Slashdot Mirror
The Battle For the Game Industry's Soul
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times has a story about the imminent release of Battlefield 4 on 29 October, as it's one of the most highly-anticipated video games of the year. The most interesting part of the article is where it highlights what a mammoth undertaking such 'AAA' games have become. There are hundreds upon hundreds of people working full time on it, and hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in its development. These number have been rising and rising over the years; how big do they get before it becomes completely unfeasible to top your last game? The article also points out that the PC platform is beginning to wane in popularity. Nobody's quite sure yet whether it'll level out or go into serious decline, but you can bet development studios are watching closely. With bigger and bigger stakes, how long before they decide it's not worth the risk? Even consoles aren't safe: 'Electronic Arts is nevertheless trying to extend franchises like Battlefield to devices, because it must. But at the same time, it has to grapple with the threats undermining traditional gaming. Though the classic consoles are getting reboots this fall, there is no guarantee that new models will permanently revive the format's fortunes.' And of course, the question must be asked: do we even want the 'AAA' games to stick around?"
Since 1898
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" There are hundreds upon hundreds of people working full time on it, and hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in its development. "
How many people do you think it took to make The Avengers? How many millions?
The video game industry is starting to mirror the film industry, with studio houses having one or two giant blockbusters every month, and using profits from those to fund the smaller "filler" films. And then, you have the even smaller, independant type films, such as what ends up at Sundance or TIFF.
No, they probably won't. The main "feature" of these reboots is to tie the consoles to Internet-based DRM and add always-on spy cameras whose official use is turning precise and effortless button-pushing to spastic, inaccurate and space-demanding motion controls. They're far worse than the previous generation, so why switch?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
PC is now the second (or third) class citizen behind consoles and mobile.
When a game comes out months and months after console releases (I'm looking at you GTA5) where is the incentive to wait? If you really want to play a game, you have to buy the console, but only because the game studios think that they know better.
Release on all platforms at the same time!
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
The Game Industry doesn't have a soul. After all the failed DRM, the way they treat their developers and abandoning older game servers that many still use, it's clear they don't have a conscience or a soul.
Let them their respective deities sort them out.
And of course, the question must be asked: do we even want the 'AAA' games to stick around?"
I've been thinking a lot about this in the wake of the release of Grand Theft Auto V. I've been an aficionado of the series all along, and have played all of the titles but Chinatown Wars. And clearly, Rockstar's ability matched their goals best with GTA: San Andreas. This game, on the other hand, has been fairly pathetic by comparison. It's far, far buggier. Once you beat the single player campaign there's nothing to do in single player any more, so you are forced to play online in order to continue to do heists and so on. The online component is horribly buggy; some days I'll have to re-join an online session after every attempt to join one. And since there's no function for "start this job for your crew only", and most players are too stupid to change who a job is open to, you often get to join a job and then get kicked to make room for crew members. Still no iFruit app for Android, which is still being advertised within the game, because Android app development is apparently too hard for Rockstar. Probably they hired a good iOS developer and a crap Android developer.
Thing is, I still like sandbox games. And there's no third-party engine.
However, it's clearly possible to displace the competition. I haven't bought a flightsim or racing sim in ages. Maybe someone will crank out a Sandbox engine.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The creativity which went into Monkey Island, The Longest Journey or Grim Fandango, or even Curses and Zork Zero, leave me bored when I confront what is merely a technical exercise. I haven't enjoyed an FPS since Thief.
I remember watching Titanic when it first came out. It was a watershed: after this, films would not be defined by art, but by geekery. And everyone can apply an engineering technique, really.
AAA titles, yes
Craptastic DRM'ed to hell sequels? kill them with fire
(easier option: just burn EA down)
And not one of them can add a "Disable Lens Effects" setting.
I'm not buying another EA lens flare, dirty lens, bloom fest.
"PC dead" is a meme that we see again and again. Mostly because theres economical interest on the console platform, but not on the PC.
"Mobile computing take over gaming" is another failed meme. It adjust after a few years, since PC gamers continue buying PC games and Mobile gamers continue buying mobile games. Big companies continue making AAA games, and indies continue making indie games. The status quo suffer no change.
Battlefield 3 was no fun to play. It was a real system hog, had unacceptably long map load times, had an external HTML-based server browser that sucked, and the gameplay pretty much consisted of you entering the game, and being mowed down by a higher ranking player with more unlocked gadgets in the first 20 seconds. Battlefield 2 was a lot of fun. Battlefield 2142 was also great (Scifi-themed) fun. Battlefield 3 sucked bad in terms of simple things like "overall enjoyment" and "fun gameplay". As for Battlefield 4, I personally have little hope that EA has learned anything from Battlefield 3's gameplay problems. I'm guessing that it will suck on the gameplay side like BF3 did, but that it will have prettier graphics (which of course will require a bang-up-to-date PC or laptop to enjoy properly). My 2 Cents...ü
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I booted up a few of my fairly recent FPS purchases last night for PC just to get a sense of where the community is at. CS:S, BF2, BF3, BFBC2, TF2, Q3A, CoD (x), L4D(1-2), etc all still strong. The thing about it is, there are so many decade old shooters that just wont die. I can still play CS 1.6 and will prefer it to any new Call of Duty. But why? Is it a comfort thing? Nostalgia for a past era? Simplicity? Muscle memory? Surely some of that.
..
The new games are still fun, but they feel 'tinny', or less substantive than I'd come to expect for millions of ducats dumped in to a piece of software. With many modern shooters, I feel like they are evolving into a caricature of what a decent shooter would be.
Also, I think as the PC gaming generation gets older fewer newbies (In all due respect of course!) back-fill our ranks. I hope I'm wrong. Anybody got stats on our rate of attrition? LMGTFY yada yada
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
There are various reasons why gamers start to turn away from those so precious "triple-A" titles.
1. Boring old game in a new cloth ... oh silly me, how could you SELL the same game again?
I think I'm not the only one who is fed up with buying the same game over and over. Battlefield is no exception to that. Lemme guess, new weapons and a few new scenarios with a few new graphics and some shiny... else, same shit as last year. Still the same game modes, still the same problems with cheaters, still the same interface, still the same options; It is simply still the same game. Yes, people will buy it because it's the new one, it's the shiny one, and some of the killer bugs that bothered you the most in the previous games are finally fixed, which only begs the question why they existed in the first place and whether it would not have been much more feasible to simply fix them instead of
2. DLC
Riiight, that way you can. The new magic of the gaming industry: DLC. Or, as I prefer to call it, "buying the last few chapters of the book extra". Because that's what DLC more and more turns into. You pay full price for a game only to find out that not only its addon, sorry, DLC was already planned, but it is actually an important part of the story which is not concluded before you bought at least 2 addons, turning a 50 bucks game into one that costed closer to 100, just to see the friggin' story of it, we're not talking about some additional storyline or actual addon content in the traditional sense, where a game is sold and if it's a success a "mission disc" gets released. These "addons", or rather, second part of the game, are already planned and developed before the game hits the stores. Your only hope is that the game bombs enough that you don't care about the end of the story.
And don't even hope that you could play multiplayer anywhere without the DLC, even if it's not part of the multiplayer game. Which leads us to
3. Planned obsolescence
With multiplayer servers being held firmly in the grasp of the game developers, and you having no chance to even play a local game, they dictate when and for how long you may play it, at least its multiplayer part, which happens to be the interesting part of those games. Rest assured, the moment the next version of the game comes out they'll turn off the old servers to force you to buy the next one (which is essentially the old one, but you can actually play multiplayer again...).
So if you wonder why people turn away from AAA titles, here is your reason. Indie games are cheaper, they offer more variety (because indies can actually dare producing anything but "tried" concepts), they usually offer complete games and they're by no means inferior to those AAA titles. They may lack a bit in graphics, but screw that, I take gameplay over shiny anytime!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually i think, gaming is what currently keeps the PC industry alive (in the sense of innovation happening). From the enterprise perspective, the development mostly happens in the software. The would still use the PC from 2008 if they had more RAM. In fact, i know several companies where the average age of the PC infrastructure is 4+ years old and they are not unhappy with it.
The people telling you the PC is obsolete and on the way out are trying to sell you its "replacement."
The only problem is tablets and phones can't replace the PC for the same reason motorcycles and skateboards can't replace your car.
Nobody wants to do real work on a mobile device. Stop pretending they do.
... is sucking because the industry is obsessed with creating movies, not games.
Apparently not! The masses are moving to casual gaming on tablets (p.e. Angry birds as best known casual game) and indeed consoles. But consoles have to do it for a longer period of time with the same hardware and are not reaily well suited for the next AAA game to be released in 3 or 4 years from now.
To be honest, that what is marketed as 'AAA'-games is all like Wolfenstein. Walk through a maze and shoot bad guys. The humble bundle games feature original gameplay. This is so much more fun than 'the same game, requiring an even tougher graphics card' I am having a lot more fun with Cookie Clicker than I have with all the battlefield AAA-nonsense together.
...they're just "more".
Like Hollywood, the top tier of the gaming industry has - when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake - become rather naturally tremendously conservative. Look at the "AAA titles" out there - Cod 13, GTA 5, Madden 25....it's much like Hollywood in that they rarely risk anything on new ideas, new creations, new stories...they just re-iterate, add more polys to the models, and re-arrange the deck chairs. Even outside of these mind-numbingly similar games, other fields like MMOs are similarly afflicted: since WoW's stunning success, every putative "WoW-killer" is the SAME FUCKING GAME wrapped in different art, with a few different button-pressing methods but about as different as expansions of the same game.
But hey, the swarming masses keep buying them, so I guess it's a reasonable strategy. My answer would be no, I don't want these AAA titles to even continue, but that's a laughably feeble cry in the face of - again - hundreds of millions in (nearly) risk-free revenue.
-Styopa
You've hit the nail on the head.
The gameplay element of what the press tout as AAA titles hasn't really advanced any since Wolfenstein 3d was released in 1992.
Think about that, no original gameplay in 21 years !
Certainly the graphics are shinier and the weapons are different but the essential gameplay of run around a maze, pick up power ups and ammo, shoot enemies, rinse and repeat hasn't changed....
