Slashdot Mirror
Feature: Why Being a Computer Game Developer Sucks
My name is Talin, and I've been in the computer games industry since about 1983. I've had a lot of fun, as well as a few "hits". I'm best known for the 1986 Amiga game "The Faery Tale Adventure", for which I still get occasional fan mail. I've worked on about a dozen projects all told, the most recent being a massively multiplayer game for SegaSoft's HEAT network.
I'm always amused be people's reactions when I tell them that I work in the computer games industry. "Computer games!" they say, "Gee, that must be fun!" At such times I usually pause, thinking "How do I break it to them?"
I've been in the industry a long time (since around 1983), and I've watched carefully the changing nature of the business. I remember the busts and booms, the changing platforms, the rise and fall of many companies. And I've come to the conclusion that the industry has gradually, imperceptibly, transformed from a cozy industry full of creative freedom and fun into a rather unpleasant place to work.
Computer game developers work in an industry where 90% of the profit is made from 10% of the products. Or to put it another way, 90% of the products simply die in the marketplace. Sometimes this is because the products themselves are dreck; There certainly is a lot of poorly designed, poorly debugged, formulaic, or simply content free products out there. In other cases, good products wither on the vine because they are inadequately marketed, or because they can't get through all of the noise and fluff that's clogging up the distribution chain.
When the games industry started, distributors were begging for product, but now you have to bribe Fry's or CompUSA a couple of hundred thousand to get your product placed somewhere where customers will actually see it.
And this doesn't even include the large number of products that never make it to market. In some cases, a publisher or development company runs out of money before it can finish a game, or is eaten by a larger company which immediately develops a case of indigestion and dies. (This has happened to my own projects twice.)
Having been involved in a number of large, multi-million dollar projects that never got released, or were pathetically marketed, I sometimes wonder whether the computer games industry isn't perhaps a net loss to the Gross National Product. I'm not even talking about the amount of lost productivity from people playing games (which I don't consider "lost"). Rather, what I mean is that it sometimes seems like more investment money is actually wasted developing and marketing failed games than is made in profits from successful ones.
Most of my industry colleagues that I've talked to about this have expressed similar feelings. One person said that the games industry is "a transfer of funds from the rich to the lucky". In my opinion, one would be foolish to invest in a game company.
Perhaps it's different in the big game publishers, where they crank out the same formulaic sports action game or first-person shooter over and over again. But in the smaller companies where I've spent my career, the vast majority of projects either never make it to market, or completely tank once they get there.
The economic realities of developing games induces what I call "The Lottery Mentality". Lotteries are based on the idea that we tend not to be able to think very rationally about small differences in probability. The California State Lottery has been called, for example, "a tax on people who can't do math". In the games industry, this takes the form of lying to ourselves about the potential chances of creating a "hit" game. We all know that our game has only a small chance of becoming a "hit" and thereby making a profit, yet we fool ourselves into thinking: "Yes, but MY game is going to be the ONE". As one producer put it: "You don't think anyone _intentionally_ tries to make a mediocre game?" (Well, there are some in fact who do, but that's beside the point.) But the fact is that your game is almost certainly going to be mediocre, in sales if not in quality, whether you like it or not.
The lottery mentality is what keeps investors pumping large amounts of money into the sinkhole of games development. After all, it's a very exciting, fast-paced, high-tech and "cool" sinkhole. It's "the wave of the future". I've watched how games get funded, and it's usually less a matter of the technical feasibility and artistic merits of the game, than it is the personal charm of the CEO of the development company. To paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville: "What a fragile thing is human reason."
I should point out that my argument only applies to games written for computers, not game consoles. The economics of the console market are very different, primarily because the console manufacturers maintain a strict editorial control over what games can be published. As a result, the distribution chain for console-based software is far more consistent in quality. On the other hand, there's far less opportunity for innovation in the console market, and this is only partly explained by the strong 'parental' influence of the console manufacturers. Because consoles don't have keyboards, console games are extremely limited in the kinds of social interaction that they can support, which means that console-based games tend to be focused around kicking, jumping, hitting, running, and other brute force physical activities. This in turn limits the console market to a fairly narrow demographic, one that isn't interested in complex social interaction. Similarly, because consoles don't have hard drives, they are limited to games which are mostly "stateless", meaning that the player can only affect a small number of selected variables in the game environment.
Failed products and harsh economics aren't the only reason why the games industry has become a miserable place.
Part of the reason why I fled from Hollywood in the early 80's was because I realized that Hollywood, with it's creativity-stifling unions, bureaucratized studios, and disreputable agents, was not the way to a happy life. Not everyone gets to be a Spielberg or a Lucas, and in fact the vast majority of workers toil away at one narrowly-defined job with no creative freedom whatsoever. The few truly inspired creators, the ones with the really unique ideas, are targets for exploitation and fraud. When I realized, a few years ago, that the whole "Siliwood" thing was a bust, and that Hollywood was not going to take over, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Now I find the games industry is becoming more and more like Hollywood itself, where each person has his or her little job compartment or specialty, and must never stray outside of it for fear of stepping on someone's territory. "I don't understand," says the manager, "I thought you said you wanted a position as a programmer. Now you're telling me you want a position as an artist?" Even when they know and accept you as a multi-talented, multi-skilled person, they still have trouble figuring out ways to apply your skills in anything but a single narrowly-defined capacity.
I should also mention that the games industry has little respect for experience. What the games industry runs on is youthful energy. It loves to exploit 19 year old programmers who work 10-12 hours a day, get paid less than the standard wage for programmers in other industries, and don't know squat about software engineering principles. There are very few 40-year-old game programmers; I'm one of few who hasn't been "burnt out" by the murderous pace. But more and more I feel like I don't "fit in". I find myself less and less interested in doing the same games over and over again, targeted at an audience of 14-year old males who have been programmed by evolution to enjoy the thrill of combat and the hunt. Quake and Unreal are _great_ games from a design and technical standpoint, but frankly they bore me. (In case you are wondering, my two favorite games are Might and Magic II, and Civilization II).
Despite the fact that the games industry has aged tremendously in both it's bureaucratic structure and the sophistication of the technology, the software engineering practices it uses are still juvenile. It amazes me to find managers who have copies of classic works like Rapid Development_, _Writing Solid Code_, and _Peopleware_ on their bookshelves, yet somehow fail to actually apply the principles in those books. The culture of the industry is simply too strong, and trying to take the time to do things right (so that it saves time later) is like slogging through mud. The whole process by which games are budgeted and scheduled, for example, is something that I find amazing that anyone could take seriously.
Anybody who's studied software engineering knows that a schedule which underestimates the time needed to develop a project actually makes the project take _longer_. Countless case studies have shown this to be true. Yet we insist on shipping projects "by Christmas season" so that programmers are forced to waste their time, trying to "hurry up" to meet an arbitrary deadline. We continue to throw budgets and schedules together quickly, so that we can have them ready for a meeting with the publisher, without ever consulting the people who will actually work on the project (most of whom haven't been hired yet.)
