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BioWare On Why Making a Blockbuster Game Is a Poor Goal
BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk spoke at the 2010 Develop Conference about the current focus within the video game industry on making huge, blockbuster titles, and why that is the wrong approach. Quoting Gamasutra's coverage:
"'While blockbuster game creation is everything that most game developers working today growing up wanted to do, it's precisely the wrong thing to chase in gaming's contemporary landscape.' Risk-taking from publishers and investors has dramatically declined in recent times, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age studio-runner noted: 'As a result, innovation and creativity [are] being squeezed. Where the bottom of the market had dropped out at one point, now it’s the middle of the market has dropped out. Unless you can be in the top ten releases at one given time, it's unlikely that a triple-A game is going to make money.'"
Zeschuk also commented that consoles aren't necessarily the future of game platforms, and that BioWare is experimenting with smaller scale MMO development in addition to working on their much larger upcoming Star Wars title.
"Stay away from our turf"
So games that aren't in the top X aren't going to make top X bucks. Is there any actual information being given here?
Strange that it should be BioWare of all game studios to claim such, as they are one of the few creating huge games with a 40+ hours time investment, such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Also these games have been performing very well.
Well, they are remaking the same exact game since Knight of the Old Republic. Take a look at KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect. Always the same mechanics, always the same basic plot. While they are very good at it, they are not very "creative".
Meanwhile, billionaires say it's not all about money, and Hollywood stars say it's not all about looks.
When your self-delusion prevents you from eliding the contradictions and just saying "multiplayer game" then you've abandoned any attempt to communicate clearly what it is that you're trying to achieve. Can you imagine being given a design brief or a development spec for a "small massive" game? You'd waste half your time just trying to reveal the egomaniac who insists on calling it that as the Buzzword Bingo 'tard that they clearly are.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The term MMO doesn't just mean that it's multiplayer and there are lots of players, it also implies that there's a persistent world and players spend all their time in it. You can have that kind of game with as little as a few hundred players.
This reads like 'Don't even bother trying to make games that are awesome.' They are actually trying to say, 'Don't overspend and try to make a blockbuster game just by spending money.'
It's perfectly possible to make and amazing hit game without the budget that Bioware and Square Enix put into games. Do games care about graphics and cutscenes? Yes. Do they care more about gameplay and controls? Absolutely. It's just a LOT harder to come up with good gameplay and refine the controls, so they throw money at the pretty pictures instead. It's never been a good idea, but they do it anyhow.
The #1 killer for videos games (for me) is bad controls. If controlling the character doesn't feel like an extension of myself, if the character doesn't always do what I think it'll do when I hit buttons, if the character is slow to react or I have to wait on its actions, it's absolutely killer for me. It's the reason I now rent games instead of buying.
Some of the better games, like Fallout and Resident Evil, I've never played because I felt like I was fighting the controls instead of fighting enemies. It's just not fun.
A coworker was just saying the other day that Sonic on the iPhone sucks because the controls are so bad, even though it was one of his favorite games. And that Street Fighter is amazing because the controls are perfect. Not a word about graphics or gameplay, just controls. (2 separate conversations, too, so it's not like he was comparing them.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Bioware needs to jump ship from the cinematic epic and graphics shell game and take stock of the history behind RPG gaming.
If the Indie gaming scene is anything to go by, funds and personnel do not a great game make. Why don't Bioware practice what they preach and make a low-budget series, with the chief emphasis on hiring talented personnel with experience playing the finest RPGs of the past twenty years. It sure beats hiring expensive singers for your musical score, scores of artists and programmers, not to mention the marketing bill which inevitably follows big budget titles.
Gaming ought to, to some extent, go back to its roots by abandoning the constant, unending improvement of graphical quality to the neglect of gameplay. I started gaming as a kid in 1991 and have more memories from the 1991-1997 time bracket than 2005-2010. The only outstanding memory of Mass Effect I have is of Shephard emerging, alive and well, after a boss battle with a soaring musical score playing and stoical gaze on the part of the character - I wasn't awed or impressed, but amused as it outcome was obvious even before the tension of "Where's Shephard gone?!" played out for a minute.
On the contrary, Chrono Trigger, a simple RPG with graphics not much beyond classic Link to the Past, has so many memories with its 16-bit score and pixelated graphics. The budget and levels of personnel are dwarfed by these cinematic titles out today. I could ramble on about more titles as example but I believe most readers browsing games.slashdot can fathom a few personally.
Gaming companies start realizing that it probably makes sense finding *your* market, sticking to it, keeping your customers happy and loyal - instead of that childish "we make kewl product with tons of features and everyone buys it!" attitude? What's next? Realizing that draconian DRM contradicts with this idea and getting rid of it? I can't believe it, this can't be true!
If it was that strawman, yes, that wouldn't be much information.
What he's saying is that is that of the games that try to be the biggest, baddest, most epic ever, only the top X will be making a profit at all. Most will actually make a loss.
And that is something that seems to escape most people, sad to say. From people going into making games with delusions of being paid a million like Carmack, to kiddies who think that pirating a game is some kind of act of resistance to some uber-rich fatcat who's only charging 40$ for it because of greed, to people starting some monumental epic as some mod and expecting to finish it with 5 people in a few months, to fanboys arguing that a publisher is the incarnation of pure Evil if they had an upper limit at all for budget and didn't give the team an infinite limit on money and time to produce the perfect game, to ultimately the devs end publishers who increasingly compete only in that segment. The fact that there's a finite amount of money to chase in that segment seems to be genuinely news to most people.
It's not even a matter of "get off my turf" as some other poster made it sound. We have the equivalent of, say, 90% of the car makers deciding they want to compete only at the Bugatti Veryon end of the market. Or 90% of the computer manufacturers deciding they want to make only supercomputers. Sure, it's great if you do manage to sell the next Bugatti Veryon for 1 million a pop, but there are only so many buyers who will buy at those prices. If actually all major companies, from Ford and Fiat and Volkswagen to Bugatti and Ferrari decided to make only supercars in that segment, that most _will_ make a loss. Same here. There simply isn't enough money in the market to cover the costs of _everyone_ who wants to make the next super-game.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So, developers are starting to realize that they nickle and dimed the hell out of everyone to the point where no one has enough spare change or simply cares enough to buy better games. The gaming industry is literally hanging itself with its own rope.
Indies are never going to make a huge impression because for the most part they simply don't have the 'wow' factor to add to their games, even if they're good concepts. So they're stuck making good little games, which don't really account for something more then a 'cool little experience', but the gamers where the money is don't want just that. So indies end up needing investment anyways to make anything really great.
That aside, I'm pretty sure a AAA game WILL make oodles of money. It will not be a regurgitated game from Blizzard which now just excels at milking people, it'll be made by a little no name company that was able to pitch their idea to the right people. Too bad Relic botched DoW2.
And yes, sometimes unheard of games are really sweet. I still have not played a game so far that beat the experience I had playing Tribes 2.
Re:You misunderstand
-Woof woof woof!
It doesn't "just" mean that it's Massively Multiplayer, but it does mean that it is. Massive. And if it's not Massive, then pick a different word to describe it, you or you might as well just start speaking in your own personal lexicon, you chuwero muptard.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
PSN, XBLA, WiiWare games, and similar systems on the computing side, as well as countless thousands of indie dev games.
All of these work, all of them are great to play, simple to make, easy to distribute.
And at a low price, more people would buy it, and a good chunk of the profits will go directly to them rather than advertising, (usually) greedy publishers, stores, etc.
How many would kill for some kick-ass classic RPG games on these services? I'd love for some old-style FF games being reborn on these services.
Or how about some physics-heavy FPS games, like that LEGO one i remember seeing a while back, and another of a similar style.
Just nice, simple game systems, no story is even required, multiplayer games are great for keeping people interested in the series.
If you throw out a whole bunch of games all the time, all pretty unique from the previous, throw your name somewhere in the title (needs a good company name of course) so people recognize it. (see Archer Maclean's Mercury as an example, very recognizable name, even if it isn't the company name)
I think studios have started to catch on lately that most consumers have given up on the graphics card wars. Sinking $50 million into a game, and having 90% of that be due to the fact that the graphics are cutting edge is a stupid way to make a game. A very small percentage of gamers want their game to be so cutting edge... It's expensive to maintain a computer of that quality, usually the games buggy and constantly being patched, and in truth the graphics quality isn't all that much better than if they had let their tech lag behind a year or more. Unfortunately most studios also go cheap on content once they go cheap on graphics.
