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Death to the Games Industry
Greg Costikyan has an article up on The Escapist railing against the current state of the industry. Bigger budgets, obese publishers, and creatively dead franchises that continue to see publishing are snuffing out the opportunity for innovation in an increasingly mainstream market. From the article: "For the sake of the industry, for the sake of gamers who want to experience something new and cool, for the sake of developers who want to do more than the same-old same-old, for the sake of our souls, we have to get out of this trap. If we don't, as developers, all we will be doing for the rest of eternity is making nicer road textures and better-lit car models for games with the same basic gameplay as Pole Position. Spector is right. We must blow up this business model, or we are all doomed. What do we want? What would be ideal? A market that serves creative vision instead of suppressing it. An audience that prizes gameplay over glitz. A business that allows niche product to be commercially successful - not necessarily or even ideally on the same scale as the conventional market, but on a much more modest one: profitability with sales of a few tens of thousands of units, not millions. And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work."
With such gripping, original, and sure-to-be-great games as "50 Cent: Bulletproof" coming up, I find this forecast completely unrealistic.
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
pretty graphics ..pick two...
good gameplay
small budget
So here's to the next revolution. I can't wait for more indy games, movies, music.
I don't get it.
We all know that Nethack beats the competition hands down!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The most important people in a game publisher or development house are the games testers because their input is most relevant to shaping the product as it will apear to the users - people like them. Sadly the "important" people are the marketeers.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
I got a chance to read this a couple days ago. I can't really argue with anything there. However, it doesn't really address whether or not the situation will be helped by popularizing alternative distribution methods like Steam. One would hope that this would be enough of a wake-up call for Valve to stop sitting on their thumbs about getting more content sent over their service.
The problem here is not about bloated, vapid monopolies stomping on creativity: programmers like Carmack will always exist, and will revolutionize the gaming industry through sheer willpower alone.
I for one conjecture there just aren't enough good programmers in the world, otherwise we would see more games as revolutionary as Doom and Quake popping up on the interent.
When is the last time a solid freeware game caught the imagination of millions? About 15 years.
Don't blame it on corporations, blame it on the fact that genius is rare!
Maybe people are just too demanding: they want something new every week and the gaming industry doesn't move fast enough to satisfy the short attention spans of young adults. WHy? Because you just can't write a winner every 6 months!!!
Realize that inspiration only comes once in a great while, and for god's sake, find another hobby!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
If they truly want to "challenge everything", they can start by bringing wing commander back and putting an end to the failure they call Ultima.
Mebbe the game industry is where it's at cuz the people like what they're getting. Make product people want and they will flock to it. Buy low Sell high to make money. The sky is dark at night outside. Water is wet at room temperature on earth.
While I admit this is the better article than what was linked the other day, do we really need TWO adverstisements for the Escapist this week? Get a slashbox set up and if they want to foster discussion they can host their own forums. Seriously, as much as I like the Escapist, the fact that their articles are passing for content here is pissing me off.
The person who pays for the work deserves to own the work. This is the same idiotic logic where we have photographers owning the rights to YOUR wedding pics, even though you paid for them. If the creator wants to own the rights, then the creator should PAY for them.
Artists should have the same rights as any other tradesman. Does the carpenter own the rights to your kitchen just because he builds the cabinets?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Ultimately, there has to be a tax imposed by the Meta system to remove Metas from circulation just as governments control demand for fiat currency by demanding said fiat currency for legal tender (primarily tax payment) -- but the principle should work to let small game authors get a presence and make money if the rules of their game are more appealing to the players than other games.
Seastead this.
"A market that serves creative vision instead of suppressing it."
A market that serves creative vision will always be bought-out by someone in a market without it. What we really need is a combination of the two, working together.
Matthew Grint Midnight Artists
That's exactly what Nintendo has been saying for years.
There will always be the simple games, and old games like Doom that will never die, people updated them and still play them on the internet.
Freedom of Speech only include discussion that are approved by the RIAA, MPAA and DMCA.
"There should be a world where I, as a developer, am free to do what I want, and people should buy games for MY reasons, not theirs."
There are plenty of creative, innovative games out there that didn't cost a million dollars to make, and to say that Burnout 3 is a glitzier version of Pole Position is ridiculous. Unfortunately, the 'We' he's talking about is developers -- as gamers, 'We' are doing fine, thank you very much.
In many ways, the gaming industry has become a victim of their own success. When a certain business model brings in lots of cash, it's very tough to give up that model, even if it obviously won't work forever. Successful companies become very fat and happy and will resist change as much as possible. Smaller game makers can eat EA's lunch, since they will be able to effectively innovate as opposed to just tweaking last year's release a little bit. When another company offers gamers something that EA doesn't, the switch will take place. Like in any other industry, the giants will have to reinvent themselves or die off. It's just a matter of how long it takes them to see the changing marketplace.
Sorry, couldn't resist. :)
Just because you can make a good game, Warren, (or can you - blackandwhite) doesn't mean you are somehow an economist in of the industry.
These wankers should stop paying attention to the 'industry' and just look at themselves and ask - 'How can I make the most money possible?' The inevitable answer is to make great games. Build it and they will come. Taking that step alone will address all of their concerns about the 'industry.'
What better example than Blizzard?
Seriously...I remember the thrill of buying a 16K RAM card so I could play the original Castle Wolfenstien on my Apple ][+.
Halt! Shizen! That game was awesome!
Reminder: Apple owns 1/255th of the internet.
Most creative industries reach this cookie-cutter, shrink-wrap product stage because people just buy it.
Why innovate or take risks? The business model has evolved to a guaranteed-sales stage. People are stupid. They're happy with top production values and no emotional depth or innovative concept.
Please stop buying crap, people!
For some reason I am reminded of this movie.
I've been saying this for years now.
... etc
"what" new textures?"
And now someone else repeats it and it's brilliant insightful news...
The problem is this isn't a game specific problem. Most of industry is based around re-hashing last weeks ideas. And last weeks ideas are re-hashes of two week ago ideas,
Look at TV? When reality TV shows really blew up we saw quite a few genres [love or hate em] like fear factor, those dating ones, etc.
Now it's all the same BS. We're in the 12th season of survivor $PLACE and the great race is getting set on sound stage C.
Why do people watch this crap? Because it's what's on TV. People would rather watch crap then nothing! [News at 11!!!].
Imagine this, why do people buy Intel machines? Because it's all that's out there [e.g. Dell, Gateway and HP].
Totally amazing that the EXACT SAME problems occur in computing and TV, two totally unrelated fields... And now people are realizing it's happening in software and games too.
Shocking!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This doesn't really seem like a problem. If there are enough developers that feel that they don't want to work for a giant company, why not start your own?
The main reason not to start your own company is that you are risk adverse. Big companies are also risk adverse. It's a natural thing. Why start your own company, when you can work for an established company? Why try a new game format when you have a formula that makes a lot of money.
There might be other reasons not to start a new company. Many developers are not business types. That's fine, find a business type and make them a partner. If no business type will touch your business plan, then that probably is your answer as to why such a company doesn't exist.
I think there probably is room for smaller game development shops that make lower budget games. However, if that's what you want, then buck it up and start your own businees. Don't just piss and moan that someone else should do it.
As for me, I'm going to go play some Unreal Tournament and wait for Civ 4 to come out.
But other creative fields are facing a greater crisis now than they have before (most notably the movie industry). I don't know if it's due to the internet resulting in broader exposure of people to more creative works, leading to disillusionment at the similarity between works, or what, but even if it's a problem that exists across all fields, it still may need to be grappled with now.
Wait a second, does this mean that Madden '07 should be blown up too? Hell, can't EA just buy up the rights to be the only one who gets to make games? Wait a sec, I think Creative just bought, I mean was granted that patent..
[an error occurred while processing this sig]
Looks like the article forgot games such as Half Life 2, Doom 3, Far Cry, World of Warcraft, UT2004, Call Of Duty and Splinter Cell.
These are excellent examples of creative products, which made millions for the companies, and still do - especially WoW.
No pun intended?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I think the subject line pretty much says it all.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
"And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work."
The word you're looking for is shareware.
As a gamer, and an avid one at that, I find that this is really becoming true. It's really hard to find a game that's not reminiscent of something of past games. Last game that left me utterly stunned was MGS, still one of my favorite games of all time. Now in Everquest II, I think this particular report is speaking more truth than not at it's kernal. (Corporate America != Good games, GAMERS do!) This is yet another situation where I think people who want to make good games should get off their butt and go out and do it. It's just like any other job, a lot of friggin hard work. I want to be one of those people too, so I'm pursuing a degree in programming. If you don't like what's available you have three choices; deal, ignore, or change it. I opt for the third.
C'mon! Derivitive, cloned, and licensed crap doesn't equal great games?!? Get Out Of Town! From all the "unbiased" reviews all you need is either FPS, Stealth, Sex, Violence, or a rapper to be a hit.
The game industry for some reason is set up to mimic Hollywood... and for even more puzzling reasons people think this is a good thing. Morons. The 360 and PS3 will do nothing but ensure that big dev studios keep cranking out the same FPS/Sports/Licensed garbage en masse as they are "safe" genre's and are fairly guaranteed returns when development costs are through the roof. I mean, who wants to take a risk on an "innovative" or "fresh" title when millions are on the line?
God, I so hope Nintendo mops the floor with the 360 and PS3 so the industry can get back to some semblance of innovation and gameplay. When will morons get sick of their damn FPS clones and crave a real game... do people even remember what a totally new and innovative game is like anymore? Hint: GTA:[insert city name], Doom[insert roman numeral], Madden[insert next year], etc. are NOT innovative!
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Nope. Can't compete with Zork I or Adventure. Now Those are addictive!
It's interesting that the author chose to write an article with a main point that games shouldn't have to be all about the pretty graphics, and then put said article on top of pretty graphics that make it hard to read.
Black on white: it works. White on peacock? Not so much.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
I am. My friend and I are developing a PC game that plays like a console -- an XBox controller (or maybe just a USB adapter) will be included with each copy of the game and is required if you want to play the game. We would have developed for the console itself, but PC development is much easier for your first game.
Our game (thus far untitled) will be similar in style to Mario 64 in that you have to collect 'goals' (Stars in M64), 'coins', and so on. However, it will include a full level and object creation system and documentation. People can create their own 3D platformer! We're also building a website that customers can use to upload their creations or download others' creations.
I'm wary to post the URL to our project's website here, as it's hosted on my own FuitadNET webspace, and I really don't feel like going over the bandwidth limit on the first day of the month. If you're interested, you can see what we have so far (note that the website is incomplete and screenshots are several months old) at bright night games.com (remove spaces, obviously).
We plan to be finished by late October or early November.
I can't help but think that "news for nerds" might not be "stuff that matters" for the next few weeks.
Mike Hoye
Sure Valve has their Steam delivery system (whether you like it or not)
Certainly, they could push more 'content' through Steam.
However, this isn't addressing the problem of the content itself being lacklustre or just 'milking' previous successful products such as HL2.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
For years the movie industry was predicting that the game industry would overtake them. And once it did movies would just give up and suck. Now that Games are king, they suck too. Wowie.
This is the same problem that will soon occur with podcasts. It's not at all the industry's fault. It's the fault of the public. To put it in terms of the podcast community, the reason the big name casts are the most popular is that you see a name you recognize and check it out, and continue to check it out, despite that it might not be the best there is. Now, you check 20 other things as well that are all independent, and you think "oh, i'm supporting indy more because give them more attention." The problem is that the indy things you check aren't the same 20 indy things everyone else checks, but the corporate america things on your list are the same as everyone else's, so when you multiply your individual model across everyone, you get a spike in the big corporations and little tiny spikes for indy. I'm not throwing stones. I'm human. I have a CNN link under my news with slashdot and drudge and a couple tiny sites nobody checks, but that 1 CNN link is crushing everyone else. DOES ANYONE REALLY HAVE A SOLUTION TO THIS?! It's a human condition concerning pattern recognition, which is the nature of our consciousness. What can you really do about that?
This doom and gloom stuff from game industry people is becoming officially tiresome. So the game industry is becoming like other mass media industries. Whatever. Just because Hollywood spits out Fantastic Four or War of the Worlds doesn't mean someone still isn't making lots of smaller perfectly good independent films. And it doesn't even mean that the big budget hollywood films are always bad. (Though IMO they generally are.)
I could really give a crap about the latest Madden release or Final Fantasy XXXIV or most of the big gaming franchises. I still find lots of games coming out that I want to play, more than I even have time to play.
So yes, shocked, shocked I am to discover marketing and profiteering going on in this establishment. But so the fuck what? If you're in the game industry and you don't like games with billion dollar budgets and bleeding edge graphics, then make your own damn game on the cheap and publish it yourself. What's that? It's hard to get reliable income that way? Oops! Welcome to the entertainment industry. Where independent filmmakers have for decades been living on ketchup soup and maxed out credit cards to try and get their films in front of people.
Ultima Online was the greatest mmo ever if you ask me. EA just took it and butt f**ked it into the ground. So don't say its a failure its simply they sucked all the life force out of it like a vampire.
As long as you have to get shelf space at a game store, stores will go with what has worked in the past and products from major companies. When we see game consoles with built in Rigths management that can download games from online then indie games will boom.
Lets face it, the most imaginitve games come from nintendo, one of the 500 pound gorilla of the industry, who can afford to be creative. Small developerds can only get shelf space making copies of grand theft auto.
With more and more chrome.
Just like the auto industry, it's going down the tubes. Even back when I was a SMOG, in the old days before the Steve Jackson raid, the trend lines were becoming obvious.
So, you can either ask yourself: what are we doing - and why? Or you can keep down the same path and then be surprised.
Look, I'll be honest - the future is games like Nintendogs and Sims: The Urbz - not FPS and race car and gangsta games. You either adapt or die.
So either choose to do a simple game design that's fun or a multi-market game that has multiple linkages - or go for the chrome spif and watch your industry go belly up.
Meanwhile I'll be playing Japanese games and Flash games, cause you've gone down the wrong road.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've been playing video games since the Atari 2600/286 PC, and guess what: the industry has always been like this. 90% of the video games ever released are derivative, unoriginal, poorly thought-out crap. The ratio of good games/crap hasn't changed substantially in 20 years. Fortunately the industry manages to produce more than enough fun, original games to keep people interested.
And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work.
Great - another arena in which the same mantra will be repeated over and over again. Video game creators can retain control of their IP just the same as a musician can. But they routinely GIVE IT UP for profitability. If they want to do that, that's their perogative. Distribution isn't a barrier anymore, but marketing and advertising is. Without exposure, your art won't be profitable, and musicians and video game designers are willing to give up control for that.
It's -their- choice to do that, not your excuse to pirate the art that they produce.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
In Asia, video games have a wider varieties in themes and controls. Over there, your choices are just FPS, RPG, 2D/3D Fighters, or Sports games. Games like Katamari Damacy http://www.namco.com/games/katamari_damacy/ are innovative and unique , just the type of thing that you'll never see from a North American publisher.
i've heard people talk about the doom and terror that is coming to the gaming industry in the near future for months now. huge studdios will stifle the creation of quality content, only what sells will get made. you'll notice these articles only pop up in between big releases, no one was talking like this right after Battlefeild 2, World of Warcraft or Half Life 2 game out. the gaming industry is just like television now, there's lots being realeased and there's still the same ratio of crap to quality, just more crap total. good games will still be made, you just may have to wait a second and realize awesome games don't come along every 3 months or whatever.
He has - this is Greg Costikyan we're talking about - he's an A-list old-skool game designer.
Nice troll, though.
-EvilMagnus
I think a large part of the problem with developing creative games, is that developing a game that will be complex enough to reach the mainstream is that it typically requires a lot of resources.
Of course, business people have the resources, and they don't like to take risks. They have to answer to shareholders, be responsible to their employee's job security, etc.
Unlike the 80s and even 90s when a group of programmers, sitting around could say: "Hey, that's a great idea! Let's build it!"
Then again, that sounds like every other facet of the modern computer world anyway.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
EA is responsible for breaking Ultima, including UO and Ultima 9. Ultima was probably the best computer RPG of all time before EA.
EA also ended Wing Commander. Wing Commander II and III were amazingly great games. WC4 and the movie just ended it. Instead of going for quality, they went for quantity and fast-to-market. So they blew it - again.
If RG hadn't sold out, and kept Origin as an independent company, all of this might be a lot different.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
How I miss saving up my pocket money to buy the latest sega master system game, back then no one cared what went on behind the scenes.
God, I so hope Nintendo mops the floor with the 360 and PS3 so the industry can get back to some semblance of innovation and gameplay. When will morons get sick of their damn FPS clones and crave a real game... do people even remember what a totally new and innovative game is like anymore? Hint: GTA:[insert city name], Doom[insert roman numeral], Madden[insert next year], etc. are NOT innovative!
You and me both - FPS and driving games are becoming so boring that you can literally feel the paint peel off of your eyelids with all the me-too games.
