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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."
pretty graphics ..pick two...
good gameplay
small budget
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!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like what happened when other companies started to outdo EA in their football games?
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. -
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!
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that anyone who is 'high up' probably doesn't 'give a fuck' because games are completely inconsiquential.
Personally, I'd be pretty pissed if our leaders spent time worrying about the amount of creativity in amusement activities. If you want more creativity in games, buy creative games. If there aren't any creative games, then don't buy bad ones and go do something else.
The job of the government is not to ensure you are entertained. You could argue that it is the job of the government to provide schools that will teach you the difference between "cause" and "because", but that's an entirely different conversation.
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.
When you see games like World of Warcraft reaching 4 million subscribers recently, I doubt you can really say the gaming industry is dying. Assuming 1/2 payed for the boxed game, that's 100 million up front, and at 13$ a month, another 520 million a year. That is almost as much money as Episode III got. There is simply no way Blizzard is spending half a billion dollars a year on the game, or even half that. I'd say that some companies are doing quite well.
Yes we all bemoan the closing of some great software makers. Yes, may of the conglomorates churn out trash. However, there is a market for solid games that is expanding instead of contracting. Companies just need to be both innovative and aware of the current business environments. The days of programmer gurus acting as CEO are over. This indicates a maturing of the industry, not some loss. Marketers have their place. So long as the new heads of the gaming companies still listen to their programmers, and leave the creative development to the creative people, they will succeed. Companies like EA are destined to failure.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Errrrr.. if you're going to give people just what they're expecting then you're not being very creative, are you?
A great video game does something that nobody expects and totally expands views of what's possible in the genre. Great people go out to create new expectations and mediocre people try to fulfill them.
I grew up during the dawn of arcades. During that time, you'd very frequently see a new game come out and say to yourself, "Wow, I never knew they could do that," or, "Gee, I never thought of that before." (Think Tempest, Punch-Out!!!, Zaxxon or Dig-Dug for examples). Nowadays this feeling comes much more rarely, even considering the sophistication of modern games.
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. It's not all that risky when you're willing to forego bleeding-edge technology and instead focus on innovative gameplay to shrink your budget.
Happy people make bad consumers.
So I ask, what exactly are people expecting, creatively that they are not getting now?
Nothing.
It's the overdone, familiar genres that make money. Therefore those are what most people are expecting.
There is a vocal minority of gamers who complain that there are so few innovative games out there, but when they're actually released, they sell like crap:
- P.N.03 (and its cancelled sibling Dead Phoenix) for the Gamecube
- Rez and Ico for the PS2
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Battlezone and Sacrifice for the PC
The only kind of oddball games I can think of that sold well recently were the original Soul Reaver (which seems to have been a fluke - its sequels didn't match its success), and the Metroid franchise, which is pretty much its own formula now anyway.
What makes tons of money?
- The newest FPS
- The newest licensed sports game
- The newest racing game
- The newest fighting game
- The newest knockoff of whatever is popular at the moment (e.g. GTA clones now, RTS games a few years ago)
- Knockoffs of 25-year-old arcade games for cellphones
- Movie licenses
All of these have an implied "good" attached, e.g. Fight Club the Shitty Game is not going to outsell Soul Calibur 2 just because it's newer.
If unusual games were profitable, there wouldn't be a shortage of them.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman