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Creativity, a Problem for the Gaming Industry?
Steeda95GT writes "A Reuters story reprinted at Forbes.com is an interesting read, saying that 'The gaming industry will shrink unless we start to see new games'. It talks about how the ratio of original titles to sequels is dropping dramatically, but it also goes on to say that upcoming sequels (Doom 3, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, GTA: San Andreas) will be successful only because their predecessors were."
No, its guts. Guts to try new things to break away from what is known in games, to produce the kind of games that new customers really want. The market is what you make it.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
originality and creativity when repackaging the same game and slapping a subtitle on it will rake in millions? The Sims comes to my mind...GTA is in a similar boat in my mind...
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
The end of the internet and the descent of the gaming industry into an uncreative apocalyspe has been forseen at least 2-3 times every year for the last 20 years. It's time to accept the instability but long living state of both industries and move on with our lives.
And also companies like EA (Sierra).
Tribes died, WIng Commanders, UO, etc, etc. It's all charts, numbers, and rehashing as opposed to highly motivated developers and a creative team.
But it is not just EA chasing after proven material. Upcoming titles such as "Halo 2," "Half-Life 2," "Doom III" and "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" are all expected to top sales charts this year, in large part because the games that preceded them were so successful.
Sure this will get them noticed more, but if the games don't have innovative graphics and gameplay, the popularity of the previous titles is not going to mean shit.
I don't think the sequels will be succussful because of the originals, i think they will be successful because the simple fact that they are entertaining! People may initially buy a game because its a sequel to a game they loved, but if the reaction to the sequel is negative, word spreads and the game doesn't sell. Its very simple economics, the sequels must be as good (and in many cases better than) the original or there's no profit to be had.
"Anything that's invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things" - Douglas Adams
Successful only because their predecessors were? Thats certainly a backwards way of looking at it. They're successful because they kept doing (and by expanding upon) what made their predecessors good games.
They may not be original, but that certainly doesn't mean they won't be fun, which is what gaming's supposed to be about. Why reinvent the wheel when you know what people like?
Mod point free since 2001
Analysts have been saying the same thing about Hollywood for 20 years, but every year the box office is consistently bigger than the last (and rising faster than inflation) -- and much of that is powered by sequels. In 2003, 6 of the top 10 grossing movies were sequels. And when Hollywood is short on sequels, they recycle old ideas -- Spider-Man was the #1 film of 2002, and it's free to spawn more sequels anew.
Bottom line: Creativity has been floundering for a long time, but people keep buying games, keep watching TV, keep going to the movies. Businesspeople would be fools to abandon a known quantity (the revenues of any sequel are easily predictable) in favor of new stories and fresh faces, not matter how much some of us would love to see them. To think that people will suddenly stop buying games because they're all sequels is silly; gamers really have no choice except not to play... and only in WarGames/I. is that a real option.
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
I hope Doom 3 will be able to stand out on its own, even without the support of its line of predecessors, but even if it turns out to be "just another sequel" as far as plot and gameplay, lets not forget its merit as a techdemo. Many of the games on the market today are based on id's engines, and even if Doom 3 itself is not the great game we are hoping for, the technology behind it will undoubtedly power at least a few great games to come. Aside from that point though, I would have to agree: the game market is becoming saturated with copycat and sequel titles. What the game market needs is not more games, but more focus on creating innovative new gameplay. Case in point: I still waste a few hours every few months playing the original Pitfall just for the fun of it. Now who can say that for most of these modern FPS, RTS, or MMORPG formula games?
The same 30 or so basic plots have been recycled in Hollywood for past 100 years. I'm sure the video game industry will survive just the same.
I think that Doom 3 doesn't really fall into the catagory of the other games.
1) Doom 3 is retro. The last Doom game came out while I was still in high school.
2) Doom 3 is a significant advance over the last sequel. It's not just new levels.
Saying Doom 3 is just a sequel is like saying Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was just a sequel. There's no comparison.
Still, I think that companies will start coming out with more creative games soon. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised of LARPing became the next big thing, and games that are offshoots of RPGs became bigger, such as the White-Wolf titles, only with more roleplay.
You know, video games are going the same way as radio -- more and more of the same crap, over and over and over again. No one wants to give anything new a chance, even though there's plenty of new stuff out there. The only difference is, I don't know that there's been much of a change in the corporate ownership structure in the video game industry like there has been in radio (i.e. the ClearChannel takeover). But then again, I suppose there wasn't much in the way of diversity in video game companies to start with, was there?
