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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."
I think Half-Life 2 will be successful not purely on its name. Half-Life had no name to begin with, and the company that made it had no prior history. That was their first game, and it became one of the most successful games in history. They've had time to learn from their mistakes and do cool new things in this game.
Halo 2 I know nothing about. I have no interest in it since it will probably be an Xbox-only title, so perhaps someone here who finds Xbox interesting can give us some insight on the potential technical innovations for that game.
GTA: San Andreas. How can you make a statement one way or the other on this one at this point in time? They have yet to release any actual information on the game yet. We haven't seen any screenshots or feature lists or anything. If they're knocking the possibility of innovation based purely upon its name, then let's take a trip down memory lane and remember the differences between GTA and GTA2.. then GTA2 and GTA3 (clearly the biggest difference), then GTA3 to Vice City (not really a huge difference technically, but I think the gameplay was much improved and it was even more fun than GTA3 for most people). Anyway, the point is that without any information about what GTA:SA will be like, you have no room to knock it at all. They may have expanded this game to be a fucking huge region instead of a single city.
I think you're confusing revolutionary with evolutionary.
Half-Life 2, while great-looking from the gameplay that's been shown so far, isn't revolutionary. It isn't using inverse kinematics for the first time in its physics engine, it isn't the first graphics engine to pass pixels more than once, and it isn't the first game to use vehicles in game play.
It might improve on these things, but it's not ushering in a new era of elements we've never seen before.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
perhaps true, but many of us have real lives and find it truly impracticle to play oneline; I have maybe two hours a week, in ten minute increments, to play games (and no problem or compunction about plunking down $50, $100 or more to buy one). I am not interested in keeping up my skillz to match a bunch of teenagers with no job or family who are online for two or ten hours a day, so for me (and a lot of my 40+ ex hacker buddies) 'massivly multiplayer' just does not matter; just like I love MTGathering but hell if I'm going to spend $3K on cards, my friends and I all play with proxies (copies of cards) so it's a matter of skill, not having no life outside of the game. (no disrespect meant to someone whose entire life is gaming, I was there once and games are a very valuable tool of intellectual development, IMHO)
At 43 I'm one of the original video game generation, starting with \spacewar and various Apple1 sims. I still love gaming as much as I did 20 or 25 years ago but if I have a choice between jumping my wife's bones or hanging with a bunch of 15 year olds in some 'clan' the kids can go on without me. Sorry, I've got the doctorate to work on and other stuff to do to bother with a LAN party, so I won't pay one cent more for that functionality; good AI (defined as something that can suprise me 9 times out of 10 and approach each situation differently even in replays) is worth an extra $30 or $40.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Big publishers go through several steps when launching a new title. They do market analysis, competitive product comparisons, greenlight sessions, profit and loss statements and so on. Basically, lots and lots of paperwork that mostly tries to compare the new product against already existing titles. It's easier that way.
How do most game concepts start? "Super Killer Frenzy Shooter is a cross between Quarter-Life 3 and ReallyFarOutCry, with an RTS component based on..." Even game developers are constantly comparing games to other games by saying this is a little of that, and a little of this, or just like game X but with feature Y. I can only imagine that other creative industries do the same (movies come to mind.)
This is not just the way big publishers do business. A lot of pitches I've seen from smaller developers include how they are different or better than a list of already released games. Mostly popular games.
Most game companies are out to make money. Usually so they can continue to make games and not end up on the dole. So, we tend to look at what is popular and selling. It's very risky, especially with the game development budgets these days, to try something brand new. It still happens, it just doesn't happen as much as the early 8-bit days when it was literally one guy in the garage doing all the design, coding and art. Unless you look at the shareware, PDA and demo scenes where small teams and individuals are still making games there.
Sequels are popular with publishers because a) they tend to cost less to develop since you can use assets/engines/design from the first game, b) if the first game was popular, the sequel _usually_ sells well unless it's a bad game, c) you can get more press since you don't have to sell the magazines on a completely brand new concept that they are not sure will appeal to their market and d) you find it easier to get "buy-in" from your internal sales and marketing staff when dealing with a known property.
I don't think the games industry is non-creative, but we've definitely matured and tend to take less risks overall. Sequels and derivitive products are a way of reducing that risk.
At the IGDA awards, three games were given "Game Innovation Spotlights": the EyeToy, Viewtiful Joe, and WarioWare Inc. All three of these seem quite novel and worthy of the attention.
At the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, both indies and mainstream games were shown. On the indie front, this year's Indie Game Jam games (full disclosure: I co-run this event); Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates; and Zoesis' The Demon and the Princess. On the commercial front, the creator of Namco's Katamari Damashii spoke about and demoed the game ("Was it difficult to convince Namco to let you do this game?" "Of course." was even funnier with the long pause for translation between question and answer); we had presentations about WarioWare and about the explorations of time as a game mechanic (specifically in Prince of Persia, Max Payne 1 & 2, and Viewtiful Joe).
(There were a few more presentations about more academic "games": Ken Perlin's work on natural-language-programming for kids, "Haptic Battle Pong", and I forget what else, as I was developing a fever during the 3-hour EGW.)
The winner of the Indie Games Festival's web downloadable grand prize, Oasis, is a fairly original and creative game (full disclosure: I did contract work for Oasis' developers on a different project), and since this is announced at essentially the same ceremony as the IGDA awards it has a fairly significant cachet.
So I think the Reuters reporters just didn't go to the right events at the GDC.
The story itself has plenty of debatable claims. Are gamers, as the article claims, getting more conservative, or are publishers just getting extremely conservative and releasing more sequels and focusing their marketing dollars there? Hint: nobody debates the truth of the latter.