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Deus Ex Creator On How a Video-Game Academy Could Fix the Industry
Nerval's Lobster writes "In the fall of 2014, 20 promising video game developers will begin a yearlong (and free) program at the University of Texas at Austin, where they will study under some of the gaming industry's most successful executives. 'The idea is to get the best of the best of the best, run them through a Navy Seals boot camp of sorts and not force them to worry about "how do I pay the rent and buy groceries,"' said program leader Warren Spector, who is responsible for creating well-known games such as Deus Ex. 'Fingers crossed, when we start delivering graduates who can contribute in major ways to the development of future games, that philanthropy will continue.' In a wide-ranging interview, Spector also talked about how his future students will be graduating into an industry in which 'every business model is broken, which is either terrifying or an opportunity depending on how you look at it.' Focus groups, analysis of historical trends, and aggregated game review scores may be comforting to number crunchers, but the majority of game projects still end up as commercial failures. Spector ultimately believes the people who actually make the games are going to make better decisions than the number crunchers. 'We've got to be looking forward and any time you start bringing data into it, you're not," Spector said. "I pitched a Lego construction game in 1989, and guess what: Minecraft is basically a Lego construction game. But at the time I was told "no, that won't work." I pitched a western game and the response was "westerns don't sell." And then Red Dead Redemption came out. Stuff doesn't sell until someone makes one that sells, and no amount of data can reveal what new thing is going to sell. The metrics and data guys, and the publishing guys will never come up with the next big thing.'""
Great, so they can be scooped up by EA and churn out shit like Madden 2013: You Bought it Again.
-- Ethanol-fueled
it will make your metrics problem just grow even more.
deus ex is nice, but if you had an idea about how to do a block building game in 1989 why didn't you make it? we dreamt of a game like that as kids, in 1989 - of course w had no idea how it could have been done well on 8mhz 640kb ega crapper. a lego destruction derby game would have been awesome.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So long as it's fun to play.
Minecraft is a bit more of a Lego construction game. I don't know how he pitched his idea but if someone came to me and told me they had a Lego game and presented Minecraft to me I'd have told them their description is a bit lacking.
And the other side of this is that Notch didn't wait for someone to give him the greenlight. Granted the culture and technology is much different but waiting for the approval of others is probably holding many back from bringing a software product to market for lack of skills or lack of resources. Sometimes you need to just throw yourself out there and hope that you can work it out to become successful.
Spector ultimately believes the people who actually make the games are going to make better decisions than the number crunchers.
The people with the money call the shots. How will a year-long boot camp for programmers make managers and number crunchers listen to programmers when they don't now?
Where they don't have The Bell. They have Taco Bell.
"You think this some kind of fucking game, private?!"
"Yes, yes I do."
More IT / tech needs apprenticeship like schooling.
Where you study under some successful people in the field and not college professors who have been in academia for years and don't know much about real work.
>> I pitched a Lego construction game in 1989, and guess what: Minecraft is basically a Lego construction game.
Sounds like the "Adventure Construction Set" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set) - that's was the Minecraft of the 2D world back in the 1980s.
Obviously, it is fairly likely that academy participants will be improved as game developers to some degree; but it seems like that doesn't really address the problem as described in the interview, which is people with good ideas getting shot down by bean-counters who want predictable sequels.
One would think that, rather than polishing developers, the logical line of attack would either be tinkering with funding models or reducing the cost of game development, which are the only two possibilities for either cutting the risk-averse out entirely, or causing them to adopt a 'games are cheap, so the ROI on experimentation is better than the ROI on derivative sequel schlock' philosophy.
why post bachelor and not something that can be at maybe the 2-4 year level or maybe just on it's own??
that 10K does not cover your student loans. And 2-4 years of CS with lots of skill gaps can be better filled with some like this as part of the 2-4 years.
And, statistically speaking, neither will game developers. For every big hit of a game there's dozens more that perform okay enough to recoup costs but any follow-up titles are completely up in the air, and hundreds more that go nowhere.
Just because in one instance a publisher said 'western games don't sell' and was then proven wrong, doesn't mean that everybody thinking they can disprove a publisher when they say their Game X is going to be the next Red Dead Redemption is going to be right.
