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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?"
Before anyone runs off half-cocked, this article is NOT about the poor employee treatment at development houses such as EA. This article is about one man (Can make a difference? Whoops, wrong show.) stating that Indie developers can carve a market, and that we don't really need the big boys to make good games. He agrees to the fact that most "Hollywood" style games do need big development houses, but he also points out that the Indie can create games with far more depth and interesting gameplay.
His end point is that we should be creating games for the love of creating games. And while he doesn't say it in so many words, that's what gave us such classics as Commander Keen, Duke Nukem', Wing Commander, Ultima, Wolf3D, and Doom. That vision has been lost, and now game creating is all about making money. Why create games when the same money could be better spent on creating a blockbuster movie or a market investment? i.e. Games != money. Have to agree with him there.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Funny how it was, back in the begining that games were developed at home, by individuals, who put in whatever hours it took to get the thing done, usually settled for a set price and/or small additional royalty for their work. If they were working a career job, it wouldn't have justified the hours, but a sudden flood of $30,000 can make people think they've struck gold. Dollar votes separated the winners from the losers. It was a lot like the early rock and roll music scene.
Now, it is a career profession, so like any other line of work you do what you have to, respond to purchaser demand, follow "me-too" the market leaders and give up on actually writing something which would be fun to play. Kinda like the manufactured pop music of today.
I stopped by EA at SDWest and asked them when they'd be re-introducing M.U.L.E. or Mail Order Monsters, while some golf and football games were sitting there. The guy didn't even know what I was talking about. That's part of what's wrong, the industry has driven a wooden stake through the heart of it's heritage and buried it.
"Think we can work John Madden into a new version of Ultima?" ...
"You see, the troll here has lots of hit points, but the elf is much faster, so he'll probably try and end-around and
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There is no real value in most gaming nowadays. Super Mario Brother 35, or Sonic the hedghog 19, NBA basketball 2020. All of it is the same and has been played before. Sure, there are pretty graphics, but, what about game content and gameplay? I miss those years, I do. I like replay value, too. Everything now is, wow, that's cool... next.
Also, I don't like cross-platform games... Super special secret level on the PSXboxCube version.
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
The game industry IS headed into a negative direction for developers and creative people. We're effectively pigeonholing anyone who wants to continue expereimentation with interactivity into a smaller, "indie" category, while letting the larger corporations continue to rampantly milk the larger audience with repetitious products and higher budgets. The only exception to this I can think of is Will Wright being backed by EA, and if it weren't for that I'd lost hope almost completely.
People bitch because they see movies today, and then see the game industry embracing the mainstream-movie-esque visibility and profit of the same scene. These same people love games and the possiblities within the medium, and do not want to see the industry turn into a generic-blockbuster-factory-for-profict-only show.
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
On the other side is a market controlled by distributors. A great game can still do poorly if it doesn't make it onto the shelves at Wal-Mart, and lots of awesome movies get overlooked because they don't make it to the Cineplex.
This gives the movie studios and the game publishers the power over BOTH sides of the equation. The result is a string of predictable, safe, and highly derivitive products. The industry isn't "broken". You can't fix it. The market just works that way.
The good news is, it's still easier to make an indie game than an indie movie.
--This sig is in beta. Please let us know abut any errors you find.
although that also populates the industry purely with kids with stars in their eyes who are prepared to work for long hours for sod all. Thats the kind of workforce EA LOVES.
Here in the UK another developer just went bust the day they release their game. Great news for whoever makes money from that games sales (publishers, maybe some of the companies original shareholders?) but the poor sods who worked a year of crunch time on it are out of work with sod all bonus and sod all reward for their efforts.
this sucks.
People who make games SHOULD make lots of money. If you are an ace C++ games coder you DESERVE that ferrari and that big fuckoff bonus. You certainly deserve it as much as the pompous git in marketing who earns triple your salary.
Im not saying you should do it JUST for the money, but good games developers shouldn't be afraid to demand a bloody good wage for their (often very good) skills.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Here are the key paragraph's from Greg's rant. Absolutely classic stuff!
