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

[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.

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.

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.

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!

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