The result is completely predictable: programmers that are under extreme stress who in turn create code full of bugs and defects. Project that end up a year later than they were scheduled. Isn't it interesting that some of the most successful game companies have adopted a "it will be done when it's done" policy?
Part of the problem is that our industry labors under the illusion that it is "like Hollywood". Film producers are usually able to turn out a film on time and within budgetary limits. But there's a difference -- film producers don't have to re-invent the camera each time they do a production. There are no "stable" technologies in the computer games industry, and the average useful life of a game "engine" is about two years.
The games industry is primarily an engineering industry, which means that what we do is solve problems. But solving problems, especially highly complex ones, knows no timetable. No one can predict how long it will take to invent a particular thing, because every invention is an accident, albeit a fortuitous one. The best you can do is increase the probability of such an accident occuring, a process which I have dubbed "accident husbandry."
Despite the fact that constant invention is critical to the industry, game companies still refuse, as far as I can tell, to fund any kind of research. Instead, each new game is itself a "research prototype", full of risks and unknowns. You might as well write "and here a miracle occurs" right on the PERT chart and be done with it.
Job stability is another thing that is lacking in the computer games field. It seems to be a common practice in small development companies to lay off the entire development team upon completion of a project. Usually this is because a small development company can only afford to pay salaries while a project is actually being funded by an outside source. It takes a long time to negotiate such a contract, and often the previous product finishes before the negotiations are complete. As a result, the development company has no choice but to unburden itself of workers who aren't producing any revenue. As a result of this high turnover rate, development companies are unable to maintain a solid body of institutional knowledge. Worse, it inclucates a sense of futility in the engineering staff. As one worker put it: "If you ship, you'll be fired." Don't get me wrong. I still like games. But the games industry isn't games.
I'm not advocating that the sources of funding should simply dry up. But I wish that investors and project planners would be more careful. Firstly, because I'm ethically offended by the idea of wasting other people's money. And secondly, because I'm sick of spending a year of my life working on a beautiful project, only to watch it go down in flames (And yes, I admit that there were times when the fault was my own...but not most of the time.)
I think that we'd all be happier if fewer games were actually produced. In my opinion, the primary result of this would be a higher percentage of good games on the market. Of course, there wouldn't be quite as many jobs, but I can tell you that there are a lot of fun, exciting jobs out there that have nothing to do with the games industry. For example, I recently I took a job at an e-commerce company. Now, I have absolutely no interest in e-commerce per se. But I found to my surprise that there are a lot of things about this job that are really fun:
- I get to do real research, to tinker around with new concepts
- I'm living on "internet time": Product cycles are in weeks, not years
- My experience and knowledge are highly respected.
- People look to me for help and answers, not to grind away code in silence
- Schedules are reasonable and flexible
- I'm learning a lot of new technologies
- I'm getting a chance to do something different for a change.
- The gender balance is a lot closer to 50%
- They appreciate and exploit my multiple skills and game-designer sensibilities.
- I get to think about social issues as well as technical ones
- The people are excited and enthusiastic rather than feeling burnt out.
- The pay is better
But these days I'm far less interested in broadcasting my own ideas and stories (the "Death From Above" content distribution model), than I am in empowering the end-users to be able to realize their own ideas and fantasies. If I chose to do another game, it would have to be on very specific terms: An R&D project up front to eliminate the major risks, solid commitment to sound engineering principles, a rational schedule (or better yet, no schedule at all), and a project premise that involved a high level of social consciousness. "Community is King" is my motto now.
Alternatively, I think I'd enjoy just develop games as a hobby, completely open-sourced, and make money some other way. I've found that being an amateur game creator is more emotionally rewarding than being a After all, I'm in this for the fun, and for the chance to express myself creatively. If I wasn't, I'd be selling insurance or something.
Talin (Talin@ACM.org)
www.sylvantech.com/~talin
www.hackertourist.com/talin
Face it people: Computer games industry is a walking dead since about 1995. The reason IMHO is that a good game is not possible on multitasking OS
Just don't get bought by Microsoft
Three words... System Shock 2
The Half-Life guys improved the Quake engine by leaps and bounds, including the integration of new multiresolution mesh and skeletal animation techniques which even ID, on it's third iteration hasn't done. As a result, Half-Life models have much more realistic animation, and as anyone who played half-life knows, kick ass AI. Now go download TeamFortress or Counterstrike for Half-Life and tell me that half-life multiplay isn't better/fun than Quake. And here's the kicker: Half-Life was written by ex-Microsoft guys.
The article obviously has good points that are true, but it's only a part of his life, and if ypu really fight for your experience and your job, it can be fun. Small game companies that have crappy coders and designers can't expect to get any money, and shouldn't waste it. They should practice with games, and then release something everyone will like. And of course how can you compete with ID??Time and good games can show it. So far what I have seen though is gaming is like a gamble, Diablo was *&(*) with cheating, TA:K was hella laggy(even with a cable modem). So do they think???They know that most people don't have over 64SDRAM these days, when putting a game on the market developers need to think what they have, and what thy need, and what will be better.
Sounds like you're just getting old buddy. Time to move on. So you won't make another game unless it's done your way, and your way is that there is no timetable. What makes you think engineers don't deal with deadlines? What a laff. I'm pretty sure you figured it out yourself - those 19 year olds you despise have in abundance what you have lost - drive, enthusiasm, and passion. You should have gone to Quakecon instead of sitting on your ass. That would have made you realize just how fortunate you were. And would probably have made you think that you assessment of fun might have dimmed a little over the years.
If your opinion of a career is doing work that you don't like, then you have a miserable life.
Yes, you can cite all the Quakes and Unreals and Half-Life's that are a lot of fun to play, but do you realize how many REALLY bad 1st person shooters are released or die before reaching market? If only 10 percent of them become Quakes and Half-life's, it only supports his assertions. And unlike what some have said above, you can't simply "do what "sells" or " do what you like" because he really didn't scratch the surface of some of the ludicrous practices in the industry. The game developers are just the Call-Girls doing the work and raking int the money for their pimps, the publishers. The publishing houses like Microsoft, Interplay, etc, only publish the games made by a developer company (the programmers and artists he talked about) and that developer is LUCKY to get even 10% of the money. That's it. All of the work for little return. if they can still live through the next game cycle, they often little choice but to go back out on the streets and peddle their rehashed games for a quick trick.
any idea how you get it to work in w95
I hve to run it in dos or it takes down windows
Huh? Sid Meier has worked for a total of two companies and he co-founded both. Hasn't saved him from what? Getting to make the games he wants to make? Getting rich in the process? Not letting it go to his head? Oh, that I should not be saved from such things myself! Noah Falstein
And then after spending 10 hours a day coding crap, I cannot force myself to come home and code some more. I'm pale and wasted enough as it is. I just can't do it. I need to drink beer and sit in my underwear and watch Letterman and not even think of thinking about programming. Doesn't everybody?