There are too many cooks in the pot right now for making popular video games. The worst thing about it is that they don't focus on gameplay at all. Not to be a complete pariah about it, but modern adventure games are some of the worst offenders. Obviously the Call of Duty franchise has personified itself in its disingenuousness, but there are other terrible problems with games like Walking Dead. If there are only about 10 puzzles using items in Walking Dead vs. massive amount of combinations that you needed for Zork, then we've got a serious problem about what is being passed off as a game these days. Not to say that Walking Dead isn't a great piece of art, but it really isn't much of a game compared to advanced text adventures, adventure games with an evolved text-phrase system, or game like Maniac Mansion. Of course, these things require hard work so game publishers and companies shy away from such endeavors. They'd rather spend the money on advertising or making the game look pretty, instead of tackling more difficult issues of game mechanics and gameplay. Just look at new SimCity, the original SimCity is far superior as a game compared to the modern version. The truly tragic part about all of this is that Windows and Mac are united in their absolute hatred of old games. If I can't even play Balance of Power on my Windows 7 machine then what are the priorities here? It's not like the word processing, emails, or calendars have had much innovation either. Linux would be able to crush the market if it supports a large library of quality classic games. Heck, why not transform awesome board games into computer games on Linux? Imagine if Race for the Galaxy or Catan could be a reliable game you could play on Ubuntu? That's a winning strategy right there. That'd be a winning strategy for Microsoft and Apple but they'd rather just slothfully accept new games as the only relevant medium for entertainment. It's going to take some time, but if enough people who understand the value of patience and accessibility get into software innovation then we're all set. Just keep fighting the good fight!
This should get modded up. The big-studio games all have shit gameplay. They're about the bling. The FUN games are all from the small indie studios these days. That scene is as alive as ever.
I remember the first time I found I was able to shoot glass out of a window - Counter-Strike. I spent ages doing just that, because of the novelty value - here was a substance in game that reacted the way it would in real life. I recognised it as a limitation of the medium, way back in the day, but it always used to annoy me when I couldn't shoot out a window in Half-Life. Or any game where a locked door impeded progress because I didn't have the key, although I was toting 6 lbs of explosives at the time.
Try shooting the farmer at the start of Halo Reach. Your gun goes bang, and there's a damage splatter appears on the other side of his head, but he won't stop talking. If you keep shooting him, after 10 shots, you die, not because your squadmates have realised that you're shooting civilians and gun you down, but a vengeful god just smites you down.
It'll be interesting to see how far the new engines go in terms of world design. Obviously there won't be civilians, or women, or children, but it'd be nice to be able to shoot out the legs of a water tower and have it collapse, because that's what the objects would do under real-world-conditions, and not just because it's a pre-programmed set-piece and the only way to complete the level. It's be nice to see enemies who weren't Terminators - combat robots who have to be completely destroyed to kill them, that can take all but 1 HP of damage and still be at 100% combat effectiveness. Maybe sometimes some of them could realise that you've just killed everyone else in their squad, and simply decide to run away.
It's also interesting to see how narrow their definitions of 'realism' are - they'll model stubble, sweat, and the texture of equipment webbing, but nobody ever bleeds, or screams, or goes mad. They'll model the correct serial number on an 21st century assault rifle, yet it'll deliver a target grouping that would shame a musket.
And I think Just Cause 2 was the last game I played where you really seemed to have a huge amount of freedom over the order you did the missions in, and there was a whole lot to do if you didn't want to do a mission. I hate purely linear games, where you have to do one thing, and until you do that to the game's satisfaction, you're not getting to do anything else. As soon as you reach a situation where you *have* to do something, rather than *want* to do something, that's work, not play; and if I'm working, I expect to be getting paid, not paying for the privilege.
Dick Cheney's heart ... the game industry's soul ....
Come on Slashdot, enough spoof articles already today!
And of course, the question must be asked: do we even want the 'AAA' games to stick around?"
No, we don't have to ask that question. We already have the answer. GTA V sold over eleven million copies in the first day of sales. It's grossed over a billion dollars. Only a complete fucking idiot would doubt that there's a market for good, high-quality AAA games.
And of course Slashdot seems determined to put those complete fucking idiots' thoughts on the front page.
He actually came out and said that the only reason SW:TOR was a failure was because they picked the wrong business model. These guys have no fucking clue.
"The bigger problem was that the game [Medal of Honor Warfighter] failed, signaling that authenticity was a dead end. It might have been something the fans said they wanted, but who can trust the fans? One of Mr. Bach’s rules is this: Don’t use data to decide what to do."
Authenticity was NOT a dead end; Warfighter failed because it was a miserable piece of button mashing quick timed event trash with zero replay value . No amount of eye candy can save that.
No possible modding was also a big downer. Can you trust the fans? Yes. Can you trust the publisher? Hell No!
I had high hopes for it but did not go thru half of it.
Cloud Imperium's opus-in-progress broke $23 million in crowdfunding this week: AAA independent production and PC-focused development. Works like this are injecting a renaissance of fresh air into the stale industry dominated by bug-dollar myopic publishers.
Games in the nineties were innovative because the creative developers were calling the shots; garage operations flourished. Crowdfunding is making that model viable again with modern production values and PC gamers are in for a hell of a ride over the next decade.
Long live disintermediation!
We here at the Glorious PC-Gaming Master-Race disagree.
I am not directly in the industry but it would seem they put a lot of effort into hand crafting things. I would ask why there is a lot of hand crafting in a computer industry.
Should we not be able to do
- automated environment creation - even balanceing and simulation to find balance
- automated setting music creation
- automated detaiing -> high resolution rendering then cut back for a texture
So long as capable developers are willing to work crazy hours for what amounts to minimum wage, the compensation model will not change.
So long are there are enough such developers graduating every year, the talent-churn due to burnout will not impact this, either.
The way things "should" be often has little to do with the way things are.
Just don't take use our credit card to unlock stuff in games and Eran discounts / other store credits based on spend on any credit card purchase*.
* high apr and other hidden fees may apply
Many of the games that come out now have really amazing visuals/graphics/etc, but they all lack something the old classics had. What that something is, I'm not sure. I miss Sierra games with things like Police Quest, Kings Quest, The Island of Dr. Brain. Then you had other games like Hugo: House of horrors and Hugo 2: Who done it? Dune and Dune 2. Their graphics where horrid, but those games were a blast to play. I don't know why, but those older games just seem to have more character and spirit then the games that come out now. Don't get me wrong, there are good games that come out every year, but it seems like a majority of the games coming out now are just the same things rehashed over and over with better graphics and slight variations in the story line. It's almost like the gaming industry has homogenized somewhat. Want to make a FPS, just remake Halo or CoD. Want to make an open world game, just remake GTA,. What to make an RPG, remake Final Fantasy, Kings Quest or Elder Scrolls. Again, don't misunderstand, there are games that come out that do not follow this form such as Dear Esther or Portals and are awesome. I am simply talking the gaming industry as a whole, it way different then what it used to be. The indie game scene, however, seems to be pumping out some pretty awesome stuff these days.
The funny thing is that the "AAA" games they refer to as traditional video games are much less traditional than the mobile games they think are usurping. Games from the Atari 2600 era to the SNES era resemble mobile games much more than they do "AAA" games.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Publishers are killing gaming on the PC through ever escalating levels of DRM. The PC has pretty well always been the better platform for gaming from a technical sense for hardware capability. You had the ability to upgrade your system, patch it and customize it at levels that a console could never match. A console is only updated every so many years, patching is a logistical pain if is even possible and the only customizations you can do are typically to the outside of the case.
The problem is that publishers have been cranking up the DRM to higher and higher levels of entitlement. What originally started as nothing more than deprivation of the product quickly became deprivation of your computer. Games would do things like replace hardware drivers and interfere with your ability to burn CD's or DVD's. The DRM measures were typically not disclosed and worse not uninstalled upon removing the game.
Gamers could spend hours upon hours trying to figure out why their computer wasn't working correctly only to discover that SecureROM or another product had done something like replacing drivers for their hardware. Nobody appreciates having a product sabotage their computer and the DRM companies refused to cooperate with disclosing anything about what they were doing to peoples computers. The result often required hours of troubleshooting at best to a complete rebuild to restore a computer. You also had the loss of the original software that caused the problem to begin with and were typically out at least $50.
Add in stunts like mandatory activation, registration and serial numbers and you end up with something that cannot be used anonymously and forced the disclosure of marketing information. Even when activation worked many companies would then self destruct the ability to use software if you made certain undisclosed changes. Things escalated to the point where simply changing a piece of hardware in your computer would be enough to ruin your game as it then refused to play.
Self entitlement furthered to the point where you had to be online to check in your serial number just to start a game. Publishers were oblivious to the fact that that most of the world does not live in Silicon Valley and for many people this was not reasonable. Once publishers started requiring players to be online in order to play at all they really burned the last of the bridges.
For a regular user, even one who has purchased the software it has become a situation that simply isn't worth it anymore. Countless millions of people have purchased a piece of software only to turn around and then download the pirated version just to get something that worked and didn't break their computer.
Are computers technically superior in just about every way? Absolutely, but the computer gaming industry is imploding from self entitlement and the publishers will have a future of paying higher and higher royalties to Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft.
It's not that PC game sales are dropping: Heck, no we can find Japanese companies releasing their games on PC, which is something that would have never happened 10 years ago. Valve is not having any trouble selling games, and neither do indies.
Now, It'd not surprise me if EA sales on PC were dropping. They decided to build their own ecosystem, one that is not just separate from anything else you can buy on PC, bun one that is drastically overpriced. EA sales can't compete with the sales you can get on anything else. Their console-oriented shooters can't compete with PC-centric ones. Sim City was an unmitigated disaster. They are failing on PC because they've been working very hard at it, and all that work is finally bearing fruit.
@"When people work 60+ hour weeks for a month or two to get BattleField 4 out on time, they should be getting a bigger piece of the pie"
Profit share... I wish. Watch (the games industry) around this Christmas time, because what usually happens after projects are finished, is that many of the staff making the games get made redundant. They don't share, they get thrown out. Then the next year the cycle repeats again as they work like a dog to get the next project done in their new company, and when its done, another redundancy notice.
I was in the games industry for over 20 years. I heard time and time again about "burnout". What I came to realize is its not burnout at all. That's a lie from the money people. ... Its really "wise up", as in wise up to the Game of Thrones the money people play against the programmers and artists who are their pawns.
The gameplay element of what the press tout as AAA titles hasn't really advanced any since Wolfenstein 3d was released in 1992.
Yeah, no real advances beyond multiplayer, team-based multiplayer, destructible scenery, dynamic maps (as in L4D2), new weapons mechanics (such as Unreal Tournament's bio rifle), emphasis on stealth (such as Metal Gear Solid and Deus Ex), dynamic AI that sends swarms based on player progress and performance (the L4D Director), modding support that allows anything from minor skinning to complete remakes, RPG elements blending in to the FPS, and the aqueducts. Aside from those things, what have the Romans done for us?
And what about dungeon crawlers? They haven't advanced since Nethack. Diablo was better graphics and nothing more.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
'nuff said
ok maybe not.
Star Citizen: 23 million in funding and going up roughly ~100k/ day.
Crowd funding looks to be working these days. Who cares if the AAA titles and studios die when we have made it easy for creative people with good ideas to get funded!
Cost me $2.50. I've spent about 400 hours on it.
This year PC market increased tenfold, Steam is more popular than ever.
The "masses" are just people who never played games in their lives and end up with a smart phone because it's "cool" and download the first title on Apple store because they paid to be there. They are not actually people who contribute to the gaming industry. This is really not a relevant statistic.
Article says nothing about PC as a platform is waning. It simply says PC sales are dropping.
I left PC gaming over a decade ago about the time Ubisoft bought Red Storm Entertainment and ruined the Rainbow 6 and Ghost Recon series turning them from tactical shooters into just an another arcade shoot 'em up. That's also when the space & combat flight sim genres died as well.
Well I'm actually looking at getting a gaming PC now because of Star Citizen. They've met their $23M goal to make a AAA title and I'm stoked. It's the game I've wanted to play ever since Wing Commander Privateer.
On the console side, I had a lot of fun with the 360. I sure logged a lot of hours on BF3, I know gimped compared to the PC version but still fun to fire up and play a round here and there, as well as the Halo series from Bungie. Frankly though in the past couple years the Xbox has streamed Netflix more than played games. Halo 4 just didn't feel like Halo. I don't know why it just seemed kinda meh. And the early reviews of BF4 is also kinda meh. BF3 wasn't great, but it was fun.
I looked at what it was going to cost for BF4 & a PS4 or XBone and decided to buy a 325a for Star Citizen and put the $500 of a new console towards a new PC next year for the release of SC Persistent Universe. What I have now should get me through Alpha/Beta. Instead of renewing my XBL Gold Subscription (Blu-ray player will stream netflix now) I'm buying either an Aurora LN or Avenger ship in star citizen.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
If you're having "a lot more fun" with Cookie Clicker, which is basically just two jokes (one, "repetitive clicking games are stupid, wouldn't they be better if the clicking was automated"; two "aren't grandmothers a bit sinister? I mean if you squint?") than with almost any modern shooter then I think you must have set out specifically not to have any fun in the shooters.
I do enjoy indie games, but they aren't going to deliver something like Portal 2. Nobody in the indie corner of the industry can afford to say "Oh, let's hire a few good voice actors, that would really add to the atmosphere". Nor can they afford to throw things away if they don't work. You've got to eat, so whatever it is, however crappy it turned out, it's got to be published. The Indies are a great place to try out new ideas, some of the ideas work, some are quickly forgotten, but we are mistaken if we think that "It's been done" means we needn't try to improve upon on it.
How about worrying about the future of some innovative games people actually care about?
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
To be honest, that what is marketed as 'AAA'-games is all like Wolfenstein. Walk through a maze and shoot bad guys.
Oh, but if only it was... then the games might actually be fun.
It's more like: watch two minute cut-scene where all the cool stuff happens. Walk through a door and see the bad guys. Press space a few times to win. Watch another two minute cut-scene where all the cool stuff happens. Sit through five minutes of boring dialogue with some random NPC where you get to select a few meaningless options. Repeat until bored.
What pissed me off about the BF series is that EA took back our ability to make user made maps. Now they make the maps and sell them as upgrade packs that i refuse to buy. note: I wont steal them either, stealing is for cunts.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I think you made the GP's point.
Whoopee-doo. I get to splatter the bad guys with goo rather than shoot them with a mini-gun. That's incredibly innovative.
When they're not making you sit through tedious, unskippable cut-scenes and canned dialogue, games are still mostly just following the only corridor available and shooting things, except these days you don't even have to worry about collecting health packs because your health magically regenerates after ten seconds. Even the 'open world' games are still mostly just running around a few streets in a world that's dead when you're not around.
Web games, console games, (native)PC games, handheld games, mobile games. Those are the 5 categories I divide gaming. And while there is some overlap between them, each one of them have fundamental paradigms and conditions that as long as their respective games obey, I'll play regardless. They are all great. The problem with PC gaming is not PC gaming, but the fact that in the past 10 years (most) developers, publishers and costumers completely forgot what PC gaming is about. "Hardcore" PC gaming nowadays feels much more like they are trying to emulate the console experience, but with prettier graphics, than actually taking full advantage of the PC "gimmicks". If I want a console experience, I'll play on a console. I don't need bleeding edge high-end graphics to enjoy a good game, and a bad game will be a bad game regardless of how much eye-candy it has.
Do you know why the Vita and PSP sold an order of magnitude LESS than the DS and 3DS, regardless of having much better hardware and decent libraries? Because they were trying to emulate the console experience on a handheld game device. Do you know why handheld ports on iOS/Android do so poorly? Because they are trying to emulate the handheld experience on a mobile phone. The same crap is happening to the high-end PC gaming scene. When you develop a game to a certain platform you must understand the philosophy behind the platform.
LoL/Dota-like games, some MMORPGs like WoW and FF11/14, Blizzard games in general, Civilization(and strategy/empire building games in general) and the Sims are so popular not because they have the greatest graphics or no-DRM(they are pretty much the opposite of those two things), but because they keep active and interactive communities, make excellent and most logical use of the standard mouse+keyboard input, multi-tasking works great(simultaneous media consumption/ internet browsing and even work). It actually makes sense to use a computer for those games, even if it's weakest computer you can find. Similarly, indie games take advantage of the freedom(for game play experimentation) and excess hardware power (they really don't have the resources to fully optimize the game), so it makes sense to have those games on the PC(two of my favorite games, Touhou and MineCraft, is a prime example of that).
There is also the modding argument. But I don't count it as for me modding is not gaming. Modding is modding. The act of modifying a product is it's own category of entertainment.(as a purist gamer modding is something I actually don't enjoy myself but I understand the appeal, so instead of badmouth it I just put it aside)
Do the statistics about "PC sales dropping" also take into consideration people building their own PCs, or those upgrading their existing units?
Some people, on the other hand, know full well how much their candy bar and caffeine habit costs because they have the patience to sit down and write a budget. That's why I switched to buying ZonePerfect candy bars in multi-packs and switched to diet soda (caffeine) from a prescription NRI (atomoxetine). Perhaps Apple, Google, and the like need to add easy-to-find ways to track in-app purchase usage of each app over time the way Android 4 "Jelly Bean" tracks data usage of each app over time.
I should probably get off your lawn then.
Where I see the real distinction is that the PC has fully embraced digital distribution, and consoles haven't even started (the Xbone's attempt to take a step in that direction was shouted down by gamers, sadly).
I thought PlayStation Store already offered paid downloads of full-size games. And as the hard drive gradually became a standard feature on Xbox 360 consoles, Xbox Live Arcade has gradually increased its size limit to where XBLA games such as Red Johnson's Chronicles take up more than half a DVD layer. I guess the remaining problem is that XBLA games have to be vetted by disc game publishers.
I see new console games for $10-$20 in the bargain bin of Walmart. I also see used console games around that price or less in used game stores once the demand for a particular title dies down or the successor console comes out. That's not even counting chains like Disc Replay that specialize in third through sixth generation consoles.
Nobody has yet combined the keyboard with the television in a way that really compels people to want that combination in their house
Hairyfeet has. He shows the HTPC concept to customers in his shop and sells a Bluetooth thumb keyboard + trackball that's about the size of a smartphone's slide-out keyboard. The problem has become one of marketing the solution to people who happen to live outside Hairyfeet's sales area.
there is no car analogy to be made here because the phones of today have more cargo area-equivalent than the PCs of not so many yesterdays ago. It's truly not that long since my desktop PC was less powerful than the phone I'm carrying around now. It doesn't have video out, so it's not suitable as a desktop replacement by any stretch, but many modern phones do.
To be useful for "PC" tasks, a smartphone would need a large monitor (which you mentioned), a Bluetooth keyboard, and an operating system with a multi-window window manager. (The phone itself would sit next to the keyboard and become a trackpad.) It's as if someone made a motorcycle that could pull a trailer, but you end up using the trailer most of the time because you have to carry the tools to do your job to each job site. At that point, you could just buy a car (an Ultrabook laptop) or a truck (a desktop or desktop-replacement laptop).
Where are the games where I can choose to say 'screw your stupid story, find someone else to 'save the day'?' and do something more interesting instead?
On Nintendo consoles. They go by the name "Animal Crossing".
Who hurt you?
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Just like it did one time already. Hell, some of the people responsible for the old crash are still pulling strings in the industry.
Yeah, no real advances beyond multiplayer, team-based multiplayer, destructible scenery
MIDI Maze (known as Faceball 2000 on Nintendo consoles) is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter that preceded even Wolfenstein. Walls could be shot out or switched with floor buttons. The concept of destructible scenery itself dates back to Ice Climber and Super Mario Bros., and combining it with a first-person view was obvious to anyone skilled in the art once 3D GPUs advanced.
emphasis on stealth
Metal Gear, MSX2/NES. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past came close; I was able to stealth my way through the first castle until reaching the basement where I had to slaughter a guard for the key.
dynamic AI that sends swarms based on player progress and performance
Arcade shoot-em-ups adjusted difficulty to player performance long before Left 4 Dead. The platformer Gods did so way back in the early 1990s.
modding support that allows anything from minor skinning to complete remakes
Good luck finding anything moddable on a console, apart from ROM hacks for third- and fourth-generation consoles decades after the games were released.
RPG elements blending in to the FPS
Or FPS elements blending into the RPG, as in Phantasy Star.
Parappa the Rapper ushered in the music game genre in the late 1990s. But I see your point about new genres being rare over the past couple console generations. Even modern idle games such as Cookie Clicker are streamlined versions of the basic concept behind tycoon games, as can be seen especially with Clicking Bad (that is, Meth Tycoon).
The FUN games are all from the small indie studios these days.
So where are the FUN games that I can play with friends in the same room? Indie games tend to be for PCs, and PCs have historically encouraged Internet play over couch multiplayer.
Not one game ever has ever failed to be pirated.
At launch, consoles are pretty much piracy-free. Several arcade games are still undumped. How long must a work go without piracy before it "fails" in your estimation? The full 95-year copyright term?
Never mind that there's hundreds of good games and titles that don't get put into publication because the publishers don't want to take risks anymore
Or because the console maker didn't want to take risks. Consider Bob's Game for Nintendo DS and The Binding of Isaac for Nintendo 3DS.
How, precisely, would a twitch game like Super Mario Bros. or Mega Man be controlled on mobile, without the player having to buy a separate $40 controller to clamp to the phone? Mobile games tend to be in point-and-click-friendly genres: block puzzles (Bejeweled), shooting galleries (Fruit Ninja), graphical adventures, and possibly accelerometer-based driving.