::Sigh::...if only companies weren't so damn risk-averse, maybe society could progress a bit.
The saddest thing about it is, if there were ever a new game that did what, say, Legend of Zelda did back in the 80's, the company that put it out could make zillions. It's not like they'd lose much putting out crappy stuff meanwhile, either.
How To Get Humans To Mars
I don't think the lack of creativity is a problem. I mean, sure, we've seen a lot of sequels lately, but also some really creative games. Paging through the reviews in my most recent EGM reveals Ninja Gaiden, Eye Toy: Groove, Breakdown, and a hole ton of other creative games. About half of the games were sequels, which is a bit much, but nothing to freak out about. Also, recently, we've seen a TON of really innovative games, and we're beginning to see sequels to them. Splinter Cell comes to mind, along with Wario Ware. GTA3 was exceptionally inovative, too. Thing is, with a lot of innovative games, nobody buys them. I love Animal Crossing, and its in a genre by itself, but it didn't sell too well, and Nintendo certainly promoted it a lot. That's not much motivation for companies to make innovative, fresh games, now is it?
Your categories are super broad, which helps. If I read it correctly, games like:
all platformers (Ratchet & Clank, etc.)
all sports games (SSX Tricky, etc.)
all strategy games (Civilization, Dominions 2, etc.)
all flight sims
all real time strategy (Warcraft, Age of Empries, etc.)
all CRPG's (Morrowind, Star Wars KOTOR)
all MMOG's (Everquest, etc.)
all fit into your "third person" category.
These games are even genre spanning like Thief, System Shock, etc.
That's quite a bit of diversity which gets all glommed over in your category system.
And why were the predecessors popular? Because they offered what people liked. Half-Life grew in popularity not because of hype but because of how fun it was. Same with Doom, and the GTA series.
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
This is not 100% true. Midway's trying to break away from the mold this year- check out their upcoming titles. The Suffering just came out- yes, the survival horror genre is a bit tired, but this one is at least trying to differentiate itself by being more action-oriented, having a branching plotline, other characters to interact with, meaningful decisions to make, etc.
:). But, seriously, it is a new IP with a completely new idea and (especially) a completely new play mechanic. There is no other game out there that plays like Telekenisis (the primary weapon in this game) plays. The closest thing I've seen is HL2's "magnet gun", but that is more of an engine show-off gimmick than an actual gameplay element.
Ballers is coming up soon- I've played it, and I can say it's like no other game I've really played before- like the previews keep saying, it plays like a fighting game/basketball hybrid of some sort.
And, last but certainly not least- coming up later in the year is Psi-Ops, which (ahem) is going to be fantastic
Anyway, point being it makes me sad to see this constant claim of no innovation in the industry when I feel like there are people out there trying to innovate. It's not their faul that, at the end of the day, innovation may not actually be what the public wants!
Nothing to see here.
Its more stuff like ThinkTanks, that feature kinda psuedo-unique gameplay that's a bit hard to master but very fun. Reminds me of the good old days of shareware games on DOS.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
As someone that just left the game industry for the second time - this time 'cause I got tired of looking for a job that didn't require a minimum of 80 hour weeks working on either a n-th generation sequel or a game that tried to differentiate itself through pushing the gore / splatter level:
The problem is with the people FUNDING the game industry. The independent shops are being swallowed by companies that have made loads of cash getting away with pumping out sequels that have only minor engine improvements. This sucks, but worked for a while in a few profitable genres. Many companies that tried to push it died after too many generations (I used to work at Accolade, that's part of what killed them...)
Unfortunately, people that funds games look at this seeming no-risk model, and refuse to fund anything that doesn't look like the same. They all want you to license an existing engine, and make a game that can be described in a single sentence as {profitable game A } crossed with {profitable game B.}
If you don't follow this model, you don't get funds.
As a related point, there are WAY too many companies in the industry for the amount of shelf space available, and the big players BUY shelf space, so its nearly impossible to compete anyway without cutting a deal with an existing major distributor. Want to do that? Guess what, you have to change your game to follow the same model as everyone else.
In the mean time, the EA's and Sony's of the world are pushing their developers harder and harder - they've currently got a surplus of available headcounts to replace all the burnt out ones with...
The industry needs more "angel" funders. But in this economy...