I have great admiration for the people who can, and do, maintain such a punishing hobby as coding on their spare time. I'll tell you one thing, though. Aside from really unconventional titles - think tetris - no one person is ever going to be able to write a "commercial quality" game again.
How right you are my freind
You need a stable enviornment in order for independent's to compete with the main stream. Take file for instance, the only thing you really can't have with a low budget is well known actors, so what? There are plenty of straving actors out there that you can get relatively cheap right? The camera, studios etc are usually the cheap part of the deal. You can make due without majorly expensive stunts and special effects, and with the help of computers you can do a lot more for less. The game industry and software in general has no stable technology, as the author points out, everything is basically rewritten for every game. The use of game engines could be a real help, and quite a few have pointed out Half-life and valve as some great company that beat the odds. The point here is that they didn't rewrite the cameras they licensed the cameras in the way of id's quake engine. The problem was that the engine was changing as they were using it, and they had to make changes to it as well, so there was no clear line between their own work and work on the engine. In other words there was no stable part of the development. Assumbly an independent developer could license the engine, but as it stands now you only save a bit of the development time doing so, and actually you save nothing because up till now the game play side of the development has just suffered. What it does allow you is to put more time on the actual game and less on the graphical representation. Another difference is that in film one man can have a very good vision, and with the help of others could get that vision in film. A game designer could also, but it is much much harder. More because all the highly specialized skills that are needed (as compared to something like dollying a camera).
You need a stable enviornment in order for independent's to compete with the main stream. Take file for instance, the only thing you really can't have with a low budget is well known actors, so what? There are plenty of straving actors out there that you can get relatively cheap right? The camera, studios etc are usually the cheap part of the deal. You can make due without majorly expensive stunts and special effects, and with the help of computers you can do a lot more for less.
The game industry and software in general has no stable technology, as the author points out, everything is basically rewritten for every game. The use of game engines could be a real help, and quite a few have pointed out Half-life and valve as some great company that beat the odds. The point here is that they didn't rewrite the cameras they licensed the cameras in the way of id's quake engine. The problem was that the engine was changing as they were using it, and they had to make changes to it as well, so there was no clear line between their own work and work on the engine. In other words there was no stable part of the development.
Assumbly an independent developer could license the engine, but as it stands now you only save a bit of the development time doing so, and actually you save nothing because up till now the game play side of the development has just suffered. What it does allow you is to put more time on the actual game and less on the graphical representation.
Another difference is that in film one man can have a very good vision, and with the help of others could get that vision in film. A game designer could also, but it is much much harder. More because all the highly specialized skills that are needed (as compared to something like dollying a camera).
Half-life changed the face of multiplayer? Huh? Changed it to the point where only someone on cable gets a decent ping, I suppose.. You must have meant single player. Multiplayer was changed boatloads more by the quakeworld client, capture the flag, and team fortress. They made multiplayer accessable to everyone on the net (dirty lines aside) and also added a variety of play.
i guess its more fun to play games than code them
Don't forget RPGs!
Personally, they're easily my favorite genre. They're is a lot of variety among RGPs as well. They can be 2D or 3D, first person, third person, party based, multiplayer or single player, story based or open-ended, etc, etc. I love them all! It's really an interesting genre, plus they're really making a comeback.
There can also be innovation within a genre. Although Halflife looks very much like a conventional FPS, I don't think anyone who's played it would say it isn't innovative. The way it draws you into the gameworld is unprecedented.
There are also a lot of cross genre games. Action/strategy, RPG/strategy, action/RPG, action/adventure, etc. There are also truely innovative games that are made by small companies and aren't hyped a lot, but are an absolute blast if you know where to find them. Ever played Independence War? Someone finally made a space combat game that actually follows the laws of physics.
It seems to me that those who complain about all games being so similar don't really play a lot of games.
The closest thing to independent games today are budget games. Yes, Deer Hunter would be the "Mariachi" of the games industry, super-cheap independent movie making big bucks. But no game developer wants to work on budget games => Old technology, small target system, short schedules and probably no public recognition. After all, the industry is, what, 15 years old? Independent movies became a major alternative not too long ago. I think the industry is still evolving and reshaping itself too fast (major changes less than every three years? The latest being acquisitions). Give it another ten years and it will be much closer to a stable state. I hope I can survive in it for that long. Javier Arevalo Software Engineer at Pyro Studios
He makes interesting points, but it would be interesting if he provided case studies - i.e. how the things he's described related to actual events.
Why does everyone on slashdot think that all gamers are 14 years old? I've seen comments to the same effect about so many times it really makes we wonder.
Here are some actual statistics:
The average age of a console (playstation, N64, etc.) gamer: 14 (congradulations!)
The average age of a PC gamer: 25
Wait a minute...aren't doom, quake, and all those games PC games?
Just food for thought.
After a couple of years of working for a large, sucky (for employees -- they made good products) company that published and developed, I'm doing a game as a hobby. If I make a great game, and make big bucks on it, wonderful. If I make a good game, and manage to make back my development costs, fine. If my game sucks and never makes any money (or even ends up awesome and still makes no money), I'll be OK, because making it is fun.
If you make games to make money, it's not going to be fun. But if you make games to make games, it's a whole lot of fun.
--Steve Schonberger
(too lazy to register, not too chicken to sign)
P.S. If anyone reading this knows the sucky manager who made my life hell with all her "are we done yet?" crap, say something rude to her for me.
Bahh, there is no difference except that the managers on the buisness side are more knowledgable about how to exploit people and still maintain a good work atmosphere.
You aren't being exploited? Well lemme look at your contract, have none then there is no question.
Don't like an area of the industry? Don't work in it. It's not like there's a shortage of programming jobs.
I agree with Talin about the quality of games in general...they're boring. And getting games to run on a windows computer means first dealing with the hardware, software, and drivers that the thing needs. Then getting it to install and run properly. Finally, the reward for these labors is typically a rather boring game that is played twice: the day it is installed and the day it's deleted from the disk. I don't even look at windows games anymore. Talin's description of the roles of "artists" and "programmers" gibes perfectly with my experience. It is impossible to separate these two areas. It is like Rembrandt telling someone else where and what types of brush strokes to make. The best games in my experience were shareware or freeware that were designed and developed by one or two people who were chasing the thrill of discovery. A committee of artists and programmers is guaranteed to produce another boring windows game that will soon be filling landfills everywhere.
I stopped playing FPS after Doom. Why? Becuase they are all just doom with a different gun or a new processor throttling graphics engine (gotta save some cycles for distributed.net). I love simulators. Horridly complex things that would make most quake player's ears bleed. I haven't seen anything new in that genre in years. Sequels suck, they have better effects, but they can never capture what made the original great, the originality. When i can stroll down the isles of a computer store looking for a new game and end up walking out of the store with a java book and my warez wish list is empty, the industry has done something wrong.
The software industry is a racket. It is no more or less idealistic or rational than other business pursuits. In consulting and contracting, the one rule is "always be billing". It doesn't matter whether projects ultimately succeed or fail. Typically outside help is only brought in when the problem is very bad or a manager needs people to blame for the eventual failure. For most big companies, software is a necessary evil. It's a cost center necessary for supporting operations or the "real" product. And big companies (I work now in telecom) have so much money in their war chests they can afford to lose millions for years. I've never worked for a very small company but have seen one from the inside. No business plan, no schedules, true worship at the altar of hackery. The programmers were the best I've seen but didn't think about making money. So I don't see problems in the game industry as being unusual. They seem perfectly normal to me in software in general.
I have been in the industry for three months now, and I've loved every minute of it. Of course, I haven't been exposed to the crazy crunch time hours or any of the dealing-with-the-publisher type nightmares. Call me exploited? Sure I could make more money elsewhere, but would I be a tenth as happy? Sure I think I can produce something meaningful one day, and I might as well try while I still have the energy, right? If I enjoyed writing SQL, maybe that would have been my industry of choice. I love writing code, and I love games, and this is exactly where I'm going to be in for as long as I can stomach it. The above author is old and jaded - the industry doesn't need people like him, anyway.
re: system shock 2 - 4 words. Been there, done that. The game is just, hunt for the key and open the next door. I was very disapointed.
He's right, well at least what I read was right. ;) Games are being made by people who like making games. Don't whine just because you suck at it. Maybe you had a hit or two back in the day: things move on. New people with new ideas are where *wow* games seem to be sprouting from; I am wrong, no? Spend more time coding and dreaming and less time bitching and maybe--if you suck less than I think you do--you make a decent game. It all boils down to "stop bitching." That should probably be recursive. :p Me.
The problem in the games industry isn't so much in the game designs as it is in the companies publishing the games. THAT is why being a games developer sucks, because you aren't given enough time to finish the game, and you have to put your name on a piece of junk that won't sell.
:-P
The key is, and always has been, to not ship it until it's done. If the game isn't finished and it is sent to the stores, you will lose more money on returns and unsold copies than you will by waiting a month or two and let the developers finish it.
What's that? An excuse? "The public couldn't wait any longer"? Don't hype up the game so far in advance, then! Look at Total Annihilation: you heard almost nothing about the game until it was in stores. It was a hit!
Rushing games out the door...
THAT is why being a game developer sucks, and THAT is why there are so many sucky games on the market. I know it's obvious, but I am sick of it.
Good point. There is a massive amount of money to be made in games. The game industry unkown to most makes more money then the movie industry each year. Hence greed will always rear it's ugly head regardless. Given time a shake up in the industry will occur and the independant game makers will have time to shine.
The "Independent" games industry used to be the shareware games. Back when I was doing tons of BBS'ing (circa 1992-95) there were quite a few independent groups/companies doing games and distributing them w/o aid of publishers (id, Epic MegaGames, Apogee to name a few).
However, games started to get so big that it became difficult to download them, and, simultaneously, most of the really good independents decided to go with Commercial Distribution as their primary sales model. Maybe there are still a few creative, fun games being made by independents, but I haven't been seeing them recently (though maybe I'm looking in the wrong places). I used to love going through the file listings on BBS's looking for what new games were available, now that most BBS's have shut down, I don't know where to look.
This is one of the most absurd statements I've read in this thread. When it comes to what programmers find entertaining, there really is a tremendous amount of variation. Maybe some common threads, but everyone is in some way different. Let's look at some classic fun games: Pac Man, Q-Bert, Galaga, Break-out. I'm pretty sure these games were programmers doing what they thought was fun (at least at first), because games hadn't become an "industry" then. However, the product they produced was enjoyable to a vast cross-section of kids, not just geeks.
I personally think the original poster had it right: if you don't think a game your working on is fun, odds are no-one else will either because you won't have made it fun.
Way more. Doom, Doom 2, Quake, and Quake 2 have all sold over 2 million copies each. Assuming a US $10 per-box royalty, that's US $80M. I can count only a dozen Quake/Quake 2 licenses, and the Doom licenses were scarcer and obviously cheaper. Let's assume 20 licenses, because that makes the math easy. Do you think that id charges $4M for a license? I think not. I think that's off by a factor of 20-40. References: www.idsoftware.com/corporate/idhist.html www.pcdata.com idhist mentions that Doom 2 sold over 2 million. PCData sales figures are not publicly available, but average selling price is. G.O.D. names a 40% royalty rate for top titles, and id definitely has a sweet deal with Activision. Other numbers are from memory.
Approx 40% retailer, 15% distributor, 35 publisher, 10% developer. Hence there's an upper limit on how much a developer can ask for. That pimply-faced sub-literate teenager at the local Soup'n'Software consumes more of the retail price than any single, individual programmer. Check out the Gathering of Developer's web site for some info on royalties & such; there's also a few books on the industry, such as "Game Developer's Marketplace", that get into the numbers more.
I believe I read an article before that stated id charged $500k for the Quake engine (possibly Q2 at the time... it wasn't too clear).
The audience is the big part of the difference.. Making something to entertain, that's not just a sit-in-front-of-box/screen/page-and-follow-along type of experience is possibly one of the hardest creative challenges on the planet.. And almost everyone in the industry simply doesn't understand that simple fact. They all think they have the greatest idea for the greatest game, not stopping to pause and realize that it's the greatest game >to themare better games than Quake or Starcraft. In most non-entertainment based software companies the goal is always to make software that is what the user wants/needs. However, in many game development companies they focus on what they like or want, and ultimately fail as a result.. I'm not saying we have to just dumb-down games either. We just need to be a lot more honest with ourselves about what we're making and who it's for. Instead of "thinking outside the box" game developers need to start "thinking outside themselves".. That would go a long way to improving the success rate of our industry. There's an excellent article on Gamasutra title "Get big, get niche, or get out" that pretty well identifies some of this.. Developers making niche products should know that up-front, and not have dreams of 2million+ sales (especially on the PC, sheesh!), and companies desiring that level of sales need to make games that appeal to the non-gaming crowd.. John Gronquist 3D Artist Cavedog
It's also the only way some of us ever get laid.
I first started thinking about this and other problems in the industry while reading games magazines, they would suggest that a game was not up to scratch if it wasnt in 3D etc.., but then in other sections of the magazine stress how important gameplay is.
What summed up the commercialism for me was when reading a review for the PSX game Syphon Filter, it read 'a very good game, hopefully the sequel will be better'. damn shame.
It would be nice if someone set up a site like www.mp3.com for games, where alternative games could be presented.... I guess there are similar sites already, but something as large and as popular as mp3.com would be nice.
I like the idea of using the net to encourage artistic freedom.
maquis@beavis.removethis.org
(Insert witty signature file here)
It's *NOT* just the games industry. I've working at a number of non-games jobs. Some for large firms. Some for small start-ups. The vast majority of the time I was working for managers who did not understand fundamental software engineering concepts. Who consistently minimized development time, abolished testing, and lived in disaster-patching mode.