Interesting. But crowd funding depends heavily on an indie studio's previous work. Star Citizen, for example, comes on the heels of Chris Roberts's Wing Commander. What sort of games should a startup studio make in order to qualify for a first round of crowd funding?
When you develop a game to a certain platform you must understand the philosophy behind the platform.
I agree. But what do you suggest that an indie developer do if, say, it has a concept (or even a working PC prototype) of a console-oriented game but no console license? Must it develop several unrelated PC or mobile titles first?
Was stealth an intended mechanic of the game, or is something more akin to speedrunning a game that was never balanced for that kind of play?
The guards in the first castle of A Link to the Past have particular patrol patterns, and a guard don't enter alert until Link enters the guard's line of sight. If stealth weren't intended, alert would have been based on distance instead of line of sight. I've programmed a few games myself, and there are fewer lines of code involved in checking distance than in checking line of sight.
I remember in Xenon II being amazed at the idea of a shoot 'em up that allowed the ship to go in to reverse.
Which Fantasy Zone did a couple years earlier.
These days, aside from some L4D and Civilisation, it's most open source stuff for me. Games like TOME aren't terribly original
Open source video games have three problems. First, they're pretty much limited to PC and possibly Android, as console makers are allergic to copyleft. This discourages games in genres more suited to a D-pad and buttons. Second, unless the business model is to sell copies of proprietary mission packs for a free engine, there's not much of a way to pay the artists. The typical model of selling support doesn't work as well as it does for, say, RHEL because games that aren't MMO need less support than libraries or line-of-business software. Some Slashdot users would in fact prefer a world without video games to a world with proprietary software of any sort (1, 2, 3). Third, open source developers tend not to know exactly where "not terribly original" ends and "call the lawyers" begins. Given Alexey Pajitnov's claim that open source destroys the market, I wouldn't be surprised if the Free Software Foundation found itself on the business end of a lawsuit from over M-x tetris in Emacs the way The Tetris Company successfully sued Xio over Mino . Apparently the copyright rules differ between video games (Tetris v. Xio) and everything else (Lotus v. Borland; Oracle v. Google).
It's a bit silly to compare game sales to more traditional mediums like music, television and film. Just on the PC side, we don't even have educated guestimations on the kind of money and sales that are really taking place. WoW alone still must gross around $2 billion a year when taking in to account micro-transactions and unit sales along with subscription fees, and AFAIK we have no real idea how much money (other than obscene truckloads) the big MOBAs are pulling in. Steam, GoG, Desura, GMG, Humble Store and scores of smaller digital distributors further obscure how many sales are actually taking place, though if Valve were to open up their numbers that would help account for the majority of PC sales across most distributors who usually provide Steam keys. In the east, tens of millions of players are throwing billions at F2P games that people in the west have never even heard of. Then you have the attendant industries that are growing up around gaming (PC in particular) like Youtube and Twitch streamers and esports, indie merchandising, conventions, etc.
The numbers articles like this pull up tend to rely almost entirely on physical boxed sales which at this point must only account for a tiny fraction of actual PC game sales, though they do tend to fairly accurately reflect the health of each individual console. The gaming market is so fluid right now that the only safe conclusions we can make are that gamers are increasingly less interested in the same old fare from AAA developers, and that they need to start taking more risks with their games or lower their development and marketing budgets to account for the decline. The mass exodus of talent from AAA developers to the indie scene is a good thing, and a natural response to the current market trend. When games like Binding of Isaac that can be developed by a handful of people over a few months and sell millions of copies and provide a far more interesting and compelling experience than nearly any AAA game released in years, you have to wonder who but your average console dude-bro really would care if every last AAA publisher and developer were to go under.
What AAA really means is that a lot more money has been spent on details of graphics and sound, not that so much extra effort has been put into the gameplay. As a result, a lot of so-called AAA titles are no more fun to play than the games from the $20 bin.
Like movies, the advertising and hype budget for a AAA title makes it different from the "average" game. And like the movie industry, that big advertising budget brings in the buyers. Unfortunately, much like an overhyped movie, it also results in a lot of disappointed potential fans who expected more from the game after all the buildup.
Do we need AAA titles? Of course not. But as long as there is the lure of winning the "big gamble" by producing a half billion dollar sales hit title, there will be those who'd rather invest in that gamble than focusing on a handful of lesser titles which would cost the same amount.
However, one should never make the mistake of thinking that these trivial little games on cell phones are going to decimate the hard core gaming market. Just because "Angry Birds" has millions of dollars in total sales doesn't mean it's competitive with something like "Half Life." They're totally different styles of games, and satisfy different audiences.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
and even DRM is merely an obstacle to be overcome to get to the Game . That . You . Must . Play . Now .
The problem is that the games suck. Right now in the 'AAA' space we have an orientation something like:
85% production values
5% compelling and entertaining story and writing
10% gameplay
0% replay value
Show me a game like this, and I'll spend rather a lot, and even suffer DRM for it:
10% production values
20% compelling and entertaining story and writing
50% gameplay
20% replay value
When the technology didn't allow for production values to matter, everything was tied up in gameplay, writing, and replayability. Games had to be entertaining to sell.