We can pretty much know this for a fact by looking at all the 'indie' games on mobile platforms and being launched through KickStarter (not counting the ones who are just using it as marketing hoping to attract the actual big money..from publishers). Although at least the latter can give an indication as to what people may be craving, it doesn't mean the end-result is going to deliver.
The problem with trying to figure out how to design and create a popular game is that, as with movies, there's no magic formula for what makes a popular game/movie. In fact, about the only guarantee is that following a formula, any formula, drastically reduces your chances for creating something popular. It's very hard to package up and teach creativity and originality.
The last thing the games industry needs is more cookie cutter production line academy thinking.
That's how we got this current crop of fucking garbage.
The random gems we do get... They were inspired by creativity, and a drive for quality.
Not just money. Which is the only thing an academy has ever produced. Money hungry willing to do anything for a buck sellouts.
You are unto thy Lord and Keeper, the GAME EXECUTVE !! Please him for he hath you created !!
HOOK em HORNS !!
LONG live DIO !!
SATAN is YOUR LORD and MASTER !!
BIKINI beach BABES !!
HERE IS EHERE EVIL DWELLS !!
When you live in a world where metrics rule and people rule out ideologies because: "it's been done", "why not do this instead".. you see that people are looking too dimly on the end result. It's always about the end result and how you get there is just.. simply a way of getting there.
Schooling isn't everything, human curiosity is a gift that is often repeatedly beaten until the point that we are mere products of our environment and you place your beliefs in a set of predefined rules from that environment. Expand your mind children. Dream the impossible and work hard to make it happen.
People say the game industry needs fixing, but there's tons of great games coming out from both the big boys and the indie scene. Sure, you can complain about Madden 20xx and "Gears of Halo Battlefield Combat" remakes, but then there are other choices you can make. You just need to realize that you're not the person those churned sequels are being made for.
It seems to me that Spector could have fronted the money himself if he thought the ideas were so good. They probably would have been if he was working on them, DX was one of the all-time greats. Unless he had some sort of no-compete contract, he should have gone indie.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
More IT / tech needs apprenticeship like schooling.
Where you study under some successful people in the field and not college professors who have been in academia for years and don't know much about real work.
Developers should follow a Jedi like approach. You have a master or multiple masters and then one day you will have your own apprentices. Programming is an art, it's just not being a code monkey, everyone has their own spin to make the way they write code unique.
The first thought I had was what categories would be eligible for winning a Freeman.
Ezekiel 23:20
In fact, quite a few of them exist:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-stupidest-video-game-school-commercials/
Quite a few of the linked videos are gone, but you get the idea.
how hard is it to buy groceries? or pay rent?
passionate people find a way. this coddling is just going to result in assholes who overestimate their abilities and are out of touch with actual gamers.
the best game designers are humanists in touch with other people and their concerns.
Developers should follow a Jedi like approach. You have a master or multiple masters and then one day you will have your own apprentices. Programming is an art, it's just not being a code monkey, everyone has their own spin to make the way they write code unique.
Also, at any one time, there can only be two evil game developers allowed.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Where does his say this is for programmers? I mean, the game industry doesn't have a lot of rigidly formal terms, but "Developer" is about as general a term as you can get in this context, applicable to Designers, Artists, Programmers, Audio Guys, or anyone else who can be said to directly contribute to the substance of a game, aka anyone who helps "develop" it.
if all university programs were run that way. The economy would be so productive it would be to the
moon by now. No. Wait. Isn't that the way China runs its universities ? Oh Damn !
What about when big name veterans dont have to bend to the whims of publishers. Its not all fine and dandy. Look at the shit double fine is in right now. Raised 3+ million dollars when they only needed 700k, and still managed to not complete their game, but are now way behind. When you dont have a publisher breathing down your neck to get the product out and to worry about profits you end up with shit like this and duke nukem forever.
Although feedback from infants is no doubt interesting, I can't help thinking that 2-4 year-olds are a little too young to benefit. Although if playing with Lego is basically the same as writing Minecraft ...
It won't. That's just heart-and-mind winning horseshit.
