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30 Quotes From GDC 06
Next Generation has a piece with 30 notable quotes from last week's GDC conference. From the article: "Mitch Lasky, Senior VP of mobile EA - 'There are too many bad games. The fact is, most games suck. It's the greatest danger to the future of this business. There's a real danger of an Atari 2600 episode here, given the oversupply of poor quality content, followed by consumers abandoning the platform.'"
When I was working on Backyard Baseball (GameCube) for Atari, I got this comment from a programmer in one of the bug reports: "I don't know what the problem is, but whatever it was it's now fixed."
I was going to ask him to step through the code to find out exactly what the problem was to be absolutely sure that it was fixed, but I didn't want to risk breaking anything else because of that. Bad enough they waited until the last build to remove the animation of one of the kids flipping off the pitcher when striking out and remove all the background phallic imagery. It was a children's game, btw.
this is actully a huge problem with microsoft smartphones imo. This is the mindset of the people who make decisions. The mindset of needing to draw people away from communication on the phone and do something else. But ffs it's a phone! When I buy a phone I EXPECT the primary function of it to be communication. If more time is spent making it play cool games or run killer apps, then it is no longer a phone!
"We didn't take money from publishers because we didn't want publishers to fuck up our game."
- One of the creators of Darwinia, accepting the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
The ______ Agenda
None of those things are actually risky. In virtually every case, Nintendo made the right decision (for them), because typically the technology / timing / society / whatever wasn't right, and often not following what everyone else was doing was a greater risk.
Example - the N64. No CDs. Why? Nintendo didn't consider it to be worth it. Look back at all the previous consoles that had CD capability (SegaCD, NeoGeo CD, Jaguar, 3DO, and so on), and you'll see that they all tanked. They had all kinds of technical problems, such as general unreliability and very long load times, in addition to the fact that none of the games were any good, and there was hardly anything worth filling all that space up with - you end up with something like 8MB of game, and 640MB of crap (CD audio, FMVs, pre-rendered backgrounds, or whatever). The PS1 came out and, shockingly enough, repeated the same pattern. The games were tiny (smaller than most N64 games, even), and generally filled the CD with videos, and CD audio, which very rarely added anything to the game. It wasn't until years later that games actually started using that capacity well enough to make it worthwhile - about a year before the Dreamcast came out.
Granted, it allowed developers to use licensed soundtracks. The CD audio capability was hardly ever used for original scores, typically because developers didn't have the resources, and it was quicker and easier to use the system's audio hardware. It also allowed voiceovers, which were utter crap.
About the only developers who really had problems with the N64 were Square, because they were set on using FMVs to make up for the fact that the consoles of the time were too crap to handle what they wanted to do.
It's only recently (middle-era PS2 games, most GC and Xbox games) that developers have generally stopped using FMVs and the like as a crutch, and have started actually using the space afforded by DVDs for game content. In the same time, the technology has progressed to the point where drive mechanisms are extremely reliable (except for early PS2 drives), and access times are good enough to be able to completely avoid loading times (see any first-party Gamecube game as an example).
Same deal with online multiplayer - they didn't jump on the bandwagon when everyone else did. Despite being popular with geeks, virtually nobody else cares about online multiplayer, and didn't even have access to it until fairly recently. And voice chat - notice the shit that Nintendo caught for PictoChat from dumbass parents who wanted Nintendo to raise their kids for them. And HDTV - even in the US, most of the population doesn't have them or care about them. Outside the US, HDTVs are extremely rare. It won't be for another 4 years or so that HDTV will actually be worth it, especially considering that it raises hardware requirements by a factor of 6, without actually offering any graphical improvement.
And even more bafflingly, and more importantly, they're the only one to sell their hardware at a profit. They're the only one with an actual business model which is making them rich.
Sure, the gamecube just about tied with the xbox in terms of worldwide, product lifetime sales. But Nintendo also sells gameboy's (advance/micro/DS) by the absolute containershipload. And unlike Sony and MS, who are selling their stuff at a loss, Nintendo makes money on each system sold. Plus they make money on the games, which is the only place Sony and MS see any return.
Face it: Nintendo have won the console wars, and with the Revolution being either the secondary console, and often even the primary console of gamers around the world (and the only one to do anything new/interesting), they're set for the current next-gen too.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?