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When Game Development Goes Bad
Thanks to Boomtown for its article discussing an insight into the failure of a game developer, in this case developer Escape Factory. The post-mortem styled interview touches on problems with engine licensing ("We had no PS2 experience whatsoever, which is why we chose to use the Unreal engine, lured by its promise of PS2 compatibility. Unfortunately, that compatibility ended later in the process"), as well as how developers present themselves to publishers ("We thought it was all about making the best game in the world, but in reality it's all about making your publisher think you're making the best game in the world") - there's more information in a post-mortem Powerpoint presentation at Escape Factory's official site.
The tone of the article is kinda "we had bad circumstances and bad luck" but you read it and it's like "who the hell gave these bufoons 3M to write a game?!?!". Yeesh, give me 600K and I'll hire some Russian artists and one or two top notch U.S. coder buddies and give you something that you can sell like hotcakes in half the time. It makes me cry how shoddy the common U.S. developer is, especially in the gaming industry.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
that must have been real shocking, realising that publishers rank their possible publishing deals by profitability/risk. a somewhat mediocre game with good marketing and sexy setting can sell quite well, and be both fast and cheap to make. look at wrestling games, they sell pretty well yet they're quite bad as games - but I bet my ass that they're always ready on schedule(why wouldn't they be? they're just incrementally improved versions of the last holiday seasons game). I'd guess that being on schedule and reliable to make good sales is something that the publishers really like. I'd imagine them to not be taking lightly to expensive projects that drag on which might, or might not, make 'a great game' and be sexy enough to sell at the same time(just the game being good isn't enough if you've spent millions after millions making the game). hl2 has to sell like hotcakes just to break even!(I shudder to think about dnf, though I wonder if they've really put any money into it all these years anyways)
maybe though one should not consider what is the 'best game' by merits of entertainment value, but by merits of possible sales vs. cost of making.
also, don't fall into vaporware in game engines, it's bad enough to fall to vaporware promises when you're the end user.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Here's the Google cache
more like when idiots try to run a business. who paid for all of those mountain trips, bbq's b-day parties? what is this tyco? rule #1 if you cant pay yourself first, you have no business paying others.
In other words :
"We forgot to make enough eye candy to fool our publisher."
Makes you think twice about Duke Nukem Forever.
It's still out there.
Running a game company isn't as easy as it sounds. Given the huge creative effort that goes into these games, there are multiple failure points. I speak from a position of experience as the co-founder of Near Death Studios, Inc., current developers and administrators of the online game, Meridian 59.
The biggest sin mentioned in the article isn't the trips (which can really help to build team spirit and loyalty), but rather talking about they should have fired the "least qualified people" and kept paying the founders. In a small gaming studio, there's no room for "least qualified" people. All your developers need to be top-notch and should ideally have multiple skill sets. If there's an obvious person to fire when the budget cuts come, that person probably should have been fired before the budget got tight.
The article also highlights the problem with the current developer and publisher relationships in modern game development. In reality, the publisher cares very little about you or your company, and cares even less about the creative aspects of game development. They look at the developer simply in terms of income potential.
Now, before any publisher types get their panties in a twist about this, let me give an example. I was watching the Mallrats DVD last night and watched the retrospective with Kevin Smith. He talked about creating the movie, and how people insisted that the movie's budget be at least $6 million. Mr. Smith was perplexed by this, since his previous film, Clerks cost $27,000 (if memory serves); the people in charge of the budget knew what a movie like Mallrats would cost to develop and wanted to make sure they didn't fall short on the budget before finishing the movie.
Yet, if Kevin Smith were a game developer, he would have asked for less money than it really required to make the game and probably wouldn't have even gotten that. Then when the costs ran over budget, he would have had to go back to the publisher and renegotiate a less favorable deal in order to get the money he should have gotten in the first place to finish the game. I've personally been in the industry for over 6 years now, and I've never heard of a developer getting more money than they thought they needed as Kevin Smith did with Mallrats.
Unfortunately, the publishers are only too happy to eat their young in order to profit. The publishers care very little about the business health of game developers and only care about the bottom line of how much the game makes. Sure, it's their perogative as a business, but it hinders the long-term growth of the industry if it does not cultivate talent to expand the market in the future. One "failure" like Escape Factory shows and they're done for. In the movie business, the "failure" of Mallrats was followed up by a series of wonderful movies including Chasing Amy and Dogma. We'll never know if Escape Factory could have done bigger and better things.
Sadly, the problems don't just stop there. As the article points out, you have to make the publisher think you're making the greatest game ever. That often means you have to lie to them. A friend of mine was working for an online RPG ("MMOG") for a large publisher. He had worked on previous online RPGs, so he knew the pitfalls. So, when the publisher came around to ask the status of the project, he was honest about the shortcomings. Other online RPG projects run by the same publisher didn't have the experience; they weren't able to accurately gauge their progress and told the publisher everything was fine even though they were many, many months behind where they should have been. In the end, my friend's project got cancelled while the other projects were still funded. In the end, the other projects ran late, had terrible launches, and one has already been cancelled after launch.
