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Game Industry Opinion Continues to Burn
The Game Developer's Rant session held at the GDC continues to reverberate through the industry. GameDev.net and Greg Costikyan's site have more details on the session itself, while Terra Nova's original thread on the subject has been followed up by an open letter to the participants from Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms Entertainment. From Matt's letter: "Anyway, please, just stop the whining. Stop telling people about how horrible the games industry is. Stop telling them that they can't succeed without radical industry changes. It's bunk and you should know better. Are you intentionally trying to discourage people from getting into the industry?"
I am part of a small studio who makes first party games for the playstation2. I don't work 80 hours a week. During crunch time I might get up to 60 hours, but that's rare.
I don't understand why EA works their employees to death.
Seems that remark resembles comments made by Henry Ford and GM's Alfred P. Sloan...
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
You don't need bigboys to make big game titles. Right, it's not about software development. However, in the unfortunate video game industry, bigboys can afford big lawyers. Which equals to buying big licenses and claiming ownership to intangible things.
Player associations, porshe and ferrari licenses are just for starters in 2004/5. I guarantee you 10 years from now, someone company would have draw out a contract for guns. Thompson, Springfield, M16, colt handguns... these will only appear in exclusive war games. Afterwards maybe the government will impose a tax on using U.S military vechicles in games.
Last year I bought Doom 3 and was totally dissapointed with it. What was initially a great horror game became a repetitve formulaic (?) shooter. After that I still haven't got round to buying half life 2, halo 2, or even World of Warcraft (although I'm getting nagged by friends to get online with Warcraft)
The only games I've spent money on in the last 12 months have been indie games. Why? Because I got bored with sequels and pretty gaming engines. Games are meant to be fun and IMHO they are becoming products to be churned out. With the indie stuff I tend to find that more thought has gone into the level design and tuning the gameplay. Thay are never going to be the prettiest titles around, but I never feel cheated or dissapointed after a purchase. Pretty graphics only go so far . . .
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
The only games I've spent money on in the last 12 months have been indie games. Why? Because I got bored with sequels and pretty gaming engines. Games are meant to be fun and IMHO they are becoming products to be churned out. With the indie stuff I tend to find that more thought has gone into the level design and tuning the gameplay
I could not agree more. I really miss the old games (SNES-era) where companies didn't put the majority of their focus on games looking jaw-droppingly realistic, but rather they put their effort into making the game fun. It seems that this old-spirit has been pretty much extinguished in large dev houses and replaced with the mantra "Make games faster! Make more money!". Which is one reason why I decided to take things into my own hands and start developing a RPG game with the old-spirit.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
In my opinion, it's hard to distinguish a honest review from a bought review though : Defenitely if they are about blockbuster-games.