Are These People Reshaping the Gaming Industry?

Mark Graham writes "An EU game development site has put up a list of the 25 people they think are 'reshaping the games business'. Although they admit the list is highly subjective, it's a debate-provoking piece, and some of the entries (Portal designer Kim Swift and Kongregate.com's founder) are spot on, going for the people that have introduced innovations rather than those that dominate column inches. Miyamoto is absent from the list, for example — although his boss Satoru Iwata is in there. Including Japansese designers like Hironobo Sakaguchi (ranked for his successful prolific outsourced development process) instead of Hideo Kojima is sure to anger a few fanboys. Or at least raise a few eyebrows." Anyone they left off that should obviously be on there?

Comments

What, no Erik Wolpaw?

[tjstork]

The list is a fraud, without him. Old Man Murray and Sons was the funniest web site ever, and the games he's writing for now have a depth and clarity of writing that honestly eludes most title. Plus, he's pretty damned funny.

Re:What, no Erik Wolpaw?

[axel2501]

Don't click, Goatse.ca !

Re:Kim Swift is Cute!

[tedgyz]

Well, most /.ers would "finish" if they actually cuddled a cute woman.

You see a cute woman and all you want to do is cuddle?

Yeah they left out some folks

[Sciros]

To put Sakaguchi in there and not Miyamoto is pretty insane, especially given their "being the creator of FF is enough" quote. Miyamoto isn't out of the picture just yet, especially with Mario Galaxy just having been released. He is also one of the driving forces behind the innovation that Nintendo is working to saturate the market with.

Hopefully the Bioshock guy, Ken Levine is on there. I just read the article but forgot right away. Also they need a guy from Harmonix (Guitar Hero developer) if there isn't one.

Kojima, yeah he's not really big-time on the radar right now. MGS4 is highly anticipated but it's not a reason to slide into the top 25. If you take Kojima then you need to take Itagaki and probably a host of other "fan-fave" developers that push the boundaries in certain genres.

Re:Yeah they left out some folks

[twistedsymphony]

...Itagaki...

Don't get me wrong, I love the games that this guy produces but I'd hardly classify re-releasing the same exact game for over a decade with little more than slightly more refined mechanics and graphics every single time as "industry reshaping". By that same token I don't think Kojima belong anywhere near that list either.

In my opinion an industry shaping player is someone who makes a game, good or bad, popular or not, profitable or not, new ideas or not, and makes other developers in the industry start thinking about their own game design as a result. I can think of several instances this generation where games have come out and their design elements have started trickling into other games in the industry. They might not have been the first to do something, but they were the first to start certain trends in the industry.

I think Portal did that with the portal system and associated gameplay, I think Gears of War did that with it's gameplay style, I think a lot of Nintendo's games have done that with the way their games use the Wii Remote, Test Drive unlimited did it with their online gameplay system, and fight night 3 did it with their analog control mechanism. Older examples are the Guitar Hero series making music a major gameplay element and Fable with it's ideals of a good vs evil evolution.

as I said these aren't the first games to use these concepts but they are the games that sparked trends that have started flowing through the industry whole industry.

Re:Yeah they left out some folks

[Sciros]

With regard to Itagaki, you're talking about DOA exclusively. BUT!! he pushed the boundaries like few others with Ninja Gaiden for X-Box. It's still the "game to beat" when it comes to the action genre. Killer graphics for its time, very fluid movement, etc. A very solid package as far as the game goes. But Itagaki went the extra mile, which people took for granted -- he release free Hurricane Packs through XBox Live, adding more content and enhancing the gameplay via improved AI, optional camera control, etc. He addressed all the concerns people had with Ninja Gaiden originally, and as a result Ninja Gaiden Black turned out to be, at the time of its release, the "perfect action game." If not for Ninja Gaiden's successful design, I'm not sure we'd have seen games like God of War, Heavenly Sword, the later DMC games, etc. take the direction they did.

There's a reason Ninja Gaiden 2 for the 360 is so highly anticipated; I also expect it to get very high critical acclaim, just as the first.

Stardock

[Marc_Hawke]

They just released IronClad's Sins of a Solar Empire. www.sinsofasolarempire.com If you don't know what this game is, I can't tell you without referencing 3 or 4 other games. It's more than a cross-over, and it's very well done. (As worthy to be on the list as Portal.)

However, if you look at Stardock as a publisher they deserve the spot even more. If you remember the big stink between StarForce and Stardock back when Galactic Civilizations was released. They continue their style of "don't screw the people who actually pay you."

Also, while there are only a few triple-A titles on Stardock Central, their scheme of 'digital download' + 'mail you a box for shipping costs' is much more palatable to me than Valve's Steam service where you are forced to make your own hardcopies from their backup files. It also get nicely out of the way once you've installed the game vs Valve's ubiquitous TSR style.

http://www.stardock.com/

(they mainly do desktop customization and other utilities, but they have an extensive selection of budget games and a few large titles.)

The Gaming Industry is Shaping Me

[sjaguar]

Unfortunately, it isn't for the better. Maybe if I stop playing games, get out of the house, exercise, eat properly.... Just one more quest. I swear, this one's the last one.

Re:The Gaming Industry is Shaping Me

[Freeside1]

The Gaming Industry is Shaping Me... Unfortunately, it isn't for the better. Maybe if I stop playing games, get out of the house, exercise, eat properly.... Same here, but I think 'round' is a pretty good shape.

CCP?

[beheaderaswp]

I know this isn't really the aim of the article.... but...

From a purely tech standpoint, the guys over at CCP (Eve Online) should be noted for the massive achievement of their database cluster. 45000 people playing in the same game universe, backed by Microsoft SQL Server (?!?!?), massive RAMSAN capacity, and all that custom Python code seems a very notable achievement. Yes I said Python! Stackless to be precise.

From where I stand, it's that kind of cluster which will run the MMO's of tomorrow.

Not everything is graphics and market share.

Re:CCP?

[minginqunt]

Utter drivel.

In almost every way, it's one of the most sophisticated MMOs available, and its technical achievements both front and back end are to be applauded.

Now, if you didn't like it, that's fine. But I don't see why you need to badmouth it though, especially with claims that are demonstrably untrue.

Re:CCP?

[DrVomact]

Now, if you didn't like it, that's fine. But I don't see why you need to badmouth it though, especially with claims that are demonstrably untrue.

Then why don't you demonstrate that his claims are untrue? He argued that Eve is "is extremely simple from a client/server perspective". And in the sense in which he intended this assertion, he's right. Eve's graphics consist of a background of stars (little tiny points of light), with an improbable amount of multicolored gases percolating about to differentiate one solar system from another. There are no animated avatars in eve—the closest thing you get to an avator is the little portrait that pops up when you click on someone's space ship), nothing much of anything that moves or changes except more little points that represent other player's spaceships (unless you're up close—then you do actually see the spaceship, but it looks just like all the other ships of its type)...and huge, spectacular explosions when you blow up some poor sucker who was trying to haul home the minerals he'd just spent hours mining. OK, the explosions are cool. Except, of course, if you're the poor sod getting blown up.

You've got to admit that 50K people logged into a text-based MMO wouldn't be as impressive as even 10K people logged into something like EQ or WoW, so numbers alone don't tell the story. Now, Eve is in some ways a very complex game. It has an admirably sophisticated economy, and a large number or craftable and tradeable items. Tracking those items and keeping up with the transactions may very well be as difficult—or, for all I know more difficult—than running a "traditional" MMO fantasy game with avatars that run around in a three-dimensional landscape, interacting and engaging each other and various MOBs in battle. However, I'd like to see some argument for this, some facts even.

Let me emphasize that I'm not saying that EVE doesn't deserve plaudits for its achievements, but if I'm supposed to believe that running this game with 45K users is per se a triumph of technical wizardry, then I'd like to know why.

And, unless things have changed radically in the 3 months since I quit playing it, there's lots of lag in Eve. Buying or selling stuff is a real chore, as you have to click on each item, then wait for the transaction to be executed...and that wait can be awfully long (10-15 seconds), even if you're not in Jita. And don't even get me started on the GUI. Like, I'm not going to whine about the fact that a game in which financial transactions are crucial forces you to use a tiny font (at 1600 x 1200) in which the characters for zero, eight, and B are indistinguishable...

Aside from merely technical issue, I have a lot of respect for the designers of Eve. It is a conceptually sophisticated game, and I would have continued to play it despite all its defects, were it not for the fact that Eve is inescapably a PvP game, and I just don't like PvP. That I played the game for two years, getting ganked by griefers at least once a week, is a testimonial to just how good the game is. If you like PvP, you'll probably like Eve.

Re:Can we fix the icon

[howdoesth]

Umm, the Atari predates 3-D. It wouldn't be possible to view the joystick from that angle.

Hmm

[antifoidulus]

Hironobo Sakaguchi (ranked for his successful prolific outsourced development process)

So maybe that is why FFIV on the GBA was one of the buggiest console games I have ever played, and the buggiest Square game by far. It crashed on me at least once, battle timing was totally off(some characters would get two or more turns before another would even get one), and there were random pauses/slowdowns in battle. Come on, if you are going to outsource a port(a port! They weren't even creating original code) at least have the decency to do some testing before releasing it.....

Re:Kim Swift is Cute!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, they probably wouln't even get the opportunity to investigate her portal. The game, I mean. Yea. The game.

Re:Can we fix the icon

[Hatta]

Yes, most people don't remember this, but before the mid 90s, everything in the world was represented by sprites.

Re:Gary Gygax

[geminidomino]

I think his point was that the current state of M:TG has less in common with its original form than it does with Pokemon. Sad, but true. (Mirage was TBOTE for me)

Re:Ken Levine

[Sparks23]

I think what has always made Levine's games so compelling is the overall presentation and atmosphere. The System Shock games were hardly the first FPS games with RPG elements, so they were not really genre-defining in that way.

But they manage atmosphere better than almost anything. So many FPS are just 'throw a horde of monsters/enemy-soldiers/robots/aliens at you!' The Shock games have rarely been about massive combat, but instead about atmosphere and tension. You may wander for a while without encountering anything, but hearing noises nearby... screams... and then you might stumble into a bunch of enemies fighting among themselves, only to have them turn on you.

In System Shock, you would step into the little elevators to get between floors, and would sometimes find yourself letting out a breath you hadn't realized you were holding. (And the contrast between the horrors outside and the soft, soothing muzak of the elevator was almost like emotional whiplash at times.)

In Bioshock, there's a beautiful (but overgrown) garden area, for instance. But you cannot really just relax and enjoy the view; there's the sound of something moving through the bushes, and shadows on the wall seem to sometimes contain a figure seen only briefly, as if out of the corner of your eye. You hear a splicer murmuring threats... but you aren't certain where they are. They're not right there, but they're clearly nearby. Watching. Waiting. Taunting...

So while System Shock and Bioshock were not really pushing the envelope in terms of technology, fans of the series tend to feel that they push the envelope in terms of pacing, storytelling, and drawing you into the game.