They simply want there to be more programmers. Higher supply means dev costs are kept at a minimum, and they have an easier time overworking the developers and replacing them once they burn out.
That is all there is to this. Free education for software developers was an eventuality given the current state of high demand and low supply. It won't work very well though, since the root cause for the current state is not being addressed: earning a living as a software developer sucks the monkey's ass.
The moment you use the phrase "best of the best of the best." Especially when referring to artists.
I pitched [...]. But [..] I was told "no, that won't work."
So, after failing to get his pitches into reality, he plans to open an "Academy" and teach other people how to fail, just like him?
I really don't see how he is solving any problems in the commercial world. This seems more like "those who can't, teach".
Of course, since he can't actually get people to finance his games, teaching will likely give him something else to do with his time, at a personal profit, I suppose. Good for him but, again, what does it do for everyone else?
Our Economy on the whole needs more Apprenticeship like schooling.
Colleges (I think partially due to the GI Bill, for WWII and Vietnam War, combined with trying to dodge the draft) have seem to have taken the near monopoly on Higher Learning after High School. It isn't that College and University education is bad, but it isn't for everyone leaving a gap in labor. As well lowering the value of a College education.
Apprenticeships, vocational training, and other alternate forms of education should be a larger part of our modern economy. A lot of people go into Computer Science, or Computer Engineering degrees to be Programmers and System Admins. Those don't need Degrees they can be learned via an Apprenticeship program. Also not IT jobs but other white collar jobs, like Accounting, Marketing, Sales, Advertising, Management... Doesn't need College degrees but experience and learning from skilled workers.
However the problem was the Baby Boomer created a culture of Cut Throat type of thinking, where if the Apprentice passes the master it is seen as a threat on his job, and the idea of working you way up in an organization is no longer the case, we need to jump from job to job in order to advance in life.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
But is EA the Master, or the Apprentice? :)
Established "vets" like the ones mentioned in the article are a real problem. Most only have one real success under their belt, with a whole string of mediocre or outright crappy games to follow. The idea that they are somehow the lone voice of quality in the industry is just crap. The fact is, these entrenched vets with name recognition are the ones sucking up funding so they can spend 2 or 3 years developing their current pet project that has no more or less chance of success than anyone else's. Setting up a school specifically to breed more of these kinds of people will only result in more "rockstar developers" who are convinced that they are the best qualified for create a new game, and publishers will probably throw money at them as a result.
Make sure that they understand that they are going to have to already prove themselves as being able to design and code a completely working and feature complete game from engine to art before they can be accepted in to the program, attend class and study under supervision for at least 80 hours per week, live strictly off of one item from the dollar menu per meal, give them a proper browbeating every once in a while, constantly remind them they are easily replaceable with other students just itching to get in to the program, and then never let them complete a project by tossing them on to other loser projects. But it's all okay because the student breakroom looks like a teenage gamer's wet dream.
Nobody is going to fix the industry. The industry functions quite well just the way it is, grossing more than Hollywood for years now. If we're talking about the precious industry, that financial success is the only thing that matters.
Now if we're talking about ART... That's a whole different problem. Art is anathema to the industry. But this is also true of Hollywood, so we can assume the same sort of results fairly reasonably. Art will still happen, in spite of the industry, not because of it. It will be accidental. It will be serendipitous. It will be the result of one madman with a vision. It will NOT happen because of some hothouse training program.
Those of us who have been in the industry think of something else entirely when talking about fixing the industry. The radical instability of development houses is what needs fixing. Nowhere else in the world is there so little code reuse, and so little retention of talent. Maybe the customers could get some of the things they want, like more reliable ship dates, and better code quality if that were fixed. That's a whole different problem from endless sequels and poor design though.
Or Wasteland 2, FTL, Dwarf Fortress, Hotline Miami, etc. It's almost like Double Fine is behind because they're bad at management (much as I love them), not solely because they decided to go without a publisher. (Side note: look at what happened to Brutal Legend. Thanks to publishers, most of the game's time and budget was spent on legal battles with Activision. What a big help that was!)
This is like invalidating all self-startups because of my late, crappy attempts at coding.
... like Deus Ex 2. He also poorly managed Thief 3 and resulted in a less-than stellar return of Garrett.
Universities have apprenticeship-like schooling too; it's called graduate school. But the end goal is different than in industry.
With budgets growing out of control so quickly, what the hell do you expect them to do?
Learn to budget? Seriously, you don't just "lose" $200M by accident.
Live within their means? They could try not spending absurd amounts for the rights to have some big name involved, for example. Good games will create their own brands, as we've seen time and again.
Try alternative business models instead of making often futile and always customer-hostile efforts to fight piracy within the current model? Try radically different pricing models. Learn from both the successes and the failures of subscription models and in-game purchases and DLC and building extensible games with modding communities around them and all the rest.
Tell the console makers to take a hike? Without games, consoles are nothing, but no individual console represents more than a modest fraction of the market. Why should any studio make a AAA game title and then agree to make it an exclusive on a certain console, unless the maker of that console is basically offering to treble their revenues?
Try bringing PC gaming back? There's a lot of emphasis on consoles, mobile gaming and social gaming today, but PCs have more flexibility than all of the rest put together, and even if the new generation of consoles is competitive in raw power at launch it won't be for long. And yet many modern high-profile PC titles are nasty console knock-offs that justifiably get criticised for weak gameplay mechanics and poor controls/user interfaces.
Seriously, there are about a million things that a lot of game studios are doing wrong. Anyone with moderate objectivity and some basic knowledge of the industry and general economics can step back and see them. But the big studios often seem to be run by people who don't want to step back and challenge their views, and until that changes, the rest is academic.
For now, please enjoy EA Super World Championship Series Sports Game 2016, exclusively on your locked-down XBox 3D Kinect Sports Edition, sponsored by Coca Cola and brought to you in generously compensated partnership with the Super World Championship Series League. Unless the DRM servers are down, that is.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
2-4 year college level
some Fields that don't need the full load of University as it's not for but it isn't for everyone.
And the in some Fields College and University turns out people with skill gaps and saying 1-2 more years is a poor way to fix that.
The dumbing down of DX2 was necessary for consoles, but I do agree that it was much worse than the original. Still, it wasn't a bad game by any stretch and I enjoyed the story.
As for Thief: Deadly Shadows, I have just one question. Are you crazy? That was the best game in the series.
Established "vets" like the ones mentioned in the article are a real problem. Most only have one real success under their belt, with a whole string of mediocre or outright crappy games to follow. The idea that they are somehow the lone voice of quality in the industry is just crap.
Case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romero
Tell the console makers to take a hike [...] Try bringing PC gaming back
Some people like to play together on a sofa instead of in the basement over the Internet, and I've been reassured by several other Slashdot users that the number of living room gaming PCs is negligible.
Why should any studio make a AAA game title and then agree to make it an exclusive on a certain console, unless the maker of that console is basically offering to treble their revenues?
Fighting games, for example, tend to be either exclusive to one console or ported to multiple consoles (and not PC) because it does treble the revenues over making the game PC-exclusive. Not a lot of PC gamers are willing to move the PC back and forth between the computer desk and the living room to play a game that requires a screen big enough for two to four players to fit around. And finally, some big-name games are published by companies that manufacture game consoles.
many modern high-profile PC titles are nasty console knock-offs that justifiably get criticised for [...] poor controls/user interfaces
If console-style controls and user interfaces are inherently poor, then how would anyone make good controls or user interfaces for a local multiplayer game? Giving each player a mouse and keyboard won't work if the operating system won't let a game distinguish "mouse 1 was moved to the left by half an inch" from "mouse 2 was moved to the left by half an inch".
it used T1 lines and it did not make it past the test citys.
Epic Mickey is just the blandest platform gameplay with high production value Disney art.
It's been that way since sometime in the 16-bit era. DuckTales on the NES was fun, but Pinocchio on the Super NES and Sega Genesis was short and bland. Might it be a case of Seinfeld is no longer funny because platforming itself had become old hat?
The solution is trivial, if you have a commercial product, don't use publishers
How is that supposed to work? Every download game on Xbox Live Arcade must be sponsored by a disc game publisher.
Their problem is they want publishers to fund them up front while they work on something.