Now, particularly given the ways that games are marketed (and the synergy between this kind of marketing and the marketing that happens on the hardware side), everything is about jaw-dropping renderings. It feels like the late '80s and early '90s, when everyone in CS departments were printing out raytrace scenes at 24x36 and hanging them on the wall.
At first, it was "omigod thassocool" to see a bunch of floating cones and spheres and rendered bolts with clearly articulated threads reflecting the image of the chessboard on the other side of the picture. But by the mid-'90s, it was like, "humf, what else you got, I am no longer amazed by the fabulousness of this technology."
That's how I feel about games now. A decade or a decade and a half ago, game engines and triangle count and an asymptotic approach to "photorealistic realtime" rendering were enough to make a person shell out $$$ just to "have the experience."
But now it's old hat. Someone else posted in this story about games being all about showing you sliding your car sideways into a flock of sheep. That pretty much sums it up—how many hours do they spend on tableaux like this? It's plots of shiny raytrace scenes on department walls all over again. I had occasion to play a few games (Silpheed, a few Sonics, etc.) on someone's Sega CD setup not so long ago. I was like "Shit, this is fun!" and then shortly after I realized why I had abandoned gaming in the early 2000's. I just preferred to spend my money on more entertaining things.
I find crossword puzzles to be as fun as many of the 'AAA' titles of the last half-decade.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If you want better weapon mechanics look back to Duke Nukem 3D. How many games let you freeze, shrink, and stomp on enemies or yourself?
PC gaming is going down
I haven't bought an EA game in six years. Given all of the backlash against them, especially recently, why are people (some of whom swore they would never buy from them again) continuing to give money to these assholes? They got voted the worst company in the US for a reason.
I don't think I've ever played a AAA title. Well, ok, Skyrim. Lots and lots of Skyrim. And Civ V, if that counts; I don't know that it does. I've seen my friends play games like...um...I don't even know the names of them. Call of Duty: MW was the last one I remember seeing. Oh, and Left 4 Dead. I read a lot about GTA5 on Reddit too.
I regularly purchase games from the Humble Bundle. I recently got Fez and fell in love with it. So clever and so brilliantly designed. I think that game was made by one person, wasn't it? I understand that "AAA" titles look amazing and realistic and everything... but does that really make the game THAT much more fun to play? Serious question. Is the gaming experience, say, *actually* 1000x better if the budget is 1000x more?
I don't disagree that AAA titles push the boundaries of technology w/r/t video gaming, but one of the big criticisms I've seen of these titles is that they essentially become interactive movies, and lose a lot of the "game" aspect; ie. less mentally challenging, more mentally stimulating. I do not know whether or not this is the case, but do people who like AAA titles prefer that sort of game? Hyper-realistic interactive movies?
Or maybe you're just getting tired of a certain style of medium. There are other games out there that cater to different tastes. Also, it's possible to simply be tired of the hobby in general...and guess what, there are also other hobbies out there that are all about not shooting virtual zombies and nazis.
People like Klaus Teuber, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, and Alan R. Moon have won this battle. The platform? A table. With chairs around it, a refrigerator full of good beer, and some good friends. The video "game" market has been lost. There isn't that much game left in most so-called video games these days.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
You learn a lot of very valuable lessons on someone else's dime by working for an established company.
But to what extent would relocation to the state where an established company is located be on someone else's dime? One problem I've encountered when discussing this in Slashdot comments has come from people who express a deliberately unhelpful attitude: "If you don't already know how to relocate yourself, you don't deserve to have someone help you learn the basics of relocating, and you don't deserve to be in the industry. Give up the dream already." What place which is not Slashdot would be more helpful?
PC is a hot market for indie games
Including games that focus on single-screen* multiplayer with two to four USB gamepads? PCs are certainly technically capable of it, but I imagine it's a bit uncomfortable to fit two to four people around a desktop PC's monitor. And though virtually any TV made in the past five years can display PC video, I thought next to nobody was willing to build the sort of living room gaming PC that Valve is targeting with Steam's Big Picture mode.
If you have a moderately successful game already developed for PC or mobile
This is the way I was planning on going in the first place. But naysayers keep telling me that no console-style game for PC can become even "moderately successful", and it's hard to make mobile controls for a game that isn't point-and-click.
* I said single, not split. Fighting games don't split the screen, for example.
As most PC devs develop on the PC with a monitor, developing for a TV is "extra work"
Some PC game developers are willing to put in the extra work to make a game TV-friendly because they're targeting the PC as a step toward becoming licensed to develop for a console. My question concerned the number of gamers who have access to a PC connected to a TV.
There is the idea of a one-size-fits-all UI, in which case we might have to ask MS what they learned from Windows 8
Games tend to have much simpler user interfaces in general than a PC ostensibly intended for work. As in mobile-first web design,* a progressive enhancement methodology applies: design the simpler UI first, and design PC-specific enhancements on top of that. A PC game supporting the keyboard already has to have some sort of I/O abstraction just to support people who prefer arrow keys vs. people who prefer WASD. Once you have this I/O abstraction, it isn't too much more work to add joystick support. And if what I learned back when Newgrounds and Kongregate were popular still applies, making the menu options clickable as well as selectable from the keyboard or joystick should be enough.
* The difference between mobile-first web design and mobile-first game design is that while the web is point-and-click, not all games are. Mobile devices don't really support much interaction beyond imprecise point-and-click with the finger.
And today's story tellers use the same 7 basic plots as the ancient Greeks. Imagine that; 2500 years and no original plots! Which is why all books/movies are terrible.