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."

Comments

No way.

[Musteval]

With such gripping, original, and sure-to-be-great games as "50 Cent: Bulletproof" coming up, I find this forecast completely unrealistic.

like the old saying goes...

[phloydde1]

pretty graphics
good gameplay
small budget ..pick two...

Re:like the old saying goes...

[Jhan]

pretty graphics good gameplay small budget ..pick two...

<plug>And if the two you selected were budget and gameplay, choose Jeff Minter

Minters games, even since the VIC20 days have

1. Looked horrible
2. Played awesomely

I mean for Gods sake (and these are just some of the best):

• Grid runner for VIC20
• Revenge of the Mutant Camels (C=64, but Amiga version kicked rump)
• Llamatron for Amiga with dual joystick control...
• Tempest 2000 for Atari Jaguar. Could be the best game ever made.
• Hover Bovver in all it's incarnations is always fun

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>

Games Smames

[MightyMartian]

We all know that Nethack beats the competition hands down!

Marketing led

[carndearg]

I'm afraid when you let the marketeers out of their playpens and run an industry this is the inevitable result.

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.

Re:Marketing led

[provolt]

No one up high gives a fuck cause it's video "games"

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.

Re:Marketing led

[carndearg]

Fair enough. My comment was based on the experience of working for a marketing led game publisher in the UK for several years and watching them push woeful titles on unsuspecting punters by pumping them up through buying magazine reviews, in effect telling big lies about the products. Their testers were telling them the products were woeful but instead of getting some gameplay improvements in they just pushed more marketing at them.

Eventually they had such a string of titles which bombed that when the finally got a good title(Virus 2000, David Braben's brilliant follow-up to the classic Virus) the damage was done and no amount of marketing could shake the shoddy image they'd aquired. Standard going titsup ensued, most of the workforce out of the door, remnants sold to a competitor.

Re:Marketing led

[badasscat]

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

Huh? So the people that actually come up with the ideas, design the characters, the levels, the worlds, design the gameplay elements; then the people that program all that in, create the artwork, create the physical look and feel of the game, these people are less important than the testers? WTF? Without all those other people that handle the creative and production tasks before the testers, there would be no game!

This is like saying the test audiences for a Hollywood film are the most important part of the filmmaking process. It makes no sense. They're more important than the writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, etc.? They most definitely are not!

But this leads me to:

And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work.

Who the hell is a "creator" of a game these days? Every game these days has many producers, directors, program managers, writers, coders, illustrators, 3D modelers, level designers, character designers, and other creative and management team members that all provide input in how the game will end up. These people work for both developers and publishers.

Is this a bloated system? Sometimes. But there are a lot of people out there who like games like Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto and those games are not going to make themselves. A lot of people are involved. Take a look at the credits for even a simple game like Katamari Damacy sometime - it's huge.

Creators do have control of their games, because these creators are collectively called "companies". All companies are are groups of like-minded people working on related projects (even if they're only related in that they're all for the same company). The company is the creator. Why should one person get to keep control of a game if he leaves the company, and nobody else who worked on it at that company gets jack? Is that somehow more fair than the system we have now?

Re:Marketing led

[Ignignot]

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.

Re:Marketing led

[AviLazar]

Game testers are not, by far, anyway relevant to the shaping of the product EXCEPT for: All they do is say "yea here is the bug" or "yea this is cool" but by the time the game gets into playtesters hands the game is already made. Too late to change concept.

Pre-development is the most important. I was hanging out in a comic book store as a kid and some marketers came in. We all got in a group and they showed us concept art, storylines, etc. They asked for our opinion on what we would like to see in the game. We told them. That is where the consumer is most important.

Yes marketers are VERY important. Do not belittle them because you are fedup with spam. These guys are trained to find out what the majority of the public want...it may not be what you want, but guess what they are not making their product for a minority....or do you play games like WoW, EQ, 1/2-Life, Doom3, etc? Then you fell for some marketers ploy.

Innovation will not be stopped; addicts

[Sebastopol]

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!

Starting with EA Games!

[IcyNeko]

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.

Uh, no

[Reality Master 101]

And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work.

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?

Re:Uh, no

[Reality Master 101]

Unless they negotiated a contract with you in advance, that's bullshit.

Nope, that's the (US) law. Copyright law specifically gives the rights to the photographers, and you are forbidden from making copies without their permission. You have to negotiate these things in advance, and a lot of photographers flat-out refuse to give you any rights. You have to go to them for prints. This is why it's often hard to copy a photo at, say, Kinkos. They're under pressure from the Photographer unions and fear being sued for copyright infringement.

It sucks, but there you go.

I had a debate about this once from a professional photographer (a horse photographer, in fact), and she went on and on about how prints are the only way she makes any money, cameras are expensive, etc, etc. Boo freakin' hoo. The rights still shouldn't belong to her if it's MY money paying the tab.

Meta

[Baldrson]

When I was working on the PLATO system doing some of the first networked games something that seemed to get people's attention was the idea of a per-contact-hour royalty. We worked this idea to our advantage in a meta-game called "Meta" which let you accumulate Metas -- a unit of currency -- which you could take between games. The player would accumulate Metas when the author of the game accumulates pennies (basically a gain of 100 to 1) -- however the player can also accumulate (or lose) Metas during play and can take Metas so accumulated to other games. Now the rules of each game are different, of course, but the idea of getting people to pay by the contact-hour with Meta is that you can get a group of game authors setting up an ecosystem of sorts, with the goal of making the whole ecosystem more valuable per contact-hour.