It's all about the fun and the story - and not adding realistic rain drop shadow effects with ray tracing chrome.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Sounds like the same thing the movie industry went through long ago. Look at the crap movies we have to deal with today. The biggest difference is that games can be bought and sold totally online. Look at DOOM shareware for a great example.
Give me the budget that they have in their disposal and I will give you the best game since Civilization. Otherwise, what's the point in saying that?
I find it much more fun to play Zelda on ZSNES than any of the new games (HL2 and Icewind Dale were the only new games I finished, or even played for more than 5 minutes, for that matter). I spent countless hours of Super Mario on my gameboy, and that was way more entertaining than any game these days...
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Any company should be able to make games for any games console without payment to the games console. Its just like any other restrictive market, it needs to be broken open. Selling a console below cost is dumping.
common wisdom today says you need a staff of 50-100, art directors, project managers, legal staff, blahblah, server farms, marketing deals, and about 100,000 USD and two years expenses to even begin work. This is very far from the basement/garage game creators we had in the seventies/eighties. The development tools alone are priced to keep out noncorporate developers.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
This sounds like EXACTLY what's going on with the current crop of movies. But this has lasted for 10+ years. Crappy movie, put out a video game, then put out a sequal, and a sequal to the game. Lame.
Or EA could
-buy them out
-crowd them out of the market by buying up a relevant license
-kill sales by pre-announcing a similar product
The PC market is much more resistant to these tactics of course, people can go public with a finished game without EA ever even knowing about it. The barriers to entry in the console market are comparatively huge.
This is why you don't see EA dominating the PC space as much. God bless PC gaming.
The president has been kidnapped by ninjas!
Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?
(This post is a little scatter-brained. Sorry)
Personally, I think that the creation of 3D games was really the downfall of the industry. It seems to me that the requirement for games to be 3D has stifled industry creativity.
Being something of a game developer myself, I've found that 3D games are _much_ harder to be creative with, and also make the games _easier_. It may seem odd to the outsider that the one little additional dimension makes that much of a difference, but once you've tried making both types of games, you can really tell. I think the games industry would be much better off if we dropped most of this 3D nonsense and went back to good ol' 2D games.
Here's an example of where 3D makes games "easier." Let's say you're standing in a cave in a 2D game. Enemy in front of you shoots at you. You have to time your jump correctly so that you don't get nailed by his projectile. Now you're standing in the same cave, but in a 3D world. Enemy in front of you shoots at you. Simply sidestep to the left once and you're done. There's no timing, no skill, no fun. In this case, 2D is vastly superior from a gaming standpoint.
That's not to say that 3D doesn't have its place. FPS games would be absolute crap in a 2D environment -- hell, would they even be possible? Other games such as Myst require a level of detail that is only possible with 3D graphics. But for the vast majority of games, especially on console, I think that 2D helps invoke creativity, brings down prices, and takes _much_ less time to develop.
I call shenanigans.
The gaming market is growing annually at a frantic pace, and so many games are being produced that customers now have to make difficult decisions with their gaming dollars. At the same time, *lots* of decent quality gaming / media engines are available for free ( id, CrystalSpace, SDL, etc ) or low cost( torque, etc ).
To fill the low cost void from the major producers, many little companies are jumping in to provide simpler but interesting games (mostly 2D), websites offering free older games within browsers, or open source levels for existing games.
The only problem I see with gaming is the lack of open tool solutions for the consoles. The biggest reported reason for this is that the console producers are generally losing money on every console they sell, so providing an open API reduces the revenue they desire to stay profitable. The solution for this would be to release an open API for consoles after a couple of years. That could then spur sales of the consoles at the time when their sales are beginning to drop off (and presumably they have already made money through other game sales). A second solution looks strikingly like what the press reports are alluding to with the PS3 - it's a computer! (gee, ya'think?). If it could profitably be released with a supported OS, games could be produced on that.
It's true that company's like EA are milking franchises for all their worth, but they'd stop doing that if they didn't sell so well! Capitalism is a great thing. If 3 million people stopped buying every version of every Madden title available, EA might actually be willing to invest in alternative titles. Innovative titles that are actually *fun* to play sell remarkably well - just look what happened with RTS, Sims, Creature based games...
When other companies offer something EA doesn't, EA will just sit on them. Maybe they'll buy them out and destroy any future products made by the company while dismantling it. Maybe they'll just drown them in crap releases to make it less likely that the gem will be seen in the rough. But whatever they will do, you can be sure it'll be effective enough to kill the attempt.
Don't kid yourself, we are well past the point where 'started in our garage' company has any chance of overturning the state of affairs without the big developer's consent or the help of some bigger bully.
Games are made poorly probably because they're made by the wrong people, viz.: programmers. Game production should perhaps be something like movie production -- the programmers should correspond to the set designers, not the director or writer.
With every complete moron that spends $50 for the newest Final Fanatsy game, or $50 for flaming turds like Doom III, or shells out $12/mo. for the lastest flaming turd or a MMORPG that has the same gameplay as they have for the past decade, it only kills the reason most fo us grew up loving games.
Blame the common gamers. They're the ones buying the complete pieces of sh*t over and over again.
And that's why it's dead, and noone can really save it.
We must be cruel to be kind, and kill the industry so it can come back the wya it once was.
I recall and interview back when Doom III was being developed. Something about Carmack indicating being tied to the first person shooter genre because of the popularity of Doom, Quake, etc.
I can see how a publisher can become known for a certain game genre almost like an actor can become typecast. I can also see how business considerations can put heavy pressure to "stay with what you are known for".
Don't know the answer. Perhaps companies that are doing well can decide to risk capital in exchange for expanding into a different genre. To do that, however, you'd have to be prepared to take losses, at least in the short term. I suppose you could rationalize it as allowing more creative freedom to your staff - thereby attacting more creative designers to your group.
Other than that, however, it seems that innovation would be less of an initial risk for the small time independent developers. In fact, it's just about mandatory since copying an existing genre will likely just get him squashed by the bigger publishers. Therefore, innovation is his only potential edge.
This makes it a good thing that companies like Id Software are willing to release source code from time to time - it gives the next generation something to cut thier teeth on.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
When is the last time a solid freeware game caught the imagination of millions? About 15 years.
That's because with today's hardware and the expectation of modern day gamers, it is not economically feasible for a couple guys in their garage to make a massively popular game.
Game development costs are huge. It takes as much or more money to make a AAA title as it does to make a Hollywood movie. And when an innovative and original title comes out and is met in the market with a yawn and no sales (Ico, Res, Katamari Damacy, Animal Crossing - great reviews, no sales), it makes it that much more unlikely that publishers will finance another one.
It's not that there are original ideas are rare, it's that those ideas don't sell a million copies, and that's what you need to finance a game today.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
My point is simply that if a great game is something you really want, then I don't think you need that huge budget. I realize it takes lots of (unpaid) time and dedication, but so do lots of things.
Take the case of id Software's Quake 3. The engine was revolutionary at the time (like all of Carmacks work), but some argue that id games are all the same; they are reincarnated to fit the current market. Well, that may be true, but this sort of technology helps others too. Perhaps, but not all developers have to spend the time to create these new engines that can produce high polygon rendering and reasonable speeds.
Once this sort of technology is out there, other developers can get their hands on it and begin to create their own games based off of it, that's the idea behind the engine-game relationship. It allows developers who may be skilled in designing games, but lack the manpower to reach that level of technology, to produce games that are of the current market standard. And when they do, other developers come out of their closets and do the same thing. The result is a market with new and interesting game ideas that developers were able to paint over the canvas that was the engine of what other companies were able to create. For example, I do not think American McGee would have been able to create Alice (a very unqiue game with several aspects never seen in the market before) base off of Carmack's work.
A lot of people seem to be making the argument, like this guy is, that these new games such as these new Halo's, Unreal's, Doom's, Quake's, etc, are all eyecandy glossed over old games. Well some people like to play them, and others like to use them to create different games.
I know this guy isn't comparing the detail of a 12 year old game to todays, how is this proving his point? Obviously there will be more polygons, just like in any other field.
Not many people make that arguement. Many people perfer gameplay over graphics, but if the graphics are there and do not interfer with the gameplay, why not have both? Doom was revolutionary for it's time - it brought in a whole new wave of gaming concepts; Doom 3 expands on that, not in the gameplay area but in technology. Doom 3 showcased Carmack's engine, and eventually it will be used for innovative new games (I'd like to see American McGee do something with it). In 2 years no one will be criticizing id for developing the game when 20 other smash hits are in the market place which are built off it.
Didn't take long for these to start. New record? Likely not...
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
And don't forget to stop treating the employees like disposable wage-slaves.
Insane hours, outlandish conditions, high turn-out, it WILL come back to haunt you. I got out, I was tired of having 60-70 hour weeks scheduled by management routinely .
They are squeezing the life out of their people, because they know a fresh batch of naive workers comes out of schools every year, eager to get into the glamourous biz. It's how it is now, it's not a sustainable way of going at it.
You can't take the sky from me...
Like what happened when other companies started to outdo EA in their football games?
In order to shift the current paradigm of the public's perception of video games as "kid toys" we would need an extensive publicity campaign to increase awareness of the artistic merits of video games as a creative medium. This would involve....marketing departments. Who's got the biggest of them all?
EA. There is definitly a need for antitrust legislation in the vg industry, and on that I agree with you entirely.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
The same old tired arguements like this tend to reappear in 6 month cycles. "New games suck. No creativity."
I call bullshit.
In the entire history of video games, there's *always* been the leading games with something new, and dozens or hundreds of copies. How many games appeared that were similar to Pac-Man? How many games were similar to Pole Position? How many games were just like Mario Bros?
You can't point at today's games and say there's a problem. This has always been a "problem" (I don't think it really is one.) When a successful formula is created, a lot of people follow because it's what people want. FPS's became immensely popular - and people wanted more. Game publishers were happy to accomodate them.
Think about it in terms of the technical aspects. A game like Doom wasn't really very original. You killed monsters in an A-Z fashion to the end of the game. The only reason it gets recognition is because it was one of the first mainstream FPS games. But it was really evolutionary - we have two eyes, we see in 3D, and so it makes sense to make 3D games as soon as computers are fast enough. There were lots of 3D games BEFORE Doom - especially in the arcades (albiet many of them utilizing vector diaplys.)
It's all been a big process of building on top of the ideas that other people came up with. This isn't a bad thing, it's a GOOD thing. Little steps. There will be a fair share of crappy games, but that's always been the case.
To say there's been no creativity in games of recent times is to admit that you haven't played any.
I mean, what do you expect from games? If you're looking for the Holodeck, you need a reality check.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
FTA:
"but in gaming, we have no indie aesthetic, no group of people (of any size at least) who prize independent vision and creativity over production values."
Umm, yeah we do.
I think there is a lot more than this author admits to. Why do you think there exists open source 3D engines like Ogre3D as well as a ton of websites devoted to game design techniques , etc? Yes, the indie scene could be bigger, but it is by no means non-existant.
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
I don't care, just making useless comments.
Isn't this pretty much the state of every aspect of the entertainment industry? Gaming. Music. Hollywood. Television.
Thanks for the compliment, but believe it or not, I didn't really intend it as a troll. I meant it as the subject said, "stop bitching". I'm tired of artists (game developers, musicians, painters, etc) blaming the big bad corporations on the lack of good art.
If he's an A-list old-skool game designer, then he should know better than anyone that some of the best games were produced on a shoestring without any publisher lined up.
Stop bitching. Do it again. Nobody is stopping you and if you do create a great game there will be plenty of opportunity to publish it.
There is no way in hell im paying $60 for another Halo sequel, or Gran Turismo 30.
Looks like the author, Greg Costikyan, is operator of a cell phone games company that made a movie license game called Mean Girls: Wannabe
News like this always makes me laugh.
Just because a mass-market game is earning a lot of money doesn't mean that game developers have stopped creating more innovative games. There are ALWAYS new, original and exciting games coming out. And this will NEVER stop. Creative games don't need $10 million budgets, therefore there's nothing stopping a smaller company from making them.
Similarly, people always whine about the Hollywood movie industry. They whine about how all the movies coming out are big summer blockbusters. They are NOT the only movies coming out, they're just the ones that get the most public exposure. There are and always have been smaller original movies, it's just a matter of knowing where to see them.
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
When I go looking for a new game, I find myself always thinking "I want a strategy game just like StarCraft, a FPS just like Tribes 2, a turn-based game just like MOO2, a multiplayer turn-based game just like Trade Wars, and an MMO like EverQuest (tons of caveats on the EQ statement, but it's still true).
Most of my friends are the same way. They want to take their favorite game from the past and just have it different enough to be fresh. They want things like better graphics and less bugs, but they usually don't want big differences in gameplay. The gameplay is what made the games great to them in the first place.
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
Give me Nethack, or give me death!
Hey, good luck with that.
After you're done rescuing the games industry from creative death, perhaps you can let Hollywood and the music industry know how you did it because both of those much older more established industries have gone down the exact same path dictated by unstoppable market forces.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The "freeware" of yesteryear has changed into the "mods" of today. Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Rocket Arena, Capture the Flag?
I don't believe these were launched by the actual companies. The future of gaming is player created/episodic titles!
There's a fool born every minute.
Gaming's not dead. It's not dying, either. It just seems that way to people who've been through a few decades of iterative improvments yielding diminishing returns. People get old, they grow up, and they realize that the games they're buying today don't offer anything new. Well, so what?
There are new suckers being born every minute, and Doom 3 is NEW to them. The industry can just keep selling the same old crap to young new gamers who don't know any better, and a few years later they'll come out the other end of the process, just like the author of this article has now, jaded and thinking that everything's the same old recycled ideas and crappy invocations that have lost sight of the fact that games were supposed to be fun. They're right, of course, but as long as there's enough fools being born every minute, the industry can sustain a business model of cranking out unimaginative crap updated with the latest graphics engine.
That might not mean that the industry has much to offer YOU, the veteran gamer, but you can still enjoy a game of PacMan, of Pitfall!, of Super Mario Bros., of any game that you've ever enjoyed. New games may suck to you, but you're on to the old tricks. If the games were truly better then, why ever leave that era?
Why must you always buy something new in order to have fun? Rejoice in the fact that you'll never have to buy another video game and revel in the library of great console and PC games you've enjoyed for years. Free up that entertainment budget and put it towards your retirement.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
First of all the article is by Greg Costikyan, not Warren Spector. Second, Black and White was designed by Peter Molyneux.
But are we the buyers are to blame here. Beyond that the market has fragemented. Anyone who expects that there will a killer game that everybody would like is a fool. The tastes of the market are far to varied now. That games are getting lame is because people buy lame games. I have noticed that on Broadcast TV it's sucks. That's because the people who were interested in good shows were willing to cough up a few bucks a month for cable/Sat. Now cable and Sat are starting to suck because of torrent and netflix.
What's it mean?
[Shrugs]
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
So is this a third person shooter?
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Aside from the fact that this has already been covered to death in the blog world (GDC this past spring).. and no, I did not RTFA, but I've read many different pieces on this subject, and don't need to read it to know what they say.
The goal market that The Escapist describes already exists in the casual game market. A place that serves creative vision over supressing it: casual games. Niche products successful: again, casual games. Gameplay over glitz: again, casual games. And as far as IP; again, casual games.
Yes, the hardcore poo-poo the casual game market; "those aren't games, more of a past time or waste of time"... They can decry it all they want, it won't change the fact that casual games have just the same ability of entertainment, immersion, and addictiveness as your "God of War" or "Civilization XVII" or what not. Just to a smaller scale. But I imagine thats not the goal of the question that the article is asking..
But what to do about the hardcore games, the "consoles" and such?? As much as games drive technological advancements, games are just as much of a slave to those technological advancements. We need to separate the capabilities of the machine with the percieved success of the game. Unfortunately that is not possible in this day and age, where consoles are completely redone every three years, video card manufacturers in a race to be the best, and the market constantly demanding "bigger, better, faster". An ideal industry is not possible under this model.
Yes, the "hardcore" industry will implode. It won't be economically viable to continue creativity; and as people get turned off by "Pole Position, new and improved!"; its inevitable that even the rehashes of the same-old will also die. But it will not destroy the industry; only normalize it. Think of it as the dot-com bust for the games industry. It will recover, and be better off in the long run because of it.
EA is not marketing their games too much for PC gamers. The reason for this is that, on a PC, a highly successful game sells 100,000 copies. In the console world, this would be a big flop. Therefore, for PC games, the costs of a big marketing campaign aren't justified.
However, I would say that EA actually IS a massive player in the PC world. They make some of the biggest war games in the industry, in addition to basically holding a monopoly with sports games (almost all other sports developers only release their games for consoles). I would say that virtual monopolies on two entire genres makes them quite a force.
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
I think the "death of..." stories may be endemic of a recognition of subtle but massive changes in society.
Maybe we're in the end of "Information Age" right now and evolving into another kind of age. And maybe people can't put their finger on the sense that something is dying and something else hasn't taken it's place yet.
