Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
Does that mean that gaming industry for Macs is doubly threatened? (death of Apple first, then death of games)
The movie industry seems to be doing just fine on sequels, I think the game industry will be fine though.
And just for the record, no I didn't read the article.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
To reply, you must answer the following question:
What is the 11th word in the seventh paragraph on the first page of this article?
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.
'The gaming industry will shrink unless we start to see new games'.
*drawing his sword*
I DUB THEE SIR FUCKING OF THE OBVIOUS!
This thread dates from 1989 and contains the phrase "Imminent death of net predicted" at least 6 times, with the first one appearing not long after the creation of Usenet. "Imminent death of net predicted" had a long and possible proud run.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
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.
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.
The entertainment industry as a whole is hitting a brick wall. Hollywood keeps making 'safe' movies and rehashing old ones for guaranteed hits. The game industry is doing the same thing.
The problem started as the cost of entry went up for developers and filmmakers. When it was cheaper to make movies, studios were (and smaller independents still are) more apt to make risky movies that don't fit into a rehashed, well trodden category. Same goes for game makers. You'll keep seeing Doom and Quake as long as Doom and Quake are easy to evolve and guaranteed to sell 15 million copies worldwide. The last thing any developer wants at this point is to throw an ungodly amount of money at a project and end up with another Daikatana.
Also at fault are the publishers. Some publishers just won't take on specific games because they feel they won't sell. What you end up with is what we all have today. People wanting something new or different but when they're given it, they don't buy into it heavily enough to send the message to publishers that 'we want something new, and we really mean it'.
If you're a smaller movie studio or smaller game shop, you can take bigger risks as long as you keep costs down. There have been some great indy films and smaller publisher games over the years.