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Cheer Up! Video Games Are In Great Shape
simoniker writes "Tired of doom and gloom from pundits predicting the sky falling on the video game industry? Long-time Gamasutra design columnist Ernest Adams offers up a contrary view in his new column, commenting: 'The industry may be as conservative as Pat Buchanan, and it may be going through a rocky transition between consoles right now, but video games are doing very well, thank you very much.' He goes on to make points such as 'The mass market is here', 'Games are getting easier to make thanks to inexpensive tools', and 'Game development education has arrived'."
It's all well and good to say the industry is in great shape, tools are getting easier and so on. Funding, however, gets harder to find every day, and sequelitis is turning into a religion regarding how not to lose money in gaming.
The status quo is becoming established, at best.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
This Thematic sequence of classes appeared just this year:
Interactive Media Studies-3 Animation and Game Design. Designed to develop a focused expertise in the theory, processes, and production skills involved in the development of 3D environments in a gaming context. Students will be able to understand the basic terminology and processes involved in 3D design, animation, and game design. Students will develop expertise in "state-of-the-art" 3D design and animation tools and be able to present and discuss underlying concepts and techniques in 3D and game design. The will also have a broad understanding of the history and cultural context of 3D game design and development.
Take these three courses:
IMS 319 Foundations in 3D and Animation (3)
ARC/IMS 404.Y Mind and Medium (3)
IMS 445 Game design (3)
I am so taking these classes.
Demented But Determined.
Original, fun games have nothing to do with technology. It just requires creative people to make them. Snood and Tetris are classic examples.
John McLaughlin: What's up with video games these days? Patty Patty Buke Buke.
Pat Buchanan: I'm thinking nothing, really. Maybe a little..
John McLaughlin: WRONG!
(with apologies to SNL)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I think Nintendo could do a lot here to help the current situation. As the article says, the market is finally here, and its in some ways easier to develop.
Nintendo is trying to force development costs down, while encouraging innovation, thats 2 things necessary to grow from this status-quo we are in right now.
Kent Simon Multitheft Auto
Not really. When all the producers are fighting over the same customers, we consumers enjoy better product and lower prices.
The video game industry hasn't been in trouble since the NES came out. There was that short lapse when people got tired of Pong, Atari, and Coleco-whatever, but past Nintendo... sorry. The chances of the video games industry going into a deep recession are absolutely zero. No, the millions of people playing MMORPG's, shockwave games, console games, and FPS games are not just going to up and vanish, nor will their numbers recede. Far from it; as great games with really good graphics become cheaper, and more available with more online content, we haven't even begun to see the limit of the industry. Not to mention the blinding speed at which gaming is growing in developing nations (remember all that Chinese legislation meant to keep people from playing long hours of online games, or the fanatacism of young koreans with MMORPGS and real time strategy?).
The only people that are facing real trouble are game pundits themselves, as the gaming journalism business is more or less a big farce. Yes, some of them do a good job and take themselves seriously, but a large majority are more than willing to take a little kick-back to give a game a good rating and decieve their readers.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
The big studios will continue to squeeze out Doom 16, Command&Conquer 23 and NHL 2020. With good tools and some brilliant idea, a hobbyist will create a good game, it will be a surprise success because the IDEA is great (the graphics might be mediocre at best, but who cares, the GAME is great because the IDEA is great).
Then some studio picks it up, sends a team of graphics artists on it and we'll see the first of a line of new sequelitis games.
Quite serious, if you want to have a great game with a new idea, do it yourself. Waiting for a studio to create an innovative game is like waiting for MS to create a secure and stable OS.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Or am I missing something?
This doens't take into account the ever-increasing cost of game production. How can it be getting both easier and more expensive to produce games?
Surely if this were the case, we'd be seeing an exponential increase in quality? If we are, it's going right over my head (with a beautifully rendered motion blur, I might add).
"Or am I missing something?"
The typical geek's inability to shop. I suggest you get a woman. That'll solve your problem, and keep the towels clean.
Umm, you kind of infered that Korea was a developer country. South Korea is right up there with the rest of first world countries. North Korea, however, is pretty bad economically, but except for a few helps that's it's been getting from it's neighbors (China, South Korea) it's more like stagnation. The only thing that North Korea seems to be developing is nuclear arms.