Consider that men have been going to bars, drinking too much and going home with ugly women for thousands of years. (The oldest known human recipe is a Mesopotamian recipe for beer) Obviously humans can do what they like indefinately, even if they regret it the next morning.
The basic problem is the one we discovered in the early days of virtual reality - no matter how good the graphics get, all you can really do in there is move around, shoot stuff, point at stuff, and select things from menus.
Isn't the reason there's more sequels that there's more games?
Like, the number of new games showing up is constant, but besides them, more sequels appear?
I wouldn't be too surprised. Creativity not waning, but not growing either, market growing seriously, gap between market growth and available creativity filled with sequels. Nothing to really worry about.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
When was the last time that hollywood didn't go for a remake or a further installment of a previously successful franchise?
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Those of us in the real world are getting a lot more milage from watching euro films and the like. At least they have story tellers willing to be an original voice
sex games havent been explored much, a little in the past on some amigas by hackers etc... but nothing major, perhaps because they are scared to be in that industry, but they can always use a subsidery to hide in.
Specific porn people might enchance their Dvd interactiveness to the max, or make some PC based game, but nothing massive.
But most games are based on some real life event, unless its a puzzle wierd game like tetris.
So until we develop some insane AI that thinks like a 12 year old, we are doing still the normal thing, 'simming' real life with art.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I agree. Theres little innovation now in the Action, Racing or Sports genres - but the RPG genre allows for alot more creativity.
Heck, flying around in a helicopter dodging gunshots gains a whole new meaning when your doing it to plant bombs on a building to lower property prices to help out Avery.
There's an increasingly strong consensus in the games industry that there should be a narrative that goes hand-in-hand with what your doing - I think this will help creativity.
Compare that to Warcraft 3, the antithesis of a revolutionary game
Are you trolling here? While WC3 obviously implemented many RTS standards, I would hardly call it the antithesis of revolutionary. The game introduced the concept of Heros - special units that gained levels with battle experience. The various abilities they gained, the items they could purchase and use, the fact that they could be "rebuilt" once they died... these are very innovative concepts for an RTS. And since Heros were given so much power, one was obligated to use them which made them an integral part of the game. RTS is a pretty standard genre at this point, but I would argue that WC3 is a solid, creative implementation.
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because of the push for 1st person shooters and gorgeous rendered graphics, IMO.
I am in my mid 30s. Most of the games I loved as a teenager are on MAME but don't allow for progression/devlopment - unless you play the sequal, of course.
Precious few computer games of recent memory really engaged me for more than a few days. They were, in no particular order:
1) Civilization II (the king of them all) and III
2) DungeonMaster (a close second from the Amiga, which hit the PC way too late)
3) Ultima III and IV (now I'm really showing my age...).
4) Diablo II and the expansion pack
5) Starcraft and Warcraft III
6) Myst and Siberia
7) uMoria (DOS and GUI).
IMO, these games were either truly innovative or so improved on their predecessor to merit BUYING the game and reccomending it to my friends.
also, IMO arcarde games were moved faster into obscurity by the fact that they focused to heavily on the street fighter genre. This is not to say that street fighter was not a great game because it was, but as time went by these were all I saw in the arcades.
Similarly, when I go into the computer stores today to buy games, I see a clear focus on the 1st person rendered/shooter types to the extent that they appear to be crowding out ideas for other games. Unreal is great fun if your reflexes are great, but snipers picking me off from God-know where just takes the fun out of it for me. Maybe this is the criticism that the article had in mind about few truly innovative game ideas.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to be said for gorgeous 3d rendered graphics and visual realism, but that should be the foundation, not the substance of a game.
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uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Look around...
Why is music repetitive, cliche, formulaic?
Why are motions picture even worse... special effects fodder? Mindless, action packed fantasies, design scientifically to appeal to the male and pimply... in the never ending quest to suck dollars out of young people's pockets.
If anything... the games genre is even more clearly designed to go after that young male demographic, with a second wave of assault aimed at male adults (namely violent games that include some degree of sexually explicit content.)
What has always been at the bottom of human experience is the compelling story, the deep and moving experience, a chance to go, do, be something you might never get the chance of doing or being in this life. A great game, has to first be a compelling story... it has to have a context, which is artful, involving, absorbing. It has to create a viable universe that allows people to discover themselves newly, heroic, or antiheroic. There will always be new and compelling paradigms for human interaction.
