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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."
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.
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.
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.
I think you misunderstood cost to much.
"It's cost too much to make".
In fact, if anything, today's computer games are underpriced on the shelves.
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.
You're seeing a highly respected programmer saying he doesn't care if you pirate his games.
You're seeing an indie game creator say that game rentals are not the same as piracy.
You're seeing a respected game designer say that he doesn't believe piracy affects him.
You have here in order:
If you think that you have the moral high-ground to pirate games just because Chris Hecker is a hippy, then you're not really thinking straight about the whole issue, are you? Don't you think before you pirate a game Chris Hecker has worked on that you should ask the other 200 people that also worked on it to see if they mind?
Don't you already pirate games? Aren't you just scratching for any excuse to make your blatantly illegal activity seem morally OK?
Your conscience already seems to know what you don't: pirating games is illegal and rips off game publishers and developers. The only person it benefits is you, the ungrateful cheapskate.
A lawyer? How does that qualify for a "large scale project manager"? Did he manage the OJ Simpson case? Was he a corporate lawyer? I'm sure he's a great guy, but what large scale project has he managed? Outside of corporate law, it's all about billing hours and not about managing costs. Practicing law and producing a video game are very different.
While I might unfairly lump "developers" into one catagory, the fact remains that the game industry tends to eat its young. We hire kids straight out of college or art school because they are naive and cheap. Take an informal poll around the office. The demographics back my assertion up. There will be a high percentage of people who are in their twenties who have held only a few jobs outside of the industry. There precious few that have learned best practices outside of the game industry, which means they pick up the crappy ones that are currently in use.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not attacking the people in the industry, but the practices that we continually use that have always failed.