong with the old one?
Cig? No, thank you.
Solutions will arrive automatically. Thankfully we've already seen the start of this via Middleware - software by a third party which is hired/loaned and used for development. PS2 and Xbox have successfully helped build an entire middleware community and a new source of revenue. Now small bedroom programmers can either be responsible for middleware or the "end game" software.
Let us not lament- Sony is the current market leader and also happens to be the only manufacterer who opened up their console for easy programming (anyone remember the Sony Yazoo (or whatever it was called) for the PSX - a home development system) and is also selling Linux kits without a free cease and desist letter to anyone who uses linux on their PSX.
There's still space out there for bedroom developers, it's just that bedroom developers are changing!
Frogmanalien
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency (Eugene McCarthy)
I don't know if it will be good that smaller game developers will find it impossible to compete in the near future. Perhaps we may never even notice that they went away. Personally, I just think that the best talent outtheir will be hired by the more successful companies, and the quality of games will remain the same.
I have tried gaming on both the computer and on console and for most types
of games, I prefer the console experience. Perhaps this is because I'm not
a serious gamer, but then, the majority of people who are potential game
players aren't serious gamers either.
Console games need to be designed such that the limited input allowed by
the controller can still provide a natural way of interfacing with the game.
Computers have more interface options. If a game requires a more complicated
interface than a console provides, then the game will always provide a
better experience on a computer than a console. However, many (most?) games
play just fine on a console and when given a choice between playing a game
on a computer or a console, I will almost always choose to play on the
console rather than the computer.
Part of this might be that I work on computers and so feel a need to get
away from the computer when I'm not doing things that require a computer,
but I'm pretty sure I felt this way when I was younger and the computer was
just another toy.
*sigh* back to work...
Stop making excuses for market forces.
There are no excuses.
If capitalism can't produce the games you want to play maybe you should rethink your form of society. It seems to be working just fine for me. I love GTA3: Vice City.
This is not a problem we can solve unless we're willing to look at all possible solutions. But most of you are too closed-minded. That's fine, not my problem. Just quite your bitchin.
Contrary to what capitalists would have you believe about art, more costly != better. Art includes movies, music, drawings, interactive theater, and video games (which are a combination of many forms of art).
:cough:) that is fascinated by and gives high regard to shiney, flashy things.
The only thing money does to art is to make it shinier and flashier. It does not make it "better," unless you're part of the breed (:cough: american idol
There's nothing wrong with enjoying shiney, flashy video games (or any other form of art). But you can't discount the entire future of art because the current popular trend leans toward the more expensive shiney, flashy art.
As a previous poster noted; there will always be your nth version of Doom, with more colors and pixels than you can dream of. But there will also, always be the next Tetris.
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People prefer consoles because they are way cheaper than PCs (even if you factor in the price of a dozen games) and they don't have nearly as much configuration and compatibility issues. And games like Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Street Fighter II, Soul Calibur, the Final Fantasy series, Shen Mue, Resident Evil, Legend of Zelda, Metal Gear Solid, on and on, have brought games to where they are today at least as much as PC games have. Note that I didn't have to include sequels to inflate the list.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
But then company A makes a set of characters, and companies B, C, and D license them. Company A now has a recognizable brand in those characters. What's the fundamental difference between A licensing a world to B and A hiring B to do the programming?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think what's killing the small developer, more than anything, is not competition from large scale developers. Bob knows, people plays tons of "frozen bubble", "solitaire", "puzzle", and so on. Yea, maybe you don't see people play this on your LAN, but small games are big time popular.
On a PC we have a somewhat thriving shareware and small time game developer scene because you don't need to be checked out by Big Brother Sony/Microsoft prior to being allowed to distribute your game.
If Sony and Microsoft would simply drop their inane restrictions, all will be well for small time developers.
Now if we're talking about a medium size developer, they shouldn't try to compete on the basis of the best 3-D graphics or the largest quantity of art. They should innovate and not all is lost for those guys! Just take a look at how boring and cookie cutter Final Fantasy is, and learn. For example, Shadow Hearts turned out to be a great game because it's more mature, darker, and just "different" in a good way. Shadow Hearts beats Final Fantasy in my book.
Displaimer: I'm not a small time developer, this is just my opinion, that's all.
I am somewhat certain that these smaller companies should be concentrating on new games, of a new style. You know, doing something different. You can't beat EA at their own game. You have to innovate. Look at the popularity of some of the simpler games, Tetris is a good example. Doesn't get much simpler/cheaper than that!
Stop the herd mentality, open your mind.
Of course, the other offering from Phantom is the ability to customize and upgrade the hardware within the Phantom, with faster processors, larger memory, and better sound.
This almost guarantees there will be compatibility problems somewhere down the road.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Development costs aren't growing 'exponentially'.
Tools are improving. Efficiency is improving. Developers can now farm out music, art creation, testing, etc. to contractors. They can buy in engines and middleware.
Furthermore there is no hard-and-fast rule stating that just because a game can eat up $10 million budget, that that is the minimum that has to be spent to make a technically sound, playable and marketable game.
Further-furthermore, each hardware generation has a larger user base, offsetting the increased costs.
I do appreciate that it is an expensive business though, and consolidation is probably the wisest course of action for many smaller companies around today.
'The new consoles could have up to 1,000 times more processing power than current models' is not even worth responding to...
Oh, and *Jez San* is saying development is too expensive? Then don't pour millions into endlessly protracted projects that then get canned, dumbass!