A developer could rely on a bootstrapping strategy to make up for the lack of publisher advances. Such a company would start with a tiny project and use the revenue to grow with each successive project. But console makers have historically required self-publishing developers to be "at least this tall", as theme park ride descriptions put it, to even get started developing for a platform.
> 'The idea is to get the best of the best of the best, run them through a Navy Seals boot camp
Ugh, this is totally wrong. The games industry continues to perpetuate the SuperCoder Myth.
There is this notion in the games community that you need a few crack rockstars to make a game. As it turns out, these people don't really exist. What you find is a few people willing to work 24 hours a day on the problem instead of 12. This perpetuates coders who program all night, all the time and leads to death marches. Again, the idea that one coder will write most of the code and the rest will support him is just misguided MBA jockeying. What you need is a solid team of methodical programmers who are all reasonably good and working a reasonable schedule.
Thus, "Let's get the best of the best! and make them Navy Seals!" is built on top of this exact myth. The idea that you can just get one good programmer and take on the world. Such BS.
The dumbing down of DX2 was necessary for consoles
For a single-player game, the question is whether consoles are necessary in the first place.
WOOSH
What we need is a super-academy for electricians, so that we can find electricians to work on our biggest, most complex buildings. We will find the best of the best navy-seals of our electricians. Rockstar electricians, so to speak, who can wire an entire building on their own. And these electricians will want to work on the biggest buildings because they will get perks like an 18 hour work day and a break room filled with electrical switches and Crestron panels.
The indie scene is already fixing the industry. The big guys can adapt or die.
The games which I've enjoyed the most recently have been:
- Legend of Zelda Skwyard Sword
- Red Steel 2
- Xenoblade Chronicles
- The Last Story
- Pandora's Tower (finally found a work-around which seems to be consistent for me for the glitch)
In particular:
- motion controls and the interface of Skyward Sword and Red Steel 2
- exploration and vast expanses and lengthy gameplay of Xenoblade
- online campaign and RPG-style grinding of The Last Story
- fascinating story of Pandora's Tower
I'd give a lot for a motion-controlled RPG w/ downloadable content, grinding and on-line play which had a good story which was suited to the on-line environment.
One of the best potential backgrounds for such a thing would be C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine stories (travel is by a series of gates to different worlds) --- I really wish someone would license it.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I think EA generally needs more developers than that...
The dumbing down of DX2 was necessary for consoles
Console, singular. DX2 was Xbox only.
But it wasn't necessary to dumb it down at all, and I take umbrage at that statement since:
but I do agree that it was much worse than the original
The original game, was also released in enhanced form on the PS2...mouse and keyboard support included. There were some minor changes in UI and levels were split in pieces since Eidos didn't seem know the trick of level streaming. (which is how you get big levels on the PS2...you stream them on the fly) But basically it's the same game.
I'm kind of tired of seeing all the credit for huge productions like video games go to a single person.
the maps had to be cut down to fit in the xbox 1 limited ram pool
Some people don't remember but Warren Spector got his start in tabletop gaming having worked for Steve Jackson Games and TSR. Then seeing that tabletop would always remain a niche, like some other tabletop designers (like Sandy Petersen), he jumped ship to where the big money was....electronic gaming.
He should have stayed on the tabletop....just because you're pretty good at tabletop design doesn't make you a good computer/console game designer.
most extreme example ever implemented. Every single weapon that uses ammo draws from the exact same ammo pool: the same kind of ammo for pistols, shotguns, RPG's, flamethrowers ... This is very problematic because when you run out of bullets for one gun, you run out of bullets for every single one of your guns.
The problem with number crunching history is the same problem trying to get accurate forecasts during times of changing weather patterns from the farmers almanac. They have absolutely truthful historical information, but their changes in trends tend to be flat lines based on averages of years past. Can they tell why the US South is so dry and Western Canada is so wet? No. You have to look at the previously east-to-west straight jetstream, which is now much more sinusoidal, and see that areas north that used to be somewhat dry with a bit of moisture (dryland farming) are now dealing with copious amounts of rain (inches per week instead of inches per month), and other areas are looking at heat, drought and fire. When you make one that breaks the rule, then they make new rules. Before you break them, they follow the old rules.
DNF was management incompetence. How many times did they change engines? Three or four? modified Quake -> Unreal -> inhouse ->? Then lets not forget the numerous videos they released at all of the E3's which made it look like they had a working game. But truth be told they were stuck in development hell which was caused by a lot of feature creep. They kept looking at other games and saying "oh shit that looks awesome! lets put that in our game." Then add to that they kept trying to add in all sorts of interactions and vehicles which stalled their story and gameplay for the sake of glitz and glitter.
Oddly enough after 3d realms folded, Apogee was brought back from the ashes to do a remake of Rise of the Triad. I actually played that game and it wasn't as good as Doom but the gameplay was fast paced and the sound effects were loud and made you feel like you were in a war zone.
fix its management practices.
who have a passion for making the games, and they make a game that they themselves want to play, not the game that some D-bag CEO thinks will sell.
Which is the same thing Double Fine is doing. They saw they had alot more money than they had asked for, so decided to tack on more shit. Tim Schafer said that since he didnt want to make a game smaller than Grim Fandango, and he now had the money to do so, then he might as well do it, and it would not be ready for like 2 more years. RotT was fun. I hope new one is as good as the old one.
Bingo. When I read "program leader Warren Spector, who is responsible for creating well-known games such as Deus Ex"
I thought, anything else he created.... really. I haven't even played Deus Ex.
Don't blame the playa' : developers, execs, money men.... it IS the game industry that's the problem. It wants to become a movie-like industry (which typically has out of control budgets).
Admittedly I never played Invisible War, but Human Revolution shows that you don't need to dumb it down for consoles. I played DX:HR on Xbox, and I thought it was a fantastic game. It fell a little short of the original Deus Ex, which I had played on a Mac, but that has nothing to do with console vs computer.
Console, singular. DX2 was Xbox only.
It was planned for PS2 as well, but later cancelled.
But it wasn't necessary to dumb it down at all, and I take umbrage at that statement since:
Yes, it was absolutely necessary for it to work on the Xbox.
There were some minor changes in UI and levels were split in pieces
Did you even play DX on PS2? It was every bit as dumbed down as DX2. The inventory/menu system was majorly stripped down, gameplay elements removed, the graphics were slaughtered and the levels were tiny.
Human Revolution on console is far inferior to the PC version. It only runs at 720p, very low res textures, no SSAO, no tessellation You're also forgetting that the Xbox only had 64MB RAM and the fact that a DX1 inventory system does not work well on a gamepad.
You haven't played Deus Ex!?
The only thing that can "fix" the industry is another complete collapse, followed by a rebirth consisting of small players (NO mega-corps). The video game industry, foolishly wanting to be like Hollywood, has gotten it's wish: it's become a faceless corporate giant with no soul, fixated purely on focus groups, numbers, and endless rehashes of tired junk. All style with little to no substance. Just die already.
Another side of it is the incompatibility of art and money. As much as it pains me to call video games 'art', I acknowledge that the developers practice a form of art; the developers being those who code, the sound recordists and the people who generate the graphical assets, etc. The vast majority of traditional artwork (as a visual medium), just like music, is mostly obscure and will never turn a profit. The problem is not the medium, but with those who do not understand art as human expression and those same people who must attach a price tag to everything.
The "failure" is not the medium, it is the endless greed inherent in large corporations who 'care' nothing of the craftsmen that enable them to profit.
Real art (whatever that is) cannot be made on an assembly line...
That depends. A few years ago when "netbooks" (cheap subnotebooks) and "nettops" (cheap small form factor PCs) with an Atom CPU were all the rage, people would buy these nettops, which were just powerful enough to decode high-definition video in real time, and use them for noninteractive home theater uses such as listening to music and watching movies. Use for recently published video games, on the other hand, requires a little more GPU power than a lot of these Atom PCs were capable of. Could Gigabyte's Brix nettop make a useful set-top console?
I have seen tons of people, young and old, who only know how to turn a PC on, get to the internet and email who have malware infected machines.
