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On The Business Of Developing Successful Games
Thanks to InsertCredit for their article covering a recent game-related lecture at an Entertainment Law and Business conference. One of the more interesting discussions covered is how game companies should develop their games. A representative from Electronic Arts indicated they do "...most of their work in-house these days. This increases consistency, but he admits that this method can put something of a damper on creativity. So they've got what they call EAPs (Electronic Arts Properties), wherein they work with/invest in games made by other companies, and then distribute them as their own." On the other hand, an Activision executive claims that "...developers prefer to be left to their own devices, counter-culture individuals that they are. So Activision prefers to purchase them entirely, allowing them to exist undisturbed. He says that in this way, they can develop the games they want to develop, and not have to deal with any of the bureaucracy." But which approach really creates the best games?
But which approach really creates the best games?
It depends on your definition of what the "best" game is:
Is a successful game one which is creatively successful or one which is financially successful?
For every ten games (and I'm being generous) that try to push the envelope, creatively, only one succeeds. Even with a creative success, in the vast majority of cases, it is critically successful but doesn't pay the bills well enough to keep the developer in business, especially when the next couple of "creative" ideas don't pay off well and sink what profits were made.
EA makes its money the same way the movie industry does. It produces to a formula that it knows will make it a consistent small profit. It may not be creative but, ten years down the line, they'll still be in business while most create houses won't be.
What about companies like Origin or Blizzard? Origin got bought out by EA and how many of the original creative types are still there? Blizzard became such a hammered part of the Vivendi Universal empire that most of the original senior people left earlier this year (World Of Warcraft may be an old style Blizzard creative success but will it remain so after years of having to appease VU's moneymen?).
Sadly, safe but boring, not original but risky, is what keeps games companies in business - and the ones that recognise that (like EA) can always just buy the few who make it anyway (like Westwood and Origin). Yes, there are a few ids but there are much bigger EAs.
Oh give me a break. Sure not every game is a new concept with revolutionary gameplay, but what entertainment medium doesn't suffer from this? ID has pretty much mastered the FPS, creating many spinoffs, but with each game they release, something new is also produced (if not by them, by a competitor trying to one up them). Take a look at Rockstar, their GTA has been imensly popular, it was innovative and has succeeded as a result. The Simposons Hit and Run isn't exactly an innovative title as it does follow closely the GTA style game play, but it's a lot of fun at the same time.
Last time I checked, games' main purpose was to be fun, if it doesn't take some huge innovation in story line or game play to be great, so what, it's still fun. Every so often I make sure to pick up a game I wouldn't normally think I'd like just for variety. Last game I picked up like that was Need For Speed Underground, and I gotta say I'm really impressed with the work they've put into it. It's got several annoying bugs, but I've dumped about 15 hours into the game. I don't "like" cars though, and honestly, I think a Honda Civic with tons of money dumped into making it "tricked out" is not only a waste of time and money, but possibly the only way to make the car uglier. Even still, I find the game a lot of fun.
I wouldn't call something like Unreal Tournament 2003 innovative, but I would call it a lot of fun and worth the money I paid the day it came out since I've gotten hundreds of hours of fun out of it. Innovation isn't a requist for fun, it's more of a risk the company would take on a new idea. Classic example of innovation being a bad thing: Daikatana. The game WAS innovative, it was just too little (the two ingame characters sucked in both personality and functionality, and the story just didn't need everything it had) too late (I shouldn't need to explain).
I've seen better flight simulators, in fact it would be hard not to be better. The ship traveled just in 2 dimentions and had only two weapons. However, it had some of the best game play of any game at any price I've played even though it used CGA graphics in 16 colours.
I kid you not:
Hundreds of stars, thousands of planets, several different space faring races to interact, trade and fight with.
If you visited a planet and picked something up, it wasn't there the next time you went there.
If you disrespected a race, they remembered. Ditto if you were decent to them.
If you didn't do the copyright protection correctly, the cops came after you within the context of the game and blew your ship up.
All this on one 360K floppy, on a 4MHz machine. I kid you not.
I believe that Origin published the game, and was bought by EA later on. There was a Star Flight 2, which was better in many ways, but took a lot more disk space. EA owns the rights and seems to be holding on to them with cold, dead hands.
StarFlight deserves to be released to the public domain, or at least GPL'd. The excellent programming techniques which allowed such a game to exist in so little space should be lauded and emulated, techniques that have been lost while disk space has become unlimited and CPU cycles can be wasted without anyone noticing.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
> But which approach really creates the best games?
Well, eye of the beholder really. Which makes for a better business model? As of today:
ERTS: $46.09 + $1.24 (13.75 Billion mkt. cap.)