How do you compete with it? Certainly not with DLC. And certainly not with yet another MMO that needs to build its userbase from scratch (BioWare's loyal fans are roleplayers; they couldn't care less about MMOs).
:wq
Nobody above me understood the summary (or know enough about Bioware).
The glorious past of Slashdot is over, and how pathetic it has become, filled with knuckleheads so obsessed with themselves and money they cannot understand a simple summary.
Yes I mad.
Company that makes blockbuster games says: stop making blockbuster games. Genius!
In the beginning, there was null.
So? He knows what he is talking about.
And Jade Empire WAS creative. So was KOTOR. Yes KOTOR was Baldur's gate in Space! but THAT was also creative. An RPG set in space? Unheard off!
Mass Effect married many new elements to the Baldur's Gate style RPG. Sometimes you can create something new by cobbling together old parts. Coat of many colors.
As a side note, I think some people put to much emphasis on creative. Just because something is new, doesn't mean it is good. New Coke was creative, it was new, it was different. You want a bottle?
I wish Lucasarts stopped being creative and released one of their old style games, when you knew when you saw their logo, you were in for a good time.
Same with Bioware. Dragon Age 2 not creative? Who the fuck cares. Give me more off the same.
The plot is indeed always the same. But there really aren't all that many plots that you can put into a game. Yes, I have written a story line for a RPG in which you are NOT the hero. That is creative. I think it even works and might oneday turn it into a simple game. BUT I also realise that JUST the creative bit of you not being the hero isn't enough to make it a good game.
Bioware knows that a hero needs an enemy to overcome. Because the same enemy gets boring there usually is a plot twist that reveals a darker enemy behind the original enemy. There are simple game mechanics behind most of the plots.
Just as in a porn movie, somehow people always find a reason to have sex, often with attractive people. No pizza has ever been deliverd to my door by a randy teenager. Nor have I ever had to discipline a wayward schoolgirl with melons the size of melons.
Fantasy has rules, perhaps even more so then reality.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The title conveniently leaves out 'for the developers'.
He is just pointing out its a poor goal simply because the risk is higher.
When the budget is high, stakeholders prefer a tried and tested formula and leaves little room for the developer to be creative. Hence all the carbon copy 'blockbuster' games these days.
With all the carbon copy games, you aren't guaranteed of making alot of money. You won't enjoy the development process as you are just cloning game after game, and adding few gimmicks here and there.
So, you better have a good workplace culture or else no one will work for long there.
Not really. The keyword there is "only". Volkswagen for example still makes models like Fox and Polo and Golf for the low and mid-range, or largely the same as Skoda models for the even lower end, and as Audi models for the mid- to upper-mid-range models, and as Seat for, well, I can't really figure out for whom. Or its famous beetle. Well, "new beetle" nowadays. Ford still produces the likes of Ka and Fiesta and, well, probably no need to list all models actually. Fiat still produces the Uno (well, ok, is restarting it as the "new Uno) or Punto II or small and cheap city cars like the 600 and 500 (again, the latter as the "new 500").
My point was more like if VW decided to _only_ make Bugatti Veryons and Audi R8 and its own Phaeton luxury car, and basically got rid of any model below Phaeton prices. Because that's the phenomenon that's described in the article. The major game publishers got rid not only of the low end, but now of the middle segment too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Many Multiplayer Game?
Many of the games that come out these days look appealing. However, when you play them, their gimmicks get old pretty quickly. Even when a game is genuinely good, it doesn't seem to be worth the price tag. Money is hard to come by, playable games are not.
When looking at the expensive games of today, I can't find many that would be more enjoyable and challenging than nethack, or perphaps Zork. Sure, some might be more entertaining, but not for the price when there are such great free alternatives.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
that's corporations' delusion, probably more because their marketing departments employ usual marketing and market understanding shit they learned in college to gaming.
for the masses, there is a 'computer game'. and thats the only classification, apart from their genre differences. they either buy it, or, they dont buy it. they dont classify themselves like 'hmmm, i like short, easy to complete games. so, i should go for that segment. let me see, what games are out in that segment nowadays'. no such delusion exists. they go and buy a game.
the only classification apart from a 'game', is probably 'mmo game'. and that is because they require monthly payments.
Read radical news here
So, you better have a good workplace culture or else no one will work for long there.