Someone somewhere once said to the now-dead comedian John Candy, "It's not show art, it's show business." I'd say lamenting the lack of new and different titles just means the business is really in charge now.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
There are and always have been smaller original movies, it's just a matter of knowing where to see them.
Indeed. And now, with the advent of DVDs and high-performance home-theater systems, it can be argued that it has never been easier to enjoy independent movies. For some independent movies, the theatrical release has become almost an afterthought, as they increasingly play to the DVD rental market.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Thanks for adding a bit of much-needed perspective. If I had the points..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Look, i'm a not a hardcore gamer but i try to be... Making things prettier and more realistic and all that is great, but he makes a good point, some times you need to escape reality and play some weird game, or some randomly strange game...those games are the ones with the most creative game designers are...we don't need more creative people in game development, we need to find the ones that are already there.
Human desire will bring death.
And... a million dollars.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
You the game buyer deserve what you get. The game authors deserve what they got. They lobbied for increased 'intellectooooool property protection'. They got it! Now their intellectoooool property is being protected from them as well by monopolists. Did you fools not see this coming. This system will not reform from within as the money bags are too strong. It will take the death of the industry, and an outstanding case of withholding valuable knowledge from a suffering public, like a copyrighted and patented ebola vaccine that protects against a mutant germ that the monopolies developed in order to sell the vaccine and hold up the public. While the mutant germ kills millions and threatens to kill billions, the intellectooool property 'holder' will act like a prima donna and hide behing a phalanx of lawyers demanding trillions of dollars.
Then finally the game will be up.
What current-day games do you think wil be remembered fondly in 10-15 years as we do now for arcade,NES,SNES,etc... games are now?
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Artists should have the same rights as any other tradesman. Does the carpenter own the rights to your kitchen just because he builds the cabinets?
Wrong Metaphor.
If I ask a carpenter to design a kitchen and I pay him for it, does he have the right to go to other houses and install the same kitched?
The answer is... it depends on your contract. The answer should be yes.
The gaming industry right now is evolving into the music and movie industries. To get published you have to sign away your life to a publisher who blasts the game all over the media. The internet is a great tool for indie developer shops but when I go to gamespot I only see games from the bigtime publishers in all the advertisements.
What has to stop is the person who commissioned the kitchen from saying in a contract "If you install this kitchen in anyone elses house, I get half of what you make on the sale."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I want all this stuff, and I want someone else to give it to me. Now!
You can tell the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
It's just that most game companies take the easy way out and try to make the game as pretty as possible while skimping on gameplay.
Look at Diablo II, for example. When it first came out - in 1999 - it was a sprite-based anachronism and was slagged for its lack of 3d graphics. Now, six years later, there are still 30,000 or more people playing it every night on Battle.Net. It was on the top 10 sales list for years.
I was a big fan of the first Zork, Bard's Tale, and Alternate Reality: The Dungeon. Of the three, despite its assininely insufficient attempt at graphics, AR:TD was engrossing because there were definite things to be solved, some of which came on you at random, and others which were at different places, and the included map was a stylized artsy drawing and not a literal map. You had to graph it out on paper and that took me several months of play to get each level correct.
Now it is all about super 3D, running around in ninety directions getting dizzy with bizarre amounts of controls, where the game play makes you wish you had four hands and forty fingers on each. The story is hack, the story-telling intellectually retarded, and the ultimate experience underwhelming. I could barely handle Doom, Quake was only fun when you set the gravity to zero and bounced around, and so forth. Now, I don't see anything engrossing enough to make getting good at it worth it.
Kingdom of Loathing is my new favorite and despite being free, I actually want to and have donated money. It takes up just enough and not too much time, it's still evolving, and the community of players is much closer knit than anonymous gripers about the latest craptacular EA Games offering. All things being equal I'd rather play that than anything offered right now. I don't even touch my Game Cube anymore having largely been turned off by the horrific treatment that Robotech was given. "WTF?! I waited twenty years for this game and this is the best we get?!" It was as much a letdown as the Robocop for Gameboy from Ocean which was delayed nineteen times or so before it broke and it sucked worse than the Gameboy Pit Fighter which was hard to imagine up to that point.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
For those of you on phones, here is the text version, with all its scrolly-goodness. Also, click there if you cannot find the "Next" button on the page.
They are being programmed by the thousands in Flash. I have seen tons of cool little games made by one or two people that were far more fun than anything I could buy for sixty dollars for the PS2. However, there's a problem:
I'm a programmer myself, and my dissatisfaction with Flash is that it's ASS-SLOW. I tried writing an action-style game in it, and it choked after an unacceptably low amount of onscreen action was occurring. If Adobe/Macromedia/whoever would fix this, it would make a FANTASTIC game engine. It's easy to program for, and the output looks great.
I realize that Flash isn't ported to any video game consoles, but if you want to see indie games, they're on the PC in Flash. If Flash was ported to CE/Java so it worked on handhelds alone, and it would be a huge market.
A market that serves creative vision instead of suppressing it. An audience that prizes gameplay over glitz. A business that allows niche product to be commercially successful - not necessarily or even ideally on the same scale as the conventional market, but on a much more modest one: profitability with sales of a few tens of thousands of units, not millions.
So you think you're going to be able to convince the wider market to change the kinds of things they like?
There is no fricking way that (say) Electroplankton is going to be commercially successful, in any conceivable way the market could configure itself. A lot of things that lack widespread success really just are that way becuase they're just the kind of thing only a limited number of people would like. And this isn't a bad thing. I don't want to be expected to start playing games I don't like just because it's what the mainstream gamers want; I wouldn't expect mainstream gamers to start playing games they don't like because it's what I want. You aren't going to change the fact that people like grand theft auto. You could maybe do something about the areas of the game industry where people keep buying the same franchise year after year because they don't educate themselves as to alternatives, but some things are just popular because they're highly likable.
I think this article is misguided, even aside from the Wired-from-the-90s-style sensory overload layout. What we need is not a market that wants innovation. What we need is a market which allows innovation-- which has enough diversity that there is room for both a ramaging mainstream and a healthy "cult" market . What we don't need is for "the market" or "the audience" to fundamentally change its focuses, becuase that involves changing people's hearts and minds. If we focus on fundamentally changing the market, we're not going to get a lot done.
What we need to look at is the more meaningful goal of keeping the niche/alternative/"indie" market healthy-- making sure there's some way for the niche developers and the niche end-users to connect to one another. Right now there are barriers to that, in the increasing lack of diversity in the publisher market, in the way that it is increasingly difficult or impossible to get anyone to find out about or sell a game without a big corporate patron. Trying to identify these barriers to the health of the niche market and fix them is probably more likely to get us somewhere than just railing against the stagnant state of the mainstream market; the mainstream game publishing market got into its current nasty, stagnant state for a reason. Though, doing things this way will benefit the wider market as well-- it will allow the niche "games as art" market to do what it's done in the past, which is serve as an incubator for the stuff that turns out once the wider, "mainstream" market finds it to be the Next Big Thing, allowing the "mainstream" market to periodically refresh itself.
What we want to avoid if at all possible is a kind of a partitioning, like we've seen in say movies, between "commercial" and "indie". Okay, so there's lots of good indie films out there, but they're inherently limited in what they can do and who they can reach. When was the last time you saw an "indie" sci fi movie? They're not very common, because you need a special effects budget to do that. Indie music is a lot healthier but that's because music production can be potentially done on such a low budget without the quality being impacted; movies and games are something of a larger-scale endeavor. Freeware games are great and all but if your choice is between "buy what the mainstream wants" and "buy games that had no budget" that would be sad. I think there's room in the market for small or more adventurous publishers to coexist right among
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I think this is just good 'ol economics. Supply meets demand. End of story. If you want the supply to change, change your demands.
Erm the film industry has been doing this for the best part of a century with no sign of stopping. Fight scenes, car chases, guns, sex, its all generic and everyone laps it up. Watch 99.99% of film trailers and you will see the exact same formula used every time! random cuts, music building up tempo and intensity, action sequence with loud choir chanting style or fast orchestral as the action gets faster or more intense, the same voice over, the same cliche scenes of people shouting 'noooo' and 'we WILL save xyz' the same 'desparation' the same 'life affirming realisation' - the same climax moment and the same post-climatic smart remark eye-brow acting followed by 'coming soon'.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
[...] or we are all doomed.
Get some perspective: It's just frickin' games!
It just isn't that important.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
move along.
Nothing said here hasn't been said hundreds of times over the past 20 years or so.
The same "problem" exists in television and film. Film's "answer" was the Indie movemet. Televisions "answer", as far as I can tell, is Public Television and cable.
As long as it takes as much money to make a new game as it does to make a hollywood film.
I've seen a lot of 'little guys' working hard to make games. The problem is financing. The answer might be to work the Long Tail:
1. Create an indie game clearing house, a place you could go to see who's working on what
2. find a game that 'looks cool' that's in production. Send 'em some cash, buy $50 "shares", share the thrill and risk of investing in a new game! You sent $50 to support vaporware? You won't be the first one to lose money: even happens to the Big Boys, so don't whine to me. At least you'll never find out how badly the game would suck
3. Now you're not only part of a Community, you're an investor, too! How slick is that? It's what Adam Smith had in mind all along. Stay involved, ask questions, ask for milestones, meet the developers. This game is partly yours, after all.
4. Ah, beta! Guess what? YOU'RE A TESTER! You get to suggest changes, and they'll take you seriously because (he he ) you've invested hard earned time AND money in their effort.
5. Holy crap, we released. Find a publisher? Go your own way? Who knows? You have version 1.0, so how involved you want to get in the politics is up to you.
This is not Open Source. I have no idea how the legal angles would work, but a good boiler plate would be some version of an investment contract now. If you don't like this, create your own business model.
Open Source is actually easier, as most of the legal stuff is dealt with under the license the developers are publishing under. I think.
What do I know, I'm a wage slave, and I ususally buy my games from the discount rack.
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
I keep seeing this complaint about games. That we're evolving the technology, but the overall creativity of games is diminishing. So I ask, what exactly are people expecting, creatively that they are not getting now?
I've personally been playing the same game for two years now with little change. I've not picked up Half Life 2 or Battlefield 2 because, frankly, there's nothing that new. I've been playing PlanetSide, and what it lacks in an uber cool graphics engine, it makes up for in large battle tactics that do not happen in any other game.
So that's what I want to see, more games that blend strategy and first person combat in large persistent environments. What do you want to see?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Here is my answer: If you want more interesting, independent (games/music/books/software) go seek it out. It will take you more work. If you are satisfied with the same mainstream bullshit that gets shoveled out to the lowest common denominator, go to (insert large store) and buy it. Independent stuff is out there, and there will be more if people start buying it.
You can either complain, or do nothing. You don't get both.
Unfortunately, as the article points out, I don't EA is going to be toppled as soon as someone else can offer something new. Like the article mentioned, gaming has become mainstream and that's where a lot of EA's success comes from. They're like the MTV of video games, in a way. Yeah, you can say that R* has that title too, but not in the same sense of financial and pop-culture omnipotence for games (with the exception of things like GTA).
With Joe and Jane Sixpack on the couch with controllers becoming the norm, I don't think it's enough to be innovative, an upstart has to convince the pop-culture before they try it that 'this is the new era'. As far as the article is concerned EA has already mastered the art of marketing recycled garbage as 'the next generation of games' in a way.
Here's the one ray of hope I do have for video games:
We're already nearing that same point of stagnation (creatively, not financially) that movies are starting to suffer for now. If the creative trend of video games has advanced to this far at such a rapid pace compared to movies, maybe we can get over the hump sooner as well.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
This is gaming's golden age. The games being released - Half-Life 2, Battlefield 2, GTA3, World of Warcraft, etc. deliver a great experience - far beyond what we thought was possible a few years ago. There are many different games genres, with sub-genres within each. Anyone who says that today's games are all alike simply isn't looking very hard (unless there are similarities between Doom and BeJeweled that I've missed) There is an incredible variety of games available - just check the many Flash/Shockwave/Java games sites.
But the simple depressing fact is that shovelware racers and shooters sell orders of magnitude more than dare-to-be-different games like Jet Set Radio
I think Valve has the right idea in electronically distributing their games themselves. I don't think there buisness model is neccisarily the wave of the future or anything, but I think they are on the right track.
Talk all you want about gloom and doom of the game industry, someone is trying to buck the trend though.
Paying for it is one thing, but what many distributers do is nickel and dime the original game development company to death...literally. The guys who came up with the game get to finish the game...maybe. That's about it. The lawyers swoop in and pick the corpse clean, dismantle the team, take all the tools and intellectual property they can find. The distributer then bangs out a couple of expansions and rides the franchise into the ground. You'll never see another great game from that team because the team no longer exists.
The risk is borne entirely by the original developers, who often have a near finished product developed with their own time and money when they sign the deal. Then the distributer begins to load on extra conditions and unnecessary delays, and does some creative accounting when the game ships to make certain the people who did the work get the least money. The company that developed the game goes down in flames under the weight of the development debt, and the distributor walks away with all the money.
So, no, the creators do not get paid. In fact, they were the ones who paid for the damn thing in the first place!
What I've just described is EA's business model. The amount of anti-competitive maneuvering in the game industry is incredible. EA just bought Renderware and are now killing it, in an attempt to break Rockstar games. Why compete with better and more interesting games when you can just kill them off, by yanking their tools out from under them?
What the industry needs is a free and open source suite of tools and engine components that nobody can buy, but that anyone can use. If the little companies want to win, that's where they should start, by pooling their resources, because anything that is commercially owned can be bought by your biggest competition, and building your own engine and tools from scratch is just too damned expensive.
I think the point was the author wanted everyone to pick "small budget" and "good gameplay"
Bored of same old crap games? Gave a look at Katamari Damachi and the upcoming We Love Katamari!
Be or ben't
did it once upon a time why can't someone else do it in the future. Bemoaning the lack of creativity based on the marketplace seems counterproductive.
classic business model applies here:
1. Create something everybody wants
2. Market it.
3. Profit!
4. Build an aerospace company!!!
These are not the
"We must blow up this business model, or we are all doomed. What do we want? What would be ideal? A market that serves creative vision instead of suppressing it. An audience that prizes gameplay/musicianship/good scriptwriting over glitz. A business that allows niche product to be commercially successful - not necessarily or even ideally on the same scale as the conventional market, but on a much more modest one: profitability with sales of a few tens of thousands of units/songs/seats in the theatre, not millions. And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work."
And, of course, we'd also like a pony.
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
The games industry is a very much alive cash cow from a business point of view. Yeah, they're milking the consumer and killing creativity. But they don't care as long as the money keeps flowing.
Who ever said that? The only "old saying" similar to that I know regards being on quickness, cheapness, and quality.
I can name a bucketload of games with huge budgets and pretty graphics where gameplay sucks. Did they just pick one intentionally?
Sorry, but I call BS on your "old saying."
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Keep dreaming, bucko.... this is america...where bling is king....
I think the answer is that the games industry needs a better way to market the "Long Tail". There ought to be more money made in the 90% least popular titles than in the 10% most popular.
l
Retail don't cut it: the industry needs an iTunes/Amazon-like way of connecting to the consumer.
This is what we're trying to do in the mobile gaming space: http://mpowerplayer.com/. Check it out.
Here's the Wired article on Long Tail: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.htm
You do realize that buying out really only can work if the company is public or has greedy private owners. If a company is owned soley by people that are determined not to have their company fall into EA's hands then it is not possible for EA to buy them. With that said, I'm sure there's plenty of other ugly things that EA could do to companies that resist bribery, but I'm not sure what they are from my rather boring consumer's view on the market.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
Put an end to Ultima?! You're out of your mind. The reason why Ultima declined and fell was that Richard Garriot sold out Britannia to EA. That's why Ultima 7 Serpent Isle's second half seems rushed. It was, there's dialog uncovered by Exult that shows it. EA took over Origin to kill it.
Damn you Lord British for selling Britannia to the Guardian!
From the article: "My friends, we are fucked. We are well and truly fucked. The bar, in terms of graphics and glitz, has been raised and raised and raised until no one can any longer afford to risk anything at all. The sheer labor involved in creating a game has increased exponentially, until our only choice is permanent crunch and mandatory 80 hour weeks--at least until all our jobs are out-sourced to Asia."
Heath Robinson contraptions were over-engineered, over-elaborate gadgets made up of thousands of cogs and widgets which performed some arbitrary trivial function which could otherwise be accomplished with a tenth of the complexity.
If the money-men stepped back a little bit to look at the big picture and come up with some new concepts, they might even introduce a lot of ex-gamers back into buying their games.
Give us something new. I'm bored. Please.
I had a friend try to tell me the other day, that the reason the gaming industry is failing, is because "games cost a lot more today", compared to when we were kids.
But that doesn't make sense to me. If I look at a new console game for PS2, say for $40. Back in the 1970's (my Atari 2600 days), by my friends logic, those games back then (compared to what the dollar is today), would have been like $10-15. I think they were more than that, somewhere around 30 bucks apiece. I'm at work so I don't have time to do the math. But I could swear new Atari games back in the 70's cost WAY more than the comparable "trend" of today's new games.
