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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
We all know that Nethack beats the competition hands down!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
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.
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. -
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.
Looks like the author, Greg Costikyan, is operator of a cell phone games company that made a movie license game called Mean Girls: Wannabe
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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
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.