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What Happens When Gaming Auteurs Try To Go It Alone?
An anonymous reader writes: As news that Cliff Bleszkinski, Epic Games' legendary former creative, sets off to found his own studio, a new article takes a look at how six other gaming auteurs have fared after leaving a major developer or publisher to go it alone. The results, surprisingly, are mixed: while some, such as Double Fine's Tim Schafer, have gone on to far greater success, it doesn't always work out that way: just look at John Romero's Daikatana. The article also makes a good point that Peter Molyneux is striking out with a start-up for the third in his career now, but it may not be third time the charm: Godus has been far less well received than Black & White or Fable. Can Cliffy B avoid making the same mistakes?
Aside from a rather small collection of anime aficionados who are generally seen as total outcasts, Japanese-themed content never fares well in America and other Western societies.
That's what the problem was with Daikatana. It was just too damn Japanese for any Western market, and the Japanese themselves didn't particularly like it because it was too American.
The only Japanese content that really does well in Western markets has no obvious connection with Japan or Japanese culture. Games like Donkey Kong, the various Mario games, and other Nintendo titles are good examples of this. They're of Japanese origin, but not Japanese in and of themselves.
Most Western consumers think of anime as just being really shitty quality animation. The comic books are seen as just being shitty drawings. The pornography is seen as extremely deviant, because a lot of it is, well, rather perverse by any standard. There isn't anything remotely normal or natural about people being molested by tentacled sea creatures.
The lesson for success in America and Western markets is to keep the themes reasonable. That means limit the Japanese cultural references, and keep the content of a higher quality and more relevant for the Western consumer.
There's no one to tell the big man that what he's doing is a bad idea.
Can you please implement something where submitters have to type the title in three times, and actually spell check it.
Well, don't you look like a dumbfuck!
"Auteur" is a real word. If you don't believe me, you can learn more about it here: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/auteur
You should at least ensure that you have a reasonable grasp of English vocabulary before acting like a polesmoking dipshit and making idiotic comments like the one you just made.
The "auteurs" in the featured article had already worked in the industry for a long time. Is there an analogous article about auteurs who have broken into the industry without having worked for a well-known video game studio?
I think someone might not be aware of the loanword "auteur".
"Peter Molyneux is striking out with a start-up for the third in his career now,"
For the third WHAT?
Why is that surprising?
Table-ized A.I.
Daikatana failed because it sucked, and was three years late.
Romero's skills were GROSSLY oversold
The game was GROSSLY overhyped.
And they burned through an obscene amount of money trying to be a "rockstar" studio (spending lavishly on facilities and trinkets, rather than putting the money where it belonged, in the game.
On top of that, the studio couldn't deliver titles on time to save their lives and was basically had all the makings of a terrible reality TV show with constant infighting, turmoil, etc, etc.
Basically the only thing Ion Storm did RIGHT was to found their Austin office (which kept its nose clean of all the bullshit coming and going from the main Dallas office). Ion Storm Austin actually gained a rep for producing solid work.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...pay enough attention to game design to consistently produce quality games. Not that they can't, mind you, but it seems pretty clear to me that game devs tend to have their attention split between designing a game's mechanics and appealing to a broad audience. You end up with a game that isn't too far afield of what you tend to see these days, but that tries to compensate by having gameplay features designed to be marketed as 'innovative' and conducive to creative and emergent gameplay. A good example is Watch Dogs, marketed as a game centered around hacking but designed as a GTA clone with a hacking gimmick.
Games are an awkward state of limbo these days, publishers know they have to start pushing out the impression of creativity and devs try to figure out how to do that without alienating the average player. The mentality sticks, and developers everywhere end up glossing over technical details, focusing instead on the impression a game will make.
I don't know much about what he actually did at Epic aside from some of Unreal Tournament's best maps (it was pretty awesome that it showed the author name when you loaded a map) and I don't know what his job was the other companies at all. Was he a coder? Designer? Producer? Artist/art director? Nothing but level-design-o-rama?
> Outside of Valve I don't think many developers ... pay enough attention to game design to consistently produce quality games
That's because a game is too dependent on Art + Tech. You can have the world's greatest designer but if they don't understand how to capitalize on Tech & Art _tailored_ for their project you're dead in the water.
There are few Game Designers that are recognized as delivering the goods. Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, etc. How many of these game designers do the general public even know??
http://www.businesspundit.com/...
> Games are an awkward state of limbo these days,
AAA games maybe, but not indie. Content creation costs are spiraling out of control. People are getting fed up with grind-for-gear ooh shiny with shallow gameplay.
Minecraft just reach 54 million across all platforms.
https://twitter.com/pgeuder/st...
Cliff Bleszkinski's about to make you his bitch. Suck it down.
The results, surprisingly, are mixed: while some, such as Double Fine's Tim Schafer, have gone on to far greater success, it doesn't always work out that way
This might be a surprise to people who know nothing about startups or business but it should not be to anyone else. Here's the reality: Startups often fail. In fact, the overwhelming majority of startups fail. Being an "auteur" may improve the odds of a soft landing significantly but it does not remotely guarantee success because there is no way to guarantee success.
The reasons for failure are many including poor business skills (there is more to running a company than running a project) and unconstrained egos. The usual bad luck and mayhem that sink projects can also sink companies that only have one project.
It is called throwing spaghetti to the wall to try and see what sticks. If you find people like a certain mechanic, you make a game around it. Another excuse is there are a bigger casual audience than ever, so the simplification of video games keeps getting more and more real. These start up companies barely have enough resources to put together anything. Just look at the Flash games on web portals. A lot of Flash games on web portals aren't as good as games you played in the NES. And there really isn't much money in free to play with advertisments unless your game goes viral, get a million plays, then you're looking at a couple grand anyway.
God spoke to me
If these guys go it alone, we will learn that the rest of the people in the teams they left behind can make good games without them. I think the main benefit of having a big name in charge is that you need a creative authority figure to keep the corporate types from messing up the end product.
Mostly agreed, these days most big budget games seem to have gameplay as a low priortiy. Though I would argue that the recent Fireaxis stuff (Civ V, nu-XCOM) is very design-conscious, even if you don't agree with all their design decisions.
And then there's indie games, which generally don't have the budget for flash and have to rely on gameplay. I would say that the two most mechanically solid games I have played in recent years are Spelunky and FTL.
Don't forget presales and early access alphas. Games like Watchdogs sell big numbers before anyone has had a chance to play it, and then the final product is a dire mess. Case in point: Watchdogs sold big bucks, even though it is universally panned as being mediocre at best.
> Outside of Valve I don't think many developers ... pay enough attention to game design to consistently produce quality games
That's because a game is too dependent on Art + Tech. You can have the world's greatest designer but if they don't understand how to capitalize on Tech & Art _tailored_ for their project you're dead in the water.
There are few Game Designers that are recognized as delivering the goods. Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, etc. How many of these game designers do the general public even know??
I don't see how that matters, the point is games are homogenized for the sake of market friendliness.
> Games are an awkward state of limbo these days,
AAA games maybe, but not indie.
Okay.
Content creation costs are spiraling out of control.
Why did you bold that and then not follow up on it
People are getting fed up with grind-for-gear ooh shiny with shallow gameplay.
Minecraft just reach 54 million across all platforms.
https://twitter.com/pgeuder/st...
Well that's a contradictory statement if I've ever seen one.
How is that a contradiction?
If 54 million copies of minecraft have been sold then people must be getting fed up with the grind-for-gear ooh shiny with shallow gameplay that it epitomizes by now.
How can there possibly be so many pre-orders. Sure I'll grant that gamers probably pre-order once but surely that first time is the only time since it's almost certain the game will be nothing like what was hyped at pre-order time.
Are gamers really stupid enough to pre-order something again? Or is the market growing fast enough for there to be enough new suckers each time?
I'm was dumb enough to pre-order one game long ago... I'm not completely moronic and hence never have again.
47.9 million via crowdfunding. 'Nuff said.
Just reached. Sales are continuing.
Is Deus Ex merely considered "solid work" now?
They're basically the same game repackaged with different graphics. If he came up with something unique once in a while, he wouldn't have had to switch jobs 3 times.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Any more than Phil Fucking Fish?
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
cliff is a fucking retard full of himself desperately trying to remain relevant. His new game is pay2win shit, he claims its not so, but it will be. Fuck him and his brethren.
I like how everyone brings up Ion Storm's Daikatana and never mentions Ion Storm's Deus Ex.
Especially when they cite Carmack as contributing actual games instead of the actual same exact game over and over as a tech demo for his new engine after Romero's departure. It really speaks to the level of understanding the average game pundit has about games or game design, or indeed even success: None.
Let's ask H.P. Lovecraft, Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Keats, Edgar Allen Poe, Kafka, and a miriad of other creators who came to fame posthumously what good a monetary or populary based measure of success truly is when it comes to art.
Fucking philistines.
Well, there is the Naughty Dog way: stick with a proven formula and polish the SHIT out of the implementation.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
He was with Epic when it was making isometric shareware games. He was a big part of the reason Epic became one of the most influential AAA development houses on the planet, and that grew out of a startup. So he has already been there, he knows the path, and he has helped create some of the best and most influential games in the history of gaming. I'd say he has a damned good chance at making it again considering his premier game with the startup is a multi-player shooter. UT 2004 is still a hell of a lot more fun than most of the multiplayer shooters out there these days. The reason UT III failed miserably is because the company released it broken, didn't patch it up to snuff quickly, and generally failed to support the game because they believed the PC was a much worse market than console. Cliff is coming back to the PC, with a free-to-play shooter, which if he does right, will be a massive success on the scale of games like League of Legends. The reason PC was believed to be inferior by lots of developers was that people pirate games. But they can't pirate your game if it's free right? The game will be supported, and likely regularly release new content because he's not dumb enough to let it die. This might be the shooter people have been waiting for for 10 years. Not some shitty Console port, but an honest to god PC monster. I can't wait.
Is Deus Ex merely considered "solid work" now?
I have yet to play a game I'd term a "masterpiece". And Deus Ex wasn't really my cup of tea.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Its too expensive to pull the starving artist living in a studio apartment and eating macaroni unless you likewise keep the games extremely simple and something that can be done entirely by ONE person.
