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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."
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.
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.
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.
Looks like the author, Greg Costikyan, is operator of a cell phone games company that made a movie license game called Mean Girls: Wannabe
While I do agree with you that we need more people working to make better games, the actual execution of that ideal is a lot harder than it seems.
A lot of people have visions of learning how to program, then designing and programming that AAA title that tears up the charts. The only problem is that most modern games take a large budget. There's exceptions but this is the general case.
That, in most cases, forces you to work for a game company that could care less about your vision for the perfect game. You're a programmer so you're going to be working 60-80 hour weeks writing code that other people are telling you to write, and not interesting code either.
If you're lucky then maybe you can work your way up to a game designer where you get to have your ideas shot down by management who don't want to take a risk, and would rather just pump out some clone using code you wrote for another game.
What's needed is not creative talent going into the current game industry, but more people taking risks and being entrepeneurs. We need more indy game developement. We need to focus on the areas where low budget games can compete and work up.
While in college I wanted to be a game developer very badly. My senior year it sort-of lost its luster. After graduating some friends and I tried to start our own game company, but as we did research on our prospects, the others lost hope and dropped out. Plus with developer hours getting longer and longer, and games getting less innovative, the draw to find work at an existing company was practically nonexistant.
Now, I'm rather disillusioned with the whole industry, without having even worked in it. I'd rather work my 40-60 hour job, and work on games as a hobby (and thus get to make the kind of games I want to), than work 60-80 hours a week on Madden 2006.
But if you ever try a start-up, look me up. I'd definately be willing to try.
<plug>And if the two you selected were budget and gameplay, choose Jeff Minter
Minters games, even since the VIC20 days have
I mean for Gods sake (and these are just some of the best):
Games that are simutaneously incredibly hard and incredibly controllable and playable. The limit is not this piece of plastic in your hand, it's your own brain, directly connected to the game.
Do yourself a favour and download the demo of Gridrunner++. Play it ten times. Don't stop because it looks like shite, don't stop because it's hard. You should now be a freshly converted Minter fan.
And the man is a out-of-the-closet beastialist! What's not to love about that!
</plug>I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
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.
What makes a game fun is the pattern it forms in your mind as you do things and get rewards for them.
Building a business around these patterns is tricky, because the only certain way to do this reliably (without, say, getting a PhD in psychology) is to repeat what's been fun before. At first you have a successful game, then you have copycats, then you have a genre.
The problem is that the patterns formed in the mind eventually become desensitized to the same stimulus over and over again. The genre must continually evolve or die.
It gets more and more difficult to find new ways to trigger that positive response while still remaining within the confines of a known successful genre.
The reason genres (such as FPS or RTS) developed in the first place was because the difference between each technological graphical breakthrough was significant to the player.
What's happening now is that the graphical breakthroughs are no longer adequate. The calls for "creative" games, for genre-busters (e.g. Katamari Damacy) that are coming about more and more, are based on the fact that we, as game consumers, are starting to get bored.
But until game designers find a formula to make a game fun that transcends genre -- meaning that it doesn't just copycat an earlier fun game -- this pattern will repeat.
I am no psychologist, but I have an idea of what these principles would look like:
1. Provide positive response for the basic activity of the game. Pac-Man slows to eat each dot, and you see and hear happy feedback with each successful dot eaten. Items in Katamari Damacy are plentiful and make happy sounds (and controller vibrations) as each gets sucked up. With an FPS, there is the flame and the sound of each blast you fire. Warcraft units click, light up and give you one of a number of obedient greetings as you select them.
2. Scale reward with effort. You can finish each screen without eating a single ghost, but if you really want the big points, you gotta try and eat all four! It's one thing to have a big enough Katamari, but let's try and really blow the king away with a BIG one... and how do you get that cat over there? It's fun to play Counterstrike and Warcraft, but it's more fun to win.
The player must be allowed to do what he is trying to do. In other words, controls must be responsive, but Pac-Man (for example) takes this even further, to where you can turn into a tunnel even if you've gone a few pixels past it, without having to turn the other way. If there's a split-second delay between clicking the mouse and knowing that your weapon's going to fire (there may be a delay in firing it a la BFG, but you hear and see feedback as soon as you say to do it), you're going to get frustrated.
Know what games follow these principles better than any others? Slot machines. Because they have to.