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Gaming Clichés That Need To Die
MojoKid writes "The PC and console game industry is in desperate need of an overhaul. With skyrocketing costs to develop games, consumers aren't going to accept $80-$100 game titles, especially not with mobile game prices in the 99 cent — $4.99 range. Not to mention, how games are designed these days needs some serious rethinking. This list of some of the industry's most annoying gaming clichés, from scripted sequences to impossibly incompetent NPCs, and how they might be solved, speaks to a few of the major ailments in modern gameplay with character and plot techniques that are older than dirt."
You want them to make games much more complex--with completely destructible environments, near limitless borders, better AI, more complex NPC's, etc.
But you also want them to be CHEAPER? Okay.
And you complain about how long it takes to develop a triple-A title, so I guess you also want them SOONER too, huh?
Perhaps you would also like to have them hand-delivered to your house by Natalie Portman in a bikini? Hell, sure, why not!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I'd say that burning too much time and money on graphics, sound, FMV, and voice acting at the expense of mechanics, plot and bug-freeness has become a cliche in and of itself.
Obviously the solution is to go back to text-based gaming. OK, fine, EGA and the PC speaker.
Here. Wish they'd just do that in the summary.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
About a half-hour of watching the travesty that is "G4" (the rotted remains of TechTV) is enough to convince me that the whole "tower defense" cookie-cutter needs to be destroyed, with prejudice.
It's almost like modern games are picked from a checklist of approved "genres." "Tower Defense" would be one of them.
I'm not supposed to be looking for a successor to Portal2, Just cause2,GTA4,etc?
Sorry, I got to the point where I had to click on the next page to continue reading the article and bailed. It just wasn't interesting enough to put up with that.
Those who have telepathy have no need to RTFA.
I like how the article describes the cost of making a game is rising exponentially, when the graphic they show below describes it as geometrically.
As an engineer who's been in the game industry for 7 years at this point, this just reads like another one of those articles that was written by people who know less than nothing about what it takes to actually get a game to market, less than nothing about the sort of engineering issues presented by ejecting these so-called "clichés", and on top of that wants you to solve all of these nearly intractable problems without affecting the price of the game.
Sure, and I'd like a pony.
- Make the story good. I still go back and play my SNES RPGs. Why? Good stories.
- Let me skip cut scenes. Always always always. If I'm going back through the game, or redoing a part, etc, and you make me watch the scene, you're pissing me off.
- Look at what people get addicted to these days: draw something, angry birds, minecraft... it doesn't have to be some super beautiful in-depth game.
"Exponential cost curves are, by definition, unsustainable over the long term."
Which definition is that now?
The monkey who wrote TFA says a lot of dumb things that you can almost agree with, but it boils down to "developers need to cut down their costs by making games with more content and better technology in less time."
Did someone dig up an old Cracked.com article?
W-A-S-D
Up-Down-Left-Right
I think a new game controller layout with possibly random input response would really freshen up the gaming genre.
Like Nethack!
Nethack is free!
Nethack will be available twenty-five years ago!
Go Nethack!
All joking aside, roguelikes exhibit this kind of complexity, yet it takes quite a bit of time for them to develop that complexity (tangent: are roguelikes gaming wine?), and that's with ascii art. Once you have graphics, you lose the justification for "use your imagination" and have to have different graphics for the 9000 different objects in the loot table, etc.
Also most people don't really have the time for that kind of game unless it's the only game they play.
That said, I wouldn't mind!
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
It's a feature I could really live without.
The players don't fscking care whether your games use physics engine X as opposed to Y. It's not as if we get a say in the matter or use that information as a basis of our next purchase.
Show me a $5 mobile game with the depth and length of a good AAA title, and I'll agree there's no point in spending $60 for games (where did the $80-$100 figure come from? Only collectors' editions cost that much, and even they are often less). Also, it has to have good controls. Not "well, this is pretty good for a mobile game", but actually good. I've bought all of five games on my iPhone. Two were terrible (Scribblenauts, Angry Birds), two were ports (Chrono Trigger and Vay), and one was a decent time-waster (7 Words). Certain types of games can work pretty well on a phone or tablet, but it's a small subset of what works on PCs or consoles. And, unfortunately, the games that work well on mobile devices don't seem to be the same games as the ones I actually want to play.