So... am I right, or is my friend? A free lunch may be in the balance, if it can be proven.
VOTE!
Big screens, entertainment rooms, etc. make playing games on even a 19" monitor on your desk less than optimal. This makes people more likely to want to play games on a PS42, Xbox reloaded, etc. From the developer's point of view, a known platform, where you don't have to adjust to resolutions, video card limitations, etc. etc. is a big boon.
What sucks about developing for the consoles is the locked-down marketing environment, where you've got to get approval and shelf space from Microsoft and Sony (Nintendo? Nintendon't).
That immediately raises the baseline costs, which justifies a bigger budget to try to pull in a bigger audience, and make those licensing fees a smaller percentage.
The PC market still makes it possible to have low-budget, high-fun games, such as Hamsterball Gold (yeah, it's basically marble madness, but well done), that tar-ball game I forgot the name of, FreeCiv, etc.
And there's work being done there, as described above. It's not dead, but it's not mainstream.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Listed somewhat in chrnological order:
Zork - http://www.infocom-if.org/downloads/downloads.html
Empire - http://www.killerbeesoftware.com/
Sundog - http://dmweb.free.fr/FTLGames.htm
Dungeon Master - http://dmweb.free.fr/FTLGames.htm
Deus Ex - http://www.deusex.com/
While I am currently playing with games like Neverwinter Nights and Far Cry, quality games like these, last and last.
this was written a while ago, so its slightly outdatted, but still relevant http://thedeathofgaming.blogspot.com/
for the sake of our souls
Somebody REALLY needs to go outside every now and again.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Lately it feels like game developers/publishers want to be movie directors. Perhaps if we'd get rid of cutscenes (bless the developers that let you skip them) and put that budget toward the elusive "fun," it'd be a big step in the right direction.
Most games with cinematics that I play end up feeling like I'm running around fulfilling someone's to-do list. I end up saying "Forget that. YOU take the magic gem to the wizard!" and dropping the game. I think that removing the "well, you NEED to do that in order to see something pretty, and we need you to see something pretty in order to justify having made the cutscene" factor, games could start to return to being fun.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
ummm...WoW over 1 million US users so that is 1 million copies of a game sold and I am pretty sure there are more then 100,000 copies of EQ, Doom 3, HL2, and the millions of Sims games. The problem is there are a TONS more PC games then console games typically because it usually costs less money and you don't have to license the information necessary to make a game for a PC. And yes EA is a huge player, those bloody Sims games are almost consistently the top of PC games sells, and they have some more games up there usually too...
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I would really appreciate any links you may have to sites that feature lots of new, original and exciting games. I'm sort of reading between the lines and assuming you are referring to some of the lower budget fare coming out of the smaller, independent game developers. Seriously, I would love to know about such a resource!
Because right now all I have is the avault demo download list:
http://www.avault.com/pcrl/
And to be honest, the "indie" games that crop here are just as depressingly discouraging as the big budget games. Not only are the indie games recycling the same old tired premises as the big boys (racing, FPS, RTS, flight sim, tetris-like puzzle, or arcade shooter, take your pick, because that's pretty much it!) but their games have the added bonus of crappy graphics and sound.
Where does a game player go when he wants true innovation?
Please don't say Japan!
I read Usenet for the articles.
You did buy a copy of Darwinia, didn't you? How about Uplink?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Is it just me, or does this type of malaise seem to afflict all of the mass-market creative arts such as television, music and now computer games?
It seems to me that each of these industries used to be highly competitive, but once major (take your pick: record label/studio/producer) moves in creativity slumps and ratings/sales have to be very high just to make a profit. The reason being, of course, that all those (label/studio/production company) builds need their nice shiny glass windows cleaned.
Now that some parts of the music industry have begun to use the internet and direct distribution (bypassing some of the label overhead) and it seems obvious that films will be next, is this not the model we should look forward to with games?
As people look more to virtual selections and rely less on walk-in sales, it seems to me all creative, easily reproduced IP will follow and further define this distribution and compensation model.
I'm sorry, I'm in the game industry, and I see all the problems he discusses. But it's no different than film, animation, book publishing, etc. It's always going to be a slog to survive commercially while realizing creative visions that don't appeal to the mass-market.
I mean, really, as far as gamers seeing stuff they think is cool, go hang out at an actual EB with actual, money-spending gamers. They see stuff they think is cool ALL THE TIME. No, it may not appeal to the videogame design elite, but the average consumer is being well served, voting with their dollars, and growing the industry.
It's cool to say the game industry is doomed, but I haven't seen very good evidence of it.
I was just playing Flatout this weekend. It's a simple game made by a small team. In essence, it's like Pole Position with better textures and a better damage model. But you know what, it's really freaking fun. Looking at their home-grown ragdoll physics stuff is great. The music is cool. I got my $50 worth. The notion that there's somehow something intrinsicly wrong with the "Pole Position" model -- simulate a real world car race -- is totally elitest and fucked, in my opinion. (Oh, and somehow the Flatout team, laboring in the slave world that is the game industry, managed to cram in some totally funny -- and innovative -- mini games... I guess because it's not Katamari, though, it doesn't count as innovation.)
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Sometimes I have to wonder if the fact that game designers are avid game players doesn't help the fact. Most of the time, when I talk to people in our game developement club, their original and creative ideas involve taking x game and adding feature y. Said feature y probably comes from game z.
It makes me wonder how much having a large game library hampers your creative process. When you're exposed over and over to certain ways of implementing game ideas, do you tend to think out of the box less and less? I see this a lot with software too. How many open source projects are truly revolutionary, and not just a better implementation of something that already exists?
One of my friends told me that the creator of Katamari Damacy, possibly the most creative and innovative game in the past couple of years, had never played video games (and actually hated them). Is this true?
Well, I think that the only way that really good games can come into the playing field is by mods. Mods don't required huge budgets or anything. Just a bunch of dudes in a basement making a game. The SDK is included in many games, because they realized the longetivity that mods produce. An example would be Counter Strike. Now that is a damn good game, and it was a mod. Now you sort of have to pay for it cuz its combined with HL2, but anyways.
Don't worry, there's still innovation out there, here's a voice controlled board wargame in development here.
The person who pays for the work deserves to own the work. This is the same idiotic logic where we have photographers owning the rights to YOUR wedding pics, even though you paid for them. If the creator wants to own the rights, then the creator should PAY for them.
No. It's more like saying that a wedding photographer would own no rights to the photos at all, even to the point of using them in a portfolio - and that's not right either.
What investors should get is profit from a sucessful, and perhaps chances to get in earlier on sequels that use the same IP. But the people that create that IP should absolutley haev ownership over it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Steam is a very useful tool for the independant game maker out there.
Being able to create mods with some of the biggest engines out there, and then distributing it simply and easily helps out alot.
There is tons of creativity and original ideas in alot of those mods, and without steam they'd never be heard from.
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
TFA: On a theoretical basis, the rise in development costs is driven directly by Moore's Law.
Is it just me who is sickened by sentences such as these?
I am a bastard cynic, but I am sure I am not the only one.
Check one of my pathetic journals for a diatribe on Moores 'Law'.
Teh Link4g3 for teh lazy
To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: hirers
random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
This problem will solve itself as the world moves to faster internet connections. You see, what sells video games right now is a few graphics on the cover and the reputation and branding. Blizzard could still sell games if their retail boxes were plain brown because they have a very good reputation. I predict, however, that games will move more and more to the shareware type model of game sales and "try it before you buy it" as a sales technique. As game sales move more and more to online channels, customers will gravitate to games they can try a few levels of first. This means you can actually sell a game based upon how fun the game play is rather than on the graphics on the box or the reputation. This will open the door to games that are fun and innovative, even if they don't have the best graphics. If nothing else there is always the physical limitations of human perception... eventually better graphics won't even be noticeable. To summarize, this problem will solve itself.
But everything in life is at a stand still. There is.....NOTHING NEW!!!
People, our society has peaked.
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
The business does not care about your wants or needs. They care about increasing shareholder equity. This is true of every industry. If not meeting customer demands begins to affect shareholder equity, then you will see something happen. However, as long as people pony up the cash for the next `great` release, the industry will continue to do as it has. If it ain't broke, then don't fix it.
can nobody prize gameplay and 'glitz' equally? what an overload of dramatics.
Yes, it's true - most things in almost every creative discipline's commercial side are NOT particularly original!
I'm a game developer by trade, working on console games. For various reasons, most of the time console games don't try to reach too hard for innovation. The reasons for it are purely business - making what you know will sell makes for a steady, predictable revenue stream, whereas taking a risk on a more experimental title runs the risk of pouring money down the drain.
You get the odd thing that bucks this trend, and it often involves hardware (Singstar and Eye Toy are the most obvious recent candidates I can think of), but sadly games like Ico or Rez or whatever just don't sell in the quantities that a Madden or a FIFA will.
The other thing preventing much originality on consoles is the entry barrier - devkits and licenses and middleware cost lots! I am therefore often surprised at the lack of more originality in PC games, where you can download DirectX for free (or SDL/OpenGL if you're feeling cross platform).
Take a look around at the PC game scene - the derivative FPS/platform/shmup titles still vastly outweigh truly original games.
All of which isn't to say that even the most derivative of games don't have touches of originality in them, or twists which differentiate them from their competitors. Maybe as someone who works in games I tend to pay more attention, but stuff like the melee combat in FEAR, or the black/white shield in Ikaruga are things that make me a happy gamer...
Game dev and music blog
Here's some info.
Similarly, people always whine about the Hollywood movie industry. They whine about how all the movies coming out are big summer blockbusters. They are NOT the only movies coming out, they're just the ones that get the most public exposure. There are and always have been smaller original movies, it's just a matter of knowing where to see them.
I disagree. People don't whine about blockbusters. People whine about the ever-increasing quantity of movies based on old licenses and the "band-wagon" mentality of the industry. When one successful comicbook hero movie releases, you can bet a half-dozen more are around the corner. When one successful 70's sitcom-based feature film releases, movie studios start cranking 'em out like it's the only thing they know how to do. The sad part is, after the first successful release, the focus shifts from making a quality movie to filling the consumer demand so the movies that follow are, more often than not, much worse. The same can be said for the gaming industry. Just look at EA's lineup for the next twelve months - all sequals and book/movie licenses save for maybe 1 or 2 titles. How many of those sequals do you think will be better than the original? My guess is none.
Japan!!
I agree with Greg's assessment of the shitty state of the modern gaming industry, but come on, "An audience that prizes gameplay over glitz??"
HAHA!. What world does he think we live in? Has he not noticed that pretty much every form of popular media these days caters to the lowest common denominator? That's where the the money is. With the masses who don't know how to think. Most people wouldn't know quality entertainment these days if it smacked em' in the face. Why else are the airwaves filled with a hundred shitty "reality" shows? Why else are theaters showing films with cookie cutter stories, sequel after sequel, and uninspired remakes of uninspiring original material? Why else, when I turn on the radio, do I hear the worst, most talentless garbage in the history of music? These industries, despite moans and groans of executives and insiders are still making record profits! As much as they would like us to believe it is, the sky isn't falling on any of these industries. At least not yet. I can't wait until it does.
He's correct in essentially saying that the problem right now isn't that the various industry skies are falling (economically), it's that all the shit they keep pumping out is falling out of the sky and all over us. Who's to blame? Large publishers and distributers which aren't willing to take risks and only look to maximize the possible profit? Partly. But For the most part I blame individual consumers. Dumbass fucking consumers who pay a premium price for complete shit and can't get enough as smile while shoveling it down their own throats. I can't see any effort spearheaded by Greg, or anyone, changing this mentality.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Let see... Pong, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Flight Simulator and a smattering of other simulators, Castle Wolfenstein 3-D. I haven't seen any truly innovative games in the last 10 years. I've seen innovative enhancements, like network and effects, but nothing to make me drool with desire.
Doom, Quake, Half-life, TombRaider, et.al. are fun and they are fun to look at, but there isn't really any innovation other than better effects. Half-life had a good story line too.
There haven't been too many moves into a more cerebral genre. What I find mostly annoying is that some of the most popular games are maze games (Doom, Quake, CounterStrike, Metroid Prime, driving games, et.al.). It would be nice to move away from those.
But as for new ideas, I'm as stumped as anyone.
I assume production has already started on "Looter: New Orleans" and variants.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
I agree. I can't help but notice that these days "innovative indie" means "It's an FPS set in WWII - but from the RUSSIAN perspective. Mindblowing, isn't it?"
All the creative stuff is happening in the Flash games right now, which are awash in a sea of suck and are only interesting if you're amused by Flash games.
Reasons:
1) Publishers control nearly everything in this industry. They decide what games are going to be developed and, ultimately, what games are going to be played. Since publishers are big companies, they can afford to screw up games repeatedly, and it's the original (non-mainstream) games that usually get screwed up. You can't even boycott them, since buying the same game from a different publisher is not an option, and good games are not replaceable.
Solution: dump publishers in favor of internet sales (from developer to gamer). However, this would require some alternative financing model.
2) Consoles are controlled by corporations that produced them. This makes independent game-making nearly impossible, and has other negative consequences (censorship, etc.).
Solution: Create a few sets of open standards for gaming PCs (this should include both software and hardware). This will simplify upgrades and make game development a lot easier. Done right, this might even be good for hardware manufacturers.
Your post is so dead on, I want to print it out and frame it on my wall.
And I don't care what anyone says, if the NFL came to you and asked you if you would like exclusive rights to their property for ANYTHING (Towels, plates, games, butter, whatever...) you would be a foolish business man to say "No, I think I like my competition having an equal footing with me. It spurs innovation."
Plus, Madden isn't going to live forever, and EA needed another property to attach it's football game to, and you can't beat the friggin NFL.Sounds good, but people are already doing these things. The problem seems to be that gamers still buy most of their games from big distributors. In other words, mass marketing Works, just like in any other industry. So I think a realistic attitude would be to accept this as a fact of life, write better quality games for the discerning few who will buy them, get used to making less money and having more freedom, and quit whining about what the majority does.
Nintendogs is about as original game as you can get. And Advance Wars DS is the most awesome strategy game you can hold in the palm of your hand. Advance Wars may be a sequel of a sequel, but unlike other franchises, this one actually improved with each revision. Maybe on platforms like the PS2 and PSP we see an incredible lack of innovation with one first person shooter after another. In fact, even on the GBA I see types of gameplay that are fun and different. The problem with PCs and high end consoles is too much power so the game authors seek to achieve only one goal: realism. In the low end market people realise that to sell a game they need to make something that's actually fun.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Markets don't serve "creative vision", markets serve customers. What you want is irrelevant. Sorry.
--
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
Can we get an official deathwatch on G4TV to go with it?
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I'll go you one better: Burn down the book publishing industry. All you need to write a book is pen and paper and you can easily distribute it world-wide from a $7.95/month web host. It's even cheaper than making a game, you don't have to spring for a copy of Code Warrior and you don't need any knowledge more specialized than literacy. What a brilliant idea, why didn't anyone think of this before?
What's that you say? Millions of people have had the same idea and couldn't make a living from it? Gee, maybe it actually helps to have things like shelf space and pretty packaging and an advertising budget when competing for mindshare with thousands of other creative works.
The present system wasn't inflicted on us out of thin air by an evil wizard. It was built by people because it WORKS.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
I raise my Dreamcast controller and dusty IBM PC keyboard to you my friend.
I feel like I'm in like Geek Braveheart.
"Every man dies, but not every man really games."
Seriously though, look at games like Orisinal which really speak for what gameplay is all about. They're simple, well designed, challenging, addictive, non intrusive games. They are genius too because the music goes perfectly with the game and what is happening. Try the cats game... doesn't that sound like cats are involved? Or the little girl and star game... makes me feel like a little girl catching stars and I'm a freakin meathead football player.
I love what the OP said, I totally agree, how about some open source games? It seems that games, once they have an engine (which could be like Quake 3's engine or any other OpenSource engine) can just be improved upon by anyone. For that matter, why don't we all work on Project Revolution. Or if you want something new, how about a game where you have to survive in New York city by playing chess and basketball. You get a "rep" and the higher the "rep" the more tournaments you can join. The grand finale could be you playing in the Rucker and then facing off against Maurice Ashley in Washington Square Park. You get minus "rep" points if your basketball friends catch you playing chess or something like that.
So basically video games are not like the movie industry. Or the music industry. It's not great, but that's the way a market economy works.
You have your major production houses that put out a lot of expensively produced, glitzy crap. Every once in a while they stumble upon a great piece of tallent, and end up with a classic.
Surrounding these are a moderate number of small houses that put out inexpensive "art-house" games that lack the glitz, but might hold some special content of their own.