The instant you start pushing beyond that you need cash flow and that means you need a business.
These game makers are often masters of their craft but they're first and foremost artists and creative type people. Just because you're a master in one thing doesn't mean you're competent in anything else. And from what I've seen most of them are highly incompetent at business.
They don't work out their budgets properly... they miss payroll... they don't do proper advertising... and so big projects turn into debt... and the debt eats them alive.
I've seen it over and over again.
The big evil companies they were working for might be soulless monsters that don't grasp or respect their vision... but they are typically competent in business.
In games... if you have to be competent in one thing or the other... being competent in business is more sustainable then being competent in the art of making games.
A soulless company can stay in business forever if its good at business.
An extremely gifted company that is bad at business might not survive past one product release.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It's mostly the exclusive pre-order content, I assume, that causes them to want to pre-order a game they think they'll like so they don't miss out on whatever bonus it is. At least, that's probably the only reason I can think of for pre-ordering a console game.
The results, surprisingly, are mixed
That's not surprising at all. SIx people in vaguely similar situations do a vaguely similar thing and the results are on a broad spectrum of success-failure.
Isn't that exactly the sort of thing one would expect to happen?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
IMHO Dues ex was one big should shrug. The graphics aren't anything to phone home about, combat was hit or miss, and the game was ridiculously short.
...pay enough attention to game design to consistently produce quality games.
You're saying this mostly because of Portal. Without that game, you'd be left with the taste of Half-Life 2, which showed they were losing their touch because they had to have enemy spawn points that never run out of bad guys.
It also was a very linear game, where even the more open sections were just an A->B->C->D path for the player...there was no side exploring of any consequence. In particular, you very rarely left a building by the same way you entered. You would often see areas where you would soon be or used to be through windows/fences/etc., with the path between the two a very long maze.
The word "content" is so stupid and meaningless. I think I'm going to write a greasemonkey script that replaces it with "bullshit" wherever it's found on a page.
Gameplay isn't necessarily shallow. Which is kind of the point to it's success. It's a sandbox that becomes largely what you make of it. I played it for awhile with a group of friends on a private server where we constructed a city over a span of months. It was incredibly detailed and had some absolutely incredible constructions (not really by me).
Actually I hadn't even considered Portal. It's an entertaining game but offers a rather narrow difficulty curve.
I don't really care if a game is linear or not, infinite spawns, etc. All that really matters is what options the game puts in the player's hands and how well opportunities presented by those options are exploited by the game itself. I think the game could have been improved in a number of ways (in particular, the acceleration curves found throughout the game were awkward. Vehicle sections could have tested a player's attention to detail, instead you just awkwardly flop from point A to B. Rockets also seemed random but this i s a minor point.) but in general it was solidly designed, particularly with regards to weapon diversity and how each affected your positioning and timing in each engagement.
Valve knows how to find skilled developers and put them in an environment in which they can be creative but still focused. Dota 2, CS:GO, Left 4 Dead, these games show a lot of attention to detail while being embellished by unobtrusive fluff.
You can make a city as elaborate as you like, it does nothing to determine your success as far as the game's win/lose conditions are concerned. It's just dicking around, the gameplay itself is incredibly unimpressive. Dwarf Fortress, by comparison, actually does involve the designs the player manages to come up with directly in determining their success or failure, and is by far the better game.
Some games aren't necessarily built around win/lose conditions. Some games are sandlot building games. I understand that YOU don't find the gameplay compelling. 54 million in sales says that you aren't representative of everyone. /I/ had literally hundreds of hours of enjoyable gameplay from my $15 purchase. By far one of my best ever game purchases.
Some games aren't necessarily built around win/lose conditions. Some games are sandlot building games.
You're talking in circles.
54 million in sales says that you aren't representative of everyone.
Irrelevant.
/I/ had literally hundreds of hours of enjoyable gameplay from my $15 purchase. By far one of my best ever game purchases.
Well I am very happy for you.
How am I talking in circles? Do you claim that hard win/lose conditions are required for a successful game? Again, I'd say that 54 million sales says that your wrong. You can claim it's irrelevant, but that would be you, being wrong. It's rather the opposite; it's the only measure that IS relevant.
You're talking in circles because you're making a point that was already raised and addressed. Going back to it doesn't further this discussion.
It's irrelevant because it's only tangentially related and mentioned only as an antecedent to a completely different point. I'm not going to address your argumentum ad populum.
An interesting article, really great! through
Great tools looks: Angry Birds Epic Hack
> Do you claim that hard win/lose conditions are required for a [successful] game?
You are conflating the issue. Remove the word successful.
A game by definition has a wining / losing condition, otherwise you have a digital toy.
Will Wright considers Sim City to be a toy.
"I have no mouth and I must design"
http://www.rpg.net/oracle/essa...
Minecraft is about _user-driven narrative_, not designer driven narrative.
Skip the first 2 minutes of this epic talk on Game Design
* Attention, Not Immersion: Making Your Games Better with Psychology and Playtesting, the Uncharted Way
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1...