In my experience, if your manager is good, and you prove your worth to him or her, then things improve. This holds true regardless of the company size.
On the other hand, if your manager is ignorant, politically oriented, etc. Or if your coworkers fall into this category, you're screwed. (Loosely translated: Circulate your resume NOW!)
Case in point: I was explaining to one ex-boss the advantages of Object-Oriented programming (ie: C++) over Functional Decomposition (ie: C). And she asked me, "But why are you breaking it into all these little functions to begin with?" It seems that when she wrote a program, she just used one big function...
That job lasted 5 months. Mostly because I refused to quit. So she waited until her boss was out of the country and fired me. (This was the same ex-boss who had, shall we say, noticeable psychological problems. And considerable military training and experience. So I was really quite appreciative of being fired!)
But I'm sure we've all had our share of horror stories, sweatshops, and nightmares. My point is that it's not just the games industry. And, at least now, I usually grill my potential employers far more than they grill me during the interview process.
I Know, Having workend in Localisation QA and Engineering for several Big games houses, that this rings true for localisation too. 1st Post!!!!
I'm in the games industry, and I can speak from personal experience working on pretty much non-clones. [I.e. not FPSs, not something that's been done to death.] My gripe is this: THE IDIOT PUBLIC'S BUYING CLONES AND NOT THE GOOD GAMES. [Sorry for shouting; I needed to get this off my chest.] When CloneGame(tm) sells like hotcakes, and the original titles don't, publishers see people voting with their checkbooks, and buying those damn CloneGames. Take a look at http://www.gamecenter.com/Features/Exclusives/Notb ought/ -- all 10 games they listed are damn good games, but nobody bought them. [I bought at least 3 or 4 out of that list, before seeing that, and might look again for the others.] Find a way to make the damn public buy a good game instead of QuakDeerSniperForce IV, and we'll see more game developers making good games.
Personally this *big budget* team effort mentality is what I believe scares potential developers from enjoying making games just for the sake of doing it. When it comes down to money and money is the goal with performance expectations, how can you have the fun and add all those great features and easter eggs of yesteryear?
Collaboration of course helps but it seems fewer and fewer people area writing something on their own (or with a small group) outside of large corporations.
If something is truly good, someone will take notice. You don't need to start with a big company. Start with an idea, forget profits, do it for the enjoyment. Make it personal, put in surprises, exude creativity. Some of my own favorite games are less well known ones without the best graphics.
Just my $0.02
losers try their best winners go home? haha thats the line from The Rock and u got it wrong... loser.
I think that the reason for only the same fps's selling really well is that there are so many casual computer gamers. Casual gamers are only going to buy sequels to games they liked or reccomendations from friends, as they buy fewer games per year. Core gamers seem to be more willing to try something new. I loved both thief and half-life last year, but the game I reccomended to my casual gamer friends (and it's also the one they liked when they saw me play it.) I personally know 3 people who bought half-life after seeing me play it, but no one was willing to buy thief. Now, I'm about to get system shock2, which looks great from the demo, but I have trouble thinking that it will sell well. I just can't see myself telling my casual gamer friends to play it. For them, I fear quake III will be the best game to play. I'll get both, but they'll just get q3. That's one sale for ss2, 4 sales for q3. Do the math.
Talin, I am proud to say, was one of my mentors when I started my game development career. Talin is a fantastically creative person.
I have worked with Talin and I have worked at two other companies. I heard about this article from a friend and at first I thought Talin was just burnt out and letting off some steam. Then I read the article. Taken as a whole, everything he said is on the mark.
The key point to take away from his article is that investors need to start placing value with a more mature engineering process. This implies everything he said - but also begs the question of how the investor will become more savvy and demanding of a more mature process.
I think about this a lot. I really do not have the answer yet. My current thought is that perhaps an alternative funding source needs to get a game to alpha/beta before the publisher is even appraoched. If so, then the deal between the developer and publisher can be much more in the developer's favor. However, that alternative funding source has a cost as well - presumably they are a partner.
Open source is very interesting. Does open source have to mean the game creates no renumeration to the developer? I hope not, because I would like to continue work on games full-time and eventually an open source game.
And as far as community goes - it is King. Talin and Robert McNally sincerely care about the gamer and I would like to think that spirit been imbued into the games I work on. Chris Taylor and myself worked very closely with the fans of our game and the board game that our game is based on. And, Talin, I would enjoy finishing Planet NET.
I, have to say, thankyou Talin for all of your instruction, insight and a demonstrated love for computer games. I also have to put in a shameless plug for my current game -> "Starfleet Command" (www.interplay.com/sfc). I am of that lucky crowd of 20 year-olds who has a #1 game (at least for last week at Electronic Boutique, Babbages and Frys! :-) Woo-hoo!
-Erik Bethke
Project Lead - Starfleet Command
I should also mention that the games industry has little respect for experience. What the games industry runs on is youthful energy. It loves to exploit 19 year old programmers who work 10-12 hours a day, get paid less than the standard wage for programmers in other industries, and don't know squat about software engineering principles.
This isn't true at all where I work, in fact there are very few young engineers. I'm 28 and am the youngest person on my team. The technical leads are highly experienced and knowledgeable about SW engineering principles as well as gaming technical issues. The pay is good too.
Anybody who's studied software engineering knows that a schedule which underestimates the time needed to develop a project actually makes the project take _longer_. Yet we insist on shipping projects "by Christmas season" so that programmers are forced to waste their time, trying to "hurry up" to meet an arbitrary deadline.
We all complain about this kind of thing, and it is frustrating to be forced to rush, but entertainment software is a BUSINESS. If shipping by Christmas means you'll double or triple your sales, then it's far from an arbitrary deadline-- it's an absolute necessity. Some companies don't realize this, and produce wonderful games that are commercial failures.
Basically, I think this guy's problem is that he doesn't like the company where he works, and he's applying his dissatisfaction to the entire industry.
There is a new flight simulator called Fly! (I think). I don't remember who makes it, but a pilot friend bought it and hasn't stopped raving about it. The cockpits are extremely realistic, and every dial, knob and switch actually works.
But India always does win over Pakistan ;-). I suspect that there's a great deal about that game that you haven't told us.
Remember the David Cranes? The Larry Kitchens? Now games are "developed" according to "designs" put together by "groups" of "designers" and banged out by "teams" of "developpers". "Management" thinks game creation is a concept -> requirements -> specifications -> coding -> testing/debugging -> marketing cookie-cutter process. It's not. The bast games have always been written by one guy (with maybe 1 or 2 others to deal with specific hardware issues like sound or accelerated graphics). But only 1 guy with the vision. The problem with this is that fantastic inspiration for a really great game is a once in a lifetime thing. You might get off a few sequels, but then that's it for you. Creativity doesn't just come on demand or magically appear if you just pay people a lot. Game companies should spend less time trying to make games (can't be done well) and more time out scouting the net for new and fun games written by individuals and to help them market their game and make big $$$. Game writing is not a career, though. It's worse than the life of a musician. The make it to failure rate of games is far lower than for songs. At least musicians can make money playing other people's songs at local gigs. Game writers don't have this option.
