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Are Gaming Studios the Most Innovative Tech Companies Out There?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Computer games are big business, with millions of players and billions of dollars in revenue every year. But that popularity puts game studios in a tough spot, especially when it comes to mobile games that need to serve their players a constant stream of updates and rewards. That pressure is leading to an interesting phenomenon: while IT companies that create more 'serious' software (i.e., productivity apps, business tools, etc.) are often viewed as cutting edge, it might be game developers actually doing the most innovative stuff when it comes to analytics, cloud and high-performance computing, and so on. Broken Bulb Studios, Hothead Games, and some other studios (along with some hosting companies) talk about how they've built their platforms to handle immense (and fluctuating) demand from gamers."
I think it is a fair statement. Unlike most business software, games actually have to be high quality in order for people to use / want to use them. Compare this to trying to pay your verizon bill online. Talk about phoning it in, hahaha.
No. At least not the big boys. Unless you call invasive DRM, sequel after sequel and shooter after shooter innovative.
So what? How does this really help us? I realize that the same question could be posed for quite a few of these articles, but I really don't see the point. It's just self-applauding, if you ask me. *expects plenty of -1 Flamebaits and -1 Trolls* Oh well; I tried getting my idea across.
Let's see do you want to run and shoot, drive in circles, or fill out a spreadsheet of abilities/items and compare your spreadsheet to somone elses? 90% of games have you covered!
I assumed the most innovative technology development, regardless of field, is in a military or university setting.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Just ask them!
I would consider companies like ID and Crytek to be innovative as they build the underlying game engine. Most other game developers then license the game engine on which their games are developed.
I'm reminded of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
When I first read about this it was attributed to John Carmack. Looking it up again now I see there's been further speculation.
The big players such as EA will never invest in a project that hasn't been already proven to be successful. This is why most if not all new breakthroughs come from indies (e.g. Minecraft).
It seems that the article mostly dropped names for websites, big data, and hosting. Most of the tools they mentioned were started at large internet based companies. Shouldn't the summary be about how web developers for gaming companies are the most innovative tech companies?
With a rare few exceptions (ongoing development of Steam, engine development at Epic, Valve, Crytek and Unity, the ongoing reinvention of the voxel wheel, MMORPG development) the vast majority of game developers are some of the least innovative people in programming, if you are looking at it from a coding perspective. If you hate middleware today, consider that most games these days are built almost entirely out of middleware, with only the art, animation and SFX assets plugged in.
In their defense however this is a money issue, not a motivation one.
Some game companies do innovate, I don't want to take that away from them. But they're not coming up with new technologies most of the time. Stuff tends to appear in a technical paper before it ever appears in a game these days, maybe gets presented at siggraph or something even before anyone can put it into a commercial product.
"Tech" also covers a lot of ground. When you consider the complexity of what's going on in biotech, video games are a footnote.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've always said that an MMO is literally the most complicated piece of software one can make. Take every single problem that exists in software engineering, and you have it in an MMO.
A) Every problem from a normal game.
1) Resource streaming for an open world.
2) Particle system running on 5 year old commodity hardware
3) Physics system to handle projectiles (Even if it's not havok you still need something for the characters falling from the sky.)
B) Every problem that a business app would have.
4) High availability clusters
5) Billing systems
6) Massive databases
7) Customer Support back end
8) Call center support
C) Every problem that 'internet companies' have
9) Latency kills
10) World wide datacenters mapping 1:1 and 1:many architecture pieces
D) Some nice unique problems for MMOs only
11) Cross server object replication
12) More hackers targeting it than they would some banks.
... I'm biased :)
I'd say the industry is at the top of innovation on some areas (e.g. GPU programming, SIMD programming, and performance-oriented programming in general). BUT on the other hand we're near the bottom for innovation in some other areas like database design, use of modern languages, and architecture vs coding.
That's not to say some games companies don't innovate in those areas, but it's atypical. OTOH, if you want your audio codec or video codec or GPU-based algorithm optimized to within an inch of its life, go talk to a game developer.
(I am biased though as I realized the above early and specialized in optimization.)
Yes, they cured cancer and made life wonderful for everyone. (Sarcasm)
You just gave me a flashback of the demo scene back in the 90s. I was blown away by future crew
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
...shooting for the worlds longest switch/case statement, you may be onto something.
I guess something on the scale of League of Legends probably has something. Games Guild Wars2 have interesting things like being able to hot patch without restarting servers (which is trivial for web servers or even databases, but for systems with persistent connections you need to do a bit of magic...but even then not that much).
