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Wideload's Seropian Talks Indie Game Freedom
simoniker writes "Wideload's Alex Seropian, who must recently finished wacky Xbox title Stubbs The Zombie, but also co-founded Bungie, has been chatting about how big-budget games are made, and noting: "I had a great experience at Microsoft. But being on the other side of the fence, there were a lot of developers that were making games for the Xbox for launch time, and a lot of them were struggling for one reason or another... a lot of them were struggling with trying to manage their finances, that cashflow, because they were living under the milestone payment system. And a lot of them were going out of business. And I thought, 'Gee, if I weren't doing this for a living, I'd think this is totally a loser business to be in.'" Seropian now suggests using a small internal group to make games and staffing up with independent contractors when each project starts. Why aren't all games done like this?"
"The other thing I've been convinced of for a while, is that games are too long and that they cost too much. It's so hard for me to play a twenty hour game, because I've got kids. But, kids go to bed, I go downstairs for an hour, I play a game, no sweat."
... I love the twenty hour games ... but there is absolutely no time in the day to play them.
I have the same problem
I saw on G4 once(AKA the dork channel) this thing on the God of War team, and I kept thinking, "wow, that team seems so small to me!"
Changed the way I look at "big-game" dev.
I'd have to question how viable the idea of hiring contractors to flesh out a project would be. Games continually grow in complexity, and those people who have the talent to create high level art and code and have a familiarity with game design would likely have been hired full-time elsewhere, leaving the second-raters as your talent pool for contractors.
The whole model of hiring remote contractors to do content work is already live and well in indie gaming. Im paying an artist and a writer for my next game -> http://www.kudosgame.com/ and I'll be paying an external PR guy and buying in stock sounds for it too. I've worked for companies that employ sound people and animators full time, which is lunacy. What the hell do these people (not to mention the QA dept) do in the first 6 months of a project?
The movie industry learned years ago that this fixed-staff system was nonsense and moved to a contractor system. Big games need to do the same. Us little guys already have.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I've seen it happen a few times in business software shops, and I'm not sure why games would be any different.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Sure, you can code up homebrew games, but doing so requires hacking your console (which is something most people don't know how to do, and in many cases requires expensive/pseudo-legal mod chips or other hardware).
Next time you see an article about "indie developers", don't get them confused with the ordinary shareware/freebie game developers you see online. The consoles have no indie developers, and probably never will have indie developers. Nintendo, MS and Sony are all afraid that people will code up porn games (which they will) and will disable the console's anti-piracy features (which they will).
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
I work for a consulting company, and trust me that all subcontractors have some kind of multiplier for markup. The main company doesn't just pay for the workers time, they pay for overhead, benefits, insurance, AND profit. Yes the subcontractor's shareholders want a big piece of the pie.
So yeah, if you don't need these production workers all the time, then subcontracting is cheaper. But if you use them all the time then it could be cheaper to just hire some more people and cut out the middleman. Of course sometimes the reason for subcontracting is to reduce liability. I wonder if Rockstar would have been as liable for Hot Coffee, if they subcontracted out the game.
"I have the same problem ... I love the twenty hour games ... but there is absolutely no time in the day to play them."
Divorce the wife. She gets the kids. You get all the time in the world to play games.
I saw a doctor about my depression, and he said my Seropian levels were too low. He prescribed Prozac and now I'm not too depressed to play games!
[rimshot]
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
...Must... Finish ... Finnished ... Game!
(who must recently finished wacky Xbox title Stubbs The Zombie)
Can the Slashdot editors ever learn how to edit? Story at eleven!
When mad at one, try running a mile in their shoes. That way, not only do you have their shoes, but you are a mile away.
I can envisage a boomerang effect http://tinyurl.com/sxelz
You know, noone forces you or him to play a 20 hour game in a 20 hour burst. If he only gets an hour a day to play, then a 20 hour game will keep him entertained for 3 weeks. I fail to see why that's a bad thing. He's proposing, what? That if he only has 1 hour a day, games should be 1 hour long? He wants to have to buy a new game each day, or what?
Plus, in my book it's not the vendor that should tell everyone what the consumer really wants. Ask a consumer, if you want to know what the consumer wants.
It's getting on my nerves already, the way the games industry seems to think that just repeating some bullshit often enough will eventually make it true. And not just about the game length, but I'm already digressing.
Do gamers want shorter games? Since when? The usual complaint I hear from actual gamers is that some gamer was too short, not that it was too long. Buying, say, an RPG used to keep you entertained for something like 70 hours. (And I'm not even getting into the _good_ replayable ones like Fallout 2 or Arena or Daggerfall, which I've sunk _hundreds_ of hours into.) Now we're down to games which one can finish in one sunday afternoon. It's already getting 1/8 as much bang per buck. Is any actual gamer actually demanding that they become even shorter? Did anyone finish, say, Fable and go, "man, I so wish it had only half as much content"? Or did anyone who's played a Gran Turismo game find themselves thinking "man, I so wish this had only 2 cars and 3 races, so it doesn't need more than a couple of hours to see everything"?
I mean, seriously, wtf? Since when and where did consumers start demanding less for their money?
So I'll tell you what it is: bullshit PR. The vendor wishes they could sell you half as much stuff for the same money, or at least not much less money. So they proceed to tell you again and again that you really want less stuff. No, seriously, you do. Trust us. Would we lie to you? Again?
And since the same bullshit fallacies pop up again and again, let's dismantle them once and for all:
1. "But I don't have 20 hours in a day!!!" Well, guess what? That's what save and restore are for. Unless he has a bad case of Alzheimer's (so tomorrow he won't remember what he's been doing or why), he just doesn't have to finish a game in one day.
2. "But I'm no longer a teen who has all the time in the world!! Only those can put 20 hours into a game!!!" Well, that's bullshit. I've seen casual gamers sink more than 20 hours in a game. E.g., mom isn't gaming 16 hours a day either, yet that didn't prevent her from putting a lot of total time into playing Mercury or Lumines. She just did it in smaller bursts, spread over almost a year. E.g., there are a lot of casual playing moms and pops in MMOs, who did manage to put in as much as 200 or 300 hours into maxxing their character's level. It just was spread over several months, in some cases even over a year. So excuse me if I don't see 20 hours as some unreasonable total time for a game. You _can_ do that even without being 15 years old.
3. "But look how many games you've never finished!!! It just shows that games are too long!!!" Well, bullshit again. If a game reaches the point where it becomes too boring to continue, then that's the real problem, not the length: it's just a boring game. Yes, having too little content dilluted to fill some hideous number of hours is one way to make a boring game, but sometimes it's not even that, it's just badly designed. But even when that's the case, the real problem isn't the length, it's the lack of interesting content to fill that length.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Alex Seropian is greed incarnate. He'd sell his own grandmother into slavery if Bill Gates offered him enough solid-gold Ferraris.