Slashdot Mirror
Epic's Rein On Next-Gen And Secondhand
Computer and Video Games has an interview with Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games. He expounds on Epic's role in the next generation of consoles, along with his opinions on the industry in general, and the sales of secondhand games. From the article: "Unreal Tournament, the original, is still our biggest-selling game ever. Because we sell our games now in instalments, no single instalment is going to sell in the same way as a single game across multiple formats. We're really recapturing a lot of the original, with less jumping around - it went a little crazy with the double and triple jumps. It'll be toned down and a little more skill-based."
They should port Jill of the Jungle to a console.
(or ZZT)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Sorry, nope. I don't agree with the prices ebgames charges for used games (save $5! wooo), but theres no way they are going to get kickbacks off of that system. Record companies dont get any money from secondhand album sales. If i sell a videogame to a friend of mine, would I be obliged to send the publisher 10%?
It seems as he has lost touch with the people BUYING the games. I buy almost all of my games second hand (because they arent worth fullprice, usually). You got your money, let me have my fun
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
One thing I really like about onslaught is that long range movement is delegated to vehicles. CTF turned into 20 teleporters streaking every which way and that just took the fun out of it. They now have vehicle CTF, but I think it still allows teleporters.
I know it's Unreal Tournament, and so it doesn't have to be realistic, but teleporters are solving a problem that doesn't exist anymore with vehicles available.
To ask for royalties on used games is perposterous. It's completely contrary to the Doctrine of First Sale.
Even if by some miracle it wasn't, how do you expect to expand that model? If we sell our game as an individual, we have to make out a tiny little check to Epic? No? Then a small company does? No? Well, where do you draw the line? It's all in a scary realm which trounces on a company's ability to do business, and introduces unfair competition.
Perhaps they could make the margin proposition more attractive for retailers, encouraging them to slow down or eliminate their used game sales.
Perhaps they could eliminate support for "used" / transferred games - like MMOs and such already do.
Or perhaps they could just suck it up and keep their noses out of other peoples' bottom line.
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
They make a big point in the article about hiring. Here's the link to their open positions:
http://www.epicgames.com/epic_jobs.html
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
Mod Wisely.
Unreal Tournament was 6GB compressed. Next Generation games are going to be 20GB plus, and how we're going to fit them on DVD9's I don't know, they'll probably be a few of them. On the PS3, we're going to be using the majority of the space on those Blu-ray disks. So, online isn't really the best option in some instances.
Downloading 30Gb isn't really feasible. What online could be, is the back-channel to get additional content. Patches and things like that. I think what Valve has done is great. It'll be interesting to see where marketing fits in. Now they're going with EA in the future, the biggest publisher of all. You can't do one without the other, otherwise no-one knows about your game. Unless you have the huge marketing budgets that major retailers have when launching your game, so I think there's still a very important role for retailers.
That says it right there, doesn't it. MS is going to have a hard time keeping content on discs. People argue whether you need the space between BD-ROM and HD-DVD for video, but I think this is even more important on the video game side. This is one of those things that could become a big problem for MS.
What about Nintendo? For some reason I don't see it as such a big problem (maybe because they aren't focusing on HD this and HD that), but it could still be a problem.
As for the used game comment, I don't blame them. There are many times that I would like to buy a game used and have money go to the publisher to support the people who made the game. The problem is that shops like EB would just take that as an excuse to raise the price higher (used games already cost enough). I buy very few games these days because they just cost too much for the risk. I agree with him that the price of a DVD would be an ideal price ($20-$25), but I don't know how they'd achieve that (except making most games smaller, which in many cases might not be so bad :). There is no good system for this right now, but I think moving to a steam/iTunes like model (where you buy the game online and download it for $15 instead of buying a used copy for $15) makes a lot of sense. That would allow people to play older games, but without paying much, and still have the money go to the publisher. Plus these days it would be feasible to have people download PS type games (one or two CDs) here in the US (let it run overnight). It might be a while before you can do that with current and next-gen games due to bandwidth problems.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Well, I have to say - are they going to fill up the Blu-Ray discs with actual game CONTENT (i.e. textures/models/maps .. the important stuff) .. or do they want to stick feature-length cutscenes?
If it's the latter.. then it's no big loss. I have trouble seeing why 9 GB is going to be that big of a problem for this generation of games. Sure, music will probably be the largest assets, but there are nice ways to losslessly compress them.
There's no news here, in particular.
[DISCLAIMER: This post is a work of satire and should not be misconstrued as a holy text upon which to base a religion.]
"There's no news here, in particular."
Uh, yeah, sure.
Ignoring just why MS is in such a bad spot with their storage problem because that would take an entire book to describe the unbelievable sequence of bad decisions...