He already tried it. Dreamers Guild R.I.P.
I've worked in the games industry and I have to agree with Talin. Games are cool, the industry isn't. I've also worked outside the games industry in software development, and on average the games industry is significantly worse than the software industry.
You weren't first, moron.
What I object to is that it seems pretty clear that everyone thinks that "violence-obsessed 14-year old boys" are to blame with the computer industry. I am a 14 year old boy, and I think i hardly qualify as violence obsessed. Yes, I do play Quake from time to time, but my favorite games are still Monkey Island and Civilization 2. I enjoy playing games that require you to sit down and think, and actually require an attention span longer than 4 seconds to enjoy. Just remember, just because someone is 14 doesn't mean they are some caffeine-jumped Quake addict. Their are usually many exceptions to all widely held stereotypes.
You can always go off and do it your own way. This is what we call "freedom to innovate".
I'm always baffled by the "poor me" posts in here - software developers have more options and flexibility than almost anyone else...I really don't have much pity for you if you can't see the opportunity.
Then again, Kierkegaard said that we were in fact afraid of our freedom.
Is anyone else dismayed by the frighteningly widespread misuse of the subjunctive mood in modern-day English?
Cause damn, I know I am.
"Isn't it interesting that some of the most successful game companies have adopted a "it will be done when it's done" policy"
:-(
That's because only the fabulously wealthy can afford to have such an attitude.
Overall I agree with him, though. I've been in the industry for four years, and I've worked on six different titles for four different companies. Only one made it into stores
I question whether id can truly be called a game company in the classic sense? Afterall id makes only a small fraction of its income from the games it develops in house. They make the vast bulk of thier income from the licenses and royalties thier techonology produces. So I submit that id is a technology company. A gaming technology company, granted, but none the less a company that is far more of a technology developer than a game developer. id's games are generaly nothing more than proofs of concept. They prove the technology works and gives people a taste of what it can do. Half-Life and the myriad other mods of thier technology are more than enough proof of the fact that the games id develops themself never even come close to exploiting the full potential of the underlying technology.
> 1,$s/game software/software/g
(Score:-1, Offtopic) What? Inflammatory yes. Offtopic?!?! At least 3 other commentators said the same thing in a more verbose way.Does this mean that the genre is dead? Well, there are several ways you can defined "dead" (audience size, money flow, media attention) but the fact is: more experimental, independent, quirky, and brilliant games have been released in the past three years than in Infocom's whole history. Ten times more. Really.
A high-tension, high-investment, bottom-line-driven industry can't do that. It can only recoup its investment by creating a hit game, and that means being ruled by what the majority of the market wants. Which is, of course, the worst possible environment for anyone creative.
Now, text adventures are peculiarly suited to individual creators. I can write a room and its contents in one evening's work -- text, code, and all. A fully-rendered Myst-style room takes days of work, hours of CPU time, and megabytes of storage. But then... CPUs are getting faster and storage is getting cheaper. I'd really like to see some independent, experimental graphical adventure games.
(It's harder to draw comparisons with Quake-style games, strategy games, and so on. With those, the engine takes all the development work -- as opposed to adventure games, where the engine is either very simple or already built for you. This is important, by the way. A good solid open-source engine -- for any kind of game -- frees up authors to go straight into scenario design, with their own individual ideas.)The downside, of course, is that I'll never be able to quit my day job and write adventures full-time. And I'll probably never reach as many customers as even the crappiest Activision game. But I don't need to tell you folks that good work does not have to spring from a salary and a timecard.
(-- erkyrath@netcom.com)
I had the experiece of working in the games industry for a few years myself, if only for a short time compared to yourself. Some of my freinds still work in the industry.
I have to say that your experiences absolutely resonate with my own. I also now work in the internet industry.
The intrnet industry has its downsides, though. Its frustrating to see product being shipped that is more clunky and less visually interesting than games developed for the Amiga or C64. The internet is 70s technology grown wild, with occasional sproutings of 80s technology.
I hear you totally.. every time I go to the computer store, it seems that there are hundreds of new games every month.. the competition is fierce just to "put a product on the shelf" rather than focus on quality and creativeness and taking their time to create a really good game. 90% of the games on the shelf simply SUCK.. it's a similar situation in the movie/entertainment industry.. if the big business people see that the general public want to see a "teenage horror movie" then they're going to be pumping out "teenage horror movies" until the general public is entirely sick of "teenage horror movies" or they show a liking to a different genre. In either case, if they let the creator(s) take their time in creating a good solid product, in the long run they would definitely make more money, they would help their image because people would see them as a good respectable company making hits, and to creative people such as myself, we see it as more "right- the way it should be".. i'm in it for the enjoyment and self gratification more than the money......
The reason why there is not a mass exodus is, as he mentioned, the fact that most of the game industry folks are aged low to mid twenties with the "our game will be the one!" attitude. Too many programmers and designers of that age run around thinking that they are the immortal, best, and hottest shit out there and nothing can take them down.
They are exploited and led to beleive that (very easily) that they will be the next ID and get rich off it, meanwhile thinking that the skills that they are gaining will really give them a leg up in the software industry.
You don't beleive me? Compare the salaries of a programmer with 5 years relational database programming with that of a one who spent 5 years in the gameing industry, got burnt out and has to switch fields.
>I find myself less and less interested in doing
>the same games over and over again, targeted at an audience of 14-year old males who have been programmed
>by evolution to enjoy the thrill of combat and the hunt.
Just because it's socially acceptable sterotypical bullshit doesn't mean it isn't sterotypical bullshit. It's unfortunate to see someone in the industry actually spouting that crap.
Having been in the software industry and never having enjoyed it all I can say is, get to work, they're not paying you to have fun. Maye you'd enjoy a job at McDonald's more?
Well, the last I've heard of em, is when I found this Java applet which lets you play around with the Dungeon Master game engine.
Much of the problems he describes -- bad management, lack of well-understood engineering mechanisms, etc. -- are very widespread in software industry in general, not just the game industry. However, software industry in general is rather profitable -- and gaming industry, according to the author, is not. I don't think it is a Software Engineering understood vs. not understood arguement. I think it is a consequence of failure arguement. In 1982, when I worked for a company to try to make real-time graphics using a CGI adapter, no one really cared that the system would crash or display incorrect values. When I tell my current employer that the accounting system I working on might not be correct if I'm rushed, then I get a very different response. It's the seriousness of the consequences of failure that is important.
