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Game Developers Fear Hollywood-ization of Gaming
While the new generation of console hardware is something to look forward too, CNet has a story discussing the possible downsides to more beefy machinery. In specific, the increase in development time that next-gen games will require may "Hollywood-ize" the games industry even more than it already has been. Warren Spector, from the article: "Once hardware guys give us the capability to do something spectacular, someone's going to spend the money to do something spectacular...The quality bar is going to be raised. Someone is going to spend $20 million or $30 million or $40 million, and the rest of us who don't have deep pockets like that are going to have to find some way to compete."
Graphics quality isn't everything, same as how in hollywood, FX aren't everything. A movie / game can be awesome in appearance without being 'intresting' in plot at all.
.... :P Think about how, say, Napoleon Dynamite or Blair Witch got immensely popular without mass amounts of money spent in their production. The same applies to games.
IMHO, plot and world matter MUCH more than the FX or graphics, so
Anybody can spend millions of dollars on flashy CGI graphics, but that will never replace things like "plot writing" and "gameplay" which will remain of high importance.
For example look at the Final Fantasy: The Movie. They spent tens of millions of dollars to do the most sophisticated (of the time) CGI rendering for that movie. But it failed because of the horribly poor plot writing and "acting". Sure this example isn't a game, but it exemplifies that flashy cinematic eyecandy is not what makes something great.
Videogames seem to becomming a more and more divergent market. I've noticed it a lot with the current generation of games.
It seems like there have become three sort of general categories for games, and systems. The first is analogous to hard core action movies with essentially no plot. They appeal to the largest number of players, beccause they appeal to people normally not inclined to play games, and also can be a sort of guilty pleasure for more hard-core gamers. The XBOX seems to be mostly this sort of games.
The second group is sort of like the hollywood drama, it appeals to people who like to thing their tastes are high brow, but in general they are cookie cutter, though they can often be good-enough to sustain people with higher brow tases during a drought. Occassionally one will really stand out as an excellent game. This seems to be what a lot of the most notable PS2 games are.
The last sort is the games noir, the less notable types of games who's fans like to be somewhat elitist and like to think of as being high brow. These correspond to independent films and such. They are usually innovative, and sometimes they work out to be something great, in which case they generally are picked up by the mainstream. These tend to be the type of games that the gamecube gets.
I think that what's going to happen is that the costs for the first, and somewhat for the second types of games will rise, and result in fruther hollywoodification of games, but I think it will also breath new life into the struggling third sort of games. The more every other game becomes a cookie cutter overhyped FX render of a giant turd, the sooner people will start to crave something really fun, unique, different.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I think the reason most forms of entertainment are becoming so passe is because it's no longer targeted at only rich or the geeky. Once entertainment is generated for the unwashed masses of proles it starts becoming stupid and tedious waste of time in the same way high school was stupid and tedious waste of time for most of us. The alternative is to start something else and draw enjoyment from it until the rest catch on and come in to ruin it for us again.
See, it's code. You can copy it. You can license it. Developing a really good game doesnt make other games worse, it makes them better. When a good game comes out, everyone buys license to use the game engine and makes more "really spectacular" things.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
How about making a game that doesn't rely on cheap special effects and ugly-looking "eyecandy" as a marketing ploy? There are still good games out there on the consoles, bargin games that are loads of fun to play.
Heck, games even ten years old would surive in this market with a little boost for the next gen consoles. The problem is the developers rely more on sequels of previous hits that don't get the full development time they deserve and end up bombing, when fans would much rather see innovation and fun elements.
I thought we've been down this road before.
Not exactly. Plot is nice, but it's GAMEPLAY that matters. How do you think Doom got so popular?
Sounds like Hollywood now, for crying out loud. This year, among others, we've got the sixth Star Wars, the fifth Batman movie, the fourth Harry Potter. And let's not mention the slew of derivatives drawn from other genres - Fantastic Four, Dukes of Hazzard - or the remakes of earlier films - Pink Panther, The Love Bug, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, War of the Worlds. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera - hell, if the gaming industry is as dry for new ideas as Hollywood is, might as well give 'em the big budgets to cover for it - if I can't have original, at least blow some shit up for me in a really expensive way.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
They fear the "Hollywood-ization" of the Gaming Industry?
What, is it 1985? Even by the middle of the 1980s, budgets were being blown on insanely stupid ideas trying to keep up with movies, buying movie licenses or paying stupid development costs to make the next Pac-Man or Donkey Kong.