It's still the case that a lot more people would like to be video game developers than the market will support, and it's still the case that most employers place a very high value on having shipped titles on your resume.
These things seriously distort the video game dev job market from what it might otherwise be; as long as those things are the case, it's going to be easy to replace any turnover for cheap, and there are going to be people willing to make Hello Kitty Island Adventure 14 even in terrible working conditions.
I think almost everyone missed the point of what the dev was trying to say...I think he is referring to "blockbuster" games as these games that are costing 40+ million to make and advertise. He's saying the big companies are putting all this money into tried and true formulas and expecting to be the next big game (and for the most part failing)...instead of trying something new and taking a risk. Bioware actually is a good example of going against the grain and succeeding. Look at Final Fantasy 13 and compare its success and budget to Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2. (Meanwhile the FF devs are making fun of Bioware for "not knowing what people want in an rpg".)
Bioware is only pointing out that companies cant keep churning out expensive generic games and expect them to be the next Halo, CoD, etc...
for the masses, there is a 'computer game'.
Really?
I like long-term games with depth, like RPGs with good single player storylines. I also like things like FPSes and RTSes, but the back-stories to these are mostly irrelevant and it's the game play and immersion that really count. There are significant exceptions and cross-overs with other genres, of which Deus Ex remains the most obvious example to me and perhaps things like Oblivion also count, but most FPS or RTS games are pretty straight-up these days.
In all cases, these are fairly high-end titles. I only buy a few of them, and even fewer these days, since anything with any sort of DRM that's liable to screw up my system or stop me playing in future or anything that tries to push extra-cost downloadable content on me is an automatic "no", which rules out a lot today. High production values count: I want good graphics, good voice acting, a well-planned story, spectacular effects, etc.
My better half, on the other hand, enjoys puzzle games. Most of them are very simple in concept, their graphics are pretty rather than spectacular, and their background music is OK but hardly going to win awards. A group of kids with the right backgrounds in programming and arts could put one of these together with a few days of hard work.
If you don't think we're completely different market segments, or that we look for games in different places and with different goals going into the store/web site/whatever, you're crazy. :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The term MMO doesn't just mean that it's multiplayer and there are lots of players, it also implies that there's a persistent world and players spend all their time in it. You can have that kind of game with as little as a few hundred players.
No, "persistent" means "that there's a persistent world". Long-running implies that "players spend all their time in it". Massively Multiplayer implies that it's got a massive number of people. Vega Strike has persistence, but it's not massive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
WARNING idealism below, Do not read this post if you cannot handle it.
#1 reason = OVERHEAD
The real reason games don't make money is the behemoth corporations controlling the industry and funneling the money into the hands of the pointy haired overlords. It reminds me of an article I read about 4 years ago about how CISCO did not produce a profit that year right before I read the article outing the CEO's compensation: 690 million(Sounds pretty profitable to me, how about you?). Overhead is a made up word managers created to confuse workers and hide the FACT that all of the money is going to them and not the folks who actually create these products. I.E. Overhead = Huge salaries for management.
This is what happens when your product is secondary to your profits.
In the video games industry, this started to become more noticable in the 90s and over the last decade has gone into overdrive. Publishers attempt to monetize every aspect of the medium and expect continual financial growth for the least amount of effort.
Most titles released today are sequels or worse, expansions, as the suits attempt to minimise risk, build brands and all the other toss that comes with making sure the guys at the top are kept in the life to which they are acustomed.
The higher-ups at these firms are ruining everything that was fun about games and the sooner the next gaming industry crash sends them all scurrying back to the industries they came from, the better.
I think he is saying that the right way to do something innovative is to try to keep costs down so that you can try a few things before you find out what works.
Take Portal for instance, the budget for that game was pretty small, if I recall most of the textures were taken from other games (Half-life), but it was great and fun.
This reminds be back in the day of Sierra ... remember them anyone ... They came out with excellent games like Heroes Quest and Kings Quest, but they put out a statement of why they are not going to create adventure games because (and get this) they are not AS profitable as First Person shooters back then, yes they were profitable, yes they can be made and people bought them by the droves, but they cost more to make and they couldn't pocket as much money. They also disappeared entirely despite being a highly successful company because the founders sold it off (Ken Williams) to a rather shady company CUC followed by greedy scandals. Activision owns them now and they are looking to unload them.