It's not really a matter of whether EA can stay on top, but will they? GM could be the leading US carmaker again, if only they really wanted to. Sears and KMart could have remained leading retailers, if only they wanted to. Management can develop some really narrowly focused ways of thinking once a company gets big. Forward thinking management, like the ones who turned around IBM, can keep a company large for a long time. But if the EA executives become anything like the KMart executives, expect to see the giant fall.
As far as licensing is concerned, anybody can make a football video game so long as it isn't NFL-themed. Provide enough interesting features that EA doesn't, and people will buy it anyway. And some things can't be locked up via licensing anyway. Good luck getting an exclusive contract to make non-NASCAR racing games.
A friend of mine clued me in on this gem. It plays like metroid, looks like old platform amiga games, and has a fun involved deep storyline! See here: http://agtp.romhack.net/doukutsu.html
I agree
I beleive this is turning a new era or a changing of the guards. We are now dealing with politics and mind sets of share holders, owners P's and VP's of people that when they started this technology thing really had no idea what it was about, they put it in a box and people bought it so thats how it went. Only now they realize how much a part of society it is going to be and now we see patent rushes and dirty practices in the hopes they can stay alive long enough to say they figured it out.
I personally don't think its going to work that way. There is such a gap in education, mind set, outlook and talent between the kids comming out of college right now to the CEO's of today that they just can't work. These companies to take these new avenues would have to loose money and market share which would kill the stock value of their company which would make it extemely timid to make the changes necessary and fail a couple of times.
If you look at it like this, in the early 80's most people 50%+ only knew of computers by minimal association such as movies and some exposure in the work place. 10%- actually knew how to use one competently. 5%- knew the internals in terms of programming and advanced knowledge. This is the era that the CEO's and VP's of today came into the picture. Most of them fall in to the 50% category maybe now have be come more enthuisast and started to play on GUI's of the 90's but still are nowhere near 5 and 10% of their class in the 80's.
Now you have the kids who were born in the 80's now completing college / university where all of them have at least 10x as much experience as the 50%ers in the 80's, most if not all have used a computer before in one respect or another and are adequately aware to run various apps and produce something from their experience, know what to do if it 'crashes' etc etc. Lastly the people of today who know and are comfortable editing internal settings, scripting and even developing are creeping into the caliber who also runs major departments. Do you know many VP's who can code? If so would you expect that trend in many of today's companies?
As a result the new generation is going to eclipse the existing where they will not be able to compete. Existing companies have left so little room that those who will take part will be willing to eat bread and jam to survive and to keep costs down. I think it will be like a DDOS type of occurance where local software shops will come about in evrey town. They will administer local servers for gaming, fix your BSOD and probably suggest things like linux or come up with their own distros.
Not many will actually produce full out software that evreyone will want but in an area of about 1000 people as an example good money can be made for 5 or so for maintence, upgrades and troubleshooting at a reasonable rate.
I think it will be a big change in the industry and as always the ideas of today will become the objectives of tomorrow.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Besides being short on time, the games for the past 3 or 4 years have been so mundanely boring that I pretty much walk the shelves "HOPING" for something cool and new.
Nope, same crap, keep walking. I am now a "former gamer". No longer do I spend $$$ on games, they're all the same, now I spend them on GBA titles which at least have some reto play.
FPS are all too boring. PS2 - same, Xbox - same. PSP is slightly interesting but not worth the money (yet).
If artwork and technology are causing exponential development costs, developers need to work smarter.
Right now the game industry is in a transitional phase where great graphics are expected, but hard to produce. The solution is to make it easier to produce great looking games and Middleware is the key.
Middleware solutions are growing fast and have enabled spectacular feats. GTA3+, for example, runs entirely on RenderWare with a proprietary background-loading/streaming system. Rockstar took existing technology (RenderWare) and existing game play stuff (racing, 3rd person shooters, crazy-taxi, etc) and blended them together with something new and unique and CREATIVE (a vast, free roaming game world). Sure the development costs were high for the GTA3 series games, but I can bet you that had they been forced to reimplement RenderWare, there would be no GTA3 games to play today. The cost would have just been too prohibitive.
Now that Rockstar has come up with this free roaming world game play style (and people clearly enjoy it) either rockstar, or someone else, should release the technology as middle ware and poof, its now easy for people to add new innovations to that.
There needs to be more art-related middleware such as http://www.speedtree.com/ and improved tools such as ZBrush (being used for bump map creation in Unreal 3) from http://pixologic.com/home/home.shtml
A lot of time is spend reproducing work. We need to work smarter, not harder. We need public domain high resolution 3d models for common real world objects, character model generation software, facial expression engines, animation engines, tons of stuff!
There is a big itch that people need to start scratching! And you can make a lot of money doing it.
http://brandonbloom.name
it is not economically feasible for a couple guys in their garage to make a massively popular game
Well it might still be popular to make a moderately popular one. Here's a pretty good review.
A team of graphic artists creating textures and 3D models does not necessarily a good game make.
Acclaim is a good example of this. Dave Mirra 3 is never coming out now.
We're getting there, just hang on! The technology where in its infant stages 20 years ago and didn't quite match the expectations about 10 years ago. 5 years ago we had the technology but it was too expensive for the average joe. Now is the time, more than ever to realize your wildest gaming imagination. We have the chips, we have the technology - and it's cheap! But without YOU...we're nothing! If you crave it...you shall have it, noone is willing to invest unless you prove to our investors that you do indeed want to break free from your safe traditional gaming world. I have an idea for an eye-laser monitor that always will be in focus no matter where you look as the laser beam will hit the retina surface and it will fill the entire view...practically this means you will be able to view IN FOCUS the whole viewing area of your retina surface. :)
Keep beliving!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I have wondered for a while whether it is really the developers who should always have "creative control" over games. To be a good developer probably requires some form of creativity, but this kind of creativity, I think, is different (or at least only tangentially related) from the kind of creativity that makes for a good game. I have begun to think that good games happen not /just/ because of good, bug-free programming, but also because of "professional creativity" that comes in the form of a producer (the analogy of a movie director or movie producer). The idea is that good games happen when this person (or I suppose, group of people) has some overall vision for the game that is "creatively unique."
/. caters to, but I think this may be true in the same way that you can't depend on camera-men, actors and extras to make a good movie -- you need a director, or at least someone with good vision. That all said, there exist people that exhibit both kinds of creativity, like Clint Eastwood who has demonstrated this ability both as an actor (programmer) and producer (game producer) for "Million Dollar Baby." I don't know id's process, but John Carmack may also be this kind of person -- i.e. one that is a good "low-level contributor" (developer), and one that has good creative "game-level" contributions (game producer).
/may/ be developers, but I think it's more likely that it's actually the artists or producers, who have experience in "creativity that is evocative for people." (Programmers have experience in "creativity that gets the damn computer to do [x].")
I know this comment will not be popular with the hAx0r crowd that
Anyway, that was a long winded way of saying: maybe 'true' control of what goes into games should be left to people who are creative game 'experts.' In some cases, this
So, I'm RTFA now, and as usual, my little post has little to nothing to do with the RTFA, but what the hell.
*hits Post on his browser*
But it's no different than film, animation, book publishing, etc.
There is a difference. Anybody can self-publish a film or animation by selling DVD-R discs online. Anybody can self-publish a book through a so-called vanity press. But in console game publishing, only the console makers can make a legitimately bootable disc, and they don't talk to smaller firms. And before you suggest developing for PC, remember that there are a lot of genres, such as same screen multiplayer, that don't translate well to the PC.
1. The lack of creative offerings in the game industry (or music, movies, TV shows, etc.) illustrates the difficulty of producing a high-quality, original product. 2. Any game (movie/tv show/music) that's bad will not make money because, in the long term, people won't like it. Corollary: if you think a creative product is bad, yet it is commercially successful, there must be *something* about that product that people like that makes it a good product. Examples abound of wildly successful creative works that were criticized as trash in their day: the works of Jack London, the Lord of the Rings, rock and roll music, rap music, etc.
Make a sequel to the Resident Evil series where the zombies are Australian regenerating mice...
As far as licensing is concerned, anybody can make a football video game so long as it isn't NFL-themed.
EA (which in many minds jumped the shark when it ditched the box-ball-cone logo) has bought up exclusive rights to not only NFL football but also NCAA football, AFL football, and even FIFA fútbol. Which league is left? Do you expect an MLS, rugby, Canadian, Australian rules, or Gaelic football sim to sell well?
If only you had those school you could learn the difference between "inconsiquential" and "inconsequential", but since I'm nice, I'll teach you.
inconsiquential is not a word.
inconsequential is a word.
If only you knew that when referring to a single word rather than a quotation, you use single quotes instead of double quotes. 'inconsequential', not "inconsequential".
Also, capitalizing the first word of a sentence is usually a good idea.
I could go on, but if you didn't listen while your first grade teacher was going over this stuff, you're probably not going to read all of this.
I've been working in the game industry for 5+ years. My current title is Lead
Programmer/Designer. I've put out 6 titles, all mass-market crap. I know what
I'm talking about, and I know what Greg's talking about. And frankly, I'm tired
of hearing it. Don't misunderstand me: he is right about the absolutely sorry
state of the industry, but wrong about its *relatively* sorry state.
Consider the movie industry: I'm sure that most people reading this didn't go
see War of the Worlds because Tom Cruise is, like, ya know, so cool and all,
but there's millions of people who did. Most of the problems Greg's pointing
out aren't truly problems with the industry, but problems with mainstream
consumers. Yes, all of us in game development would *love* a return to the days
when only the hardcore bought our titles, and we were communicating directly
with a horde of fans who grokked what we were doing. But now things have gone
big budget, and you can't make a game with a few guys, a vision, and a garage.
You can't count on your players grokking your vision anymore. You can't even
count on them knowing what grok means.
Video games have surged in popularity like no other medium. It took centuries
for the novel to achieve its current form, and decades even for relative
newcomers like film and comics. Games, as a medium, aren't ready for the
mainstream. In these other media, the early creators had a long time to develop
and tune techniques of expression free from the constraints of profitability.
(Of course, most of them were also quite poor; more on this later.) Video games
haven't had this time. The entire medium is just barely alpha-quality, and yet
the money drove it mainstream. And, like any other medium, the majority of
casually-interested consumers don't prize the same things that hardcore fans
do. That majority has the money. They don't care about gameplay any more than
they care about a good script, but they love pretty graphics the same way they
love Tom Cruise.
This leaves developers with a choice. (Yes, Virginia, we do have a choice.) In
fact, there are 3 choices:
1) Side with the mainstream and the money. This is what almost everyone is
doing, and what Greg is railing against.
2) Fuck the mainstream. Make good games. "But what will we eat? How will we
pay rent?" Yeah, those are problems. Deal with it. No one is going to make
realizing your personal vision easy for you. You're going to have to go out on
a limb to do it. Is it uncomfortable? Yes, horribly, but it's utterly
ridiculous for someone to claim that the industry is unfair because you have to
sell 100,000 titles to be profitable and there are only 10,000 people who want
to play the game you're making. That leads us to option number 3.
3) Get better. The best creators, in any medium, appeal to both the mainstream
and the hardcore. Shakespeare was popular in his day, across many strata of
sophistication. So is Katamari Damacy. So is Animal Crossing. Find a way to hit
both crowds. Is it easy? Hell no; it's next to impossible. But it's what you
have to do to be great.
Now, I'm being a bit hard on Greg. Some of this is made harder by the way
publishers (and retailers, etc.) treat creativity. (i.e. they hate and fear
it.) They've fed people pabulum until the masses believe it's ambrosia, and
that's a crime against a medium I love with all my heart, and I will never
forgive them for it. But it's *our* responsibility as creators to show the
masses there's a better way. Is it easy? No. Is it profitable? Not likely. Is
there an alternative? No.
I'll fall back on a favorite quote: "Neither individuals nor corporations have
any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or
turned back, for their private benefit." - Robert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line"
That holds the same for the legal courts and the court of public opinion. It
holds even if the clock of history is moving in in the
I wouldn't exactly consider myself "videogame design elite" (more a casual gamer) but I can see the problem. There seem to be more games produced today that at any other time and they're all getting a little "samey". I'm far from saying that there isn't ever anything new or innovative, IMHO there is but the gaps are getting bigger.
I absolutely love it when I find something that's unlike other games I've played. The games industry needs less formula copying and more creating. If they don't they won't collapse but they'll get stale and that's not good for anyone involved.
Silly rabbit
Katamari Damacy? Its gameplay is simply amazing. I suggest you all to try it.
PS: try not be too much shocked by the opening when you see it...
The music industry is getting owned by the new methods of distribution available to musicians now. A startup band can reach way more people now than it could 10 years ago for roughly the same amount of cash. Thats cutting labels out of the deal, and they don't like that. The bands that embraced this mindset and methodology have done very well for themselves. Plus, these artists understand that touring is where they make their money, not album sales. The Music companies make money on HOW you get the music, not the music.
The movie indistry is having a similar problem. Theater ticket sales have slumped because A) the movies suck and B) People hate other people. Why sit in a theater to watch a movie for way too much when you can wait 2 months, and then pay half the price of a ticket to watch a movie at home, smoking a jay and drinking a beer - pausing to use the restroom when you wanted too AND being able to comment out loud about the movie without offending someone? A Disney exec said they were toying with the idea of releasing movies in theaters and on DVD simultaneously, and the theater industry went apeshit. They make money on HOW you watch a movie. Not the movie itself. The movie is to get your ass to the theater.Games have the worst of both worlds. You have to make an initial investment on HOW you get your games. You choose a system (XBOX, PS2, or PC) and then you can only play games on that system for that system. To expand your choices, you have to buy another box. Now, game companies take a loss on the boxes (except for PC makers) and make it up on licensing. Well, if you begin making games that sell less - even if they are the baddest games on the planet - the license model is worth less cash. And that would in turn cause the console makers to scale back the specs of their systems so they could generate profits on the machine too (or take a smaller loss). Here's where PC games make it even more F'd up. They can ignore the distribution sytems of Sony and XBOX. ANYONE with enough desire can make a game for the PC. It just takes a little work. But, these games can only hit a segment of the market. It's very difficult to make a cool indy PC game and transfer that to a medium for an XBOX or PS2. You can burn music to CD, rip it from the CD, stream it, and hold it on a player in multiple formats. Movies can also be distributed in multiple formats playable on ubiquitous machines. This is not true of games. Games have non cross platform hurdles firmly entrenched. There is money to be made on "porting" a game from one outlet to another. The game industry profiteers have no urge to have a uniform gaming delivery standard like the other industries do (MP3, Wav, CD, DVD, VHS, MPEG, ect..) Creativity will ALWAYS get squashed when you have to pay the piper just to get the material out the door.
If you think a good game can only be a photorealistic John Horner scored, then you're right.
The customer is always right. If the customer thinks a good game can only be a photorealistic John Horner scored, then a good game can only be a photorealistic John Horner scored. The only games that hit consoles are those that are thought to be able to sell.
What a fucking n00b!
The graphics in Flatout look pretty fucking weak. Maybe I'll grab a torrent for it to see if it's any fun.
hell, bring back the whole freaking genre! please!
I want more "Monkey Island" and "Sam & Max" games,
and "SpaceQuest"...
These were the best games of all time.
FPS RPGs just suck...
If there is no employment contract, the rights will go to the employer.
Nowadays there is almost always an employment contract, so the default state is nearly a moot point. Given that things such as employee conduct and health care benefits need a contract anyway, why not clarify copyright ownership while you're at it?
Problem is not the "game industry", problem is with those that run things, which are not game developers. Those that run the big publishing houses, big hollywood studios, etc etc, they are BUSINESS PEOPLE, NOT CREATIVE PEOPLE. They dont give bananas about creativity, they want the fattest bank account they can get, and that means appeasing shareholders, which means keeping the company profits high, which means throwing out the same old BS that the ma$$es want. Some of these not-creative-business-people can even be called PSYCOPATHS! (Have i heard someone saying Jim Caparro?)
There are no more "game developers" running the "game industry"!
it's not foolish, it's honest commerce.
something that has been forgotten in the sands of time.
the difference between making money and making it honestly is that you are working to benefit the public and yourself versus just benefitting yourself exclusively.
i mean that's why corporations are allowed to exist in the first place: the benefit to the public.
in what ways does having a 100% monopoly on NFL games, benefit the public?
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Looks to me like the gaming industry is in need of a revolution of sorts...
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
I've seen several people making comments along the lines of "Big whiners, don't they realize that Hollywood/TV/etc has exactly the same problems?"
Here's how the game industry is different than Hollywood:
The lowest ranking person on the status totem pole of Hollywood production is the writer. A writer working on direct-to-video features makes about $100K a script. A decent feature script goes for around $200K. "Big" scripts start around $500K and can go into the millions.
Compare to the salary of most programmers and artists working in the game industry, much less designers or writers (and I should point out that many game companies do not consider writers cost-effective, despite marketing bullet-points trumpeting the depth of their "interactive storylines").
Or take the example of "above the line" personnel such as actors and directors, who routinely get a back-end percentage of the gross. The day anyone in the industry who actually made a material contribution to the development of a game (and no, not voice actors) gets any kind of royalties is the same day that Larry Probst takes a vow of poverty.
