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.'"

Comments

Yea right

[AKnightCowboy]

3DRealms has been focused on Duke Nukem Forever for 5 or 6 years now and they still have nothing but vapor. They're hardly a company to talk about video gaming anymore since they can't even get a simple game out the door. License the damn Quake 3 engine and make Duke Nukem Forever with that instead of jumping around redesigning engines every year. 3DRealms is like a kid with ADD when it comes to their flagship character. The fun thing about Duke3d wasn't that it had great graphics (it didn't), but that you could hold up a buck to a stripper and say "shake it baby". We must have more of this in the next version!

Re:Yea right

[robnauta]

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.

Re:Yea right

[0x0d0a]

Two points:

1) Game dev houses do public post-mortems. I wonder what we'd find out if traditional software developers did public post-mortems? Maybe a lot of them wouldn't have the careful planning that you might expect.

2) Games are (I believe necessarily) *somewhat* driven in design by implementation issues that cannot be found out until implementation time. It may be that having 20 goat-riding banshees running around attacking you just plain uses too much CPU time, and the game has to be changed. A design document is *very* useful when you have to interface with someone else's code, but game developers aren't interfacing with code. The game field moves quickly, and they may want to include new stuff that comes out during the dev process.

That doesn't mean that game developers can't improve, but I suspect that there is a *reason* that they don't always work the same way more conventional developers do.

As for the term "unprofessional", I've found it to be a loaded term that rarely conveys useful information.

Re:Yea right

[fredrikj]

I think Carmack stated in a Slashdot post about a year ago that writing a 400-page design document and following it down to the details is a really bad idea - a good game evolves out of thousands of design decisions that turn up along the way. Compare Tom Hall's original "Doom bible" written in 1992 with the end result, I don't want to think about how bad the game would have been if they had followed the original plan. I think Tropico's problem was lack of communication, not lack of a design document.

Re:Yea right

[Twylite]

Unless your development team has only one member, you're interfacing to someone else's code.

Designs are able to be changed. That's the whole point of using flexible patterns. But if you don't have a design to begin with then nobody knows where you are planning to end up, or has a framework in which to control the change.

There is nothing special about game development that isn't part of any other software development process.

DNF original?

[Roshin]

"He cites the lack of focus of conglomerates and aversion to risk-taking on original brands..." Original brands? Duke Nukem Forever..?

Hey Scott...

[MImeKillEr]

..how about a little less telling everyone else how to run their company and a little more Duke Nukem Forever development, mmmkay?

At this rate, the PlayStation IX will be out before DNF.

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

[insert DNF comment here]

That pretty much sums up the comments so far ;)

Introductions are necessary

[CrazyClimber]

Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.

History lesson:

[Asprin]

Doesn't he remember Atari? T-W owned that from '76-'86, their most profitable and inventive years when they made great games.

/Tongue-very-nearly-almost-only-partially-in-cheek :)

Re:History lesson:

[SuiteSisterMary]

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.

Re:History lesson:

[ClosedSource]

Your history is a little confused. There were dozens of companies that flooded the market with Atari 2600 games, not just Atari. Atari tried everything to stop it including suing former employees, but it didn't work.

In addition, there was the Intellivision and Coleco game systems (among others) that died during the same period.

It's funny that you cast Nintendo as some kind of hero. It would be as if you had to get permission from MS to write SW for Windows.

Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot this one:

[Asprin]

Then, there's the obvious:

(ahem)

Well, at least Time-Warner will **MAKE** games that will have an opportunity to suck.

Thank you, thank you very much, I'll be here all week!
Drive safely, remember to tip your wait staff and try teh fish!

Re:Warner Brothers killed atari

[gamgee5273]

That's Atari only in name, Jacek. Warner Brothers "killed" Atari back in the 80s after it bought it and Nolan Bushnell went off to other pastures.

The Atari we know of today is Atari only in name. The current company is actually a re-branded Infogrames, which bought Atari's name & such when it bought the Hasbro Interactive unit from Hasbro (Microprose was also acquired by Infrogrames at this point). If I remember correctly, the Atari properties stopped at Midway between Warner Brothers and Hasbro. In fact, I want to say Slashdot just recently covered Midway's sale of the old Atari office (not 100% sure... might have been something else along those lines).

But, no, the Atari that killed Microprose is actually Infogrames in disguise.

Interesting but naive

[Twylite]

There is an assumption amongst "focused publishers" of games that leading edge (techniques, graphics, sound, action) counts. It is an assumption that holds true for (probably) most of the gaming market. Nevertheless, the current gaming market is arguably a niche market, and "focused publishers" either aren't aware of this or at a loss to exploit the bulk of the market.

A market means having (a) customers who want your product (b) who have money (c) enough to afford the price which is dictated (at minimum) by your development costs.

The current game publishers are pretty good at (a). There are millions of gamers out there who want the product. The problem is that the vast majority of those gamers do not earn an income. Those that do eventually find that they have less time for gaming in order to do something called "living" or "working" or "getting a wife and kids". Slashdotisms aside, the age profile of gamers is heavily slanted in towards youth and lack of income.

In other words, current publishers aren't a whole lot of good at (b) or (c), or "finding the deep pockets". Games are pirated or obtained occasionally via Mommy or Daddy's money.

So where are the publishers going wrong? To me that's simple. I don't play games anymore because I don't have much time to, and few modern games are entertaining for a person who only plays occasionally. Games are written for gamers, and gamers are highly skilled addicts. This means they get their "hit" from the challenge and, to get value for their money, they require game that is lengthy to complete. Something challenging to a skilled gamer is, even on easy levels, not very entertaining to me when I want to relax for half an hour.

TW is, by comparison, an entertainment company. While many people (especially here) can't stand them, they nevertheless understand how to cater to the mass market ... and I'm guessing they're going to do just that.

Why play in the highly competitive leading edge games market when you can combine non-interactive media with yesterday's techniques (that have been made into a Microsoft SDK), at a fraction of the cost, and target a far larger market that also happens to have money?

Its all about understanding your market. People who earn money (more particularly those who have "responsibilities") tend to be more price sensitive when it comes to products they aren't sure they will get their money's worth from. You may not be able to sell a $50 game to such people except at Christmas, but a $10 game a month will slip right under their radar.

There are also other markets that aren't currently served by game publishers. Do you remember interactive fiction books? They give you a paragraph or two, you decide what to do, and get a "goto" for another paragraph. There's thousands of them out there, and children and young teens love them. It would take one such book, a week of VB, and one day in your average TV series studio to turn the book into multimedia interactive fiction (30 second clips rather than paragraphs). TW could flog off stuff like that at a quarter the price of a game and still make a killing.

Risk taking

[fmaxwell]

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...

This is a man who really knows about "risk-taking on original brands." Look at the Duke Nukem brand: How risky is it to take eight or more years to release a sequel? Even "focused" game publishers like Epic Games and ID Software aren't willing to take risks like that with their flagship brands.

There are people who played Duke Nukem 3D when they were in junior high school and they've now graduated from college and there is still no sequel. There's a risk that, when/if Duke Nukem Forever is released that no one will even remember the original. If all game companies took risks like 3DRealms does, stores wouldn't need nearly so much shelf space for video games and consumers would have a much easier time of it.

Third time's the charm?

[Peteroo]

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