-Start-
As recently as 1992: games cost 200K. Next generation games will cost 20m. Publishers are becoming increasingly risk averse. Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto. Who was at the Microsoft keynote? I don't know about you but it made my flesh crawl. [laughter] The HD era? Bigger, louder? Big bucks to be made! Well not by you and me of course. Those budgets and teams ensure the death of innovation. Was your allegiance bought at the price of a television? Then there was the Nintendo keynote. This was the company who established the business model that has crucified the industry today.. Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer, and my question is what poor bastard's chest did he carve it from? [audience falls about]
How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can't afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it's ok because the HD era is here right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of Redwood City! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation's time there are still games to love. You can start today.
-End-
Hahahaha, who's heart did he pull out? Just brilliant!
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.
This is one of the major gripes that people have about games. Acquiring a publisher just adds another person in the contract which brings about more legal hassle (remember Valve delaying HL2's Steam release to match the hardcopy release?) and more overhead. Given the nature of software, physical copies are completely overrated unless they have interesting bonus material. It would be much nicer if companies who make games that are primarily online (Q3, CS, all MMORPGS) just dropped the whole physical aspect. They could just tack on a BitTorrent client to a lightweight download/install program and just send it out to everyone. Then encourage people to make copies of the data files and distribute it to friends (since this is impossible to stop) and just sell the CD keys online. This would be just as effective for games that already require an Internet connection. They could also just give out the installer on DVD for free in stores and sell the CD key online or sell physical cards in stores that contain a CD key.
One of these days, the companies will catch up with the state of technology.
--
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Wired article as proof
Iron realms makes text adventures.
Such games have not been published retail in approximately twenty years.
Players of such games are wildly at the fringes, and would probably happily admit it.
It would seem unwise to use Iron Realms' games, gamers, publication model, or general experiences as something that's generalizable in 2005.
Not that I disagree with all of his sentiments, of course.
It's called "false economy". EA believes that they'll get more work out of employees for less money by making them put in a rediculous number of hours. The problem is that EA fails to take note of how that impacts inidividual performance, team relationships, and overall morale. Not to mention the amount of experience they lose everytime they pitch out a burned-out programmer.
Management in such organisations are quite aware of what they are doing. What you say is very true in general. Unfortunately, in the games industry you have people lining up at the door looking for a way in. They can work their existing employees to death and if anyone has a problem with it, there are ten more people fighting to take their place. Hell, they could have daily whippings and there'd be someone who'd see it as a fringe benefit. Experience? They don't care. You need a couple of good developers at the top (and sometimes not even that!) and an endless rotating roster of 100 hours/week wage slaves working the oars.
Not saying it's right, just saying how things are. I'm trying my way at indie development myself because I hate this state of affairs and deep down, I completely agree with you.
And why is that necessarily a good thing? Does someone have to be an absolutely committed gamer to work in the video game industry? Wouldn't a more well-rounded team, with other skills and interests, lead to better results?
I've been programming for over 20 years, and have been in the software industry for around 12 years. I've worked for a word-processing company, a tax-software company, an ISP, a defense firm doing electronic-warfare simulation, a defense firm doing 3-D battlefield visualization, and two video-game companies. It never once occurred to me that I should look to specialize my software in one particular field; the true strength of a programmer is to be able to pick up any field and program it. But your attitude is consistent with the sort of people that I've met in the gaming industry -- they genuinely don't seem to understand that. I remember when we lost our audio programmer, and the higher-ups were panicked about hiring a new one. I told them I had done plenty of audio programming, and they told me no, they needed a specialist. I gave them a little history of the sort of audio programming I had done on my own, and left them speechless. They simply weren't willing to believe it. When I was being interviewed for my second video-game job, the president of the company told me that what he liked about my resume was my console experience; what he didn't like was that I didn't have enough console experience. Talk about tunnel vision.