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.

Re:Wow, it's like every other creative feild.

[pete6677]

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.

Wow,

[tomstdenis]

I've been saying this for years now.

"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, ... etc

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

It seems pretty easy to me.

[provolt]

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.

Re:Wow, it's like every other creative feild.

[interiot]

There's an inherent tension between financing art and producing art for its own sake that has existed for a long time, and is overall a good thing (otherwise no art projects could reach beyond a small group's income).

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.

Doomed eh?

[Shadow Wrought]

We must blow up this business model, or we are all doomed.

No pun intended?

Officially Tiresome

[mrbooze]

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.

Re:Wow, it's like every other creative feild.

[notdanielp]

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.

Games too expensive for publishers to gamble

[L-Train8]

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.

Re:Wow, it's like every other creative feild.

[Drooling Iguana]

Like what happened when other companies started to outdo EA in their football games?

Blah Blah, same old recycled complaints

[cbreaker]

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.

Indie Games

[wviperw]

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.

Irony beyond comment.

[Rahga]

Looks like the author, Greg Costikyan, is operator of a cell phone games company that made a movie license game called Mean Girls: Wannabe

PT Barnum once said

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Re:Hot air

[Red Flayer]

"These wankers should stop paying attention to the 'industry' and just look at themselves and ask - 'How can I make the most money possible?'"

Unfortunately, this will not always drive innovation. If you have consumers who desire innovation, who will take a stance and NOT purchase games that don't innovate, then it might happen.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of people out there who either
(1) don't place a high premium on innovation or
(2) are young, and don't realize that the 'new' game they're playing is redundant.

Faced with the choice of purchasing a sequel to get at least *some* new gameplay, or not purchasing any games at all, most video game players will go ahead and purchase the sequel.

Game developers understand this, and take full advantage; furthermore, production costs for a sequel can be much lower than an original game. Finally, non-innovative games are attractive because they engender less risk.

When a developer asks, "How can I make the most money?" the answer is, a lot of the time, "By putting out a tweaked version of a previously successful game."

Gameplay DOES still sell..

[rbonine]

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.

But what are they wanting?

[sterno]

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?

Re:But what are they wanting?

[nakedsushi]

There's already an MMO strategy RPG that just came out of open beta a few weeks ago, I believe.

Dofus

I played some of it in open beta and it's a little like FF-tactics with a pretty bad French to English translation. However, it's still playable and I would have enjoyed it more if the battles weren't so slow due to players forgetting to "complete" their turns.

Re:But what are they wanting?

[Tyler Durden]

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?

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.

Re:But what are they wanting?

[blincoln]

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.

Re:But what are they wanting?

[Hatta]

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?


Adventure games.

Re:But what are they wanting?

[Rimbo]

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.

Re:But what are they wanting?

[donscarletti]

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?

Ah, so in fact you actually do want Battlefield 2 (which blends strategy with first person combat in a large environment with persistant rank) but have been prejudiced against it because it has the number 2 after it. Battlefield 2 has a squad and commander system that makes it easy, intuitive and fun to play as part of a team. It also has been designed to make teamwork florish over individual work by its balancing of outfit kits and making vehicals heavily enhanced by additional passangers. Battlefield 2 may not be a revolutionary step, but it is a clear evolutionary step in the field of group tactics and team strategy. I picked up a copy three days ago and I am very glad I did.

As for the other game you mention, Half Life 2. I found that game increadibly innovative in that firstly, it is the only game I have ever played that has physics simulation as an integral part of the gameplay and not just an afterthought. In HL2 there are puzzles (albeit not overly challenging ones) based on clever usage of physical objects with really great effect. It is the only game I have played where one's most powerful weapon is picking up part of the scenery with a special weapon and flinging it at enemies at high speed with accurate effects on impact. Later on it becomes the first game I have played to allow a players to hurl enemies at other enemies. Half Life 2 is also the first game to have a large section of it played in an unarmed semi-amphibious watercraft where one needs to both navigate an artificial canal and clear obstructions on foot in some fairly cool senarios at dams, locks and sluices. To my knowledge, none of these things have been done before, making HL2 far more innovative than it's predecessor.

It occurs to me that much of the whining about lack of creativity in games at the moment is done by people who rather than judging it by its content, judge it by its enumeration. Get over the numbers and give the damn game a try; games need something to build on and a game is basically a sequence of numbers anyway.

Re:Good Programming to make good games, BRILLIANT!

[Rycross]

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.

Uh, yes

[Thangodin]

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.

Screw you and the cinematic you rode in on!

[EEBaum]

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.

Re:Wow, it's like every other creative feild.

[iocat]

Bottom lime: all Greg seems to do is write gloom-and-doom articles about the game industry. If it sucks so bad, go get a different job.

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.)

Re:Wow, it's like every other creative feild.

[Irish_Samurai]

Actually, the NFL approached EA on the exclusive licensing of the NFL. From their perspective it made sense to unify yourself with the company that made the number one selling football game.

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.

Re:Wow, it's like every other creative feild.

[Nikker]

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.

Same old same old

[jparker]

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

The industry is in decay

[Robotron23]

Ultima Online was a game EA pretty much turned into a failure inside of a year. It originally belonged to a smallish firm called OSI, which was tied to Richard Garriot, who invented most of Ultima's concepts. UO was one of the first MMORPG's and was very popular...until EA took over.

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.