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I think the 2 killer concepts for the PC market would be a cheap box that would accept multiple standard controllers (like a 4 port system), and more developers willing to develop multiplayer games. That's where the console strength lies... in multi player games on the same system in a small package. Unfortunately every FPS game requires multiple players to have their own computers.
As for myself, I haven't purchased a console that wasn't more than 3 years old at the time. I think there's definitely a market for them, and some excellent revolutionary games have come out of them. (See the Dreamcast and the music series games, Samba, Space channel 5, Crazy taxi, etc). But IMO you're wasting your money buying a brand new console for hundreds of dollars and new games for $60 a shot when you could be getting a great pc game for less than $50, or a used console and a ton of games for even cheaper.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
For example, there's a huge boom in Symbian and J2ME devices with the new mobile phones at present. Could code for that - that can't produce the effects which take up all the time on a big-hardware gmae, but it can sill be extremely playable. Sort of back to the late 8-bit/early 16-bit stages.
The Gameboy Advance can use homebrew cartridges - why not have a crack at writing something for that? It's about up to the standards of the old SNES (I think it's identical except for sound channels, though I'm prepared to be corrected on that), and the old SNES had some truly brilliant games.
I'd suggest that if the cost of developing for one platform starts heading for the stratosphere, then look around for platforms that don't have that problem.
Cheers,
Ian
One thing I am noticing is that games today are, getting way too complex with regards to graphics, geometry, lighting, etc. It takes a TON of time and money to design, build, texture, test, and finalize these worlds. "What's your point you ask?" - Its this: That the gameplay isn't THAT much different today than it was say 5 years ago (exept with AI development), and quite frankly I don't play the game for the eye candy (although that enhances my experience while playing).
Game enjoyment is all about challenge, goal accomplishment, and interaction with AI in the computer. These are paramount elements, and these costs can be normalized to fairly predictable levels. The eye candy is on the list but not that near the top for me, and yet game developers sink huge dollars into this.
I really don't "enjoy" Quake III or UnrealTournament2003 any more than Quake II or UnrealTournament1999 except where BOT AI is concerned. This is because the GAMEPLAY has improved because of AI development, not because a building is made of 3000 objects instead of 500.
Does anyone else feel this way??
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Will we ever see a new Jeff Minter?
Why would we need to see a new Jeff Minter when the current one is single-handedly (well, with some financial support from Lionhead Studios) making a GameCube game right now: Unity.
Somehow, I doubt that Unity will cost $30 million. Smaller scale game dev is still possible -- so long as you don't want $29 million worth of theatrics, and $1 worth of a game.
As PC's and consoles get more and more powerfull, they'll have more and more processing power to spare. They'll probably be tools like visual basic for games. Drag and drop games, minimal coding. It won't make the next doom3, but anyone who could make a map for quake3 would be able to make their own little game. It won't be state of the art, but it wont have to be. People still make games based off of the q3 engine and thats a few years old.
Ok, so I'm having a large reaction to what I feel is a change in the balance of power.
1. It started with small unknown developers writing games for the PC.
2. The small unknown developers become giants.
3. The consoles allow the giants to sell more games to people who don't understand computers.
4. The giant can no longer afford to develop PC games because they need to put all their development into consoles.
5. Nobody buys anything but consoles and console games because that is the only thing the developers program for.
The end...PC gaming DOA.
What I generally dislike about consoles...
1. Doesn't allow mouse control.
2. Doesn't have high-resolution > 1024x768. And even if it did, that doesn't mean much to people who don't have HDTV.
3. You are locked into the game...no modding.
4. You can't always freely connect with other large groups over the net without using a system that was developed to monitor your gameplay...like Microsoft's.
5. How about setting up a 32 player server with a console?
6. Ever try to backup your console game CD?
7. Can you upgrade you console system without throwing out the entire box?
8. Why do you say consoles are easier? PC game interfaces are exactly the same (on screen configuration and controls)?
9. Consoles are sold separately from PCs. An investment in a console is not an investment in my PC. Why would I do that?
The end.
++more.
If a small game developer can't afford to be in business, well, perhaps that game developer should get out of that business.
Yeah, the customer might not get what they want, but they should go and spend their money somewhere else then...
Companies already do this.
Automakers giving away driving games.
The Army releasing FPSs
Big deal. Buy a complete state-of-the-art game engine with free updates. Cost? Several thousand dollars. Do you fancy cool lightning and shadows? Give id a call. Want better interactivty, physics and character animation? Try Valve's Source. Don't have several thousand dollars? Get a slightly less advanced engine very cheaply or even for free.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Interesting but wrong.
You are incorrect. I am unsure about Nintendo but with the Sony PS2 any Joe Schmoe can indeed call up and order a dev kit. It is a set of SDK's and there are actually distributions for both Windows and Linux environments. A lot of PS2 dev happens under Linux btw.
Ok, so I'm having a large reaction to what I feel is a change in the balance of power.
1. It started with small unknown developers writing games for the PC.
2. The small unknown developers become giants.
3. The consoles allow the giants to sell more games to people who don't understand computers.
4. The giant can no longer afford to develop PC games because they need to put all their development into consoles.
5. Nobody buys anything but consoles and console games because that is the only thing the developers program for.
The end...PC gaming DOA.
What I generally dislike about consoles...
1. Doesn't allow mouse control.
2. Doesn't have high-resolution > 1024x768. And even if it did, that doesn't mean much to people who don't have HDTV.
3. You are locked into the game...no modding.
4. You can't always freely connect with other large groups over the net without using a system that was developed to monitor your gameplay...like Microsoft's.