The first poster did a good job pointing out that the added complexity the article wants will cost more, not less. I would like to point out that these cliches aren't universal, but there are problems with trying to "solve" them. I'll use "mandatory missions" for my example, alongside the article's example of Wing Commander.
Wing Commander allowed you to progress through the story while failing every mission. Your ending would suck, but that should be expected. It was a neat idea. There were a two major problems with that, though. Orion discovered that most people never saw the "failed" paths, because people would restart missions until they succeeded. People want a sense of accomplishment, and failing a mission doesn't give that. The other big problem was the added complexity. When they set out to make Wing Commander II, they wanted a much larger, more expansive plot. It became much too difficult and costly to create all the possible branching paths, cutscenes, and script if they followed the same formula as Wing Commander. So they cheated. There are less branching paths than in the first one, but the result is a game with a better-structured story.
There's also a side issue with allowing players to fail missions: You can game the system. If you just want to see the good ending of Wing Commander, all you have to do, IIRC, is play four missions. For every other mission, just eject as soon as you have control of your ship. Want to see the bad ending? Just eject on every mission! You can finish the game in just a few minutes, this way.
I also feel like allowing a failed mission takes something away from the experience. It's more realistic, but what's the point of beating that really hard level if you can just fail it and move on to the next one?
In the end, as I mentioned earlier, and as others have as well--I'm not sure how adding complexity is going to somehow magically drop down the price of games, or make them shorter to develop. I would also like to point out that games right now are cheaper than the SNES or N64 days. Heck, even NES games retailed at $50, and that's before you take inflation into account. I'm not sure where this "gaming is too expensive these days!" myth came from.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
"Tube" (a movie) is doing it. Why can't studios? Re-use the art assets from game to game, or release them for free so others can use them/upgrade them.
If the cost is because of incredibly high art expenditures for detailed worlds, then the cost has to go down somehow.
I;m sure someone from the game industry can give a few more insights than my layman's notions, though.
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from scripted sequences to impossibly incompetent NPCs, and how they might be solved
You must be under the age of 30 to say that. The original NES, the first major standard ever created, thrived on making games that were cheap, painfully difficult (Battletoads, anyone?), and wasn't advertisement supported. The reason the industry is suffering is the same reason everything turns to crap: Money.
Producers have gotten the notion in their head that they don't just expect profit, that it's an inalienable right. Take linux for example; There are hundreds of command-line based programs that are there, for free, that can be combined and manipulated to perform almost any basic function. In the windows world, I'm expected to pay $30 for an application that can rename multiple files at once. It gets worse when they see dollar signs in advertising revenue.
Imagine Super Mario Brothers if it were made today; The entire first level would be a tutorial where it cheers everytime you press 'A', gives you an 'achievement unlocked' after you stomp 10 goombas, and at the end of the level asks you to 'upgrade' to a Premium Mario that would start every level in 'fireball mario' mode for only $9.99. Especially in MMOs -- microtransactions now mean you can buy levels, gears, whatever you want. Some guy who slaved through all the levels gets no respect when some 14 year old with daddy's credit card comes in, curb stomps him, and then steals all his hard-earned equipment, which he just drags to the trash anyway, because hey, I can just buy it with real money. ha ha!
Good games are about personal achievement, and being difficult enough to be a challenge without becoming tedious. Good games are intuitive and don't require a three hour introduction, and they are immersive experiences; You're thinking about your next move, not wondering if there's any way to unlock that next level without spending a weeks' worth of groceries on upgrades.
No... Money is what ruined games; Businesses don't look at it as providing entertainment anymore, it's revenue, it's eyeballs for advertisers.. they aren't selling a product anymore: You are the product of the modern game. And it shows: The quality of modern games is shit.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
DLC is fast becoming a gaming cliche and needs to die off. Everytime you buy DLC you tell developers.....
I want to pay more than 60 dollars for my game.
I want to buy something that I will never own. I will pay for content I cant trade, sell, or give away.
I want my games chopped into small pieces and sold me to seperately over the MSRP price of the main game.
I am fine with paying for a inferior product because DLC is never as good as the original.