Oh, and isn't Hollywood unionized as well?
Let's face it, game development is a 21st century sweatshop where a few people realized that they could make a whole lot of money off the backs of a lot of other passionate, dedicated people. Given that, the fact that games seem to have become rote, cookie-cutter affairs in many ways should not be a surprise to anyone -- after all, factories produce widgets, not works of art.
I don't care much these days about the gaming industry, but Greg's work on Paranoia 2nd Ed. transcended game. I consider it great literature.
pretty graphics
good gameplay
small budget
pick one. Unfortunately the quality of old games doesn't transfer. I haven't seen affordable games anymore... they either have good graphics, good gameplay or they're affordable (and both play crap and look crap). At this rate, DosEMU forever!
Midway's "Blitz: the League" is coming out this fall and it has a lot of stuff that's never been seen in a football game like a storyline. Also hookers.
No NFL license doesn't mean you can't make a sports game, in fact, Pro Evo/Winning Eleven has been kicking the official FIFA games butts for the last few years. If the game is good enough the lack of license doesn't matter.
I would love to worry about all of this, but for the last 15 years I haven't been able to ascend my chaotic human monk.
An artist without representation can represent himself
No he can't. Console makers don't even talk to individuals or to smaller firms.
The publisher's capital is cold hard cash
As well as access to the hardware on which games run.
Why do they deserve the return on my investment?
Because they invented the hardware on which your game runs.
A better way would be for the little companies to bundle their games together into a single pack of maybe 10+ games.
Some console makers routinely decline titles containing multiple games so as to avoid association with pirate multicarts. Exception is when there's a story line tying the games together, such as the minigames of Mario Party or WarioWare, or in the case of a re-release compilation from a recognized industry name, such as Namco Museum or Midway Arcade Treasures or Sonic Mega Collection.
You make some good points, but I disagree. I've been around a few decades, and I can tell you that the video game market didn't seem dead in 1983-85, it was dead. And I disagree that "idiots" (which I assume also includes uninformed or otherwise ignorant consumers) will always prop the industry up. You had the same idiot ratio back then as you do now(I'd say even higher... word of mouth was nothing like is now with the Intarweb), but it wasn't enough to keep the industry alive back then. Yes, the market is much bigger now, but so are the production costs. You can't extrapolate 15 years of growth and assume that something can't die. Titanic was thought unsinkable, but hubris and some ice was enough to prove otherwise. For Atari, it was hubris and "ET" for the 2600 (yeah I know, and others).
But there's another problem. As pc gaming continues to decline, the pool of talent shrinks further. If you want to learn PC game development all you need is a PC. However, if you want to develop console games, or even learn how to do it, you're pretty much screwed. Supposing you could afford a development kit ($10,000 -$100,000), you still can't go out and buy one -- you need to be an established publisher or development house. So, a success story like Id software simply wont play out today.
You think that you have poor quality and unoriginal titles now? Just wait 5-10 years when the pool of capable talent shrinks to a fraction of it's size, and the only developers that have access to the state-of-the art are working for EA.
Speaking of EA, I hear they're currently hard at work on the innovations in store for their Madden franchise. No siree, no way will this ship ever sink!
Easy, just open console programming to the people, publish the specs, sell development kits to anybodythat wants them, let an ecosystem grow up, pick the best and support them with money.
That is sooo true. I can hardly wait.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
All the comparisons that people were making between Disney and EA are actually quite clear on many levels. EA has been accused of killing creativity, with the dozens of titles they release each year a small fraction are original releases. Everything else is a sequel or a annual release like the sports titles. Just like disneys model over the last 10 years. Very little original content. Instead they bastardize old favorites with lame sequels. The movie industry is suffering form trying to make every movie a canned winner instead of gambling on original content and now the game industry is following them down the same dead end road.
WURD!!
As soon as Richard Garriot sold up, OSI was referred to sarcastically as O$I by a great deal of UO's playerbase, it was a joke at first...till the real changes began. One of EA's first updates to the game was "Publish 16", a large patch that basically Diablo-ified much of UO, changing the game mechanics profoundly. It also encouraged farming/hyperinflation, you had to have like a million coins for decent armor. Then came Age of Shadows, which pushed these changes further, introduced materialist crap like Bulk Ordering and customizable housing. One of the sole good EA-additions in my opinion was champ hunts - you gather up like 5-8 people and spent like 3 hours in Felluca (Pvp realm) fighting tonnes of monsters.
Not to say that the playerbase weren't fussed before that. I knew a lot of dudes in UO that believed that 1998-9 was its "Golden Age", anything after that was just spoiling what was the first truly brilliant PVP game. Anyway, by 2004, nothing was untouched by EA, even the previously tough gain system was fucked with...and users began to leave. An employee at EA was sacked for duping in game and selling gold/items on eBay. A lot of the guys I spoke with before I quit in spring were just staying for the 7th year vet rewards (I think they turned out to suck aswell). Since then they've brought out more expansions, andcreated more crappy incentive items/clothes (pixel-crack as many users called em'
Point is, is that EA generally fuck most things up, usually after a decent start. Take Medal of Honour Allied Assault, it was EA produced and marked the beginning of a swathe of WW-2 (later Vietnam/Gulf war) themed FPS's. But it was a geniunely good game, and if EA hadn't made about 2 expansions and then another 3 or 4 MOH games to follow it then it would have been remembered as a standalone hit, not just the start of something which would later come to derision among many magazines and websites.
Here's my suggestions to how games can improve :
Cut the budgets to about 1/10 their current size.
Keep staffing teams very high, allow brainstorming sessions within dev teams. In the case of RPG's, use literature as inspiration - all a good RPG needs is a story and gameplay. If you care for the characters/plot twists then your playing a great RPG.
Stop making sequels. Even GTA is starting to get somewhat spoiled now - because labels just force programmers to make sequels too soon and too quickly. Make a maximum of 3 games in a series. Further to this, stop making copycat FPS's.
Do away with lengthy working hours, and put little or no pressure on the devs. EA's games suck for a reason - too many wage-slave caffiene fueled all night coding sessions.
Yeah, bring Wing Commander back, and also bring back real-cinema cutscenes like we saw in C&C Tiberian Sun. Who cares if the actings a little cheesy? Wing Commander IV rocked because Mark Hamill and that dude from Back to the Future put their all into a canceled TV series. If a canceled TV series can do that much for a games cred, think of what a well-planned, filmed production could make - a legend perhaps?
Petition for EA's breakup. Its too large, too cumbersome and obsessed with profit over innovation. Gaming can't be allowed to go the way of music - where big firms make crap...and get away with it.
Lastly, stop paying attention to graphics. Focus 60% on gameplay/plot, 25% on sound and 15% on graphics/overall look, scenary etc. I'd prefer a plot akin to FF7's than some shiny windscreens and nice scenic views.
Creator control is a good idea for a healthy artform.
Not because creators deserve to own their work, but because work-for-hire produces the kind of bland, boring, uncreative "art" that the article complains about.
The comics industry is a prime example. In the 60's, the industry became consolidated to 2 major companies, and a single genre: superheros. Work-for-hire was an industry standard, with artists and writers treated as disposable cogs in a machine. And, by the 80's, they had abused their aging base of collectors so much that the mainstream comics market suffered a collapse from which it still hasn't recovered.
Any of this sound familiar?
The moral of this story is: a consolidated, work-for-hire "art" industry can pump out mediocre schlock with expensive production values for decades before collapsing and throwing its controlling corporations into bankruptcy. But in the meantime, bad art crowds out good, creators and fans alike are exploited, and it sucks to be a developer.
So, get ready for decades of beautiful FPS's that make full use of all the latest graphics card, coz that's all you're gonna get.
I was with him until this:
And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work.
Let me guess, the creator should have control for life plus a bazillion years... The creator should be allowed to limit availability to old works after they no longer feel the work makes them look good. And the creator isn't the person doing the work on the game, it's the big-shot "rockstar" that has his name on the box. That crap is exactly why stuff is supposed to end up in the public domain after the creator has had sufficent time to profit from it.
Not that any of that even matters. It's irrelevant to the consumer - the gamer - who controls the IP, and that's not something he should be crying to his audience about. As long as the gamer can use the work as he/she wishes after they've forked over the cash for it, who the hell cares who owns the IP.
There is nothing dishonest about an exclusivity contract. The NFL has every right to say who can use their property. And it is prudent business to choose someone with a consistent record of selling the most football games. EA would be idiots to allow their competition to get that contract. Once again, they did not initiate the talks. If 989 or someone else had gotten the exclusivity contract, people would be bitching that Madden didn't have any players or teams and that EA sucked for letting it happen.
the difference between making money and making it honestly is that you are working to benefit the public and yourself versus just benefitting yourself exclusively.EA is making footbal games. That's about as beneficial to the public as penis pills man. EA is never going to save humanity with a football game. Neither was any other developer. And so what if it's a monopoly on NFL games? It's not a monopoly on football games. If a company locked down a whole genre, I could see the problem, but that's not the case here. No one prevented anyone from "benefiting the public" with their football games. One company just happens to have a tool that no others have.
Using your logic, a company with a superior game or physics engine should allow all other developers to use it to make games. Bullshit. What if other developers make games with content the engine makers felt was inappropriate? What if I make a kick ass physics engine and I decide that I only want it to be used to make racing games because I think all the existing racing games suck? Am I monopolizing the game industry for not allowing my engine to be used in other types of projects? It's called a free market. Keep it free, not regulated with your one man view of business ethics.I think most of the doom and gloom comes from the dropping revenues. The dropping revenues can be credited to people at home now pirating games and music and such at a mass quantity due to the ease of use of most filesharing / bitorrent / irc and the like. But seeing as how I pirated 99% of the games in the past 10 years it's all because of one reason. The market doesn't want to stagnate.
I would pirate a game just to see how well it would run on my current rig (and if the gameplay was good or not). It sucked having a 2 month old graphics card that wouldn't even run a newer game all because the guys at ATI or Nvidia wanted to come out with a bleeding edge graphical game with no substance that only a 500 dollar video card could handle.
A lot of the newer games now have no substance just as the article mentioned, but most people are content with graphics as they are now and want to stop spending their hard earned cash on a 400-dollar graphics card (I did the smart thing and got a 6600 GT when it dropped to 150). People are starting to wait a year until the 500-dollar cards drop by a third of their original price, then are excited cause they can play the games that they could not before. Only to find out that in 2 months another hyped up card will come out that 5 games will take advantage of, and it will be the 500-dollar cards suitable enough to run it.
People do not like spending money on a game that is all hype and pretty graphics. Gameplay has waned in the past years. And it's pretty deplorable. I can see where this guy is coming from.
http://www.ugo.com/channels/games/features/evilgen ius/top11/10.asp
He only came in #10 on the Ugo list but I think he should be higher up the Evil Genius ladder.
Nevermind the victims of Hurricane Katrina! Here is the real issue facing today's world: gamers are feeling bored with the raft of entertainment being plowed their way. We should take the entire budget of Homeland Security and that being spent on the Iraq War not to mention those homeless people, and divert it into making better or more funnerer games! For the sake of the gaming industry and gamers, the world must change!!!!!
Boo hoo. Y'know what, time for a reality check. If you're playing a game instead of sweating it out, you're doing better than 90% of the world. Not saying don't have fun - I'll be playing Guild Wars tonight. But just realise the truth. 'Cause this article aint it.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
The market serves the consumer. if people are willing to wait in line to get the first copy of some crappy $50 game, in fact as willing to pay $70 for a "special edition" of that crappy game. Then you really shouldn't expect change. The mainstream market serves the mainstream consumer. And until profits dip, I don't see any reason for the business model to change.
Now if enough people are complaining about the problems with mainstream gaming, then perhaps there is a market for indy gaming. (infact there is, there are several indy gaming companies, who offer very interesting and inexpensive games online).
Besides gaming isn't like shoes. You actually need shoes. It's pretty hard to get around with out them. So if you don't like the styles and trends in shoes. You want a $20 sneaker that isn't made by children in sweat shops, well your options are pretty limited.
At least with gaming you can choose a diffrent hobby. Like biking, or watching tv, or painting or kart racing. Frisbee golf is starting to gain popularity I hear.
I'm disappointed that theaters show a lot of crappy hollywood films. And that blockbuster doesn't have a section for films made by local artists. It's really inconvient to watch good films, finding some good games is actually quite a bit easier.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
without Pole position, without space invaders, without Mario there wasn't a business model for video gaming. if you want innovation in the market, then innovate. if people like what you have to offer, then you are in a position to define the business model. this is natural selection, this is economics. the current model reflects what people actively seek from gaming. build it, and they will come.
I remember playing GTA in 1997 (or so) and saying "this should be in 3D !!" I had to stop and ask why it wasn't in 3D. Maybe there were no 3d engines? No, not so. GLQuake, Quake 2? Well, maybe disk space constraints? Not so, according to games like curse of monkey island and myst. So what gave? We didn't see it (gta3) until almost 2002. And we all know how that fared. I guess my point is the games industry is similar to the gold rush. The gold was there for ages.. it took explorer's spirit and a little initiative to make killers out of mimes.
The games industry -currently- supports the small indie developer making 10,000 sales rather than 1,000,000. But the games industry is still an industry. And more importantly, the retail industry is still the retail industry.
If Mall-Games-Co has the choice between a hot selling game and a mediocre selling one, they're going to pick the hot game in an instant. The shelf space costs them the same!
And as long as gamers keep preferring console games to PC games, the game industry will be beholden to the retail industry's way of things.
Hey, at least Nintendo is doing something new. It maybe not as good, but they are making us play differently.
I think you and the parent poster who claims it has been 15 years are forgetting or not giving proper credit to Counter-Strike. Although it was written on top of a licensed engine, and was later sold as a commercial product, it was written/developed non-commercially by a team of volunteers, was given away for no additional cost, and was for a time the most popular game on the internet.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Video Games I think have reached the same state. I like 2 types of games: Air/Space combat sims and FPS tactical sims (like Ghost Recon 1, the first 2 Rainbow Six games on PC).
I've played Halo and Halo 2, and with friends on a friday night with some booze, it can be a lot of fun. But is that the game or the people playing it?
I haven't seen any Space shooters from major developers since FreeSpace 2, great game that didn't sell all that well. However with the semi-opensourced FS2 code, there have been some really cool mods.
Ghost Recon 2/Rainbow6 - 3 I hated on the consoles. They seemed much more arcadish shoot'em up and less tactical stategy.
A few weeks ago I thought about creating a MMOG FPS set in World War I. I looked at several game engines, and found Military Forces at sourceforge.net.
I finally did buy a new PC game (first one in 3 years) the other day: Falcon 4.0 Allied Force. I purchased Falcon 4 six months after it was released for $15. WHy? All the features never worked. Well some in the mod community were able to get Atari to actually release a new version of the game that all features that were supposed to work actually did work.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
No, the NFL offered its license for bidders, and each company chose the terms to go along with their bid. Take 2 wanted non-exclusivity, EA wanted to shut everyone else out. The sad part is, EA didn't even have the highest bid. The NFL just decided that EA would do the best job, and made the infamous deal.
I think you'll always see a dip in innovation at the end of the cycle, as more teams move onto ramping up for next gen, but that will be followed by a rash of bizarre games at the very tail end of the cycle (like the Sea Monkeys game on PSP, or Easter Bunny's Day out).
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Eventually, we can relieve humans of producing creative works for the mass market because the process should be so rooted in statistical mediocrity and hence formulaic, that we just let rules-based systems generate "art" for the consumer. But chances are that as soon as these big media companies think they've figured out the market, consumers who yesterday thought this factory-churned crap was cool will suddenly get really bored and start looking at what the unpopular people are doing, steal their ideas, and make it a trend -- as the cycle usually goes.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
And the NFL decided to take it exclusive after Take Two started a price war with their $19.95 price point. Here's a link to the article. The other reason Take Two wanted non-exclusivity is because they couldn't afford it. That part of a contract is expensive. If they had wanted to get exclusivity take Two would have needed to raise its price back to the $50 range to cover costs. Then all the fanboys would have been screaming "See, once you get a lock - you gouge the price!" It would have been a fight with your customer base you will always lose. They never could have won the NFL contract, they never had enough juice.
Besides, the NFL is a business also. They like to make money and protect their property. They didn't like a pricing war being waged with their property at the center of it. Would you? They went with a solid standard that could pay the bills. When my company needs supplies, I don't always go for the lowest price, I also pay attention to quality. Take Two made a good game, I prefer it to Madden. In fact, I won't buy a Madden game, I'll just keep playing 2K5 and updating the rosters. But they did not have the track record that EA has with an NFL game. The 2K series started hot, then dropped, then rose from the grave. Not exactly what I look for when I need a steady eddie to handle my license.
He's actually right about the tendency of games to go for the more 'shiny' super-realistic, state-of-the-art graphics and gizmo's...instead of compelling gameplay.
h tml
I mean, c'mon, there used to be great games, even in the 90ies. Yes, they were very basic, graphically (compared with the techniques today, it's almost pathetic)...but at least they were great fun! They are often still fondly remembered!
Indeed, those oldies are not as pleasant to look at, but they had other things going for it. (I wonder why they don't make such games with modern graphics?) As an example, I would urge anyone to try out UQM, based on Starcontrol 2. you can read an analysis on my blog about it: http://newsbyte.blogspot.com/2005/06/game-of-fun.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
It's like someone took all the insightful comments on games.slashdot.org and put it together in an article to try to make everyone just nod their heads because it's a popular opinion. But it really is just trash and absolutely the opposite of insightful. Oh no...that game industry is dying! It sure is, look, gaming companies are making more than ever in history. Oh god, all the games are sequels! While that is not even close to the truth, a lot of game sequels are better than the first one. Sometimes people really enjoy playing a game so if the new one is similar enough with better graphics and a new story, it makes an excellent game because it is still fun. And there are plenty of innovative games out there, you just have to stop looking at what everyone else is buying and look a little deeper. It's not the game companies fault you can't put a little effort in to looking in to games other than just noticing that everyone is buying halo. There is really just as much innovation going on today as there was before if not more. How can I possibly say that? Because innovation is inevitable in a brand new field. It was impossible not to be innovative in games because there was nothing else out there.
Right now there are more good games than any one person should play in their life time. You don't care about graphics? Then buy all the old consoles and play through every great game on those systems. You all are such hypocrites saying you don't care about graphics. I bet there are hundreds of great games you haven't played...still, you sit there and wait for the new systems and bitch and moan about lack of innovation on those systems. All the old games are still out there for you to play...if it was so good back then, then go back to those systems. You will find you are just looking at the past through rose colored glasses.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
The people 'high up' are into spending time keeping the public entertained, that IS the problem. If they did pursue video games and movies, it would be too obvious to too many people.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You forgot
Hunt the Wumpus for the TI-99/4A
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work.
Because, this is what most inhibits development now.
The creator must own their precious rights regardless of whether or not technologies will eventually be implemented. Until this mindset is vaporized we will be locked in this model.
What is the cause of the cyclic problem? Ownership of thoughts.
"... creators deserve to own their own work."
Workers owning the means of production?
We must stamp out this kind of evil thinking. Everything is perfect just the way it is...
Just shut up and obey.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
He does have some point. When any industry is new, you get more people that are willing to explore the medium. When its become established and very profitable, people tend to tread off the beaten path less. Here's a good example, what movies are playing this summer? Let's see, you can see the one about the superheros, or about the animated animals, or about some secret military weapon gone haywire.
I don't expect the industry to die soon. The people in japan still comes out with some great stuff. (katamary damacy comes to mind. And the ever so popular, DDR and kirby: canvas curse) But if everything becomes monopolistic via RIAA/MPAA paths, it might be. But I do miss the games I use to play on win 95. Like the puzzle game where you have to collect the break the mirror to blind the giant eyes so you can get a brainsickle and a fridge motor to put in a leaf so that the little people will give your their board that they were using to paddle across the cosmos. And yes, that game made as much sense as it sounded, it was a great game. ^^
But given all that... the game I miss most is still pong.
Sony and Microsoft do not.
While Sony and Microsoft are embroiled in a wanger duel over graphical power, Nintendo have publically stated that we have reached the point where graphics are really important. Nintendo understand that to continue to focus on the goal of photorealism in games, is to destroy the games industry. If games have the production costs of films, and they are certainly starting to, publishers will not take risks, and fewer games will be produced.
The upcoming Nintendo console, the Revolution, supposedly will create a new gameplay mechanism that will open video games to a much larger demographic. You can already see nintendo doing this with devices like the DS, and software like Nintendogs which really is not a game in the traditional sense.
I for one look forward to the return of a period of creative game development, similar to that of the 80s and early 90s. The industry is stagnating, and at the moment, only Nintendo seem to be making the correct sort of efforts to change that.
The film industry also lacks from innovative design and cookie cutter movies. Their only saving grace is the independent film market. What I feel like would help the gaming community is a Sundance like festival.
Of course games require considerable skill and talent to make but public ally available graphics engines help to cut down on development time. These resources should be more publicized and open source in the gaming community should be supported if true creative development is going to occur at the rate of more than one or two games a year. (This year the mercenaries game takes the cake with complete interaction with the enviornment).
Keeping the current business model is beneficial in the sense that it produces game to perfection in execution even if concept is lacking.
You are always welcome to dump your own hard earned money and also time into a game idea that you personally think is really cool and watch it bomb. Or you can always sit on Slashdot and bitch that someone else isn't willing to do it in your place.
Right now the heavyweight boxing division is in "crisis"; there are no fighters worthy of the championship belts. Why? The speculation is that, in their formative years, the biggest, stockiest kids who might make great pugilists are being recruited into other sports -- football, hockey, etc. which do not inflict brain damage, scars, dislocated ribs, etc.
Suppose you are a creative genius, full of great ideas, and looking for a way to earn a living. Which would you rather do -- Work for the games industry (suffer long hours, low pay, create derivative pap aimed at target markets) or work in IT/development (decent hours, high pay, individualized projects) ?
This signature is being generated randomly.
I think the problem of huge development budgets will be solved by procedural techniques. Just think about it, did someone draw the textures on your skin or clothes, and preanimated all your different movements? All the textures we see can be calculated by mathematical models, and all our movements can be calculated from our physiology. The first of this new generation of on-the-fly procedurally generating games is Spore; I'm sure EA saved loads of money by not needing any animators and level designers for it.
What did I win in bullshit bingo? The gaming industry is bigger than the film industry and now this mediocre journalist is anticipating that it'll all go down the toilet *LOL*.
Oh wait, incoming rez...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I don't know about other people, but I think games today are better than ever. I'm a very happy gamer with my PC and my Xbox, and I've been playing video games since the early days of Space Invaders, when I was barely tall enough to see the screen. Sure, the colors get prettier and the polygon counts higher and all those nice things. And for a while, it all seemed pretty pointless. But now the real artistry is gettingbehind it, and games are becoming not just technically proficient but gorgeous, and more immersive than ever.
Sure, there's not a lot of genre-busting genius games. Guess what, those are inherently rare by their very definition, in any artistic genre, whether it's fantasy RPGs or historical romance novels.
You're just another jaded old coot who wants everything to be blowm up and restored to some theoretical level of 'purity' because video games don't make you happy like they used to do. Well, guess what, that means you're a grownup now. As we get further and further into what we love, we trade eagerness for sophistication, and a broad love for the whole genre for a deeper love and appreciation for those parts of it we like.
So go ahead, Mister Indie Games. Make your own studio and design your own games. Maybe they'll kick ass. Maybe not. Maybe they'll just be half-baked attempts to break ne ground that make no sense to anyone and you'll only be able to sell them to grizzled coots like yourself.
Me, I'll be playing Fable. A voice in my head just told me I have a very important Quest Card waiting for me at the Guild. Oh, and P.S., if you think GTA San Andreas plays like Pole Position, I have a waffle iron with a phone attached that I'd like to sell you.
Michael J. Bertrand, AKA Fruvous or FruFox My
You can choose to riot in the streets of Redwood City, to down your tools and demand an honest wage for an honest eight-hour day.
You can choose to find an alternate distribution channel, a different business model, a path out of the trap the game industry has set itself.
You can choose to remember WHY we love games--and to ensure that, a generation from now, there are still games worthy of our love.
You can start today.
Atlas Shrugged, baby!
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I know Spector didn't write the article, but the premise of the piece is a statement by Spector.
Second, you are correct. I should have double checked that. Thanks.
Now, what other two huge money-making entertainment industries have had this problem for a little while as well? Music & movies. Now, since I'm not in the movie industry, I can't speak for that, but I am a working musician, so I can speak for what I see in that, both in general & personally. But, unlike the games industry, music is often the result of a single, creative mind, or a close-knit group of like minds. The artist, as it were. The game industry appears to be pushing entirely too hard towards ridiculous commercialism, employing vast corporate groups of developers, designers & artists to create these games, somewhat like the movie industry works, and in some cases this is necessary, but in others, a smaller team would work better.
Unlike the movie industry, which, if something tanks at the box office but IS a genuinely excellent film, will pick up in DVD sales, or the music industry where an artist can either purely play live & record/release albums independently or go for the mainstream appeal & sell out a bit, the games industry has only a single avenue of revenue, and that is the (relatively) small gamer audience. Keep in mind, unlike movies or music, the vast majority of video games audience grew up in the mid to late 70's-80's (I'm a child of the 80's & 90's, myself), so a VAST chunk of the world's population is missing from this equation. When the audience for games becomes more universal, I expect we can see a surge in appeal for a wider palette of games.
Anyway, just my 2 cents
"all we will be doing for the rest of eternity is making nicer road textures and better-lit car models for games with the same basic gameplay as Pole Position"
/.-ers that get it)!!! :)
I guess you haven't heard:
EA NASCAR '06 is gonna let you RACE THE TRUCK (this is actually funny for the 3 other
The person who pays for the work deserves to own the work. This is the same idiotic logic where we have photographers owning the rights to YOUR wedding pics, even though you paid for them. If the creator wants to own the rights, then the creator should PAY for them.
You have this completely backwards. Photographers own the copyright to your wedding pictures because you paid for prints, not the rights to the pictures. Offer to pay the photographer more and you may be able to negotiate a copyright transfer. It's ridiculous to suggest that the creator has to pay for the rights he already has.
This got modded to a 5? Sheesh...
The fact is that there has never been a better time for PC gaming than there is today purely because of the vast back catalogue of older games that can still be played natively on a PC or by using an emulator program.
Yes, realistic 3D graphics can help to sell a game but of more importance are the design of the game itself and, quite frankly, there is simply no more innovation coming out of the games companies because now it's *all* been done - there are simply only *so many* weapons that can be thought up for an FPS or only *so many* different types of cars that can be raced around a track.
I'm not a parent so I'm not overly experienced with kids but I've had my share of babysitting for nephews, nieces and friends' children and I've found that whilst they do have favourite modern games they like to play, they've found games like "Superfrog" and "Speedball 2" on my Amiga CD32, "Atic Atac" or "Manic Miner" on a ZX Spectrum emulator, etc, equally entertaining and engaging - hell, I even have a teenage niece who's now dropped "The Sims" completely since I installed "The Incredible Machine" (a very addictive puzzle game from the early 90s) via DOSBox on her PC.
Sure, the legalities of "abandonware" and emulation have yet to be fully decided but it's not difficult to find these old games on the Internet and it's a facet of gaming all too frequently ignored by avid gamers.
Only the other week, my buddies and I abandoned an Unreal Tournament LAN session in favour of an Amiga-emulated "Speedball 2" league evening and we had as much fun playing that as we do with UT normally.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
He could just as well have been talking about Hollywood, with his comments about "creatively dead franchises" and so forth, and the parallels are very real. I was fortunate enough to work as a game developer back in the mid-eighties ... it was a way-cool time to be in that industry. Probably a lot like it was to be in the movie business early on, when you didn't have some corporate suit peering over your shoulder all the time, squashing any hint of novelty or creativity. My brother still works as a senior developer for a major game house, but it's very different nowadays. Big business is running the show, and if time has shown us one thing, it is that big business is neurotically risk-averse.
Really, all of the major entertainment vectors (movies, music, games, popular books, and yes, television) are in the same boat. People want something new and different, and they don't dare give it to us because it might not be sufficiently popular. As a consequence of that, we get the same old recycled crap which is starting to become unpopular anyways. Time to get the committees out of the creative process and let our best-and-brightest get back to work.
I used to know a guy who designed pinball games for a living (this was back in 1979-1980 or thereabouts.) Sold his designs to Stern, Gottlieb, all the rest (ever play one called Nine Ball?) He also ran a video game / pinball arcade called Silver Sue's on Chicago's North Side. He told me something once that I think some of our media moguls should understand. We were talking about what makes an arcade successful. His comment was along the lines that, when it came to new games, "It doesn't all that much matter what it is, so long as it's something the kids haven't seen before." That was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, of course, but the point was that you have to keep trying new things, implement fresh ideas, or your customers will get bored.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Grand Theft City -- New Orleans.
The city is flooded after a storm. There is no law enforcement, the waters are rising and drowning the city . You and/or a bunch of guys must do everything to survive and at the same time fight off other gangsters, FEMA, police, National guard and at the top level US military to get loot and get out of the city
I thought I could apply some lessons learned from the movie industry but then I realized that the movie biz. is just as fucked-up as the games industry. Shitty stories, knackered acting and big-budget FX are dooming the movie biz.
Since the movie studios are in the process of taking over the games industry I see no light at the end of the tunnel.
Aside from Linux gaming (which I suspect comprises quite a whack of the conversation - I'm afraid I haven't bothered to read it, it's just too late :P ), and after we got over the whole psychological need for emulators and ports, it seems to have worked on almost precisely that suggested model.
There is very little very glitzy on the machine, but there's some stunning native and original puzzle games that haven't been done before, as well as not-quite-commercial-quality games like Nazcadreams, Nazcarunners (both using Fenix, so you'll be able to play them on a PC unless I'm much mistaken with no trouble) or even GPSpout. Once upon a time the games for it were limited seriously to what you could emulate, but these days, there really is quite a lot. The guys who make it generally get a decent ammount of respect for their work and (albeit not so often) from time to time donations from people in the community. And of course, they absolutely control their own code; they wrote it in all likelyhood from a bedroom for fun, notably without needing a license from somewhere to do so, so there's absolutely no reason why their IP ends up in the hands of a corporate giant, although conceivably it might at some stage end up in the public domain. If they say so.
True, such a machine doesn't leave a great deal of space left for commercial development simply because there's so much available for free (whether legally or less so in the form of emulable roms) that is of commercial quality (in the case of emulated stuff because it once was, of course). But considering the hardware itself was profitable it didn't have to be.
Ok this is a handheld, not a PC, and the situation is entirely different on the two, principally because of the lack of the culture of hardware being subsidized and homebrew being made as hard as possible in desktop computing which exists in the gaming handheld industry, alongside a great deal of other factors that for some reason aren't springing to mind. But that said, its still worth pointing out as an instance where the idea was at least partially successful.
Developers are always looking for the next big thing, the next great new idea that can sell them millions, I mean the sims was an inovative idea, wasnt it? It is now the #1 selling game of all time. B&W was creative, lumines was new and different, nintendogs is a fairly new idea, I mean actually having puppies that act like real puppies in a game? I thought it was a stupid idea when I heard it, but people seem to love it. WHat about pokemon, catching stupid monsters, wtf? but yet again, it sells millions. We are seeing new games and new innovations, I dont understand why people dont see this, every week it seems like I hear about some new and interesting game that isnt like other game out there. I mean sure, there are doom and hl clones, but its not like theres all there is, and they dont sell that well at all.
Yes, why do we need or should desire fancy new games? Chess or poker have not dropped in popularity. Why can't a video game be played for a couple decades, that like 0.001% of the lifetime of chess.
What the movie industry does NOT do for each film is totally change the core infrastructure. Even Pixar or ILM makes small incremental improvements to it's production pipeline. Yet the game developers seem to need to create a new engine and rendering tools for any significant new FPS. Something in that industry needs to stabilize or the unfeeling laws of economics will stabilize it for them.I am sure there is some reuse of core technologies but if it's the look that is what counts, then they need to find some core tech that lets artists rather than programmers have control of the production. The next wildly successful game company will probably not have many if any 'engine' programmers, but rather a system that lets the writers, game designers and artists build a game without massive software efforts.
In any case, there a lots of great small online flash games that are quite clever and seem to be built by one or a few developers.
What do I want to see?
KOTOR 3.
Star Wars Galaxies set in the Old Republic or Post Endor era.
Variations of the "Elite" type of game, set in whatever universe (Trek, Star Wars, etc.) which is why I enjoyed Freelancer.
no, no you find the last 4 madden games, at least one big name heavily hyped alternative sports title, a couple of completly vapid shooters (killzone im looking at you), at least one of the need for speed underground games and probrably a smattering of pc titles that they bought simply because they had hot chics on the box art.
if you want inovation in games, buy inovative games. its that simple. stop f**king whining, and buy shadow of the collosus, everybody loves katimai, go and get rez, get a dreamcast and ikaruga, download takumi fighters.
its really simple you, the consumer have the power just like the movie industry is now very very scared at the fact that no one can be arsed to spend 20+$ per person to go and see the latest big budget low plot blockbuster (ie: stealth) when they can spend 5 bucks and rent it a few months later you too can make a difference to the game industry just buy refusing to buy the latest update to the same old sequels.
but they wont. they never do. they do as we tell them, you will buy *insert title here* 2006.... wont you
"We must blow up this business model, or we are all doomed. What do we want? What would be ideal?"
Shut up. Creativity brought down too many game companies before. Been there, done that, and having the ENTIRE game developer community do that will disinterest gamers more (i.e. wtf is THIS game about?). We don't need wierd new funky gameplay, we just need well excuted gameplay with, if I may dare say, A REAL FREAKIN STORY/PLOT! This is the reason for sequels because new franchises are harded to sell at all than if it was Bang-Bang-Boom 3: Your DEAD!
I was hoping Digital Extremes Pariah game would kick major ass but it didn't which disapointed me greatly since it wasn't a sequel unlike many others.
I sometimes think that gamers who play games all the time need to realise something. With reading many books, plots will become repetative and boring. With watching too much TV, every story seems to play out the same old cliche (OMG! It wasn't real! It was just a dream!!). With games it's the same old shit but due to cost factors, it sticks out more of a sore thumb.
Been there done that affects every industry. People just waking up to that fact or something?
As for new gameplay ideas, THEY ARE OUT THERE AND COMMING SOON FOLKS!! Spore, DNF, Prey, Gears of War.. ect. New game ideas take longer to execute properly so that's why you'll see less of them.
I can't believe people complain about stupid things like this. Oh wait, they're hardcore gamers/game reviewers so they HAVE to play everything. So how about this as a solution. You play too many games so admit that and shut up.
When Lucasarts cancelled Sam and Max 2, I almost cried :(
Noooo... can't risk bringing back a *classic* game. Instead, we'll pump out more star wars generic crapola. bah.
The Nintendo DS is perfectly suited to adventure games because of the stylus. We already have one (Another Code). It would be nice to see some more of a similar comical style to the old Lucasarts adventures.
..."And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work."
IP, as it applies to the music industry is bad, and people should be allowed to 'share' to their hearts content, but when it comes to game design, should be rigorously protected.
Are you talking about M1, M2 or M3? Or don't you know what you're talking about at all?
Seastead this.
I understand and yearn for the same thing - the chance to create really innovative and inspiring stuff. However, a part of me also realizes that this business is, what, 30 years old (at best)? I imagine in the early years of cinema Charlie chaplain would grumble that he had to make the same damn thing over and over to please his audiences, too. These days anyone can afford a camera and we're seeing an explosion of smaller, independent works that are really creative while at the same time the mammoth studios are still in existence.
My point is this: the big studios and the business model are not the problem and never will be. The problem is the expense of producing and (more importantly) marketing a game. I believe if costs were lower there would be more independent studios doing things. I believe If console manufacturers allowed indie games on their systems then there would be a lot more exposure to those games. There are a lot of fabulous indie games out there but they don't get the front page of PC Gamer.
Maybe what we need is... I'll call it X for now. The Oscars are to E3 what Sundance should be to X. A well publicized showcase of *only* indie games, not the deameaning pat on the head (I am led to believe) they are given at E3. There needs to be a grassroots movement, starting with developers, that whispers "indie games are more cool".
In summation, creating unique and innovative games is not the greatest hurdle. The greatest hurdle is in getting the world to know you made it.
couldn't agree more! i don't want multiplayer Metroid Prime or multiplayer Metal Gear tag team madness or something.
i want to feel like a lone hero in my quest to save the world.
MMORPGs completely break any adventurous mood. they just feel like a graphical irc with the same morons acting as ( stupid ) NPCs and talking about their everyday useless lifes.
I don't feel like it...
But without cinematic cutscences, what would publishers use for screenshots on the back of the box ?!?
Every single "game" on the holodeck was the same thing, only with a different historical setting.
But that's the point isn't it? Let's have less holodecky games. I'd personally like to see a continuation of the space quest series. Or some other 2-d kings quest ripoff. Just because every game *can* be 3d doesn't mean every game *must* be 3d.
Oh and katamari damacy? isn't that the game where you roll a ball around that picks up stuff? I think that games should be more than just original. They should be good. There are far too few of those.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"A game like Doom wasn't really very original."
It introduced multiplayer deathmatch and FPS co-op to a lot of people. I know that deathmatch at least had been around before, but Doom's was probably the first good implementation. FPS co-op might even have been a first, albeit a logical extension to other games with the capacity for co-op play.
I agree that not all new games must be 3d, must require the latest hardware, and must be online.
But those are the games that have the most replay value. While I love playing all the MAME games and pogo games as much as the next guy, I get bored with them. On the other hand, I can play CS for hours and hours every weekend and get a lot more play for my money.
The little games they make for Assembly (two of them were really cool this year) show that there's a lot of different directions that publishers could take with games. I agree that more could be done to make quality releases instead of just releases. But I don't think the state of gaming is poor.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
HighOctane
You forgot
:-D
Hunt the Wumpus for the TI-99/4A
That is totally one of the "best EVAR" implentations. Boy, I hate to post 'me too', but what the hell. I was just explaining Hunt the Wumpus to my wife the other night.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Look, the truth is that the reason game publishers are sticking to the "tried and true" methods and genres is that that's what most people will buy. Also, personally, I like the sweet graphics of today's games (I think that how fun the game is is more important, but still. . .) Plus, the programmers don't really have anything to do with the game's textures - the artists do all that - and the modeling. And there are still games that don't follow this "tried and true" method - for example, Darwinia. Problem is, not enough people like these sorts of games - from what I hear, the game's maker, Introversion Software, is pretty broke and considering filing for bankruptcy.
If you wanna see some more creative games, check out open-source games. Although I think you'll find that a lot of the most popular ones are a lot like today's proprietary games (or at least proprietary games from a few years ago).
www.linuxpenguin.net
And here's an url, for the kids.
http://www.videogamehouse.net/huntwumpus.html
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Well, clearly what we need to do is support indie developers rather than buying a copy of the latest big game company offering!
Um, on a completely different note, did I mention that I'm in indie game developer? http://www.empiresofsteel.com/
>> Midway's "Blitz: the League" is coming out this fall and it has a lot of stuff that's never been seen in a football game like a storyline. Also hookers.
Yes, because that's what games need, more hookers!
*sigh*
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
"Nowadays people are only willing to make safe bets on the games they're willing to put out. It's time the industry grew a pair of balls and were willing to create something for the sake of doing something damn cool and just hoping that potential buyers feel the same way."
Yeah! Then we can Bit-Torrent it.
You want an example of a great franchise destroyed by its publisher?
Starsiege Tribes.
I would like something that plays like the Old School Kings Quest / Space Quest / LSL series, with the old school typing of the commands, with the old school simple dialect. They were fun!
Nowadays they keep trying to "improve" on that but it's missing something. The gameplay was fun!
(I'm the GGP poster)
That's more of the point I was getting at. Traditional game distribution is being driven by the publishers, who are risk-averse because of their size and the scope of the games they bankroll.
Digital distribution does create the possibility for more developer-driven work. There's tons of indie games out there already, but the more marketability they have, the more complex the games can become. The problem so far is that centralized channels like Steam have been extremely slow to grow and gain mindshare, and Steam itself is highly averse (and laggard) so far to accept third-party content.
Heh. While you're being smug, just know that the adults all take you for an imbecile because of your careless spelling and grammar.
Don't worry, you'll grow out of it!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
previous /. stories on spore
First step is to declare EA a monopoly. There is yet a standard Anti-Monopoly trust in the video game industry. Sure there is the Sherman Anti-trust act, but some politican needs to bend the same rules to apply it to EA.
I don't believe that you can use the sherman anti trust act to break up non-essential industrys. Monopolys only count when they control an essential resource such as food or oil. Although, IANAL.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
" Except that Diablo is nothing more than a pretty roguelike. Gameplay from 10-15 years earlier!"
Yes, Blizzard rarely comes with _new_ gameplay, but when they make a clone it's high quality. Diablo and Diablo 2 had a:
- very good interface (it may seem like "bah, it's easy, you just click-click-click", but having played two dozen clones, it seems to be anything BUT easy. E.g., fuckups that required clicking _exactly_ at the feet of a quickly moving enemy, and ended up running around the enemy instead of attacking him, were the norm, not the exception.)
- very easy learning curve
- casual-gamer-friendly difficulty curve (half the games released are _still_ a nightmare for the non-l33t of us who just want a relaxing game in the evening, not an exercise in "bang! you're dead!" at every turn. Most importantly, it did _not_ assume that I'd spend hours running in circles for xp and loot to be able to survive the next level. By the time you finished one level, you'd actually be ready for the next one.)
- good balance (having played each of the 3 classes in Diablo, I can honestly say that neither of them had a substantially harder time than the others)
- very few pointless wastes of time (most of the time I was doing something, not running like an idiot between two cities to do some postal quest, nor combing every inch of a mountain to find some door, like in Morrowind.)
Etc. So while it might not have been _new_ gameplay, it nevertheless was _good_ gameplay.
Add to that the fact that, like all Blizzard releases, it had extremely few bugs. Blizzard did release some patches for minor issues, but mostly to fine-tune the balance in multiplayer. But I don't remember Diablo or Diablo 2 ever crashing to desktop, having my character fall into the void, or any of the other crap that was the norm in PC games.
So basically, yes, I think he does have a point: quality sells. It might be every publisher's wet dream that only marketting matters, and any crap shoved out the door sells just the same, but it's a pipe-dream. Quality always outsold crap, and Blizzard's games are among the prime examples of that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
For all you game developers-Where the hell is my Mechwarrior 5? Don't tell me X-box,Cause i tried it and that ain't Mech5.
The Mechwarrior series sold a LOT of copies and the Mech 4 set keeps getting sold out here,So why no Mechwarrior 5?
Mercs will be on my Harddrive forever,But it would be really nice to have some new places to drive my Double AC20 packing Fafnir. :-)
Way off topic,But wouldn't it be fun to hack something like Everquest just once and show those little elves and wizards what 100 tons of Fafnir would do--"I will stop you with my spell of"-STOMP! Tee,Hee,Hee! No offense to Everquest fans,It is just an extension of astronauts vs cavemen,Who would win to me.I'd vote Fafnir,Yeah,BABY! :-)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Does anyone here know of them? Unlikely. They are a small UK based dev who have provided us with two absolute gems of gaming fun. The first, Uplink, a fairly basic but tense hacking game. Yeah yeah it's not like hacking blah blah blah. It's graphics are little more than a few menus and a simulated OS. But the fun is there. The music builds as your TracerTracker (V3.0) alerts you that the corporation whose research you are stealing are getting close to tracking you. Feeling deliciously evil as you type the commands into the console to erase their fileserver and set it crashing. Building yourself a remote machine with 8 parallel processors and a self destruct in case you get caught. Their other offering, Darwinia, is a simplistic looking RTS, released sometime in the aftermath of HL2 and Doom 3 engine games which is probably the source of it's poor sales. People fail to realise it is MEANT to look that way. Look up the picture poster "Digital Dreamscape" and tell me that you would imagine the inside of your computer in another way afterwards? Combat is not a matter of point and click the units go. You are firing the weapons, leading the tiny green stickmen Darwinians into battles against massive red viruses (virii?). Above are two examples of innovative and damn fun games. Where are Introversion as a result of doing this? Currently beginning to get into finicial difficulty. Their crime: Having some fun. Meanwhile I'm sure the "EA Sport Some Celebrity Football September Edition" game is about to make EA another mint. Fun fun times.
I wrote the following five years ago trying to put my frustration with the quickly dying genre of "Adventure Games". What I had to say here still holds true and the last truly great game I played is still the same one this article ends with. Once again (I've said this several times in the past) the one and only true hope for gaming is the Indie developers, support them, praise them and pray for them, they might be our last chance.
A skinny little blonde haired, blue eyed boy named Jason sits down in front of the TV and fires it up He then proceeds to open the package his eyes shine brightly as he gazes upon his brand new copy of Scott Adams adventure game "The Count". He gently loads the cassette into his Commodore Vic-20's new Cassette Drive and waits ..... thirty minutes
later he's plunged into a medieval
castle with Count Dracula stalking him.....
watching his every move.
23 years later .......
Jason sits in front of his newly built PC and loads up his brand new copy of Funcoms The Longest Journey and as he waits for it to load he thinks back on all his grand adventures. From the depths of the seas to the outer reaches of the universe he's traveled.
Just like books, adventure games open up your wildest imagination, from sailing the seas as a pirate, exploring the deepest darkest dungeons to discovering the wonders of Egypt and much, much more. In an age where books have been replaced by violent movies and action games the wonders of these adventures is dwindling. Seems like the youth of today would rather remove the limbs of their enemies than use their minds to outwit them.
Adventure games began to decline with the creation of a game called "Doom" I played this game and found it a fun little distraction but my mind couldn't comprehend such a shallow game as changing the gaming genre to such extremes.
3D..... First Person.... Hmm.... I thought with this technology they'll make some truly grand adventures games so I waited and watched........... Ackkk... another Doom clone L .
Hmm.... What's this , Gabriel Knight 2 The beast within all full motion video J , now we're talking! Great game I thought as I finished it up. So this is going to be the future of gaming. Hmm... Under a Killing Moon, yup this is the future what an incredible game!
So I waited ......
New Sierra game, ugh... more technical problems, shallow plot and mediocre
graphics.
I waited..... Broken Sword, Circle of Blood Demo.... WOW! Have to have this game... finish it .. wonderful game again
adventures are saved!
I waited..... Broken sword The Smoking Mirror... hmmm... ok but not near as good as the first one L .
So I continued to wait..... I watched game after game hit the shelves most of them too terrible too bother finishing with a few nice exceptions such as The Pandora Directive and Overseer. Time after time I searched the shelves finding more and more Doom clones in pretty disguises with new engines and better graphics....
I waited... hmm... Gabriel Knight 3, hmm... 3D L , oh well I'll try it, great plot, ugh ... sneaking?
What is this Thief the Dark Project or an adventure game? *Sighs Deeply*
Jason snaps out of his trance as The Longest Journey finishes loading and he fires it up ... hoping... praying... this is the one.
8 hours later... I got to get some sleep!
And so it went... The game was the best of the best even including the great adventure games of old! Adventures were granted at least a reprieve.
Sits and waits for Mystery of the Druids and hopes other companies will pick up the trend that Funcom has followed from the days of old creating truly incredible "adventures" for us to partake in.
Jason D. Blevins
The Adventurer ;)
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"
That's a fan-made project, and one of many. It's not bieng made by EA, and it's unlikely that any fan-made projects will ever hit the spot the way Wc3 or Strike Commander did. Hell, a full on Wing commander/Strike commander game or a new System Shock would kick ass, but it's not going to happen. EA's only interested in direct-to-console games and the odd franchise like BF - and even that was rushed and released with bugs that should NEVER have got through QA.
.. but it's at present only active in Japan: "doujin gaming".
d el:Doujin
Doujin games are independantly produced, and usually done on relatively low budgets, but they are [i]sold at retail[/i] - albeit in "doujin stores" which specialise in selling independant works. (Actually, they are usually launched at anime conventions.)
There's some fantastic games out there in this category (and a fair number of crap ones as well, of course). See:
http://www.indiegameworld.com/Category:Revenue_Mo
- and that's just a few.
So why don't we get any similar distribution mechanism outside Japan? I couldn't tell you.
Get over it. There is gold in them there hills. The game biz is going the same direction as all other creative entertainment. Formulaic crap to make money. Nothing innovative that introduces risk. These companies are required BY LAW to do this since they are publicly traded. Anyway, just like there are garage bands and independent films there will be independent game developers that DONT fit the mold but go on and create anyway. Not for money, but because they are driven to. All you have to do is support them with your money. Seek them out, buy their stuff. (
As noted in the article, however, it's actually hard to compete on a middle ground. It's possible to be the flashiest with the largest marketing budget (see: EA), or to be a cheapo tiny studio that produces things with fairly poor graphics, audio, or just less content. It's tough to be in-between, though.
The small guys survive by being small. Double the size of that team (to up to ten people, say), and suddenly they need to sell twice as many copies or finish games in half as much time (which isn't realistic). They don't have the advertising dollars to necessarily sell twice as many copies (they have more employees, and therefore less money for advertising), but they do have a high burn rate.
Only publishers can decide to try smaller budget games like this, and some do, but the market doesn't bear this out as being worth it. It's all part of the modern day problems of internet speed communications and a global market: You have to be the best, or people just choose the best over you. It's the reason why quite talented musicians struggle; they aren't the very best musicians, so most people don't listen to them.
It's actually a very tough problem, and making something analogous to Sundance is required: something where the innovative are supported merely for being innovative, not for money making opportunities. Many such projects are the result of almost angel investing by big names that have already made it, because they have faith. Big corporate publishers aren't likely to be sympathetic to this idea, but maybe Sid Meier or Will Wright will be.
- Jodiamonds
It's all been downhill ever since Galaxian, which was just a clone of Space Invaders with glitzier graphics.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
In the good old days when computer games was something new and special, I didn't have to compete against the movie industry. Since then they have been blending more and more.
A result of that has been that game developers strive to become more like movies. And sadly enough, the players in demand realistic graphics that is at the same level or better than the rest of the market. Acceptance will not be granted without.
But I believe that focus will again resolve around gameplay was the graphics reach a more stable level.