Ultimately this can be traced to a lack of a rigorous definition of what makes a particular piece of software "malicious", other than "I know it when I see it". If you can cite such a definition, I'd be glad to discuss it.
Press power, put the disc in and start playing in a few seconds.
A few seconds, or ten minutes of watching a Kurt Russell wannabe smoke a cigarette?
Where the developer was so fucking lazy they didn't even include mouse support in their menus, you have to use the keyboard.
I don't own a copy of Borderlands for any platform, so I'm not familiar with its control style. But say there's a PC game that can be played with a keyboard, a USB HID gamepad, or an Xbox 360 Controller. If it can't be played with a mouse, why should the menu support a mouse? The player would be moving his hand back and forth between the mouse for the menus and the keyboard for controlling the player in the game. The other option would be to add support for actually playing the game with a mouse. I don't see how that would work for all genres: how would mouse control in a platformer or fighting game work?
Exactly...as Microsoft proved when Windows Longhorn was released on time and under budget....
Did you even play DX on PS2? It was every bit as dumbed down as DX2. The inventory/menu system was majorly stripped down,
Simplified yes... the PC version was too fiddly. The changes made increased the amount of time actually playing the game.
gameplay elements removed
Which ones? Considering you can just use a walkthrough for the PC version
, the graphics were slaughtered and the levels were tiny.
Not tiny, they were just split into pieces. As I said, Eidos didn't use the trick of level streaming. And how were the graphics slaughtered...they look the same...except the PS2 models are mo-capped.
lack of a rigorous definition of what makes a particular piece of software "malicious"
I have cleaned out PC's belonging to friends, family and co-workers that were full of trojans.
Then perhaps the way to bring back PC gaming is to analyze the threat model and limit what trojans can do to accomplish their purposes. One could require the publisher of a device's operating system to inspect each program, as is standard practice on iOS and the game consoles. But this is not the only answer nor even the best answer. Operating systems could help by providing robust sandboxing capabilities, such as allowing each user account to make sub-accounts that can see only what the user explicitly puts in that account, and allowing system components such as video codecs to be installed into one of these accounts rather than system-wide.
Price
I suspect this won't remain a huge advantage for long, especially once someone posts a "best gaming PC for $500" parts list this November to match the "four hundred and ninety-nine U.S. dollars" introductory price of an Xbox One console and people start taking that parts list to the local PC builder. And if you play only single-player and online, Steam sales and the like make PC games much cheaper.
Ease of Use?
In what way are GOG and Steam any harder to use to install games than the consoles' download stores?
More diversity of genres?
What genres are lacking from PCs other than, perhaps, cooperative platformers like Trine and fighting games like Street Fighter IV?
Sony and Microsoft also have first party games.
If you buy a Microsoft console, you can't play Sony first-party games, Nintendo first-party games, or PC exclusives. You have to either pick one of the first-party publishers and stick with it or pay more than a PC for all three of a generation's consoles. Even a $1,000 compensating-for-something PC is cheaper than a $1,250 set of three consoles, plus you get to use it to do homework and watch videos that just freeze at the error message "The content owner has not made this video available on your device" when watched on anything but a PC.
You focus way to much attention on Nintendo.
I picked a name. Let me rephrase: What advantage do you see in PlayStation consoles over PCs for single-player gaming, especially if you're not interested in Sony games? What advantage do you see in Xbox consoles over PCs for single-player gaming, especially if you're not interested in Microsoft Studios games?
I have a running bet with my business development guy at the small studio I work for - if we make the most simple, idiotic game backed by a lot of marketing cash, we'll rake in a winner.
I know, every game is supposed to be this perfect little fucking snowflake, full of VISION and DREAMS, but you know what is really going on? Most gamers could give a shit. Witness the success of mouth-breathing titles like "Candy Crush", "Kill some soldiers - again", and "Lets play sports - Part 24". The concepts that most people want to impress upon the teeming gaming masses isn't going to stick in large amounts.
Minecraft is an example of being as fucking simple as possible. The game is great in expressing this simplicity, but it boils down to not being too HARD for the average IDIOT to pick up in a few minutes - that's key. Also is the budget for marketing. About half of any gaming budget is going to be burned for pushing it out there, competing with every other stupid fucking title that involves madly clicking/tapping/whatever.
So in that sea of crap, there floats your wonderful concept - except you didn't bother to put more than $10,000 toward marketing, so after the initial introduction pop (even if you get featured in the iOS/Android portals), it all reverts to a long-tail minimum that doesn't do jack for you.
The problem with any "rockstar" and any game concept being lauded as the "way" is this - SUVIVORSHIP BIAS. We aren't studying all the games that were pushed out and failed miserably, just myopically focused on what is doing really well.
Between the massive gulf of fools, the insane needs of just having your voice heard, and the continued trend of only studying the few "successes" - it isn't surprising that the whole industry resembles a fresh cow pie in the pasture.
Gotta go, time to make "CLICK 'DEM TERRORISTS" for the next paycheck.
There's been a couple decades since 1989. Warren Spector has since produced:
Wing Commander (1990), Origin Systems
Wing Commander: The Secret Missions (1990), Origin Systems
Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990), Origin Systems
Bad Blood (1990), Origin Systems
Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi (1991), Origin Systems
Wing Commander: The Secret Missions 2 - Crusade (1991), Origin Systems
Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams (1991), Origin Systems
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (1992), Origin Systems
Shadowcaster (1993), Origin Systems (Uncredited)[10]
Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (1993), Origin Systems
Wing Commander: Privateer - Righteous Fire (1993), Origin Systems
Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle (1993), Origin Systems
Ultima VII Part Two: The Silver Seed (1993), Electronic Arts
Wings of Glory (1993), Electronic Arts
System Shock (1994), Looking Glass Technologies
CyberMage: Darklight Awakening (1995), Origin Systems
Crusader: No Remorse (1995), Origin Systems
Thief: The Dark Project (1998), Looking Glass Studios
Deus Ex (2000), Ion Storm Austin
Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003), Ion Storm Austin
Thief: Deadly Shadows (2004), Ion Storm Austin
Epic Mickey (2010), Disney Interactive Studios
Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two (2012), Disney Interactive Studios
I'm going to go with "He can certainly do, not just teach."
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
This is hardly new or needed, there are hundreds of "Make games" courses in colleges around the world.
Maybe its new for Universities who tend to only deal with theoretical and rarely practical applications of knowledge, but community colleges everywhere offer this.
The only problem is you can't teach creativity, you either have it or not. So knowing how to make the game is not the same as making a great game.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
8 core CPU
I'm getting conflicting results while trying to figure out whether the 8-core CPU refers to eight independent cores or to eight half-cores like in AMD Bulldozer.
8GB of GDDR5 [and moreover, installation of a game for Windows is] not as quick and easy as PSN.
Good point. I'll try to ask the PC fans how important a one-step, controller-operated installer is in the next article, and I bet that by the end of the year, they'll probably have come up with some drawback of unified GDDR5.
music games in general
To pick random examples from the sixth and seventh generations, my cousin plays StepMania and a lot of other people play Audiosurf.
3D platformers
A lot of the Sonic games are on both consoles and PC. Sonic Generations, for example, is on Steam.
light gun games
I thought those had gone out of fashion on consoles after the sixth generation because light guns don't work on LCDs. Or are you including the Wii Remote (and Namco's clone thereof called the Guncon 3) in the category "light guns"? In any case, there are plenty of mouse-controlled shooting gallery games for the PC, many in the style of the classic Area 51/Time Crisis style arcade light gun games.
kart racers
You mean like Split/Second, Blur, Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing, and its sequel? But in general, thanks for reminding me of what genres are still underrepresented on PC.
if you buy an Xbox, you want the exclusives, just like if you buy a PSfoo you want those exclusives
And if you buy a gaming PC, you want the exclusives. There are currently a lot more exclusives on PC than on any given console, though that includes a lot of non-AAA games, and it may change in this generation depending on whether one classifies OUYA as a PC or a console.
That is some good information,
but my assertion had nothing to do with his ability to make games,
but rather, the "pitch" them; i.e. to get financing for games which he wanted to make, but were non-mainstream.
If he had successfully pitched something, and then taught others the secret, then it would make more sense to me to say that the academy would fix that problem.