I want to pay for something that more than likely wont be availible to me in 5 or 10 years if I want to go back and play it.
I want features sold as dlc. Like how tecmo is selling a difficulty setting for ninja gaiden 3 as dlc.
I want endings sold as dlc. Like how square is selling the ending for final fantasy 13-2 as dlc.
I want content on my game disc I paid for to cost me extra. Like how capcom sells on disc dlc as extra.
I want content on day 1 that should be a part of my game I bought. Like how bioware put content out on mass effect 3's first day.
Every single time you buy DLC you are telling developers and publishers that. Now DLC is almost expected for everything and becoming its own cliche.
leaving aside the fact that it argues for more realism and complexity that consumes less resources and costs less (i.e. MAGIC), it also rails against a lot of the elements that make games, games. be careful what you wish for.
do you really want open-ended plotlines where the player truly controls the direction of the plot? there are real problems to that approach. dramatic fiction (which is a huge element to the appeal of, say, RPGs) depends on a cogent story being told. one thing must logically lead to the next. stakes should rise as the game progresses. events should build to a climax. that sort of thing. if you give the player true agency in their decisions, you have to actually program a compelling story for every possible choice. assuming finite resources, the problem here ends up a choice between either coding a tiny number of "alternate endings", or giving the player a large number of plot-inconsequential choices. personally, i'd rather have one great story than a handful of prefabbed ones riffing on the same theme. and i dislike games that pretend they're giving me a choice when all roads lead to the same place anyway. it's a silly dance. if your'e making a game where the story element is important, tell a good story. the choose-your-own-adventure books were fun when i was a kid, but so incredibly limited in narrative potential. games shouldn't try to emulate that model.
another stupid gripe from that article concerns indestructible objects and other walls and limitations designers wisely implement in order to keep things actually fun and balanced. games are not intended to simulate reality. levels are carefully balanced to provide a stimulating challenge. pac-man would not have been improved by letting him smash through the walls of the maze. the best games, of course, do a good job of blending the walls of their maze into the scenery. but those same walls exist in every game, in the form of unkillable NPCs, an out-of-order staircase, or a thousand other incarnations.
i could live a little longer in this prison
People seem to forget, or never learned, that the gaming market has crashed before; in the 1980s, to be precise. And why? Because loads of shovelware titles were being released to capitalize on gamers' increasing willingness to buy them, while development costs were skyrocketing, and every other game was a ripoff of another title that came before it. Sound familiar?
Eventually all the bloat collapsed in on itself and the market for video games nearly died.
Personally, I'm of the opinion another video gaming crash may not be such a bad thing. The price of games is already many times over that of other forms of media (would you buy a typical book or movie for $60?), while development costs are starting to outpace even most big studio movie productions. Ingenuity and creativity are among the casualties, while developers and publishers are trying every way under the Sun to extract as much money as possible from customers, from activation limits, to invasive DRM, to serious considerations to kill used game sales (a first sale right that extends to every other product on the market, yet gaming companies seem to think they, somehow, should be a special exception). Financially, the market is booming, while creatively, it is dying.
Without the gaming crash of the 1980s, we never would have had Nintendo. I'd like to see what major boons would come out of another crash.
...That being the needless pagination of the source article. Three paragraphs, next page?
Nah. I'm cool.
There's no such thing as "Game Over" anymore. Its always unlimited tries and if you plug away for enough hours you will eventually see the ending.
I miss the days where seeing the ending was kind of a big deal because it was something you achieved rather than simply eventually got to because you played for long enough.
Something that's escaped all of the online courses is learning through gamification.
In real life, learning is growth - we learn something, it's useful, then we incrementally learn something more useful. There's a reward at every stage.
In online courses, there is no reward - instead of pursuit of goals it's a continuous escape from penalties. It's the exact opposite of what makes a game fun. The MITx "Circuits and Electronics" course is exactly this way: it's a continuous stick instead of a carrot. Get the homework done before the time limit.
Video games are typically a series of tedious, repetitive tasks. They're also structured to give the player a reward for progression - and as a consequence, the player has fun (Everquest comes to mind). Slot machines are the same way: tedious repetitive actions which have no benefit to the player whatsoever - except that the tasp one gets from hitting a minor jackpot is enjoyable enough to be worth the cost.