But that is still nothing compared to what retail manufacturing (actually having to deal with real physical thing... When you code can break non-standard machines permanently in ways you can't just google for), or finance (some of the big banks are a decade or more ahead in term of data stores and analytics).
Game innovations are generally incremental. New rendering algorithm for this or that, new compression this, new network that. Nothing revolutionary.
Once a game makes a billion dollar out of a single algorithm, wake me up.
You don't have much experience in universities or the military then. You have to make working programs in universities as students and researchers routinely make 'theoretical' breakthroughs that lead directly to commercial applications (I.E. the internet). The 'military' does not need everyone to know about computers, just one division, say the NSA, should suffice.
1-Add quick-time events
2-Print
3-Ship
Isn't it a bit too black and white to say one sector is unequivocally more innovative than the other?
Call Of Duty 8: Kill The Arabs (or whatever money spinning title the publisher is mulching out now) isn't innovative in the same way Half Life (1 or 2), Deus Ex (original!), Doom or Starcraft etc. were, but likewise I don't doubt with modern AAA titles a lot of work goes into the graphics.
Microtransactions are innovative, certainly, but moreso in a psychologically manipulative sort of fashion.
I guess my point is does it have to be one or the other?
...busy making 37 versions of the same fucking game. How many CoD games are there, now?
In the 80's, 90's, and even the first half of the 2000's game companies were huge innovators, even the big ones.
Today, game companies use the Hollywood formula:if a game is successful release sequels 1-3 with minimal changes, then when people finally realize they've been playing the same game but in a different box and get tired of it, make a few changes, put in fresh characters and release it under a new name so people will think they are buying something new.
Actually indie and small studio games still have it, but any big-gaming-company game, with a few exceptions, is just a rehash the previous version, with updated multilayer maps, and 20% more cut-scenes. Hey, if people buy the games then why not, huh?
And I am so sick of 'the cloud' being mentioned as an innovation. Remote storage and remote processing has been available for decades. That's all 'the cloud' is, but on a larger scale.
In a word ... No.
I have played video games since there were video games, and most certainly the last decade of games (bar very few) have had no innovation other than graphics, which wears thin quickly.
Gaming companies as whole have dated client side and server side architectures. The software they write is still stuck in the early 2000's for the most part. Things like distributed, highly available systems are still far beyond there grasp. They have a hatred towards modern languages (C++ EVERYWHERE YO) and tend to have a poor understanding of where, when, and what to optimize. I am sure there are some game companies out there that do push the edge and "get it", but for the most part game studio are some of the most bassackwards part of the industry.
Gaming studios have been milking identical game concepts, or 'templates' innovated by companies such as Nintendo and Blizzard several years ago. Creating something completely new requires risks that companies (particularly EA) aren't willing to take. Innovation at most is incremental, in which game features are borrowed from previous games and a very small amount of 'new' is added to make the game competitive.
They're about as innovative as Hollywood is creative. The problem is that all the good gaming studios out there get bought out by one of the 3 large publishers, essentially forced to make yearly installments of whatever IP they created. To compound the problem, they have been targeting consoles rather than PC's, which means the actual hardware and specs in use are 10 years old.
big ones are Innovative in makeing them suck with loads of crap like DLC, Haveing to buy stuff in game, killing user mods and maps with a big load of DRM.
For as long as I've been involved with computing (early 1980s), two things have always held true:
1. Gaming has driven the performance envelope in many areas, which then filters down to other applications. For example, GUIs in the late 80s/90s would not have been possible if gaming hadn't pushed graphics technology 5-10 years earlier. More recently, GPUs led the way toward general multi-core processing, and game UIs led to the "tactile" interfaces that are now common on smartphones and tablets. Expect to see more recent gaming innovations like motion controllers and VR technology migrate into non-gaming applications over time.
2. People look down on gaming, and "gaming" machines. The C64 and Amiga were dismissed as "toys" by many, just as today a lot of people dismiss an Xbox 360 or PS3 in the same way. This I think is gradually changing, as people (and companies like Intel and AMD) realize that gaming is where the demand for higher performance is coming from. People only need their spreadsheet to go so fast, but gaming can always make use of more resources (for now at least).
One big AAA failure can sink an entire gaming studio, and everybody loses their jobs.
We had a story on Slashdot 2 weeks ago about how California spent $135 Million on a now-scrapped computer system for the DMV. HP (the contractor) could have hired trained chimps to work on that project and the outcome would have been the same.
In one industry, failure is not sufficiently punished, and sometimes even rewarded. In the other industry, failure means that you are looking for a new job, with a crappy game as the last entry on your resume.
There's no obvious measure of "innovation", so there's no way to say which tech companies are the most "innovative". All the word "most" is is totally pointless speculation.
There are ways in which hardware OEMs are innovative. There are ways that OS vendors are innovative. There are ways that databases are innovative. There are ways that financial software are innovative. There are ways that game companies are innovative. I could keep going with every sector in "tech".
But it doesn't really matter, because "innovation" isn't really what helps users. What helps users is solving their problem, which is sometimes innovative and sometimes mind-numbingly dull. It isn't even what helps tech companies: What helps tech companies is enough hype to get the market's attention combined with solving their users' problems enough to keep the revenue flowing.
I am officially gone from
... we are right royally screwed.
No doubt, video games have pushed hardware a long quite a ways, but defense R&D has pushed technology much further along than this narrow commercial industry.
"No because at the end of the day Video games are art, not technology."
BULLSHIT. The graphics, in some case, can be consider art.
But decision making? response behavior? creating consistent and complex context aware physics simulations?
Please, it's engineering and science more then it's art.
Unnles you define art as "anything I happen to like becasue I am a Pretentious fuck"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The way I see it is:
1. Games innovate coding techniques a lot of times, algorithms, methods, best practices, etc... :)
2. Business apps innovate the methodologies, techniques, and things related to saving the business money by streamlining processes, pretty sure MVC came out of this, but MVC is NOT for games by any means. Agile though...
If the approval, manufacturing, and delivery time for a downloadable complement is substantially less than that for a disc game, then how is a "day one paid DLC" for a disc game unjustifiable? The developers ship what they have, keep working on new features after the game goes gold, and make these new features available to the public.
When I started working on my game several years ago, I decided to actually *use* the hardware. As a result, almost nobody could even play it reliably until the last couple years or so.
:-)
In other words, I am insane--unlike professional game studios.
If yer curious it's free please please come play my game
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MVC is NOT for games by any means
How not? To me, the key concept behind model-view-controller is separation of the part of the game engine that handles physics and AI from the part of the game engine that handles graphics. Provided you aren't trying to port to a platform that only has a single language (such as JavaScript for the web, Java for applets and the earliest smartphones, or C# for WP7 and Xbox Live Indie Games), you can remake the same game for different platforms by slapping a new graphics layer on top of your already tested and balanced game.
Believe it or not, I am serious with that answer.
Heck the web as a whole grew in no small part due to the existence of porn.
Is there a gaming equivalent to Rule 34? No, Rule 34 relates to internet porn.
Looking back even further, porn embraced VHS tapes before major movie studios ever did.
Compared to the games industry which only uses the web to force always on connections even for single player.
Instead of allowing people to play peer-to-peer online force people to join their online community only. (and will turn game servers off forcing your game to be useless.)
The same game industry which only recently and reluctantly allowed downloadable distribution.
Is it even a competition?!?, porn beats the gaming industry easily for embracing technology.
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Game studios are NOT innovative. They keep making games based on 5+ year old tech, while the tech world has moved well beyond it. Most PC games are straight ports without anything added to make it better.
Okay, now that we have new consoles, that is supposed to change? For what, 2 years? Then once again, the tech will be beyond what consoles can do, and yet, everything released will be based on the current generation of console tech, no matter how much the tech has moved beyond it.
Yes, I am looking forward to see how games have improved, and yes, I hopefully will have to upgrade parts of my computer for them. Then I'll be good for 5+ years again. And No, I will NOT buy a next generation console, considered a Wii=U, buy honestly, I'll probably just go with a cheap ass OUYO, and maybe check out the Steam Console, but probably not.
Be seeing you...
You fucking twits. Games are being neutered by ridiculously underspec'd hardware on consoles. That's why a side by side comparrison on an 8 year old console looks identical to the PC version -- The assets / polly counts are the fucking same (except shaders and texture res -- because that won't break the game enough to require a whole new batch of logic testing like AI or new meshes would).
INNOVATIVE?! What the FUCK?! YOU CAN NOT GET A PUBLISHER DEAL WITHOUT LICENSING AN EXISTING (read: uninnovative) ENGINE!
Perhaps a FEW basement indie game devs are being innovative. But "Gaming Studios"? -- NO!
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