I was hired to my first video-game job as a sort of "opportunity" programmer; they knew I was good, though I only had informal video-game experience, like the Quake II mod Weapons Of Destruction. I've been doing assembly-language programming and other low-level hardware tweaking since I was 12, so they gave me the (HUGE!) PlayStation 2 Hardware Reference manuals, and told me to get on with it. Within 3 months, I knew the machine well and was rewriting large sections of our code to either use the vector unit or to squeeze better into the FUBAR memory model. I was finding stuff that seemed really basic to me, but all the best "game programmer" minds that had worked at that company for 10+ years somehow couldn't find them. I even achieved an order-of-magnitude increase in performance for our physics engine. Oh, I picked up physics simulation while I was there too. (I remember being told by my boss that I was now considered the PS2 and physics-performance expert in the company. The same boss that was speechless about my audio experience. LOL!) It's not "passion about the video-game industry" that drove me to these accomplishments. I just normally act this way at work. (I act this way at play, also.)
Besides, what sort of grown adults could be so passionate about video games? The same sort that suffer from arrested development, that's who. The social atmosphere at both video-game companies where I worked was positively middle-school. I remember being told, hush-hush, that so-and-so "just doesn't like you", as if that was supposed to be some life-altering event. It was, too: I got fired from both jobs for reasons that didn't rise very far above that. A rejection letter I received recently from a video-game company actually went so far as to admit that.
If the video-game industry wants to improve itself, then the people involved first have to grow the hell up. The rest of what you need to do will become more obvious once you do that.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Sorry to interject - just in case it adds to the discussion I recorded and covered the rant session for Gamespot. The Wonderland transcript is great, just incomplete. If you want to see the whole thing, you can find the full transcript here.
GalenI imagine the developers are going to form a collective bargaining agreement here, and pretty quick. This is exactly the sort of worker unrest that led to the rise of labor unions in the early part of the 20th century. It's almost scary the parallels you can draw between the game developers and the meat packers (read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair again, if you haven't recently.) Rough working conditions, aggrieved employees stirring up dissent; next thing you know they're going to be taking torches and pitchforks into the EA executive suite.
John
I doubt that, say, GTA:San Andreas, could have been created without the huge investment that was made in it.
GTA 1 was the kind of game you could knock out in a couple of months. It also captured the moment and was hugely successful at the time.
GTA 2 came along, brought even more money in.
GTA 3: Liberty City moved to 3D and all the rest of it, but probably could have been developed off the profits of the first two.
GTA 3: Vice City could well have been developed off the profits of Liberty City.
GTA 3: San Andreas, true enough, couldn't be developed without a large bankroll - but by that point, they frankly had one. Then again, without the experience of the earlier titles, it would probably not have merited that money either.
To paraphrase the movie industry quote about scripts: Game ideas are like asses - Everyone has one.
Sure, GTA3:VC was an incredible game. The thing is, most indie developers probably shouldn't try to make it - they'd screw it up.
Making a successful game isn't about a good idea. It's about having good managers who know how to keep their programmers on track, developing good code without cutting corners. It's about actually, you know, planning milestones and such in advance so you don't have your coders crunching 20 hour days and coding while hallucinating. It's about knowing that good post-launch CS is the key to convincing players to go with your next title. It's about putting in the features that are fun, rather than the ones an obsessive developer has tunnel vision for.
Those are all skills which take time to gain. An indie developer probably shouldn't be developing a triple-A title. They should be developing the next Counter Strike or the next Turn Based Strategy title, getting the experience while they build their bankroll. Once they have a few hundred thousand in the bank then, sure, they should move on to the next really imaginative idea - like Will Wright's Spore concept and get to the point where they have milions to their name and experience with that scale of title.
There really isn't any reason why that should be impossible. So why don't we see it happening?
Because taking risks sucks. Few people mind betting everything when it's just your evenings and weekends outside a real job. The problem is, once you get successful, most developers don't want to feel the risk anymore (and that's excluding those who don't even wait to be successful and simply take a job at EA or wherever in the first place). A big publisher comes along, offers them a big sack of money and they never have to risk their nice big house again. Most of them take it.
Will Wright started with SimCity, Maxis evolved, got reasonably successful - then sold out to EA.
Peter Molyneau created Bullfrog, released Populous, Syndicate, etc. - then sold out.
The Roberts brothers created Origin, built up the Ultima Series, Wing Commander, Wing Commander 2 - then sold out.
RockStar started small with GTA1 and the like, grew, and ultimately sold out.