One could combine existing game categories creating comletely new game types... one could come up with a new game genre all-together... The interactive novel, you press a button, and suddenly you're part of an interactive, compelling universe, a story driven by actions, choices, and an author's intent. A story that is complex. subtle, mysterious, that demands that you be smart, show finesse, and strength... Or maybe one could create a game which is a puzzle, where a team of players has to take elements, visual, linguistic (programmable code?), or alternately perceptual (music, motion, magic.) And combine them, related them, assemble them into a whole, a creation, a unique solution to the puzzle space. Then in an arena, teams compete, either for the love and appreciation of the spectators, or for some kind of game points... It took only a few seconds to invent something unique... A bright person could spin ideas out all day long... this isn't magic.
People... it's a wide open universe, you can do anything y'damn well please. The limitation of guaranteed profit (the worst kind of fallacy), or get in quick, get out quick, hit and run, sloppy. greedy half-assed attempts to shakedown the lusers, is it's own resolution. In the end, people will just walk away shaking their heads and find something else to do with their time and money.
It's not hard to create something unique. It's not hard to create something compelling and beautiful. It is however impossible to create anything that satisfies the bakers and beancounters, when the first contraint, is to make money without risk...
One more reason, to give people who aren't bound by the profit motive, the tools and space to create new and unique play environments.
Genda
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
Damn, I wish these people would stop crying wolf for once. The gaming industry has doomed for over a decade and now, oh my gosh! It might shrink! Ok, lets break it down for the doomsayer-- Every market goes through phases, which are normally driven by what sells. If FPSs sell in the gaming industry, guess what you'll be seeing a lot of????? GASP! First Person Freakin Shooters!!! Eventially people will get tired of FPS. A new cycle begins. Something else sells. I mean think about it logically, do you think they would continue to make it if people weren't buying???
Come on, people, let's pull out heads out of our short term asses and realize:
-The Gaming Industry isn't doomed
-PC Gaming will not die out because of console competition
-The industry goes through cycles and there's no shortage of creativity
Oh yeah-- We'll be running out of oil in 25 years too.
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Nintendo's seemingly endless investment in Pokemon games.
..just like everything else in business, and it will change when it NEEDS TO. People complain about Microsoft as well for similar reasons. These companies are businesses and will change when it makes a difference in their bank accounts. And that's the bottom line.
:)
Why would you try something new when you're guaranteed to make money on a FPS? They'll try new things when sales dip. As far as I knew, the gaming industry is at an all-time high. Why try and fix that?! Obviously I'm not undermining innovation, but come on, does the music industry lack creativity? NO! But that doesn't mean the creative stuff is on the top 40 every week. They play that shit cause it brings in the dollars. When the same music starts to get tired, they bring in some fresh legs.
Why would Microsoft fix all the bugs in their code when it won't affect the bottom line? What are people going to use instead, Linux? Please. You trying to say Microsoft doesn't think it would be a 'good idea' to fix their bugs? Of course they know, but they've got more profitable things to worry about. (Like X-Box
None of these companies are out there for good will. They're not stupid, and they definitely know the best use for their money. It's just amazing how many articles and posts are about these sorts of things.
Acar
www.PenguinMagic.com
The way I see it the video game industry is analgous to the movie industry or music industry in general. In fact, we can group all of these under the heading "Entertainment Industry".
I will use the movie industry as an example and I believe the analogy will become fairly self evident. In the early phases of film making the director had to struggle with many technical issues as the art form was in it's infancy. Low light shots, grey balance, film processing, sound editing and duplication were enormous technical and logistical hurdles. As the technology of this artform became more complex, people involved became specialized in their particular niche of the process. The technical resources are now available to the director without the complete, in depth knowlege of each process. The director is free to focus on his particular job: making the best movie possible. (Please note, I'm not in the entertainment industry, I'm just hoping to make a point here)
A video game, without question, is a form of art and entertainment. I believe that the industry is still in a developing phase. In the beginning, the person programming the game WAS the director. Typically they concieved the game, developed, programmed and had the challenge of overcoming all technical and creative issues. (Relatively few creative issues, I might add [think: pong]).
Now the indusrty is seeing it's split of fields. People are now only responsible for texture mapping 3-d models. Other people work on physics engines. We have been seeing the specialization of technical fields within this industry. My arguement is that this specialization allows for greater creative freedom by those whose job it is to just "make great games".
Lastly, I think there have been a lot of crap games recently, but let's look at why that is. Well, why is it such a high percentage of early movies made are now considered classics? Well, they were good movies, but why? Because the people who made them were professionals and it was expensive to make a movie back then, so they took it seriously. Today, anybody with a DV Camcorder and iMovie can make a film, but how much of the stuff thats churned out is actually worth watching? It's the same with video games, the development and distribution costs of game making has dropped dramatically and the technology to produce games is now as easy as getting a developers kit and a PC.
Any discussion of the current state (or future) of the gaming industry without at least a footnote to the entertainment industries history, I think, is somewhat lacking perspective. I believe the industry is in an acceptable place, given its relatively short history.
Sequels are chosen because they're safer and more prone to make money. PC game publishers are worried because piracy is eating into sales so badly. Consoles are a little safer, particularly the Gamecube.
It's the great unspoken truth that Slashdot won't admit. Rampant game piracy is a problem. Look at all the stupid copy protection we have to go through. It is still insane to expect people to have to put in a game CD every time they play, but publishers make the development teams put them in.
He claimed that the RIAA is claiming that piracy is hurting sales, and then pointed out that their hand-wringing was contradicted by their continued success.
Be that as it may, I believe the grandparent's skepticism is well-founded. "Piracy" (what a terrible term) has -- according to pretty much every study that wasn't commissioned by payments from the major labels (and even a few that were) -- either a negligible or positive affect on sales.
I've never understood Slashdot's reasoning for this.
Well, first of all, -2 points for assuming that all of Slashdot has a single opinion on anything.
If you've never understood the reasoning behind people arguing that sharing a product also being sold doesn't automatically hurt sales, you are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of "advertising". You've also never read any of Janis Ian's or Cory Doctorow's essays on the matter -- two people in a position to actually be able to compare their sales figures before and after.
If you choose to remain ignorant of arguments being presented by either side, that's really not "Slashdot"'s problem.
laugh out loud argument? most people will not claim that file-sharing is advertising - you're right, that is laughable. instead, the point being made is that an argument against file sharing is that it ABSOLUTELY hurts sales, no question about it. the point about advertising is giving out free samples can encourage sales of a product. it is not necessary to then necessary to immediately assume that file-sharing is the cause of the declining sales. there is no question that sales have declined - that is a fact - but the cause of the decline is questionable. before file-sharing is blamed across the board, other possible causes must be examined, such as: -the "crappy quality" of most RIAA music out there. yes, there is "interesting" stuff being produced on the indie labels, but that is not what you find at best buy, nor is it what you hear on Clear Channel stations. it is generally accepted (at least among my family, among my friends, and in the opinions i have heard and read) that there is declining variety and innovation in mainstream music today. -the price of cd's. i refuse to pay $14.99 for any cd. i consider the RIAA and its record labels to be price-gouging the consumers. i know the RIAA has gotten in trouble before for price fixing. i do not believe that the prices of cd's are not artificially inflated. taken together, these two factors would lead you to believe that people are less willing to shell out as much money as the RIAA wants them to for crappy music. also, ove rhte past several years there has been all this talk about the economy going down the shitter - wouldn't this also just make people more reluctant to pay that much for a cd? and while file-sharing in this situation is probably only aiding these people by giving them a way out - i can still get this music even when i don't want to pay that much for it - consider another situation: consider a healthy economy and cheaper cd prices. so there's a cd for $10.99 that i think i want. i download a few of the songs, and i enjoy them, so i go buy the cd because it's only $10.99 and i'm making good money. if there's no file-sharing, then i'll probably go buy the cd anyway, because it's only $10.99 and i'm making good money. but there's also a case where file-sharing helps in a bad economy with high cd prices (like now). there's a cd i think i want, and it's $14.99. so i download a few of the songs to see if i like them. if they are total crap, then i've just saved myself $14.99 - and that's $14.99 that i can go spend on another cd instead, should i find one i want. if the downloaded songs turn out to be good, then personally, i will go out and buy the album. maybe too many people won't do this. but a few years ago dave matthews band released "busted stuff" which was little more than an official release of "the lillywhite sessions" which had been only available through file-sharing before that. if everything the RIAA tells you is true, then that release should have flopped. but instead it debuted at number 1. file-sharing can help. my last point is that too many people hate the RIAA and refuse to buy cd's to spite them. some people make the argument that if you don't buy a cd, you're hurting the artist. but the truth is, artists don't make as much money as they should off each indivual album - they make pennies. there needs to be massive reform in the entire recording industry, and we need to see greater rights for the artists at the expense of recording studies. actors have a union to protect against the movie studios, why can't musicians have the same sort of thing?
There were a couple of great Lucas Arts Star Wars games. Both Tie Fighter and Star Wars Rebellion are among my favorite games. Now all they need to do is remake Rebellion into a multiplayer game.
How many have actually tried to develop a simple game? Compared to developing other end-user applications it is very difficult.
Even with access to a good high-level API, such as Managed DirectX, or a complete game engine, it is still very hard to get into the technologies behind the games. I remeber the first time I was writing a very simple game where the chararcter could walk around in a simple limited 3D world. I quickly gave up trying to get shadows working, and basic things such as gravity or collision detection was more difficult than I would've imagined. The easiest thing was actually the AI of the computer opponents.
What the gaming industry needs are simple tools and standards for creating games. Sure, there are a number of APIs and game engines available, but none is simple enough for a an average programmer to start with.
The problem with piracy in the gaming industry is also a problem. But I think the solution would be something like iTunes for games. And they have to get alot more cheaper. But that would come naturally when it becomes easier to develop games
Yes, this laugh-out-loud argument is something I've seen posted over and over.
It's not that laugh-out-loud. Take yourself out of the Clear Channel pop crap music section for, ohh about ten seconds. There's a whole world of tens of thousands of _great_, _original_ bands that you would never hear about, or be able to find the cd of if it weren't for file sharing. This holds true immensly for the underground scene. Let's enter this world for a moment.
I listen to dozens of bands from Europe and Japan that I would never have heard of if it wasn't for file sharing. They don't tour here. Their EP's and LP's arent distributed in the US at all; if we're lucky we might get 100 or so pressings that are quickly snatched up and resold on Ebay for 50 times their original price. In these cases, we have no other choice but to rely on our friends overseas to rip the albums and let us download them. Period.
Now, say one of those bands were to decide to tour in North America one summer. All of the fans would show up, pay $5 at the door, then buy every piece of vinyl and cotton that we could get our hands on. I'd easily blow $100 at a show if one of my favourite bands from Spain actually played a show in North America. (Hell, I'd spend $3k to fly over there and see them if I had that kind of money.) Multiply this by about 4 or 5 thousand.
Now, if it wasn't for file sharing, they wouldn't make a single dime from a tour over here, and would be lucky to draw a dozen people at a gig.
I think that more than makes up for "stealing" their work.
Underground and DIY artists and labels THRIVE on file sharing. The entire scene has literally EXPLODED in the past 4 years because of free advertising tools such as the internet and file sharing networks.
I've been in several bands that've cut albums. We put all our shit out for free on certain file sharing networks. Why? Because we play for the love of music, not for money. Download our shit, if you like us come to our next show; that's all we ask. Did we lose money? Nope. We made more and drew more at shows than we would have ever hoped to.
The plain fact is that kids aren't going to throw down their hard earned money on a band they've never heard, or don't know if they'll even like. They download it to try it out, and if they like it, you can bet damn well that those same kids are going to save up to have the real thing. Vorbis and MP3s can't touch the viceral qualities of a vinyl.
Those same kids are going to show up and pay at the door for every show you play, and buy every shirt and sticker and patch you sell. That's the truth. Of course if you suck, you won't be getting anything, but you're not losing any money either; chances are they wouldn't have bought your album in the first place.
As for the rest of the world: Clear Channel and your pop artists can fuck off; anyone who is stupid enough to pay for that shit should be shot.
The kids who download radio music and never buy the cd aren't music lovers. They would have never bought that cd in the first place, wouldn't have ever gone to a single concert, or bought a single piece of merch, period. For them mp3s are like a custom radio station that always plays what they want to hear. (and would be hearing for free anyway, so I don't see how it's stealing at all...) The labels and the RIAA are fooling themselves if they think otherwise.
It also goes without saying that major label artists as a whole make nothing from store sales of albums. That money goes straight to the label, the RIAA, and the publishers. Pop artists and bands make money from TOURING and MERCH sales. Most of them actually have to buy their CDs and merch back from the label and publisher to sell it at a show; it's pathetic really. It's sad but true that a band can put out a platinum *selling* album and end up in debt when it's all over, so don't for one second try to say that they're losing money from file sharing. It's not the bands losing money, it's the labels and the publishers
It was from 199? (before 1998) and it had no heroes and only small diversity in the teams. But the building and the order system were revolutionary, I'd say.
There were 2 switches for unit behaviour, that could be set per unit, directly, via a group selection or as a default for new units from a specific factory.
The first was aggression: always shoot, only shoot back, do never shoot and the second was allowed path deviance: break orders whenever aggression triggered, stray only lightly from the path, stay on orders no matter what.
That was perfect in my opinion, since you could easily create guards, patrols, offensive patrols and suicide missions without the need for any "pre-fab"-stances.
These stances also applied to non-combat units, since you had a multitude of construction vehicles, that were all able to interact with one another, automatically.
Set a constructor to shoot-all, and it will repair anything damaged and harvest any resource it sees along its patrol. Set path straying to light and it would only repair standing units and buildings, set it to liberal and it would follow damaged units until they are fully repaired, then returning to the next path vertex. And all would aid in construction buildings automatically.
Now imagine you do this with 20 construction aircrafts, that patrol your base, repair all buildings, repair all defense units, aid in all construction projects and harvesting minor resource thingies along the way.
Imagine another thing: you could set the aircraft factory with a predefined guard route and the stance behaviour, then assign some construction units to "guard" that factory. They will then aid in all construction projects this factory starts and will heal the factory if it gets damaged. Since there are 20 units helping, it churns out aircrafts extremely quick. All these go on an offensive patrol directly or meandering into enemy territory, sweeping anything away they see en-route. All this, while you concentrate on the main tank/battleship attack, resource expansion or a stealth operation behind the enemy.
This is automation and that's what I expect from todays games. Westwoods "Dune2 Battle for Arrakis" had essentially created the genre, but you had to click and command each and every unit on its own. Wasted mouse and brain of the avid gamer in less than 3 hours, but it was still a great game. Command & Conquer added a central build interface, unit grouping, hotkeys. Starcraft made this more RPG-like with clear values for each aspect of the units and allowed the first automations. "Attack ground" for a rapidly growing hydralisk army bred from 10 or more hatches was devastating against all but the most skillful micromanagers, since it used the most valuable resource in a realtime-strategy game - human attention.
Warcraft3 went leaps and bounds backwards. This game needs such a minute attention to details, micromanagement on all occasions, even special units to care and feed for and even an inventory to fill properly. Come on, I wouldn't consider this "strategic" anymore. Strategy is a concentration on overall goals, resource management, unit mix and attack plans. Warcraft is more like a tactical element on a smaller scale. If you like it that way, no problem. But it wasn't revolutionary on any aspects. It just consumed too much attention with no chance of recovery.
Strategic games shouldn't give the player the feeling of a trained hamster in a wheel. Recurring and trivial clicky-tasks should be assigned to some of the units in the game. "Repair all buildings damaged in the last whatever-storm" shouldn't involve more than 3 clicks. Let the player decide how much micromanagement he'd like to use. And through that, you not only make the game fun to play with, you also create possibilities for more discoveries and "real" skill & experience increase for the player as they find new ways to let the units interact. That way, you can win the game with less-than-perfect hand-eye-coordination since you don't compare click speed but some kind of "leadership"-qualities. At least it does not become a boring clickfest...
I think the biggest problem in this case is the publishers who shy away from risks.
I want to give two examples:
Arx Fatalis and the Gothic series. Both excellent games but both had the biggest problem to find good publishers in the united states, because they were not walkin on proven tracks.
They belong to the most interesting and best games released in the recent years but game publishers were unwilling to pick up the already finished games and sell them to the US to fair conditions for the producers. Because they were no shooters and no clickfests.
I've come up with several ideas for games which I would LOVE to play. They, of course, contain derivations at the lowest level, (for any computer game designer there are only two choices in only two categories; 3d/2d, (Doom vs Pac Man) and realist/iconic. (GTA vs Tic Tac Toe). You can jump/slide between degrees within both categories, and mix and match as you please. In the truest sense, of course, there is only 2d and iconic, as the screen is flat and points of light can only be representational. --I've yet to see a game where pixels are actually thought of as pixels. Sound is also a layer I consider to be largely under-exploited as a challenge/reward mechanism.
In any case, I certainly have game concepts which could be enormously enjoyable.