5. How about setting up a 32 player server with a console?
6. Ever try to backup your console game CD?
7. Can you upgrade you console system without throwing out the entire box?
8. Why do you say consoles are easier? PC game interfaces are exactly the same (on screen configuration and controls)?
9. Consoles are sold separately from PCs. An investment in a console is not an investment in my PC. Why would I do that?
10. Licensing issues for consoles for extorting money out of developers.
The end.
These software folks are just beginning to feel the disaster which hit pinball years ago. As pins went electronic (CPU-based operation vs solenoids and cam wheels), the development and production costs went up and up. And just like vids, the perception was that people wanted ever more features and fancy doo-dads in their pinball game. But for some strange reason, humans can't deal with the fact that a quarter is not worth what it was in 1960 :-( . So even tho' an inflation-adjusted game of pinball should cost at least a couple bucks, operators are limited to charging 50 or 75 cents per game. This is one of the main reasons pins are disappearing from the scene. In fact, there's only one company still making them -- and it ain't Bally, Williams, or Gottlieb (or Chicago Coin for you cognoscenti out there :-) ).
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Now, if they had made it more of an RPG, with an action component
Hmmm... possibly like the Mana engine... smells good.
and extended the universe with a new story, THEN it might have been interesting.
For one thing, Disney might have dictated terms to Virgin that prohibited writing new story lines because any new story lines might conflict with the direction Disney wanted to take the characters in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride.
Better would have been to do like Rare did in Goldeneye for N64: missions inspired by the movie, with more depth in each mission than was explored in the movie, and a couple extra missions that might as well have been "deleted scenes" in the movie. Completely linear levels where the player dies instantly if he leaves the track, such as if he jumps off the ostrich in the "Can't Wait to Be King" mission of The Lion King for Super NES, are a Bad Thing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't understand. Why exactly are razor manufacturers giving away consoles and games? Shouldn't they just stick to razors!?!?
Download my free songs!
I can't decide if this guy was being ironic or not, but I'll bite anyway...
"Games like Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, Hexen II, Quake, Quake II, Quake III, Myst, Riven, Exile, Warcraft, Starcraft, Red Alert, Wheel-of-time, Tribes, Tribes II, on and on. These games were PC games, not console trash....Please please don't let the PC gaming industry die or you will stop seeing innovation. DONT buy into consoles!"
That would seem to be a rather contradictory paragraph...I'd like to modify that statement a bit.
"Games like (FPS), (FPS), (FPS), (FPS), (FPS), (FPS), (FPS), (FPS), (PUZZLE), (PUZZLE), (PUZZLE), (RTS), (RTS), (RTS), (FPS), (FPS), (FPS), on and on. These games were PC games, not console trash.....Please please don't let the PC gaming industry die or you will stop seeing innovation. DONT buy into consoles!"
Wow, three whole genres of gaming in 17 games mentioned (-:
It all depends on your definition of innovation, I guess. I like more genres than that, so I play consoles, simple as that. Play what you like, and leave the rest alone, okay?
You are just plain wrong. A dev machine and the SDK cost about 2000 USD. Check the sony site. Nice lie to get Karma though.
ps2dev.sourceforge.net/linux/contents.cfm
This may come off as a flame bait or a rant, but the fact of the matter is...
When I was at the GDC in San Jose this year, as always they have a section dedicated to small independant game development companies. Usually these are games for the PC, but they could be for any console that would really want to fund there project.
After playing several of the games, it occured to me that these games sucked. I'm sorry, i'm sure the kids (and they were kids) that worked on these put a lot of time and effort into there creation, but when you have a game that looks choppy, skips, is about a remote control throwing food at the tv, or some side scrolling realtime rpg where you dont level up and dont gain new abilities, you have to kinda wonder - why the hell would I play this game? If it looks like crap and plays like crap and doesn't have any story whatsoever to it how would you expect it to compete with games made by ID, Blizzard, Bioware, Square-Enix, etc...
I have a friend who at one point wanted to get into game programming and he started making little tetris like apps and whatnot - although that takes a skill and talent that I don't have - I know enough to say that unless he went to work FOR a game company he would never be able to create a whole new game engine that would compete with the Unreal or Quake engine by himself and be able to make a "good" enough game that someone like EA or Sierra would want to publish.
And IMHO - NO we don't need more of Yak's games.
Ave Molech Setting
What shall I play now... galactic civilizations? day of defeat? railroad tycoon (not as dull as it sounds)? strange adventures in infinite space? Or maybe I'll play some GTA 3 after all.
The point is, *expensive* games are costing more and more to produce while the market for *cheap* games remains the same. There isn't just one monolithic games market; there are many niches and levels and most of them are doing okay.
Day of Defeat (and other games that use an older game as an engine) are an interesting case -- could it be that as more and more powerful toolkits and engines become available, it will cost less and less to create new games? Of course, large companies that can make their own engines will have an advantage, but that seems fair enough to me.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
If you are looking for a handheld console that has a free SDK, can be used with any development environment on Linux, Mac or Windows then have a look at the GamePark 32 which is available in Korea and soon into Europe.
:)
I recommend looking at the GP32 site though as it has better descriptions, reviews, news and gives you a great overview of what is possible. It is the first 'Open' console that's been produced and already has quite a 'bedroom' community that has sprung up around it.
Not only it is open, it just happens to be the most powerful handheld console out there and there's ports of Doom, Heretic on it already as well as Atari ST, Gameboy, SMS, PC Engine and Megadrive emulators. It has a built in MP3 player and you can also plays DivX movies if you pay a small fee (3.50/$6) for the player. All the commerical games for it are very cheap too - most in the 7/$12 bracket.
In short it is superb and runs on standard Smart Media Cards so once you've bought the console you aren't tied to buying proprietry hardware like the Gameboy.
So, you have no excuses now - buy one, start developing and make money!
There is little doubt that we are coming closer and closer to a "market correction" (and not just in the US, see the "What's Wrong with the Japanese Gaming Industry" series at tokyopia.com). The hows, whens, and whats of the issue, however, are really rather hard to predict. There are a few developments I predict for the future of the "gaming industry", which may or may not directly result from said market correction:
1) Shorter games at cheaper prices - This has already been brought up several times, but I think this will be one of the major themes in the future. If gamers truly are searching for "cinematic experiences", then why do many modern games promising to deliver on this account run 40 hours, when the average movie runs around 2? Shorter games will be the perfect forum for testing the new ways of telling stories that have yet to be developed (and which will most likely be pioneered from smaller and/or open-source independent development houses).
2) A resurgence of older games - Say a big industry powerhouse suddenly finds itself publishing games for a market that is no longer investing in the big-budget rehashes that said powerhouse has been investing, well, big-budgets in. It won't take too many $20 million dollar investments to flop before the company starts hemmorhaging. The answer? Tapping into the incredible backlogs of intellectual property that the company has at its fingertips, possibly stretching all the way back to the 8th bit generation. What better way to recoup on failed development investments than by re-releasing older products with little development investment required? This would mean that we finally see legal emulators released on new-generation consoles (what a major coup for Nintendo, if they were to suddenly to gain a huge chunk of Sony's marketshare simply by releasing an official SNES emulator and working with developers to ensure quality re-releases!)
3) Gaming will find its Voice - Maybe not directly related to the Crash, one development that is certain will be a rising interest in looking at video games from an "academic" perspective. Institutions such as the IGDA and publications such as Game Studies are heralding a new age of vdeo gaming discussion, criticism, and theory. And as we well know there have been several calls-to-arms among the video game journalism crowd (which the quality members of will also help to fuel the desire among gamers to get their hands on some of the older games through their nostalgic advocacy of previous classics). It is only a matter of time before a common language for game theory is developed. After that, the sky won't even be a limit!
4. Innovation based on older technologies - If you were thinking this category is just an excuse to throw out some links to Tenebrae screenshots, well, you were right (and stop reading my mind already!). Do yourself a favor and feast your eyes on some of these (Tenebrae) and these (Tenebrae2). These engines are based off the GPL'ed Quake 1 source, people! I mean, OMFG! T2 could be on par with Doom3 (in terms of capability, if not performance...yet), and it is _open-source_! Under the _GPL_! Which means it can only keep getting better! Alright, I better stop here or else I'll exceed my quota of exclamation points...
5) Convergence of Media - Check out this excellent article from gamesindustry.biz that contains speculations about Sony's long-term plans. Better believe the PSP will be my "Walkman" once it's released!
Okay, I think that is all I have to say for the moment. I am very excited fo
I think there is a certain amount of marketability behind being a big game manufacture with a big name and flashy design, but while I was playing ICO on my PS2 I realized something. That game isn't technologically advanced. It doesn't have flashy new features and wild new concepts. It's a simple game and it was TONS of fun.
ICO tells a nice story, nothing spectacular. It has simplified game play, nothing brilliant. It has quality graphics, nothing amazing.
But I was captivated by it for four straight days. I played nearly six ours every day for four consecutive days. By the way, that's a lot for me.
I think two things went into this. A simple game that I was able to purchase for $30 (my limit) and play without vast instruction or learning curve. It captivated me immediately.
Ico was produced by Sony, I believe, but it wouldn't take a multi-billion dollar corporation to put out a game like that. A couple guys banging away on their home computer could come up with that. They just need to be creative and know how to not make it too complex at the same time. What's killing the small shops is their competing in the wrong market. They need to tone it back and work on projects they can handle.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Games have matured as an industry, mostly because the market has got far larger.
Personally, I believe video games, especially online massively multi-player games, are going to emerge as the highest grossing creative industry going. It may already be happening with Star Wars Galaxies, the game could out grossing the movies.
My vision of a future mega block buster entertainment project goes like this.
- Buy pre-established franchise. (you want a preexisting, pretested concept)
- Produce a full budget movie based on said franchise.
- Produce a $100+ million dollar online universe based off the franchise.
- Do extensive tie in deals. All in game everything, from virtual vehicles to in game music, is a tied.
- Blow the traditional $100+ million on marketing.
Now your about half a billion dollars into it. Seems like a lot, but I'm sure at least that much was spent before say, the Harry Potter movie, sold its first ticket.
With the game thrown in as the ultimate cash cow you get revenue streams that far exceed what's available in Hollywood today. The only trick is you need a lot of consoles out there with the power to handle a multiplayer universe.
Console prices are going down, power is going up, hard drives and broadband are standard.
The crack for the little guy is developing the initial franchise. Writing the comic, novel, etc.
> consumer prices stay approximately the same
Uh huh. I remember the days when I could pick up the latest and greatest for around $25. Now games come out for $50, even $60, not to mention collector's editions that start at $80.
The thing is, it is silly to just avoid looking at the whole computer industry (thus including platforms and hardware) when addressing this issue here. Regular business and consumer apps have been experiencing a similar problem as well. However, two primary differences are evident just by looking at financial reports of the vendors as well as published specs on systems (and of course the plans layed out by various CIO's and similar decision makers).
First of all, there are many tool, component and conversion/middleware solutions available that are helping developers and integrators pump out "more for less." These third party products (and services as well) are what can help turn around a hopeless and endless software project and better leverage the existing pool of experience, products and ideas. Maybe someone just has figured out a better way to build part of the mousetrap... why should they then rebuild the rest. That is reinventing the wheel and due to cluelessness (of business sense) and general lack of estimation experience you end up often with a product that is a pile of dung. That part that is most likely greatly superior (or just adds functionality that would make any product superior within a given domain) is overshadowed by the rest of said pile of manure. Once upon a time, the UNIX way of doing things was to have many small components do something little but do it very well. I won't blame the folks in Redmond as the entire industry should share in that blame and not point fingers. This is why component (read: well designed and implemented) systems _CAN_ make all the difference between a diamond and a broken mishapen lump of coal.
The second part that is different is just the combination of supply and demand for quality. Having worked a while in the business apps arena I can tell you that my experiences with large companies is that of a complacent, "status quo" type of enviornment that often does not know and would not care what the quality of the product is. Added to this the irony that you don't exactly have to be concerned with frame rate issues, sound synchronization, "realistic" behavioral modelling, and other high-speed game features. Basically, you really only need to worry about data bridging and providing a clean interface (user and data) with existing data and logic elements.
Sadly, the business and consumer products often fail to even provide this. Instead of a good design taking advantage of existing standards, components and data formats the developing organizations show great innovation in the ability to foul things up and produce large quantities of steaming manure. However as the analogy goes, manure can be a great boon for those that know how to use it.
What everyone, games or business apps, can learn from this is to stop wasting resources and time. First, hire competent business leaders. These will be the ones making the smart decisions about customer acquisition and retention. These guys will be your eyes and ears into the thoughts of the current and potential customers. They must be thorough "bullshit filters" unless you want to let clueless clients (read below) pull you down to your knees. The business managers should also understand the value to delegation.
Next hire someone who knows how to develop and maintain a business plan and business procedures. Pretty straight forward... often you can just outsource to various groups to setup your business internals and lay out a method to expand and adapt... don't ever forget that most business plans do NOT scale well. If you ever grow much then you had best redo your infrastructure and reduce bloat.
Next, hire a systems engineer (again this can be outsourced for small companies) to go over your intended/existing market, your plans, your business plans and your business infrastructure. They then take a look at the technical side of things and come up with the map
I think garage developers are far from finished.
There's a gigantic mass of untapped territory out there. All it takes is creativity. As John Carmack himself mentioned, big companies have trouble breaking away from molds. They produce "lock-in" conditions for themselves, being forced to run the same old games and formulae time and time again.
Games, like anything else, exist on a fitness landscape. Games like the shooters are searching for pinnacles, ever higher, in one very narrow area.
If id software broke away from their formula and tried something new, they'd then be duking it out with smaller developers, or houses with some money but without a huge popular name, like CDV/Fireglow (Divine Divinity, Sudden Strike)
Much of the bottleneck for small developers is art. Textures and models. These are hard to do, even for talented and skilled specialist artists.
I think a solution here is one that's fallen almost totally by the wayside in the last few years, and that's proceduralism. In other words, draw textures and models, as much as possible, procedurally-- as the insightful guy above said, parametric models are starting, and I think that's a way of coding that's going to revolutionize the way things are done.
Also, buildings, dungeons, plants, city maps... all these things can be done as L-systems or as other types of grammars. It's not impossible, it just takes a little bit "more work" right up front, and the things get tons easier. Like so many other programming tasks. And then you have almost endless replay, until you see to the bottom of what the system can do.
Id and Blizzard may not be around forever. They may be the SirTechs and the Broderbunds and the Beagle Brothers of today, to be supplanted tomorrow by hungrier smaller companies.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Iam not sure whether a game has to delivered "once for all" to the consumer ie Iam not really sure whether the razor blade analogy really holds. This is like saying with advanced hardware OS'es take longer to develop for the market.
OS growth is incremental with each version doing a bit more than the previous version. Not sure why the gaming industry has to wait "10 years" before releasing something good. Just get people get hooked on the game and gameplay. Do the fancy stuff , character development etc incrementally.
The easy answer to this question is licensing technology. Look how many companies licensed the Quake (all 3) and the Unreal enginges, quite a few. I see more of this happening in the future.
This got me thinking, you slashdotters out there, what are some of your favorite garage-brand games?
i ng lil space exploring game. Kinda lacking in the graphics dept. but will soon be fixed with the advent of the next version (hopefully) this guy developed his own 3d gaming engine for it which you can tinker around with too if youre a programmer. Interesting stuff.
heres a couple of mine...
The Unreal World
http://www.jmp.fi/~smaarane/urw.html
Its like Nethack meets Robinson Crusoe. Your goal isnt to find the big foozle & steal his amulet, but to survive another day. World is randomly generated every time you play, excellent game.
Stair dismount & Truck Dismount
http://jet.ro/dismount/
strange little games, the idea is to get hurt as much as possible.
SimuTrans
http://www.simutrans.de/
a fanmade (& opensource i think) clone of my old favorite, Transport Tycoon. Its not quite ready for primetime just yet, but its close.
Also, if youre a big fan of TTD like me, check out the fanmade patch that adds a LOT to the original game.
http://ttdpatch.net/
Noctis
http://anywherebb.com/noctis.html
amaz
They can't afford to produce for the console? Well, earn your stripes in the world of pc games. Once you can make money there, you can license the stuff for the consoles and move on.
This really doesn't seem like the end of the world.
Games are already 50-60 bucks.
They're already double to triple what they're worth as an entertainment (which has caused me to stop buying new, and only buying used).
Where the @#$#@ are they pissing the money away if they can't make money at that level.
Further, I thought that since consoles are so difficult to pirate games, that this leads to lower prices (ha ha ha ha...lies).
Seems to me there's an unrealistic expectation of prices and profits by the video game producers.
This is life. Circular and rollercoaster like.
One of two things will occur. Either the rollercoaster will seemingly in our life times go up and down, or eventually sooner or later it will level out.
Obviously game development can't continually increase exponentially forever while the cost of the game remains the same and console costs reduces.
Games can't rise in price as people will not buy them.
Piracy on console games increases every day as people make it easier and easier to modify and steal games through the internet.
Eventually the bubble will BURST just like the stock market. Microsoft / Sony will get sick of not making any money. They are both fighting a nearly endless battle of trying to win all customers while loosing money intentionally just to fight eachother off. The problem is both companies have way too much money to fight with. So they need to actually make better products / games.. Well, the problem there is most games come out for both platforms... Well, then you can say better hardware, but we all know the hardware only tells a fraction of the story as Sony continues to stomp over Xbox... Regardless, new hardware from both companies comming out soon.
Internally both companies will say we have new innovative hardware that our competition will never have (PS3/Xbox2), but the truth is, that is bull-shit. You will never remain on top long enough to kill your competition in this seemingly endless moores-law technology craze where every 6 months you are much faster/cheaper etc than 6 months prior.
Getting back on the subject though, Small game developers will always be able to compete through making BETTER and more FUN games but not necessarily with all the fancy special effects of motion capture etc.
But you know, it is the small developers that innovate in game technology and game play ideas... All the big companies with million dollar budgets just spit out $20 million dollar games but the games don't innovate at all... Just another football/baseball/basketball game or another FPS.... "This time with __Fill_in_your_favorite_actor_ Right in the game!!!"
Enter the Matrix anyone?
- Voxel
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
>I have had enough of the "losers" who buy consoles. The gaming industry was not brought back from extinction by consoles, it was the PC that brought games to where they are today. Games like Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, Hexen II, Quake, Quake II, Quake III, Myst, Riven, Exile, Warcraft, Starcraft, Red Alert, Wheel-of-time, Tribes, Tribes II, on and on. These games were PC games, not console trash. These games allowed modding and internet gameplay free and open.
You sir, are an idiot. Allow me to explain.
Consoles DID save the gaming industry. The videogame crash, around 1980, happened because games were only clones of similar game concepts previously launched (pac-man, asteroids, dig-dug, and so on).
PC games, in that era, really, REALLY sucked. Only a handful of games really needed a PC to exist. The IBM computers had a pc speaker and low-resolution 4-colors graphics and a 8MHz processor that had to do everything (hence was unable to move full-screen graphics). And as far as storage goes, only rich people could afford those expensive 20MB hard disks.
The NES really did ressurect the videogame industry because it gave programmers new tools to play with (hardware video acceleration). The fact that it didn't need 30 seconds or more to start up and the fact that anyone can pick up a gamepad and start playing was the key. The game console was still as easy (if not easier) to use as a VCR.
And as for your "PC games innovation", let me remind you that 90% of the PC games today are either Doom/Quake or Command & Conquer clones (better graphics and AI doesn't count as "better games" if you ask me).
The only REAL breakthrough was Myst. And it only happened because at that time the PC had better storage options than consoles (CD was pratically non-existant for consoles). Other than that, it's mostly a reash of old ideas.
Zelda on the PC would be just as wrong as Halo on a console (which, sadly, is a reality since it's only available for the Xbox).
Let there be choices.
Nintendo, Sony, Sega (now dead for hardware, I know) for consoles.
Microsoft, Apple, Linux/BSD for PCs.
The more you try to kill platforms, the less chances you have of getting UNIQUE and CREATIVE games. Zelda. Metroid. Pikmin. Look at all the different types of games on consoles right now. There's a lot of stuff, just open your mind (and don't look at the crappy games available for the Xbox, a lot of these should be PC games). Look at the GameCube, and at the PS2. Heck, even check out Gameboy Advance games.
Then look at the PC. Who the hell cares about Doom 3, it's still the same fuksing game as Doom but prettier/better. Innovation in PC games is as good as dead.
And if you ask me, the Xbox is just wrong (it's a damn PC inside a console case, it tries to have PC games but doesn't even have a mouse)
Some kinds of games are made for PCs and should stay on PCs. Same goes for consoles games. I don't want Zelda with a keyboard and mouse, no more than I want to play Halo with a stupid gamepad.
There's room - no, there's a NEED - for both to exist. Just don't be so close-minded.
Just my 8-bits.
"without major improvements on the supply side"
More likely on the cost side. They've got to get the cost of development down. More project planning, tightly controlled development, blah blah blah.
If anything, the market is getting more croweded with games, and people will to make them.
I don't know who's counting, but when I was young, and I asked my parents for Zelda, and it was 50 bucks, that was a lot of money back then. Heck, it's still a lot of money now. I think that people underestimate the cost of video games in general -- and I think the prices are rightfully high. These games that are coming out now are of the caliber of full-console arcade games or better. Does that cost money? Of course! But who wouldn't want to pay that money for the luxury of having a true home arcade, in the sense that the games are THAT cool.
stuff |
to reserve your Phantom game console yet? maybe we shouldn't worry about that one in the next few millenia :)
Someone mentioned this above, but almost no "code" is reused in the sequels you listed above besides Doom 1-2 (almost the same game) and Quake 1-2. What is reused in the 'big' jumps is the experience of the developers and their understanding of 3D in a computer world.
Take Starcraft, for instance (I know it's not an id game, but I know beyond doubt that what I say about Starcraft below is true). The very first build of Starcraft was made by adding onto and editing the Warcraft II engine Blizzard already had. After about three complete start-from-scratch redesigns, the game was released. What is used are the ideas and concepts, but the physical Warcraft II code was not carried over. Quake III was made in a similar fashion, with start-from-scratch code.
I just finished reading Masters of Doom, and I'm fairly confident in saying that Carmack and his team could all walk away from id Software and make a new FPS called 'Mountain Dew Menace' or something with Doom 3 caliber graphics because they have the skills and the knowledge.
Just thought of something, too. I'm fairly certain Quake 2 was a complete redesign due to a part of Masters of Doom where Romero gets the code from Carmack and has trouble porting Daikatana from Quake 1 to Quake 2 because Quake 2's codebase was so radically different than Quake 1's.
So, in short, Doom 3's code has nothing to do with Doom 1's code. Only the concepts have evolved, not the actual if-thens.
"while the cost of producing games increases exponentially as new technology comes online, consumer prices stay approximately the same"
Ok, I'll agree that the cost of producing games has gone up quite a bit but the cost of buying games has too. I sure don't remember paying $50 for every game when I was a kid. I think they were more like $20-$30.
There's also other things to consider like how many more copies of games are sold now. I'm just guessing it's quite a bit higher. We'll just forget about that one since I don't have numbers to back it up.
Another problem I have with this is the fact that engines can be reused/licensed so they don't have a huge development cost. Let's take for example Battlefield 1942. When I bought that game, I think it was $40. Road to Rome expansion pack was $20 and the Secret Weapons expansion coming out soon is another $30.
Oh, and I almost forgot about games like Ultima Online that get a monthly fee out of you for playing. So I really don't think it can be said that games cost a lot more to produce but that cost isn't being passed onto the consumer.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I must've read the topic wrong. Razor blade games? Reminds me of that old SNL bit with Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin. Akroyd is a sleazy toy manufacturer pushing Christmas toys like "Bag O' Glass" and "Bag O' Sulfuric Acid".
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Kvetch is Yiddish for "throw an exception" --Dr. Ron Cytron
Like many other industries that get settled in to institutionalized methods, the video games industry has a growing amount of bloat. Many middlemen are just not necessary and often hurt the game development process more than just the economic drain. Interference and manipulation by inept decision makers can bring a great team's efforts to a standstill. The only thing "the suits" should be doing is drumming up business and manning the books. Most do not have either the business sense, managerial and leadership, or the domain experience and sense to be anywhere in the chain of command.
But then that just may be my experiences :)
The answer is simple: the cost will go up, and people will pay more for games. $50 a game may seem expensive now, but people will pay as much as the market will bear.
My 7 year old daughter loves to play PPG, Scooby Doo, and other games on the PS2. She has about 20 Game Boy games. In the last year, I have spent almost $1000 just on her on game addiction.
I never thought I would be buying video games again, but kids have a way of getting their parents to buy them things. Young adults have a way of buying things themselves. And older deviants cannot help their compulsive behavior. Thus, the market will sustain itself.
M
Mind-numbingly repetitive and overly simplistic fish-feeding game. Guppies for easily-amused yuppies.
Any other classifications you need, pard'ner, just ask. ;-)
There should be a lowercost associated with development on the X-Box 2, since you can leverage Windows OS knowledge.
As for the PS3, wouldn't small developers be able to continue to pump out PSX/PS1 and PS2 games for it, since presumably it'll be backward compatible. If the public were willing to buy a bit less flash (as most assuredly, a segement will be) you can pump out games requiring less development cash.
More likely on the cost side. They've got to get the cost of development down. More project planning, tightly controlled development, blah blah blah.
Obviously you don't know what the "supply side" is in this case. That's the people who supply the games, ie the developers. Getting the cost of development down is an improvement in the supply side economics.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Many of us would like to see a return to gameplay over graphics. That's essentially the problem here. Games didn't cost as much to make when the focus was on gameplay and not on making the game as realistic as humanly possible. That's why some of us have flocked to the Gameboy Advance and dropped consoles altogether. Because we want to play fun games, not crappy games that look REALLY realistic. I know this will never happen, but how about a return to that type of gaming? Maybe a solution for some companies. There's definitely a market there. Now back to Advance Wars (which is infinitely more fun than any game I ever played on a modern console save GTA: Vice City).
I have news for you ... the console industry achieved razor-blade giveaway status years ago. Look at any of the major consoles: Sony, Nintendo, particularly Microsoft, none of those boxes are sold much if any above cost. In fact, they are sold at a loss much of the time, with the expectation that game cartridge revenues will help them turn an (eventual) profit. That also explains why all of them are so much against anyone using their consoles for general computing tasks (e.g. Linux) because they derive no revenue from such sales.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
just thought I'd throw in my $.02. You want a superlow budget movie, check out El Mariachi. $7,000 budget (as compared to the $35,000 budget of Clerks. Not to say that less (or more) money means anything as far as quality (as so many have pointed out throughout this thread), just thought I'd give props to one of my inspirations.
Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?
Hate to break it to you, but manufacturers have been selling consoles at a loss for a long time now. Their business models rely on profits in software sales to recoup their hardware development and manufacturing costs.
Besides the initial financial risk to the console manufacturer, this model causes tremendous stress to the software development companies as the manufacturer negotiates harsher deals to allow themselves a greater profit margin. With the costs of development systems going up with each new platform release, not to mention contractual obligations, console software development is not an easy market to get into. This isn't likely to improve either.