At the same time there is now a game called Battle for Westnoth it is a cute fun game and it is far better then many turn based games of the 1990s each new version is creative and enhances the game and it is free ...
There will always be startups, people that have vision and they will take hold, unlike movies that a low budget film can cost 1 - 2 million to create games can be created for far less. Even pretty graphic games (check out Myst and the history there). Most computer game companies started in some basement some place by dedicated gamers that wanted to build a really great game and they did but then with the influx of money comes influx of investors wanting the next big thing and many companies fold at that point because it is hard to meet the demands of investors and customers at the same time (Well normally it takes 3 or 4 release of game duds for the company to get absorbed).
The article is right in that once you start to chase the money it ruins the vision, the game, and the success, ultimately that attitude ruins the company especially in a market that the barrier to enter is fairly low, yet once the founders leave pretty much anyone that takes over will care about the money/shareholders first, customers second and product third.
As for the price of games ... well if you are like me and you play them on the PC and you wait about 1 1/2 years after release you get for $35 the edition with all the add on packs, all the extras and fixes and it is worth the $35.
Just because you can't conceive of the idea, does not mean that it does not, or cannot exist.
In fact, their earlier game, Neverwinter Nights, showed a lot of potential for such a game. The server could support up to 75 players in theory. Many people set up their own "small scale MMO's" using that engine. And before someone starts in to argue the semantics of "MMO", and how it "implies a persistent world", some of these actually did use techniques and software in order to make them into persistent worlds. They were no WoW of course, but it was still pretty impressive what the community manage to cook up.
I personally think that MMRPG makers have been stuck in a rut in how they think of MMO's (in regards to the impact that a number of players has in a game, how those players are partitioned from one another, and how many can coexist in a small area). A small scale MMO could find a niche and try new ideas.
A "massively" multi-player game means few instances (possibly just one) with many people in each instance, as opposed to simple "multi-player" where each group of people wanting to play together create their own private instance.
The distinction is qualitative, not quantitive. You could have an MMO with fewer than a hundred people.
Bonus points for the first person to make an MMO where all the characters are photons, and refer to it as "Masslessly-Mulitplayer"
There are two possibilities here that I can think of - by small scale MMO, he may be referring to a game with a fairly small playing area - maybe the world is only about the size of Oblivion, rather than, say Azeroth. Another possibility is the "programmer lingo" vs the "consumer lingo" is a bit different - as a programmer, I think of MMO as a game/network that scales with player base and has nothing to do with the number of actual players. A "small MMO" would mean the player base for a particular are would be small in comparison to, say, WoW. A practical example would be something like NWN multiplayer without the fixed connection limits (which the world designer/network owner could then set, if desired).
I can think of a 3rd possibility. That he's just talking about a multiplayer game, but he's the sort of egotistical prick who orders a "cold hot sandwich" just to make it clear that he's the guy calling the shots.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
sooooo making expensive blockbuster games that need to be in the top 10 to break even causing them to play it safe remaking the same game again and again *cough* NWN * cough* is making the industry stagnate and might not be a good idea... no objection here, i agree completely
but then "BioWare is experimenting with smaller scale MMO development", really ? adding the 12309742377th MMO to the ones in the making is not causing stagnation ?
how many mmos can a gamer play at the same time ? i doubt its more than 1, development
are they really any different from each other ? they are all the freaking same game
server maintenance and troubleshooting staff for that are cheap ?
the constant postrelease development required to stop players from running away to a new game (and many will leave anyway) is cheap ?
a few stupid mistakes coupled with arrogance and your investment is down the drain just look at APB, it seems to me this path will erode the consumer base much faster than the older one.
Bioware, what the hell ?
You nailed it.
-kgj
Always fancied the idea of an Intimate Multiplayer games myself, think fallout3 with a persistant world but only 8-16 players or so. Admittidly the logistics of such a thing would be tricky but the payoff would be a truly persistant world, rather than 100,000 persistant worlds running similtaniously.
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
I quoted your post on my game design blog:
http://handyvandal.com/2010/07/making-blockbuster-is-poor-goal/
-kgj
Your argument is well written and persuasive, so I quoted you on my game design blog:
http://handyvandal.com/2010/07/making-blockbuster-is-poor-goal/
-kgj