ALL of the game companies, and I mean ALL: Atari, Taito, Nintendo, Gottlieb... they all spent TONS of money developing INSANELY dumb games trying to get blockbusters instead of focusing on good gameplay and letting people work out games other ways.
This is nothing new; just another article acting like there's something shiny and dew-like under the sun.
The Gaming Industry has been polluted for decades.
Funny, since I remember that the budget for Final Fantasy IX was already $40 million... and that was still on the original Playstation. I have no doubt they've gone higher since.
Those crazy effects will only cost a lot at first - shortly after people will create new tools that drastically lower the cost of implementing those effects. In other words, all three Lord of the Rings movies were made for less money than Terminator 2, and the effects look a lot better. Expect the same thing to happen with video games.
Shenmue cost $40-60 million dollars, and was/is the most expensive video game ever produced. In this case, the result was actually really frickin' good.
Shenmue at Wikipedia
The quality bar is going to be raised. Someone is going to spend $20 million or $30 million or $40 million, and the rest of us who don't have deep pockets like that are going to have to find some way to compete.
Half-Life 2 cost $40 million to make, and is arguably one of the best single player games ever made. It looks to me like the bar is already set, and at $40 million to boot. The person quoted in the article better FIND some deep pockets.
That said, a game doesn't have to cost that much to become popular. There are a few mods out there that are more popular than a lot of "blockbuster" games, and yet cost almost nothing to make. The trick seems to be making your first game low-budget as a startup company, and then using the proceeds from that to fund a big-budget followup.
With this perspective, a game like "Gish" or "Orbz" couldn't exist simply because a game like Halo or Morrowind "raised the bar". Several disparities exist between the hollywood distribution model and that of games:
Number One: "the internet". Right now, hollywood is very much against the internet for distributing movies legally because they can't figure out how to suck more profit for each of the middle men involved - the game industry, at least the game companies, LOVE this. The game publishing companies (much like the distribution companies for movies) might not like this, because it enables game creators to directly publish their own material (aka direct download, etc). This allows a tiny game company to get their product out without all the huge overhead costs involved in an "on the shelf" product. Traditionally in the movie industry, it was virtually impossible for a small independent film to get the same notice or distribution as a huge film. In the game industry, a game like Gish will be noticed and can be equally distributed without a huge budget.
Number Two: Games provide more long term entertainment than movies - as long as mods and mod developers are out there, a small game company/individual can get a huge amount of notice, because you can make mods on a shoestring budget and distribute them for next to nothing. Most recent game makers usually allow mods if not encourage them outright. Hollywood is old-school and too worried about payoffs and liscensing rights to even THINK of independant people using parts of their movies, etc (in general) to make a NEW movie or a changed version. Think of how lucas would shit if you made a short of starwars clips voiced over and published as a movie without paying him off first. It's a crude analog to a mod, but you get the idea.
Number three: Hollywood has too many middlemen involved with EVERYthing, thus costs are astronomical. You have to pay off this group and that union and these guys and those people just to get stuff done. Costs are spread all over the board, outside of the movie company as well as internally. With a game company, the costs outside of the company are less fragmented. You basically have creation/production (usually internal), publishing (external/internal) and maintenance (internal). Some people will argue that yes, some things are being outsourced at the moment, and these could be arguably be considered the same as the movies. That logic works until you realize that with Hollywood politics today, you have to hire/pay your unions, or pubishers can't carry your film. This and that contract prohibit a non-union film maker from being distributed by someone with an agreement with the unions, etc, blah blah. That kind of setup doesn't exist (yet!) in the games industry, due to the internet distribution model as a possibility:
"You won't carry my games? Screw you, I'll publish them myself."
As a matter of fact, movie makers like Robert Rodriguez are moving the movie industry toward how game makers create stuff: "You wont publish my movie without union workers? Screw you, I'll publish it myself"
The two industries are very different right now, and the sooner everyone realizes this, the better.
Comparing hollywood and video game production as a person who does neither, I'm still aware that hollywood has extensive prop libraries. What I find lame about the video game industry is that code and objects are so easy to store. Prop houses don't keep entire sets because they take up too much space. Entire levels though fit on a hard drive.
I'm not suggesting developers give away their material to competitors for free. Charge some money, but make it still cheaper for the licensors than re-modeling the wheel for the thousandth time. This should make development less costly and faster.
For coding the games, I know code is complicated, but can't some of it, particularly for games sharing the same engine, be modularized and techniques shared? Or does optimizing each game for maximum frame rate make this impossible? It just seems like there must be some things that can speed up coding.