The only possibility of this situation improving is manufacturers driving-up the retail prices of consoles far enough to recover costs on inital sale - but then they price themselves out of the market. This isn't likely to happen.
With games coming into new devices, such as mobile phones, at least there's opportunity for development companies to grow into areas other than the console market.
A few have touched upon the real issue here ever so slightly, but miss the point by a mile:
The huge rise in tech is a good thing, and won't lead to ruin. Why?
Because now (or at least in a couple years time)the tech is at a level where you can make stuff as good as it needs to be.
Think about that sentence. Not everything needs a zillion poly's. Less can be more: stylisation leads to differentiation; sometimes a character looks just as good with fewer polies/shaders etc than with twice that amount.
Graphics have become so good and advanced that we have reached a point of diminishing returns on the realistic side, too. Shit, you can hardly spot the difference between a game model of 500.000 polygons and one with 1.000.000 poly's on todays computer screens.
Does anyone else realise this? We are reaching the point where technology doesn't make stuff cooler anymore...only cool art direction and game logic will, because that is what the player sees and plays with.
Sure, tech will get better, and we will see marginal gains because of that, but tech driven advances in 'coolness' are over...the jump from PSX to PS2 shows that very well: nes was cool, but the gfx of a snes blew it away. Then the psx came out, and blew the 16 bit era away; psx games just looked cooler. But did the ps2 give us an equal jump in coolness? No. Sure, things looked better, but not in the wayyou got a buzz from the difference between a 16 bit console and the 32 bit ones. This argument goes for game engines too, only consoles are easier to spot the generation gap with.
Anyway, this will lead to an unfettering of the imagination: it doesn't really matter what you make, as long as it's cool. Sometimes big budget (and the art direction, production quality etc that entails) is cool, sometimes a simple budget suffices. As mentioned before, the movie analogy shows what's going to happen: there will be Lord of the Rings and Clerks. And both are cool, not because of their budget, but because of what they are.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I distinctly remember games costing $50 or more when I was a kid- all the console games were expensive due to the cost of cartridges. Chrono Trigger was $54.99 when I bought it, for example.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
They can keep up because the tools to do what was expensive a few years ago are affordable today. I'll cite an example of my own creation: Using the free integrated development tool, "Game Maker," I made a game in 72 hours for a competition. You can see the game here on Simtel. It's a fairly simple kind of game that you might've seen in the mid to late 80s selling for $30-40, and likely with graphics of lesser quality, too(the tiles probably would have been better and more diverse with more time to play with them, but they didn't have the same resolution or color depth then). It would have taken probably at least a month to make, depending on the platform. But I did a 2003 equivalent in three days, with 10 levels, sound and music and recordable high scores, because I had the tools to do it.
A small team today can get into game development through the shareware market, which has always had its share of diamonds among a rubble of uninspired clones and "1,000,000 variations on Solitare." Consider 3drealms and Epic, both of whom brought themselves up through shareware sales. There are developers today pulling out success at the "low" end, too, like Popcap, Dexterity, and GarageGames. But you'll notice that they never go in the console market, because consoles realistically are a playground for the industry giants, with a market that faces significant challenge in expanding demographic reach(it's a chicken-egg situation - no games to appeal to a new segment, no segment to buy those games) and no method of distribution outside of retail.
A lot of attention is put on the console market, where it seems like a lot of action takes place. And it seems like big budgets lock small developers out. But in reality, larger budgets mean less innovation. All the best games of today are evolutions or reworkings of previous games. GTA3 comes from GTA, which itself was taking a new angle on the maze games of yesteryear(Pac-Man etc.) The Sims is a new angle on Simcity. Diablo 2 is a new angle on Rogue. All the Lucasarts games have their heritage in ADVENT. These are not triumphs of technology, but good design and well-rounded development. It stands to reason that in reality, there is nothing stopping a small developer. Their only limit is that they can't push the envelope in ways that will break their bank. If they want to go for the high end, they can start small and build up with sequels that evolve the technology each time. The market will prove whether or not they are worthy. And the little guys will never get hopelessly far behind, either.
On the other hand danila says that there are some games (like Civilization) that have good randomly generated areas (well the entire world in Civilization is based randomly)... that is not only because the geography is believable, but also because it provides you with the challenge of exploration: you have to discover how the world is mapped and where are the rival civilizations are, and that is a good deal of experience that you make with the game.
Diablo on the other hand is too poor of details to give an experience.
It must feel like the rest of environment.
Yes, common error... you enter in the randomly generated mazes and then you find you lack of details... or there are too many details, or too many wildly interconnected parts with too much varying features one another.
It must be beatable. Well, a normal commercial game must be beatable, so this is another proof of concept: if the random part has too many tight constraints, then you will make for a poor game.
Now... what about roguelike games? They are completely random games, who have a great deal of atmosphere as well. The experience in good roguelikes (think nethack) is complete: you have many things to do and many things to discover. The problem is that usually you have only one possible way to do them. This last thing is what it makes nethack an hardly beatable game... this and also that fighting the RNG, the Random Nethack God (another name for the $DEITY known as Random Number Generator) is a proof in action of Darwinism... only the characters with the better stats and better players (that is experience) survive. (Once you ascend you can easily enter the elite of player who survive more times the dungeon of menace see rec.games.roguelike.nethack).
Anyway... for the most part of your post I agree with you, but don't tell me that I can't enjouy a random-generated game. :)
It's only that random-generated game does a good part for intellectual games, while statically made games is good for action games.
"I am slashbot, hear me roar!"