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Game Developers Burn Down the House
Plenty more excellent writeups to share as the Game Developer's Conference comes to an end. Gamespot has The Dark Spirit of Silent Hill, discussing how to craft the spooky survival horrors. Alice has worked her fingers to nubs writing on the Wonderland blog, and offers up Can MMOs Develop Mass Appeal?, and Burn the House Down, a ranting session between Warren Spector and some other surly curmudgeons. From the post: "But I have to say something so I want to say how this business is hopelessly broken. Haha. We're doing pretty much everything wrong. This is at the root of much of what you're gonna hear today. Games cost too much. They take too long to make. The whole concept of word of mouth, remember that? Holy cow it was nice."
Wow, the next time someone says "Don't pirate that game, download the demo and if you like it, buy it!", just point them at that "Burn the House Down" rant. Here are gaming's top people, all saying "Pirate my software!"
[o]_O
As a student trying to get into the industry, I find what they said to be very inspiring. Everyone has different opinions, but hearing them all like this from the different companies and developers of the industry, through the GDC, is really helping me to get a good idea of how things are and where they're going. It's really cool to be able to get all these different views on game development and put them all together; it really puts things into perspective for me.
Jeez, if there was one thing that could make up for missing Will Wright's talk earlier, it's sitting at his feet while this session was delivered! So my mood is slightly improved, although we have to wait between 2-6 weeks before GDC posts the recording (if they do so at all). Anyone find a transcript or a recording out there yet?
.. we have to find alternative sources of funding. Chris Crawford used to rant about how we need patrons.. I don't care if it's wealthy patrons, I don't care what it IS, but it's critical that we divorce funding from distribution.
So, my notes on the last session of the day. Hosted by Eric "Stage Presence" Zimmerman, the panel was feisty, passionate and speed-talking. I got most of it, bar the detail (who needs it?).
IGDA Session: Burning Down The House - Game Developers Rant
Warren Spector, Brenda Laurel, Jason Della Rocca, Chris Hecker.
Eric: We do not live in a perfect world and this is not a perfect industry. I'm moderating this panel of illustrious curmudgeons who have a lot to say about what's right and what's wrong with this industry today. Every GDC and in the corridors of the companies where we work, there are complaints. Grumblings. This year it's quality of life and working conditions in the industry. The idea of this panel is to bring out those rumblings, bring them to light. So without further ado:
Warren Spector:
First of all I don't hate you, Will Wright. I just had one of those "I'm not worthy" moments in the elevator. YOU ARE the 800lb gorilla.
[argh what did Will SAY already? alice]
OK. I don't feel very ranty actually. I tried to bail on this panel. But I have to say something so I want to say how this business is hopelessly broken. Haha. We're doing pretty much everything wrong. This is at the root of much of what you're gonna hear today. Games cost too much. They take too long to make. The whole concept of word of mouth, remember that? Holy cow it was nice.
Wal-Mart drives development decisions now. When publishers minimise risk by kow-towing to the retailers, you have a serious problem. When every game has to either be a blockbuster or a student film, we got a real problem. For my end of the game business all of our efforts are going into reaching a mainstream audience who may well even not be interested in what we do! My first game cost me 273,000 dollars. My next one is BLAH millions. How many of you work on games that make money? 4 out of 5 games lose money, according to one pundit who may be lying, admittedly. Can we do any worse if we just trusted the creative folks entirely instead of the publishers?
My point is coming. We're the only medium that lacks an alternate distribution system. All we have is boxed games sold at retail. This is changing a little. But think about our competition for your entertainment dollar. First run, broadcast, reruns, DVDs.. you name it. hardback, paperback, e-book. Theatre release, pay-per-view, video, DVD. We put our thing on the shelf at Wal-Mart, it sells or it doesn't, and OMG you just blew 10m dollars. The publishers not respecting developers, this is not the problem. We have a flawed distribution model. There are very few ways of getting a game done these days. Developers.. why should we get a huge return? We're taking some of the risk, but the $10m, the marketing space, the retail space all belong to someone else. We have winner-take-all business that carries a lot of risk. So
We need alternative forms of distribution too. I'm not saying publishers suck, although I do believe that in many cases. [laughter] If the plane went down who would care about the marketing guys? We need another way of getting games out there and in players' hands. If any of you bought half life 2 at Wal-Mart, please just leave the room. Has everyone bought Bioware's online modules? JUST BUY THEM, OK, even if you don't have the original games! We HAVE to get games into gamers' hands. So I'm not saying publishers are evil.. if
I for one, found the overall tone of the speech to be disheartening...it felt like the top names had given up. They pointed out problems and demanded solutions...that they didn't have. It was if they were imploring the audience to fix the problems for them. Kinda sad.
I did like how they all jumped up to smack down the guy who was complaining about game rentals. "Not all money streams lead to your wallet!"
Haha! BURN!
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
"games cost too much" has been said since the invention of video games, yet everyone still buys them, this is why the game companies still overprice what they sell
It's unrealistic to tell people to boycott games, they will still be bought. Games prices will remain high as long as games are sold
Business Voyeur
His argument is basically that the new 'in-order' chips are not going to be any faster on spaghetti game code, and that all they're really going to be better at is high-volume number-crunching for graphics and physics. And that this is somehow going to lead to worse games.
Obviously he hasn't looked at the performance profile for a game recently. The gnarly game logic doesn't really take up much of the time. The heavy-duty number-crunching is where all the cycles go. So, in fact, it's exactly the correct tradeoff to design hardware which makes those bits get faster, because those are the performance sensitive bits.
In addition, it's clear how throwing more processing power at graphics and physics makes for better graphics and physics. Whereas it's not at all clear that more processing power leads to better gamplay. You don't need more clock-cycles to make a more interesting game, just more imagination. So complaining that there isn't any more processing power available for 'gameplay-type' code is kind of a pointless complaint.
So you've talked about spyware and their ethics but didn't get to the article, eh? I'd say mod down, Off-Topic.
Now why are you saying they're making something "completely useless"? Because the games are clones or because they're games and you think games are pointless?
Since I have a hunch that it's the latter (...Flamebait...) I'll address that.
Games are a recreational activity. While they're not productive, they help society to exist. Entertainment is an important part of our lives, whether it consists of playing cards with your buddies, a candlelight dinner (or the reaction you're trying to evoke with it) or sitting in front of the TV and shooting hookers. A life without any entertainment (in the broad sense, not the corporate sense) isn't worth living, it's a chore and will ultimately break the individual. If you don't or can't do anything you enjoy you'll snap. And that is what games and other fun things are preventing: They make you happy. Happyness is an important factor for someone's productivity. Without happyness we'd all be incredibly depressed or might go insane and try to attain happyness in ways that hurt society or ourselves (rape, drugs, that afterlife your religion of choice is preaching, etc). Videogames are just another form of fun.
And let's not forget that videogames are also an art form. While some American capitalist (nothing against americans but their understanding about culture is different than that of the rest of the world) might dismiss art as pointless and unproductive the rest of the world's population sees art as an important part of life and culture.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Asheron's Call was popular in that it had a generic action aspect where you could dodge and move. But it stopped there. If someone made a MMOG that had action oriented hack and slash fights with some semblance of balance and counters for PVP, it would rule above all.
God spoke to me.
It might help that his games are huge bestsellers, but I much prefer this attitude to the "count every copy as a lost sale" mentality that the BSA uses in there numbers for the cost of piracy.
In this DRM headed world, how long before the media companies get congress to declare a "war on copyright infringement". Maybe we can start locking up people for an illicit copy of Doom 3. I guss they could hang out with the busted for a joint crowd.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
So, the rest of the world thinks video games are an important part of life and culture, but not the US? You think this is a shame and blame capitalists? This is perhaps the oddest anti-American rant I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
What did you expect from a nazi?
All three comments on piracy were stupid. If Warren Spector actually believes that, he's ignorant or out of touch. The fact that many people tried to pirate HL2 and then bought it when their piracy attempts failed (and then were subsequently banned) proves him wrong. Not just kind of wrong, but ignoring-that-which-is-blatantly-obvious wrong.
Warren Spector is, however, correct in that a digital distribution system would be nice. I'm speaking as a consumer rather than a game developer here. There are better reasons to want it than so you can let your schedules slip... after all open-source development teaches us that the only thing that makes software "finished" is deadlines. Steam is a step in the right direction, but the ability for Valve to arbitrarily shut off your access to the game isn't part of what I would call a good distribution system.
The rest of the talk seemed like people complaining about how The Man is stifling their ability to innovate. The industry is profit oriented... we all understand this. Yes, it affects how games are scheduled, funded, released, and distributed. Yes, this might not be the best thing for developers or consumers. But, if you don't like any of these things and you don't care how big your paycheck is, then you have no excuse not to go indie, right? If you're already indie, I wonder why you're complaining about any of this in the first place.
Why stay in an industry that's forcing you away from doing the things you want to do? Just so you can complain about it? That doesn't seem like a good reason.
I just read the Burn the House Down article. It brought a tear to my eye. I follow Spector and Rocca closely and I email Costikyan everyonce in a while. We all pretty much think that the development and distribution is broken.
I've contributed to two books about the subject. The first book I talked about implementing a total quality assurance system to the game industry that's been in use for decades in the auto industry. The second book was built around ways to prevent bug defects which include eliminating the counter-productiveness of 80 hour work weeks.
The game industry is totally insane. There's no way I'd ever go back unless I could have total control over quality, which means we don't ship until QA has final sign-off. (Yeah, I'm going to get a smartass reply saying "That'll never happen then" but I've got a system and it works.)
I know work in the health/medical field and deal directly with the Food & Drug Administration. The quality controls I deal with put anything in gaming to shame. Why the gaming industry doesn't use established practices in other industries is a mystery.
Well, actually it isn't. The problem is that managers have really never truly managed a large scale project outside of the industry and the developers and artists have never worked anything other than games. Gaming is too insulated and is becoming inbred. This practice is slowly making an army of retarded game developers who will shortly implode.
Well, if you look at Quake 3 and the bot AI they just made the bots slide around on a preprogrammed path while pointing the aim exactly at the target and then adding some shake based on skill. Yes, I do know it's not a new game, but the AI is pathetic compared to the gfx.
Why not give the aim a bit of weight so it has to be swung around, and gradually stabilize on the target if it stops moving relating to the aim angle? That's what players do and it wouldn't be hard to simulate. Right now it doesn't matter how much I move. If I stand 100 meters away they keep missing me when trying to snipe, and if I'm in close combat and move a lot in relation to their aim they always hit me. That's not how players work.
Why not have the AI's gather information just like humans and then face the same/similar weighted choices as the player? Anything better than - if shot then target=attacker - that seem to be popular.
I know this would probably make the bots more stupid, but I'd prefer that over predictable.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
you posted as anonymous so I can't look up your previous posts. ....I'd say you need another term for your program.. 'voluntaryware' or something... it isn't as bad as spyware if it clearly tells you exactly what it does and people voluntarily say 'yeah i don't mind if you watch'. Spyware is when people don't agree to be watched. I don't see fine print at the bottom of EULA as agreeing obviously that's still spying cos nobody reads that crap anyway.