Westwood started small. Built some 2D RTS games, got hugely popular, sold out to EA.
About the only big names that haven't done so are Id, Valve and 3DRealms. Id has continued, sticking to its core beliefs, much to its credit. Valve had success with Halflife which its publisher (Sierra, now a part of Vivendi) barely advertised initially, built off a bought-in game engine (Quake 1) then went pretty much silent for years. 3DRealms is a good example of a smaller firm that got too successful too fast and now has enough money it can survive having a bunch of people who really don't know how to execute ideas as big as it seems to have for Duke - hence the constant restarting of the project.
The point is - a developer can start small and work their way big - but most decide they don't want to take the risk and sell out. The big publishers don't want to take the risks either - which is why their games are kind of boring. Still, just because m
Let's start with the good point I saw. Yes, you can produce some excellent games with virtually nothing. Elite is an absolute classic, and is most definitely not a text adventure. Sierra Online started with very little money and highly risque advertising. I'm not sure if US Gold ever had any in-house developers, they seemed to work entirely through contracts with home-based coders.
Now onto niche markets. There's a niche for text adventures, MUDs, etc. I'd say 99% of that niche is adequately maintained by the free (as in beer) free (as in free speech) software that is already out there. The standard engines meet most of the requirements a person might have for a text-based system.
Engines that I know of fall into three rough groupings - LP-based MUDs which use a C-like interpreter and "Tiny"-based MUDs which use a simple scripting language combined with triggers. There are also engines which don't fall into any category. A brief list of common engines is as follows:
Who, sanely and rationally, is going to try and compete in an already crowded market, where the competition is freely available and freely modifiable? There are places you can make money in the gaming market, but you need to carve your own niche, not hang onto the coat-tails of products you can't realisically compete with. If the niche you carve is any good, people will buy your products. Companies like Psygnosis started in this kind of way. They didn't start off as corporate giants.
Bad Point! Independent products are hard to market. His example was getting them sold in Blockbusters. Well, yeah, and I wouldn't expect to do well trying to get car mechanics to sell cheese, either.
If you want to sell indie movies, you go to indie movie theatres. That's why they are there. You sell to an audience most likely to be interested. If they're interested enough, maybe invite some movie critics along for the ride. Perhaps look at events like the Edinborough Fringe Festival and Edinborough Film Festival to circulate what you're doing. Meet the markets half-way, and you've a better chance of convincing them to do the other half. Do nothing at all, and neither will they.
Lastly, the difference between markets. There is no difference. The nike shoes produced by a 10 year old kid in a sweat-shop could just as easily be made by a 10 year old at their home. All they need is a design, materials and energy.
People make way too much of labels. Labels mean nothing. They used to indicate craftsmen and reliability, but companies have wormed their way out of anything approaching Quality Control and consumer protection. Especially in software, where you can buy a product and have no rights to complain if the product doesn't (and never will) exist.
the EULAs people happily accept amount to one thing. If you now have an unusable, empty disk - or even an empty box - you have voluntarily waived any and all rights to object or demand compensation.
They sell you a license, not a product. So long as the license is present and functionin
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Bit of an exaggeration ... these people are by no means starving, and they make a decent living - which is pretty darn good for someone fresh out of college. You get treated like a guy at Target because, in a way, you are. Sure, you got a shiny college degree, but that means jack in my world. The class teaches you the technical side of programming, the job teaches you the practicality of it. Im sure most of these "EA Cattle" have little idea how to go about actually making a complete game. EA shows them - and that is something I consider to be a part of their salary. Knowledge, not just money, is gained by working - and the former can be far more valuable than the latter.
And it is the most wonderful game I have played in years.
Now, I don't know if the games industry is going to take some path WIl Wright and Warren Spectre drag it down kicking and screaming, or if the EA megacorporate megabudget idiom will take over the industry completely; and either way, I don't know if "innovation", whatever the fuck that is, will result, or if it's a good thing. But looking at my Yoshi Touch and Go cartridge, I think that if what the game industry wants to go with the EA path rather than the Yoshi T&G sort of path, then it can fuck off and do it without me as a customer.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts