Slashdot Mirror
3D Realms' Scott Miller Warns Warner
firstadopter.com writes "Scott Miller of 3D Realms, maker of Duke Nukem and non-maker of Duke Nukem Forever, is panning Warner Brothers' recent re-entry into the videogame industry. He cites the lack of focus of conglomerates and aversion to risk-taking on original brands as the heels of Warner's future downfall, suggesting of their new gaming division: 'Focused [game-only] publishers will always lead us in making the best games... It's just not as important for a [diversified into films/TV] company like Warner to really try hard in a area that, in the end, doesn't mean life or death to their company.'"
Yeah, Scott Miller has no right to critisize anyone. Much less spout a vague 'managers know nothing about games'. Maybe if he himself approached game making more professionally, then things would actually get done. The game making business is one of the most unprofessional software development businesses. Starting with too optimistic planning, vague design documents, a project typically relies on developers gut feeling, adding features when someone things of them instead of following the technical design. They all end in missing the deadline and making all employees work 18 hours/day for 7 days/week for a month and still ship with known bugs. All this because some designers feel that any management imposes on their creativity.
You should read the postmortems on Gamasutra, at least half of them admit afterwards to have worked without a decent design document. For Tropico eg. the lead designer found out after a year that his designers all had different ideas about what the game should be about and were implementing all kinds of features and interfaces they thought were 'cool'. This was because the design document was too vague and general.
Daikatana failed in two ways, first because it wasn't that good. It had been in production for too long and by the time it was ready it was not technically advanced anymore. But more importantly, because its creators had such a big mouth in the press (nonsense about making you his bitch) the press were sceptical about the game, which is their right. You can't pretend to be mr. know-it-all and critisize everyone but yourself and expect to get respect for it, if you don't have any achievements to go with it.
For those who don't get the reference, Atari single-handledly destroyed the home video game market during this time, mainly by glutting the market with crappy games (E.T. for example; several million unsold cartridges were dumped in a landfill. Pac Man had more cartridges manufactured than there were consoles sold.
The home video market managed to stay destroyed until Nintendo forced their way onto the scene; they were very careful to avoid the sins of the father, so to speak, by retaining the right to not allow crappy games, limiting the amount of titles a licensee could put out in a year, and other such practices.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Actually, this will be TW's -third- attempt at publishing games. In the early and mid '90s, Time Warner Interactive released perhaps a dozen games across a range of platforms. To its credit, these included Software Sorcery's first game (Aegis: Guardian of the Fleet), the Saturn version of Virtua Racing, the PS1 version of Return Fire, the sequel to the classic Amiga game Firepower. It also put out a real stinker of a fighting game called Rise of the Robots. Of course, it's one thing to have good taste in cherry-picking games that other people develop and quite another to make them yourself. I hope for the best, but Scott's warnings are well-considered. Peter