And guess what? I'm not the only guy with good ideas. Not by a long shot. I know a couple of game designers who cry, "There ARE cool new game concepts! Lots of them! It's just that they don't get any production and promotion money because financiers are too conservative!"
Money people would rather invest in a tried and proven concept than gamble on a new idea. New ideas come from weird people who don't fit in and who it is hard for people to overcome their self-protective herd mentality in order to listen to. This is self-evident. Financiers don't care about advancing the medium; they care about making their money back! If they cared about advancing the medium, they'd be Art and Design people. Not Money people.
Anyway, I don't really care. Computer games are a flimsy distraction from the much more vital and rewarding game of Life.
-FL
Because in the company you have to work 60 hours the week to meet your milestones. If, i mean IF you have any energy left after that you can try making new concepts. Simplification? Maybe a little bit, but this really is part of why many of the people who have the skills needed to make a good game just can't do it.
What was going on with Deus Ex 2? Why don't these developers actually learn?
"Hey Bob, did you see how we dumbed down game x?"
"Yeah that totally killed the sales. The reviewers savaged it and all the fans hate us now."
"Great! How should we go ahead with DX2?"
"Let's dumb it down."
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
A three hour movie about dwarves and elves filmed in New Zealand with Elvish subtitles, Aragorn saying things like "Not idly do the leaves of Lorien fall," and so many convoluted back stories and places with strange names that many people who saw the first two still had no idea what the hell was going on. "The blood of Numenor is all but spent"...wha?
They expected some success but I'm sure not on the level it achieved. LOTR was a popular book but not THAT popular--it was always a geek thing. Once again, Slashdotters assume their niche opinions represent the majority.
I'm a man in my fifties who started playing videogames when my then 8-year-old daughter first got a Sony PS1. She played Insomniac's Spiro the Dragon and its sequels for a few years after that, and we still play them from time to time some four years later.
When Insomniac released Ratchet & Clank for the PS2, we purchased and enjoyed that as well. Why? Because all of Insomniac's games have offbeat stories and a terrific sense of humor. However, the sequel, Ratchet & Clank Going Commando is a distinctly inferior game to the original. Why? Because the emphasis was on adding more weapons, more explosions, more of all of that, with a lot less emphasis on writing a clever, humorous story.
About a year ago we happened to pick up a copy of Final Fantasy X. Neither of us had played an FF game, though we had rented Kingdom Hearts and didn't like it very much. FF-X was a revelation. Here was a game with a complex story and attractive characters with whom one could empathize. It was also a game where the female characters were not simply bimbos in skimpy outfits. The heroine, Yuna, is brave, intelligent and, in particular, modest, and I felt no qualms about her being a role model for my daughter.
When the sequel to FF-X was released, what happened? Yuna's kimono was replaced by the usual skimpy outfit, and the two other main female characters were equally sexualized. No doubt they'd heard from their marketing department that they couldn't expect to sell their games to that all-important young male demographic if they weren't sexier.
The problem I see in the gaming industry is not an overemphasis on sequels, since well-made sequels can be just as entertaining as the originals (cf. Spiro I-II-III). It's the attempt to make every game appeal to the supposed prototypical gamer: a young man in his early twenties who only wants to pretend to drive fast cars, shoot lots of people, and fuck bimbos (GTA, anybody?). Reading comments about gaming on Slashdot could often lead one to believe this stereotype isn't that far from the truth. The games that get discussed are almost always in the Doom/Quake genre; role-playing games like FF or The Sims get short shrift.
Now, of course, FF games have their share of violence as well, but the gameplay is more like chess. In fact, I prefer the turn-based approach in FFX to the real-time approach in FF7 or FFX-2, because a lot of the skill in FFX is deciding which characters, skills and defenses you need in particular settings, not mindless button bashing.
But, when all is said and done, what counts most with us is the STORY, not how many weapons I can deploy, or how many ways I can crash a car, or how many ways I can slash an opponent's throat. I see games as a natural progression from movies, replacing passive viewing with active participation. We didn't like FFX-2 less than FFX because of any of the gameplay elements that usually get discussed on Slashdot. We didn't like it as much because the story was rather lame.
Of course, to have good stories means you need good writers, not good programmers or graphic artists. Unfortunately, I see little evidence that the gaming industry thinks that writing matters, because, in their view, why spend money on writing when the target audience of 14-29 year-old males just wants more sex and violence?