ATVI: $18.44 - $0.56 (1.64 billion mkt. cap.)
Nobody makes bad games forever. Draw your own conclusions as to who's appealing to Joe Average.
They have so much marketing power it's scary. Yet the products they push out on the market are no longer getting better every year.
1.) If it was not for ESPN/sega basketball, their live basketball series would still suck today. They develope 1 engine, and build upon it for half a decade.
2.) The sims online is a disaster from every angle.
3.) Battlefield 1942 is filled with technical problems but it's marketed well enough to stay alive.
EA is like big brother microsoft. They can afford to make mistakes and no one can touch them. Now that's dangerous for the video game industry.
Tha answer is simple. EA has nice polished games, Activision releases new/fresh exciting games. Both are good but I prefer the average game released under the Activision brand as opposed to the EA brand since it is the "new" experience I crave, not the "improved" one.
As one of the recipients of the "buy and then leave alone" method (for Day of Defeat) I'm personally a fan of that method. DoD's creative side is still "owned" by the same team that made it to start with, but that same team doesn't have to worry too much about owning marketing, product release issues, E3 booking, etc. etc. etc. They get to stick to making the game, which is what they do best.
"Cinematics, graphics, AI and storytelling will all improve."
I can only hope that this wasn't listed by order of importance.
Storytelling is a prime reason people make and buy games, and I would rather see this improved than overly-drawn-out cinematics that take up space on the disk that could be used to make the engine and AI better.
I'm a long-time hardcore gamer, and if anything, since gaming challenged hollywood and the multibillion dollar market, games took 2 steps ahead in terms of graphics and storrytelling (quite a few titles I can recall host hollywood-class voice actors).
... console "RPG" (where you're done leveling up on the second level of the game, because the whole XP and leveling up scheme was too much on console gamers. Sure, Warren Spector could go on all day with how they wanted to make the "open endedness" the main feature of the game. Right. Warren Spector knows as well as we do that Deus Ex 1 was designed to be a good game. Deus Ex 2 was designed to milk money).
The problem lies in the 3 steps back the games took in complexity, technicallity and everything else that requires the gamer to actually use his brain. For me at least that spells L-E-S-S-F-U-N.
What's happening today is a collective takeover by large corps over many successful indipendant game makers, game makers who didn't make mass money but made very good games, at least as I, not an arcade gamer, am concerned. Said corps couldn't care less about me, as I'm not where the big money lies. The big money lies in pointa-clicka-no-thinka couch-potato arcade games, aka console games.
While earlier the arcade market co-existed with the more sophisticated PC game market, the big producers are all for buying out every last successful PC brand and its developer, and riding that brand into yet-another-dumbed-down-arcade-title. And since they're wielding the heavy paychecks, there's no way to resist them (other than to cause the vast majority of consumers to stop buying consoles, which doesn't seem like it's going to happen anytime soon).
I was outrages by Might and Magic 9. A wonderful technical hack-and-slash game that successfully earned its bread for 15 years.
I was saddened by Heroes of Might and Magic 4, which looked like HOMM3 only without half the widgets.
I was frustrated at Ion Storm having sold out to a
Unreal 2 wasn't even a game. It was an engine demo. Again, someone who wants money trying to call his product a "game". Wolf in sheep's clothing.
And the list goes on. Black Isle went under, and with it all hopes for not only technical, but sophisticated, well-made RPG's like Torment or the first two Fallouts.
Freelancer could have been a wonderful technical game, but some design decisions to dumb it down (not being able to take more than 1 mission at a time, forcing the plot on you _before_ you could explore the world), killed the game.
Since Deus Ex 2, I really can't name one _good_ sophisticated game that hit the market. I can name a lot of glamorous-graphics ones like Max Payne II, but sophisticated? Zilch. Nada. Not a single one.
And reading the article above lays my suspicions out clearly: people with my expectation of a game are a dying breed, and 'good' sophisticated games - From Star Control 2, to Ultima 7, to Privateer and to Deus Ex 1 - won't be around no more.
Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust.
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Origin Creates great games.
......
EA buys Origin.
Origin Creates a crappy game (U8) under EA's influence.
Richard Gariott leaves origin.
Origin is just a empty husk, providing support for UO, living from their inherited IP.
Bullfrog Creates great games.
EA buys Bullfrog.
Peter Molyneaux leaves Bullfrog.
Bullfro is just an empty husk, programming updated versions of old games, living from their inherited IP.
Dynamix creates Great games.
Sierry buys Dynamix.
Dynamix releases Tribes2 Prematurely under Sierra's influence.
Sierra closes down Dynamix.
Sierra tries to patch Tribes2 with inhouse developers.
about 1 year later, they hire ex-dynamix employees to finish the game.