I would happily pay $100 for an online course structured as a game, something which would teach me something. For example, the "Circuits and Electronics" course could be structured as a bank account (a game score) in which the "player" (student) could accrue money by completing assignments presented by the system. Accrue enough money and the system would unlock the next level of study materials - proceed to the next chapter.
Add some color and the entire journey would be pleasant and rewarding.
Example: A mad scientist wants to get his lightning-moat working, and he believes there's a problem in *this* circuit (shown) where the designer got the transconductance calculation wrong. He offers $20 Mechanicsburg dollars for the right answer. You need $70 more to gain the title "advanced minion".
I would pay $100 for that in a heartbeat.
$20 million is cheap for a modern AAA game. Most of them cost more like $40-$70 million, with a similar amount spent on marketing.
$ apropos cliché
cliché [] (1) - I used to be a game developer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee
I love scripted scenes, don't remove them.
How about overly short paragraphs interspersed with lots of pictures spread over an unholy amount of pages, simple to get more pageviews for ad driven revenue.
Game clichès that need to die that are not mentioned in the article:
- The US are the good. The <insert other nation here> are the evil.
The linked article misidentifies the problem. If you look at the greatest games of all time (e.g. Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger) they often use the "cliches" mentioned in the article. That is because these cliches are a necessary part of a well-designed game, especially if it is an action adventure or a JRPG.
The problem is a monoculture of game genres. Just as hip-hop has pretty much taken over music to the exclusion of everything else, so have two specific game genres (FPS and MMORPG) basically colonized the entire PC/console gaming industry. These were never very good genres to begin with, and they're totally overdone and worn-out now. I, personally, will not play any game that has a first-person perspective because I simply can't feel comfortable or get used to it. Good 3D games need to have a third-person camera angle.
So I went to the local video game store just the other day. I looked at the new releases section... Out of 20 new releases 2 (the one is arguable) are new and the other 18 are sequels, spin offs or updates of previous games...
Then I got bored and left.
Does anyone actually believe this? It gets repeated over and over, but it makes zero sense. There isn't a single gamer that can't recognize the difference between the complexity of a mobile game and something like Skyrim. I get the feeling that this statement is just being repeated over and over in a lame attempt to brainwash people into believing it.
How about encouraging real companies to "sponsor" games by having their products advertised within, ala television, movies, sporting events, etc. etc. etc.
Not only would this provide a revenue stream with which games can be developed, it would also assist in the immersive quality of the games. Think about it; playing the latest installment of GTA, you jack a Ford Escape (complete with Sync system, connected to the microphone in your Eyetoy/Kinect), drive to the nearest Cabela's to load up on an Armalite AR-15 and some Winchester ammo, then head down to the Starbucks (passing various real-world product billboards) to get your next mission... and rob the joint; this is GTA, after all. So long as the advertising doesn't detract from the gameplay or atmosphere, it's a win-win-win situation.
Heck, enough sponsorship and a developer could practically give the game away.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You want 120 FPS [...]? Well shit, there went a ton of calculating power. Even if your video board is handling the rendering, you still have to calculate collisions and other factors on CPU.
You know, calculating collisions is independent of resolution.
But not of frame rate. Do most modern video games run on a time quantum system, where the physics run one "turn" for each frame (with multiple steps without a draw if frames take longer than 60 fps)? Or do they run with essentially floating point time?
To be clear, it is not idiotic in general, just within the context of the article where they are trying to lower game costs.
Instead, we have people making all new engines every year, copyrighting their code so nobody else can use it, locking up their assets and IP in restrictive licenses
Part of this is that the system libraries of the video game consoles are licensed in a way that is incompatible with copyleft licenses. For example, the requirement of Installation Information in GPLv3 and the corresponding requirement of "the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable" in GPLv2 pretty much require a console to be completely open to homebrew. This issue forced a recall of Pajama Sam for Wii: Atari and Majesco apparently wanted to release the ScummVM (for Wii) source code but Nintendo wouldn't let them.
"I want all games to be completely open ended, unscripted, nearly unlimited in scope, with perfect physics, and human-level intelligence to all NPCs; everything you done to simplify any of those is a cliche."
As someone who has been a PC gamer, professionally and ad my hobby, I think the one mistake in this article is that; PC gamers who pay 60$ a game, these gamers (like my self) have the systems to run these high end games and if we are willing to put 2000-5000 in to a computer, we are certainly willing to pay 60$ to have a game lOoking as good as the designers make them now a days. I'm sure, there are enough people like my self in this world which will keep the pc market going. Dark souls, perfect example...you see how many people protested for this game to be ported over??
Yeh, high end pc gaming will certaingly stay for a while lOnger.
Consoles....eh, screw them....
...but then I took an arrow in the knee.
And I've never seen a developer state that porting costs more than art assets. Porting can be expensive
Porting can sometimes mean rewriting all the code from scratch, even the physics and AI (which should ordinarily not need much porting). Consider having to completely rewrite a game in C# so that it'll run on Windows Phone 7, which can run only verifiably type-safe CIL. (C++/CLI won't do because standard C++ is not verifiably type-safe.) Or, for a developer too small to meet the selective qualifications of the console makers' ordinary development programs, having to rewrite it in C# in order to target Xbox Live Indie Games, which has the same restriction.
Game, 1990 40 bucks. That's 65 bucks in today's money.
Consoles from 100 - 300 in the70s
Game prices arent that bad at all.
They do have new competitors, i.e. the 5 dollar game. They should be recognized as whT it is: different game type will cost different amount of money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
SHUT THE HELL UP!!!!
This is life. Everything worth while comes at a price. If you want excellence, than you need to pay for the labor that it took to create it...
END OF STORY!!!!
Well my biggest gripe is the amount of space it takes to install the games. If the problem is all the video, sound, and graphics, why not just run the game directly from the disc? Don't they make you put the disc in to play the game anyway? It's like they want to annoy you in both ways, eating up your disc space and still requiring you to have the disc.
Off on a complete tangent.... Since I am still shooting even when I can see myself doing it, is it really a 3rd person shooter? I mean I suppose if it was you instead of I shooting, or even if'n you join me in shooting, we could get it up to a 2nd person shooter. But one would kind of require some random dude on ur screenz to honestly go wit 3rd person. Or perhaps I need to drink a beer and kill a mob of mobbed up mobs.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.--Mark Twain
"The gate is locked, so rather than climb over this three foot high fence, you'll have to make your way through that scary hedge maze."
In either a life-by-incremental-changes view or a created view, humans are all late-comers to the planet: there's no way any human-made thing can be "older than dirt." Water, then dirt, then everyone else.
Cranky educator.
Maybe a couple signature developers were paid that amount, but there's no way every single Atari game dev was paid that much.
Changing platforms, there was plenty of Bargain Basement Dev going on there too. I particularly remember Keypunch Software as being laughably ludicrous, they'd use Ascii art to represent characters in games, and I sat there thinking "this can't have taken 2 guys more than 3 months to make." That would make the production cost like $50,000.
I think the only game that blew my socks off vs the hardware was Bob Keenan's Rags to Riches. A bunch were midline. Keypunch games were what I played when I paid $9 and it felt like it, like the Rocky Horror of gaming.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Dammit I missed a noun, read my second paragraph talking about Commodore 64.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
... up hill both ways
To this day it's hard to beat M*U*L*E* or Elite on the C=64 /strut'in rights
I loved my time on Evercrack and WoW, and now playing DDO
But you catch the Wumpus and you got
Don't know if it's nostalgia or if in fact those early games were trope / cliche free
but they shore were fun
Imagine Super Mario Brothers if it were made today; The entire first level would be a tutorial where it cheers everytime you press 'A', gives you an 'achievement unlocked' after you stomp 10 goombas
Let me guess: you saw that on Zack Hiwiller's site.
Give me 1% of the budget of any of the big AAA titles that came out this year and I will demonstrate. Basically drop 99% percent of the art budget and spend what is left building an amazing gameplay engine. I have been saying this for years but only since the boom of indy games with shit graphics like minecraft people are starting to understand that it can work. An amazing gameplay engine in this context is to first create randomly generated worlds for replayability, then create a real language engine so that you can converse with NPC's in a more natural way. Yes I realise that second thing is a major undertaking, but you could start out basic and small on the first game, and as your studio progressed it would improve with each game. Now if only I had 1% of the budget of anything.
if you realize you get x increase in sales for spending y in motion capturing hookers. That's an easy number for a buisness major/investor to work with. However writing a good story, ai or gameplay takes thought, thought isn't as consistent on cost to outcome. Much easier to recycle the stuff you did a decade ago with shinier graphics.
...where you're a guy with a knife or a gun and you run around killing things and making blood splatter.
I think PC games are often not made to be FUN, they are these hardcore experiences. I imagine game developers see the PC market as less casual then console gamers.
good.
1. let us own what we buy like you used to. I'm not talking about owning the IP, just the right to play it (modding too where applicable).. indefinitely. don't build in network checks and switches for content that depend on servers that might disappear in a few years. same goes for 'portals.' gamers hate that trash. now, a site that sets up matches (or the relevant equivalent for your game) are quite useful as long as they aren't strictly required. quake had master servers, id run, and community run which helped casual players, while regulars used 3rd party utils or just typed the ips in manually. there's no need for all this single signon bullshit just to play a damn game.
2. if you want to charge $60 (or $30 for expansions), justify it. don't just bilk people. release mod/map tools/server binaries. don't be mad if you can't figure out a version 2.0 premise that overshadows 1.0 and the community spawned content. it just means it's time to move to a different premise/game idea. innovate, or revisit in a few years when the gfx/media upgrades from a AAA studio will be more desirable. meanwhile continue to make cash on sales of 1.0 by encouraging community growth while you focus on other game ideas.
3. don't port console focused FPS games to pc without modification. that's shovelware. no one will pay $60 for that trash.
4. DRM only hurts the paying customer. the pirates will never have to worry about it. do what id software did with quake3: whitelist cd keys with an authentication/authorization server. it wasn't impossible to beat, but the goodwill you spawned in the community for folloing the above rules means the community will back your play, forcing more sales from new players. if you wanted in on clan matches and such, you needed a real copy of the game to reliably participate.
5. if the above no longer makes enough money for you, consider what you're really trying to accomplish: games, or interactive movies. hollywood grade voice actors and story are nice, but not absolutely necessary to make a good GAME. gameplay is intrinsic on its own, with the media and story just window dressing. movies are linear and focus on story and character development. which way are you biasing the development?
6. a high price doesn't guarantee excellence. spending most of the budget on marketing hinders it.
7. test the game before release.. this shouldn't be so hard really. if it is, then the industry is fucked up and too top heavy. most of the bugs I see in games today are things the mappers/coders should've known about immediately, and easily fixed. id software's 'when its done' mantra works (when it's actually applied, not just stated to drive up confidence; marketing).
OK I guess I shouldn't admit to read tfa but I developed a tick from the twitter feed, first a pop up asking if want to share the fact that I'm reading the article then the annoying twitter feed, guess I will not become a regular reader of hothardware. While I'm whining, what is with all these websites that insist on driving viewers away with animations and suggested articles and pop ups?
It may be that $50 in 1985 is $100 now, but $1000 now is $500 in 1985. If, in 1985, the average paycheck was $500 and not $1000, those $50 NES games would remain in the shelf.
The problem with AI in games is that it is not real AI, because it does not learn and adapt its strategies. AI in games is generally a set of conditionals, which if large enough, may seem realistic.
True AI would involve keeping facts in memory, doing a statistical analysis on which facts may lead to a better outcome, applying some Bayesian fliters etc. But I doubt these calculations could be done in real time at 60 fps, without cutting corners.
Why not try developing your game in the fly-over states where EVERYTHING is cheaper and there is still a wide selection of technically capabable people. Seriously, start a game studio in Oklahoma City or Little Rock, advertise for jobs and then call Home Depot for a line of credit so you can buy new front doors several times a year because you will receive thousands of applications and actually find people you need at way less than they charge on the coasts.
I mean when you are facing 300 new enemies all with guns bigger than your car and you have nothing but a pistol, a shotty with 3 shells and an alien weapon that you've never fired before, do you really care if Morgan Freeman or your next door neighbor was the one that told you this section would be hard?