In the end, running a game development studio is not an easy task. Publisher callousness towards the developers makes it even worse, causing problems for the long-term health of the game development industry. This is my view of things as a self-pubished, self-funded independent online RPG developer.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
We believe in an extremely simple formula for success... No openings at this time, but if you're super talented and super passionate don't let that stop you. Send us your resume anyway. We just can't promise if and when we'll be able to get back to you.
Here's a bad concept gone even worse. Bob Gale (Back to the Future) came up with an idea and gave it to Data East's pinball division for turning into a game.
The story was that a bunch of people had magic tattoos that came alive and smashed people. A sub-par MK ripoff. But the story of how it came together was even more spectacular.
The designers were promised $20,000 each for finishing the game in 6 months. They ended up slapping something together fast, burning out within a few months. The team knew the game was utter shit, but only worked on it for the bonus. During playtesting, the playtesters also decided it was shit and played the pinball tables also being playtested... by that time the programmers knew it was shit, and were hoping the art would be really good, and the artists knew that it was shit and were hoping the programmers would come up with something really good.
They finished the game, half-assed, got their $20,000 checks, and quit the next day. The game was never released for obvious reasons. The existing prototypes were destroyed, except for two, one American version and one Japanese version.
That was the only video game designed by Data East. In the middle of it, they were bought out by SEGA.
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Is it better to just lie to the publisher?
Is it better to make a "B" title with last year's tech dressed up to look like this year's tech and sell it to the publisher as an "A" title. Then to try to make a completely new kick butt game?
If the publisher doesn't understand honest schedules, then it stands to reason the publisher isn't going to understand tech, but "buzzwords".
(And ironically, isn't that what we're mostly seeing from the media companies today?)
The schools teach that in an offhand sort of way... How the developer has to understand the customer's needs better than the customer does.
"These buffoons" made decisions that seem perfectly rational at the time but in retrospect are a bad idea. Cutting their unique feature is always a bad idea, but when you're coming up significantly short on the funding end, that unique feature probably represented 1/4th of the budget. They chose to focus on developing the character that needed the most work, rather than working on the character that was OK. The publisher made the switch to the PS2, which supports with the cutting of co-op play. Using a licensed engine is a very reasonable thing to do usually, especially if you have no experience on that platform. Not continuing with the prototype is completely understandable if you are making your "first and greatest" game. You don't want the baggage of your prototype and hey, you licensed an engine for a reason, right? Nobody likes firing people, even if they are bringing the team down. And many people underestimate the publisher's role in development.
In other words, they did not make any uncomprehensible mistakes, and they didn't make any mistakes that haven't been made many times before in.
BTW, 600k will get you two coders and a office. How will you pay the artists? Designers? Testers? Mo-cap? Voice actors? Texturers? Administrators? Musicians? It makes me cry how much people with no connection to the industry underestimate the development process. "Just make it great." "What, really, makes a game great?" "You know, not bad stuff." And then they go on to quote some price and team size that might get them Prince of Persia 1, not the 275 people who worked on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or the 230 people who worked on Halo.
600k is so low as to be downright insulting. What do you think we do all day? Play tetris? Why do you think we accept salaries of half of what we could earn elsewhere, doing twice the work?
The ______ Agenda
The following quote struck a chord. And when I changed a word or two in it, I found out why:
The notion of an industry grinding its creative force down to a soggy little nub isn't exactly a new idea. The two-word change should sound warning bells: if left unchecked, I consider it possible for the game industry of today to more and more resemble the music industry of today.
id got ther start producing a shareware product, as you said. It would behoove other game designers, especially those with solid concepts, to go a similar route, establish names for themselves before going to producers, and using their leverage to neegotiate an honest contract at least. (And this gives me some clue how to go about developing my game idea...!)
Using the internet for distribution might also have the side-effect of weeding out the weaklings, although as things are now it could also do more harm than good:
(Spoken like a true proud papa!) :)
And thus, another problem with another industry can be tracked to consumers. Personally, I think it's the consumer's duty to buy what they consider the best product on the market, even if they have to go somewhat out of their way to do so -- the notion of "voting with your wallet" taken to its logical conclusion. But, as you observe, consumers aren't focused as much on gameplay and story as they are on "ferret factor" -- whatever sound and graphics put the hardware on their high-end workstation-grade PC to the most (not necessarily best) use.
Producers are most interested in producing what the most consumers (seem to) want to buy. Either the consumers need to grow up or the producers need to take a better look at what they're really producing.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.