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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.'"
Phone == communication device. What part of this is unclear?
Honesty. Loyalty. Kindness. Laughter. Generosity. Magic!
Neil Young
General manager
EA L.A.
"One new feature or fresh take can change everything."
This from Electronic Arts?
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
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.
Jason Ford
...that I'm not sure if I would laugh or cry if I got to play the games that they rejected!
General manager for games and entertainment
Sprint Nextel
"We reject about 30 games a month because so many of them are offering the same gameplay over and over again. Lots of these games just aren't fun, offering wretched controls. Many of them are mediocre at best."
Wow. If this is at all indicative of the behaviours of other publishers, then let me be the first to say...
that casual gamers are the real market/universe, and that hardcore gamers are only a small subset of that.
That, to me, is the lesson of Nintendogs.
When the gaming industry wakes up to that one is when games explode into life.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
as a *very* casual gamer, and one getting dangerously close to 40, I actually appreciate games that are (1) simplistic, (2) easy on the eyes, (3) I can figure out how to play in 30 seconds or less, and (4) don't require I make a professional investment of time to enjoy.
As for the Atari 2600, I've still got most of my cartridges; and if I had a functional console I'd still be playing them!
Does this mean I'm out of touch? Maybe... but I'm willing to be there are millions of us "out of touch" people who would love a quick game of astroids.
Satoru Iwata -President Nintendo
"We do not run from risk. We run to risk. We move beyond current boundaries."
What he's actually saying: Risk 2000 is being developed for the revolution! Finally bring a good boardgame to the console!
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
"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
To be fair, Nintendo had the first online console, the the first handheld portable game system, the first re-writable optical drive in a console. They had the first (and only) all-red dual-eye parallax game console, the first battery backed-up cartridge, the first scrolling arcade game. They had the first shoulder buttons, the first analog stick (on a major system), the first rumble pack, the first diamond configuration buttons. They had the first analog buttons that click when you hold them all the way down. They had the second handheld to system link feature, the first utterly gratuitous plate-spinning robot, the first sewing machine attachment. They had some of the the first portable single-title LCD games. They had the first 3rd person / 1st person hybrid shooter, the first action floor mat, the first touch-screen portable gaming system. The first (by a few days) portable gaming system with built-in wifi.
All of the things that you list as Nintendo shying away from are actually things which everyone else in the industry considered the safe bet. When everyone was going to CD, Nintendo took a risk and stuck with the access times of cartridges. 10 years ago when everyone said that online console gaming was now, Nintendo correctly said that the time was not yet right.
With Pokemon, Virtua Boy, Nintendogs, Kirby, Brain Games, Bulky Drive, etc, it is hard to fault their originality. Nintendo routinely does really bafflingly odd things.
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?
"Don't tell me you'd stop playing Grand Theft Auto if you saw a Gap ad instead of some generic fake brand."
Yes I would. GTA has satirical adverts. They criticise the media, the insulting way they treat the public, and make an good social comment which improve the game no end. This is what sets it apart from EA rip offs.
We've enjoyed a medium near enough free from advertising. And it is our duty to preserve this. If I pay £40 (and next gen £50) to buy a game, I buy the freedom from ads. You can put them in, but then you must make the game free. There is no middle ground. An XBOX 360 game full of ads won't cost less than some fantasy game that doesn't have them. If you think it will, I am sorry but you are fooling yourself. All it does is succeed in making genres that are not "advertising friendly" less financially viable.
Just because american TV lost the battle to product placement (as the UK might, if the EU stops product placement being illegal), that doesn't mean it's ok for games to lose too. Because this is what this is - Product Placement.
And most importantly, I think it's fair to say most people who play games on slashdot want games to be seen as art. Want them to be acknowledged as a new , creative and meaningful media. And how can that happen if the people making the game have no fucking respect for their own creations.
To quote the late, great, Bill Hicks:
"Here's the deal, folks. You do a commercial - you're off the artistic roll call, forever. End of story. Okay? You're another whore at the captialist gang bang and if you do a commercial, there's a price on your head. Everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink." - Bill Hicks
http://skeptobot.blogspot.com/ - A site for the Renaissance man and woman
Wait, isn't XNA and the Xbox development kit super expensive? Thus cutting out the "two guys moonlighting" entirely?
- chrish