MS has put publishers in the position that they have raised the cost of every game that is ported from the PS3 to 360 by the number of units shipped times the cost of a DVD.
Do the math. And take that right out of profits.
On top of the million other problems with the 360 like massively weaker hardware and Dreamcast size installed base, as a publisher why should I bother with the 360?
Ports aren't a form of charity for people dumb enough to buy a deadend console.
Sure, music will probably be the largest assets, but there are nice ways to losslessly compress them.
Games already use lossy compressed music. For instance, Dance Dance Revolution Konamix and Katamari Damacy use Sony's VAG codec which is supported by PS1 and PS2 hardware, and Unreal Tournament 2003 and newer use Ogg Vorbis audio. Do you expect publishers to go below the quality of MP3 at 128 kbps on console games? The only music compression that can get really tiny and still be listenable is reorchestrating the soundtrack as tracked music, whether MIDI or MOD or XM or whatever, and nowadays only handheld games can seem to get away with real-time wavetable synthesis.
Textures tend to be bigger than compressed music, so unless you synthesize textures (as is done in .the .product), they tend to fill the disc. In addition, there's a tradeoff between raw loading time and decompression time.
Who says you need the entire 30GB to START playing? That is where Valve is messing up... Give me the first level (which has most of the models and at least one song) and let me get started. Then stream it down at low speed over the time I am in the game. If I hit an area that I don't have... Kick up the speed and tell me an estimated time to load. I think this would work a lot better on games. How many people make it all the way to the end of the game?
Do not stare at the sun. It might hurt your eyes.
He has a problem with secondhand games, and I see his point - support and infrastructure costs going to customers who haven't paid the developer.
On the other hand, though, he's not going to have any luck convincing me or anyone else that we can't resell something we've bought - games, books, music, teddy bears - no one will accept limits on the First Sale doctrine.
But, there is a way out. An article recently on Gamasutra here talked about how the pricing strategy for games and the entire sales model is based on an old, old way of doing things that's far more suited to cabbages and sealing wax than digital information. If game companies got over the retail model, and instead did interesting things like web-based delivery, episodic content, subscription-based models, and so forth, they would solve the secondhand-games problem and make more money to boot. This becomes more possible as game consoles and even handheld systems gain Internet connectivity.
Steam (as badly implemented as it is) is a glipse of the future.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
How much more does a store make on the sale of a used game over a new one? They've still got to purchase the used copy from someone after all.
I can understand wanting to support the people who made a game, but why should the publisher benefit from a second hand sale? They've provided nothing of value in the transaction. They may have enabled it in the first place by producing the product but they were already compensated for that.
That is a completely bullshit argument. The original buyer paid the developer and then *sold* the game to someone else. So after the sale you again have one customer, not two. Support and infrastructure costs don't change at all due to second hand games, but they probably do increase due to bootlegged games, which are a completely different issue.
His argument is the same that the MPAA/RIAA push. They want to be paid every time you watch a movie or hear a song. Yeah sure, and hammer manufacturers would like some money every time I get my hammer out. I bet door makers would love if you had to pay every time you used a door. Copyright owners* have never made a sensible argument about why they should be special.
* Note I didn't say artists, because they are rarely the ones that end up owning the copyright.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
This is Epic we're talking about and the 6GB were without videos. I have no doubt that the 30GB they're talking about will be only game content as well. Lots of highly detailled game content.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
When it's an online multiplayer game there's no way to tell where to start streaming.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Or better yet, release all the new game content to be avialable for download before the actual game is out, then I can pre-load the whole thing and be ready to go from day one...oh wait
The problem with this model is that while I would trust a company like Apple to do it correctly, I would NOT trust Valve to handle such a distribution system responsibly.
What I and many other gamers fear is that once Valve gets Steam as the de facto for their games and has most of their player base using it, they will start trying to get all mods downloaded through there as well.
Then they will require it.
Then they will charge for it.
And the end result will be that not only are they getting paid for their game, but they'll be getting paid to distribute mods which other people create. And I guarantee that they're dreaming about it as I write this.
This actually really bugs me. The massive size of game content means that mods are pretty much undownloadable - In old UT with a well-configged server you could hop on and fetch the files quickly. As files get heavier you take longer to fetch files. Pretty much means that nobody plays on servers with 3rd party content because of the endless waiting.
The worst part is that most of the downloading is for textures. Textures are, to me, the least important part of the game. Use a friggin low-res JPG for all I care. But now, every game needs 9 layers of lossless-compressed 1024x1024 images. This would be akin to serving up webpages that are just a giant imagemapped gif.
Still, can't wait to see it.
Well, the textures are what make the graphics look believable, stylized, artistic, whathaveyou. But yeah, 200MB mods are annoying. Mods these days seem to be mostly concerned with adding "realism" and graphics than they are with original gameplay.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.