Game studios need to learn how to make movies cheaper the way Hollywood does it, by not making movies in Hollywood.
Studio's make money on franchise titles. HALO 4 will pay for many many many crap titles that should never have seen the light of day.
1. Case too big? Wrong -- the case doesn't have to be huge. It needs to fit a mobo, cpu, video card and Blu-Ray drive. Like the Xbox the power supply could be external if you want to save that space. The CPU, especially if you use a self-contained liquid cooler takes up about 27 cu in. The mobo can be an ITX-ish mobo at 7"x7". The video card is pretty big though, at 4"x12"x3" approximately but can sit on its side and be connected to the special mobo by a riser. A slim BD-drive can be 6"x2"x6". Add a little 2.5" SSD and some mental Tetris and I come up with about 11" wide x 12" deep x 6" tall with a vertical slot drive. Comparatively, the Xbox 360 is 12"x10"x3.5". So yeah, looks like it's in the ballpark.
2. Mouse and keyboard requiring a TV/console/game set per player? Wrong -- Windows and Linux both have supported multiple pointers for about a decade (though very few programs use them). There's no reason they can't do the same with redirecting USB keyboards to separate input streams. The only reason it's uncommon is because it's a very narrow use case, not that there's some huge technical hurdle to connecting separate keyboards and mice to separate input streams. VMWare, however, I believe /can/ dedicate USB devices to specific VMs, so I don't see why it couldn't dedicate input devices in the same way.
3. Distinguishing console from PC games -- Why is it better that you wall of potential developers from your console? I'm under the impression that some of the best new innovative games have been indie or at least based on indie games. Portal, for example, comes from a school project using the same mechanic. Yes, the walled garden of consoles does distinguish itself from PC gaming, but for the worse in my opinion. If I want to hack up a game on my PC I can. If I want to hack one up for my Wii it's practically impossible. Even so, if I'm making a PC-like console there's no reason I couldn't ship it with a custom OS that refuses to load unsigned software just like how current consoles work. So, I don't see the drawback there either way.
the case doesn't have to be huge
I agree that a gaming PC's case doesn't have to be huge. But despite that it doesn't have to be, it usually is, at least for gaming PCs sold at the big box stores. I asked in Best Buy for a gaming PC in a smaller case and was pointed to the PS3 aisle.
The only reason it's uncommon is because it's a very narrow use case
It's a very narrow use case because PCs happen not to already be in living rooms. This in turn has two causes. First, PC video was too high-resolution for TVs from the mid-1980s (EGA/VGA) until the late 2000s when HDTV became common. Second, actual gaming PCs sold to the public have living-room-unfriendly cases because they're intended for desks, not living rooms. This contributes to a misperception among the public (and hence among major game developers) that PCs are for the desk and consoles for the TV, and never the twain shall meet.
Why is it better that you wall of potential developers from your console?
The common rationalization that people repeat to me has to do with the release of Custer's Revenge and the North American video gaming "crash" of 1983. A glut of crap games or a set of highly publicized objectionable games for a video game platform is said to demean the platform. This is why games for the Atari 7800, Lynx, and Jaguar carried a digital signature, and why every Nintendo console since the NES and handhelds since the DS have had either a lockout chip or lockout firmware.
Even so, if I'm making a PC-like console there's no reason I couldn't ship it with a custom OS that refuses to load unsigned software just like how current consoles work.
I believe that was called "the original Xbox". But using off-the-shelf parts means that console manufacturing costs are not likely to come down enough in price over a generation. CPU and GPU makers tend to use their to provide more capable, higher margin parts. Microsoft continued to lose money throughout the lifespan of the original Xbox because it just didn't have the clout to get Intel and NVIDIA to make and sell Celeron 700 and GeForce 3 chips cheap enough. Had the Xbox 360, for example, used off-the-shelf parts, there would have been no Xbox 360 S with a combined CPU+GPU on one die.
Could I please get you guys to stop making us to shoot dogs. Even demon dogs. It just sucks.
Also, more grappling hooks. In fact, in a completely formal and scientific pole [sic] here at work at a *major* games company, it was decided every game developed from here on out should allow the player the use of a grappling hook. Just Cause 2 FTW!
quis custodiet ipsos custodes