I heard the Sega Master system used to be big in Brazil and other latin american coutries well into the 1990's (maybe still) because it was cheap and easy to develop for. Most developing countries won't be able to afford games at premium pricing and would likely just be rife with piracy. Maybe locally grown games or old games meant to run on old systems. If you follow international news at all you'll know that most of the developing world isn't developing. The few exceptions include China, India, and Qatar.
The world is a sad place for many people. Wars; bribery; embezzlement; unchecked criminal activity; arbitrary enforcement of laws; poor education; and lack of investment by the government, local individuals, and foriegners into infrastructure and value-added industries all contribute to a perpetual developing status for many countries.
In John Cleese's How To Irritate People, the final sketch (one of pure brilliance) involves two bored airline pilots trying to entertain themselves. It begins with the co-pilot turning on the intercom and saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about."
The joke is, of course, that the only time someone feels the need to say, "Don't worry; everything's okay!" is when there really is something to worry about. Or, when someone is trying to pull your leg.
Shortly after Wal-Mart's RFID trials were aborted, scrapped, and otherwise sent to the wastebin, I began receiving RFID e-zine articles all with titles similar to this: "Problem? What problem! Why, RFID is as big as it ever was!" Sure enough, the big RFID revolution is dead before it even got started.
The signs have been there for a while that history is repeating itself. The big studios of gaming are reliving what the big studios of cinema lived in the 1960s: "The people say that they want more from the moviegoing experience? Oh my, we need a bigger budget! Ten times the cast! Bigger sets! And a costume change for Liz Taylor in every scene!" Of course, the people didn't want more sets. They wanted more variety, more stories, new ways of telling stories -- not just the same thing with more baubles. Oh, you had some new ideas like Easy Rider which were nifty, until the studios churned out 10,000 Easy Rider knock-offs. It wasn't until the 1970s when upstarts Lucas, Spielberg, Coppolla and Scorsese came to town and the old guard died off that the studios' fortunes changed.
What's gonna happen? Things are gonna get worse before they get better. Some of the old guard will get so decrepit that they'll have to take risks. And that's where we'll end up with the next Godfather, Jaws or Star Wars for video gaming.
NHL 2020
Dude, I would so totally play that. Just imagine, jet-powered hockey skates, on-ice obstacles, shifting play field, multi-layered rink...
'Game development education has arrived'
I'm screwed.
The ______ Agenda
Now imagine if those creative people had awesome ideas but were weak at programming. Tetris is much simpler then modern 3d engines but if they screwed up the technical work and it affected gameplay it wouldn't have been so fun now would it.
The same is true of game engines, a really crappy one is really crappy.
Hmmm... Pie...
back in my day, tetris stressed the hell outta those darned XT's.
What is more powerful: an IBM XT with a 4.77 MHz 8086 CPU in a 40x24 cell text mode or an NES with a 1.79 MHz 6502 CPU running in almost the same text mode? If a two-player Tetris clone doesn't particularly stress the NES, then why would it stress an XT? Tetanus On Drugs, on the other hand...
I didn't realize anyone out there still played with consoles
Show me several good single-head real-time multiplayer titles for PC, and I'll believe you. I want to plug multiple joypads into a PC and have a game recognize them all and assign one to each character on the screen, without having to buy a separate PC for each player in the same room.
Tetris is much simpler then modern 3d engines but if they screwed up the technical work and it affected gameplay it wouldn't have been so fun now would it.
Did you say "Tetris Worlds" by THQ? It actually breaks Tetris. Quite a few clones pay little attention to controls either.
if you want to have a great game with a new idea, do it yourself.
So once my team has a prototype working on the PC, how do we get it ported to and distributed on a handheld system?
Flash gets crapped on all the time here
Largely because there's no Free, free, or even affordable equivalent of Flash available to the general public, is there?
Games like Half-Life, NWN and Oblivion ship with serious content creation tools, so powerful that you can rewrite virtually the entire scenario.
Are they powerful enough that I can put four players on a single machine, as seen in Bomberman or Smash Bros.? Or will single-head multiplayer gaming be forever the exclusive domain of lockout chip based consoles, such that independent games require the purchase of one PC and one copy of Half-Life 2 for each player? And which handheld games have serious modding tools?
More civilized areas use the GSM system.
"More civilized areas" (i.e. continental Europe, Japan, and Korea) tend not to speak a lot of English or use payment methods that interact well with developers based in the United States.