Games aren't about "code" Games aren't about "graphics" Games are about having fun. I'm still waiting for something better than: * ROBOTRON * MS-PACMAN * ASTEROIDS I don't care about anything but the game! -- - Aaron
One site I've found is surprisingly good for games occasionally is www.completelyfreesoftware.com, or, for my personal favorite freebie-game, HellFighter, which as a testament to it's popularity, the author of the game has been, as of late, been having to shell out more and more money to keep their web-site up, as every month without fail for the last 6 months, within a week of the 1st of the month, their hard bandwidth limit is hit. :-) HellFighter Homepage
I've had first hand experience of a project controlled by a non-technical person and I agree it's a growing problem. About twelve months ago, I was working on a game on which the project leader was an ex-artist. He insisted on drawing up the programming schedules himself, while all I could use my software engineering knowledge for was to make a head shaped hollow in the wall. Needless to say, the project died a horrible and messy death some months later. I've said before that games are primarily an exercise in software engineering and should be lead by someone with knowledge of that field. I've also been shot down in flames for doing so, being told that knowledge of games is sufficient!! Uh, don't get me started. I'm going to lie down before I burst a blood vessel...
He did. He now works at an e-commerce company. Re-read the article.
Heh, you SUCK Corndog. Read the article again. You sound like a parrot who doesn't understand the words that it is mimicking. Little trouble with the comprehension skills?
1. He doesn't like the economics of the industry
2. He doesn't like the youth oriented culture
3. He doesn't like the chaotic management style and lack of engineering principles
4. He doesn't like Quake!
I don't really like Quake either (I prefer strategy or role playing) but Quake is where the money is.
I suggest he move on to something else. It happens to the best of us.
...and man, I can sure sympathize with a LOT of what he says. It is a very volatile industry with some really odd ideas, as he says. Case studies? Like the way that Sid Meier's experience hasn't saved him from company to company to company? Believe me, there's a lot of truth in his essay.
"Perhaps it's different in the big game publishers, where they crank out the same formulaic sports action game or first-person shooter over and over again. " That is your problem right there. The same formulaic sports action game and first-person shooter over and over again is what people want. Go look at all the Halflife, Quake I+II+arena, Unreal, etc... servers out there and tell me that the people don't enjoy a better looking first-person shooter. Maybe you need to play the games some. Unreal was a good jump in graphics over the competition at the time, Halflife changed the face of Multi-Player, and Quake Arena has amassed quite a following with the BETA test! While you think up 'creative' new games that you 'think' are interesting, other companies will produce what I want to play. Sorry, it's called supply and demand, it is business.
Its axiomatic that most software projects fail, whether they be games or other more generic business ventures. I work for a company that repeatedly sets projection completion dates before
1) they have ironed out the requirements 2) they have investigated what that entails. So what happens is you get behind the proverbial 8-ball before the project even starts. I work in a group where the full time permament employees frequently work 80-100 hour weeks. Thankfully, I'm a contractor. Early on, I worked for a game company. In my (very limited) experience, game software projects fail for the same reason other software projects fail: poor management, poor handling of personalities involved. Game development is more sensitive, because you get more of the geek coder type where pride (as in "I'm right and you're not") comes before project. Its not the real world. But then, neither is business. Sometimes I wonder how software companies make money at all.
He may not like half-life + quake like the rest of you 'masses', but his experience is real. I've been a mere follower of the industry for several years but those on the inside consistently tell how tough it is. It's simply not fair to be expected to work 60+ hour weeks at low wages and have no security that when the project is over you'll still have a job (reality is, the question of making more money afterwords is very slight-- i hear).
Here is another guy from the inside who is very eloquent on the subject.... here's his page:
http://pages.infinit.net/idjy/
Here's a bit of one article...
The Game Industry and the Economics of
Failure
For the past two years, the game industry has been mired in what the financial press calls a
"consolidation phase". Despite growing sales for the industry as a whole, not a month
goes by without some once-proud publisher announcing drastic cutbacks to its release
schedule or being bought out by a more successful one. Countless start-up development
studios set up shop, barely manage to survive until the release of their first title (when they
manage to do it at all), and disappear without a whimper. Meanwhile, the cost of
developing a top-tier title keeps growing, and the marketing budget required to support its
release skyrockets even faster.
No matter which way we look at it, one glaring fact remains: not very many people make
money in the game industry. Especially not the people who create the product.
It is my contention that the current economics of the industry, as supported (actively or
tacitly) by publishers, retailers, the gaming press and most developers, is completely and
utterly inadequate. This article presents some of my observations, and attempts to identify
a few potential solutions which might help improve our lot as a community.
The Distribution Bug
In the early days of interactive gaming (say, until 1988 or so), the "lone wolf"
basement-dweller who developed an entire game (code, art and music) by himself in a few
months was, if not the rule, at least a common phenomenon. Virtually all software was
sold to and by hobbyists, whether in the city's single mom-and-pop computer shop or by
answering adds in specialized magazines. The computer-enthusiast shop owner enjoyed
nothing more than to see the local game publisher (often the developer himself) drop by
once a month with his Ziplock bags full of floppies, which he had copied himself all night
long. They'd talk for thirty minutes or an hour, playing the new releases while the
customers, all of whom knew each other by their first names and proudly showed their
own clever bits of BASIC code to "the professional". In such conditions, a developer could
write 2-3 titles a year, make a comfortable living off of 1,000 copies of each, and then,
after a few years, go out and get his driver's license. A game could sell for years. Taking
a risk with an innovative title didn't require nerves of steel, as not much money went into it
anyway. This was the Golden Age.
However, as computers gained popularity, the hobbyist retailers were gradually replaced
by large, nation-wide chains, which have themselves lost a tasty chunk of the software
market to generalists like Price Costco and Wal-Mart. Now, it is estimated that the top 8-10
retail chains (i.e., Circuit City, CompUSA and Toys R Us) control approximately 85% of all
game sales in North America.
This changes everything.
First Law of the Game Industry: Channel to Market is Everything.
On the one hand, the professional buyer who is in charge of acquiring PC games may very
well never play them at all. He is a businessman, with responsibility for a huge budget, of
which games may not even be the most important item. His job is to acquire product that
will move off his shelves as soon as it hits them. Shelf space it precious, and there are so
many products out there that if one doesn't sell through fast, he'll find another one that
will. Besides, the buyer is a busy man, with lots of salesmen competing for his time.
Unless you happen to be hawking NHL '99, chances are he doesn't even want to see you.
It is not uncommon for a game publisher's salesman to have less than fifteen minutes to
pitch his entire quarterly lineup to a man who can make or break 10% of his company's
channel to market. You, Joe Salesman, had better make an impression right now if you
want to see your big Christmas release in this guy's 2,000 outlets.
That being said, please tell me, what is easier to push in 90 seconds: a weird, wildly
innovative game unlike anything anyone has ever played before, or the sequel to last
spring's 500,000-unit seller with better graphics?
On the other hand, if you know that the only product you can get on the shelves is
something that the buyer feels comfortable with, chances are your competitors do, too.
So, if all of you are coming out with first-person shooters and real-time strategy war
games, which are all essentially the same game, how do you make sure yours is the one
that will sell the most? Why, you advertise more, of course. If you shout louder than
everyone else, people will hear you. This is why game marketing costs have become so
staggering. Ten years ago, a standard of one dollar of marketing for each dollar of
production (back when games cost a few hundred thousand dollars to make) was about
right. These days, with network broadcast spots becoming almost commonplace, a 2-to-1
or 3-to-1 ratio is not all that uncommon. Turok: Dinosaur Hunter reportedly came out with
a $7 million marketing budget; I don't even want to know how much Sony spent to push
Final Fantasy VII.
On the gripping hand, with so few people controlling so much of your livelihood, you
absolutely can not afford to pass on their business. So, you do whatever they tell you to.
You spend $25,000 a week for a two square-inch add on page 14 of their flyer, which will
net you about as many sales as if you spent the money on Great Aunt Edna's Senior Girl
Scout cookies. You invest fortunes in snazzy in-store displays. You promise to take back
(and refund, in full) every item that fails to sell through, whenever the retailer decides to
return it, even if it comes back in the original packaging, meaning that it never left the
customer's warehouse. You promise that your release will be backed by a million-dollar
print media campaign, and maybe 8 weeks of rotation on MTV. Next quarter, when your
big competitor spends seven to ten million on his big game, you'll have to do the same.
And what does that buy you? Four weeks, maybe six. If your product hasn't sold by then,
it is out of there, and don't expect a second chance, either. Even if the product sells
reasonably well, it probably won't stay on the shelves for more than 2-3 months, because
there will be other, newer games available by then that could sell even better. Only big
hits (i.e., Tomb Raider or Starcraft) get more generous treatment.
So, where does that leave you? With a product that costs you millions of dollars to market
and with 60 days to recuperate that investment, assuming you manage to get a decent
channel to market. In all likelihood, it won't work. As a publisher, your strategy is to put
a good selection of products out there, hoping that a few will catch fire and more than
make up for the money you will lose on the others. Risky business. Given the fact that the
safest way to conduct risky business is to minimize costs, and knowing that ever-increasing
sales and marketing budgets are a fact of like, where do you cut?
Why, in developer advances, of course.
The Development Cost Bug
Which brings us to the second part of this equation for catastrophe.
Second Law of the Game Industry: Whoever stands between you and the customer holds
you by the balls.
You are Joe Developer, and you just barely managed to write a cool little demo and a
design document, while working a day job coding credit card databases and surviving on a
diet of macaroni and cheese because all of your money went into computer hardware. You
finally have a meeting with a publisher. He probably won't want to sign you up, but if he
does, he'll pay you enough money to finish your product, right?
Probably not.
The last figures I saw placed the average cost of developing a PC game at approximately
$2 million. (That figure, by the way, was double what it had been two years earlier, and
more than forty times what it had been a decade before.) Unless your name is Sid Meier or
Lara Croft, you won't see that much money before you ship your finished product. In fact,
chances are you won't even see it after, either.
The game industry works pretty much like the book publishing industry: the publisher buys
the developer's product for a cut of gross sales (typically $6 to $10 per unit for PC games,
a bit more for console titles). Most publishing contracts also stipulate an advance against
royalties which the publisher agrees to pay before the game ships. Most, but not all:
desperate developers have been known to sign with dubious publishers for no advance,
maybe getting a bigger royalty per copy in exchange. Still, advances are the norm.
Advance money is usually non-refundable, no matter how poorly the game performs on
the market (although if the developer fails to deliver the product at all, the case may end
up in court.) Some of that money may be paid upon signature, or upon meeting certain
development milestones.
However, advances are supposed to represent an early payment of royalties, so of course
they depend on expected sales. Since most PC games sell between 15,000 and 50,000
units, few publishers will pay advances based on bigger numbers than these, unless you
happen to have a fantastic track record or a great license to build your product upon.
Therefore, assuming that you negotiate a contract for $8 per copy, with a guaranteed
advance covering the first 50,000 copies, your advance check in going to amount to
$400,000. That is, twenty percent of the average cost of developing a game.
So, how will you finance the rest? Venture capital, maybe. Bank loans, if your banker is a
very optimistic man or if you can get him drunk. Sweat-equity, probably; that $2 million
figure can be misleading, because it estimates the value of the work performed, and the
principals in a start-up game studio often work for little or no pay. Or maybe your
publisher or another bigger company will buy you out and fund the rest of the production.
Or maybe you won't finish the project at all, and go bankrupt. It happens. Often.
Now, assume that you manage to finish your game and to get it published. Further
assume that it sells three times the expected amount, or 150,000 units, which would make
it a minor hit. You are still $800,000 short of the average budget, but that's OK, because
most of your staff have been working for a cut of the profits, so your out-of-pocket
expenses were much less than $2 million. Now what? Unless you want to keep writing
games after business hours, you'll want to start paying your people regular salaries. And
now, you're in trouble, because you have to start the process all over again, and this time,
you'll really have to spend that $2,000,000.
It is estimated that between 1,200 and 1,800 PC games are released every year. Less than
10% of them break even; fewer still earn significant profits. Not surprisingly, very few
independent start-ups remain independent for very long. They either collapse, or get
bought out by bigger companies with more cash flow. (Companies founded by industry
legends who have publishers at their feet begging for the rights to their products are the
obvious exception, but how many Peter Molyneux's and Sid Meier's are there?)
It should be noted that the situation is different for console developers. Sony, Nintendo
and Sega regulate who develops for their platforms, and who published what, so the
number of titles on the market at any given time is much smaller. Furthermore, console
owners buy more games than PC owners, and rental outlets buy large numbers of console
games. Therefore, it is easier to break even with a console game than with a PC title.
However, writing games for the PlayStation (tm) is not a license to print money, as some
people believe. If anything, console games cost more to develop.
The Press Bug
The so-called "Game Press" is a misnomer.
Third Law of the Game Industry: Style is at least as important as substance.
Over the years, I have met quite a few people who write in game magazines, and they are
not "journalists". They are gamers, mostly in their early twenties (or late teens), who grew
up on a steady diet of Doom and Super Mario. Most of them have very definite ideas about
what makes a good game, and they stick to them. They are not objective, they are not
investigators, and they are not supposed to be. Game magazines are basically written by
fans of a specific type of game, for fans of the same.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with that, until you realize what it entails for the
industry's economics. For the gaming press, Risk on CD-ROM is not a game. Neither is
Barbie's Fashion Designer, no matter how many trillions of copies it may sell. You Don't
Know Jack barely qualifies, because it is funny, but a dead-serious trivia game might not.
In fact, a good game, in the eyes of the press, has to have the following:
More and better graphics than was thought possible six months ago;
Lots of fast action;
Stuff like secret levels, bonus characters and moves that are hidden so well that only
Real Gamers (tm) will ever find them.
So, basically, anything simple to play is not a game, unless it achieves 60 frames per
second with 10,000 Phong-shaded and/or texture-mapped polygons per frame. And most
of all, anything that could have been made with the technology available two years ago
sucks. Which means that if you ever try to develop a game that would cost you
significantly less than the above-mentioned millions, the gaming press will kill you.
Therefore, either you saddle up and work on the next framefest, or you find a completely
different way to get people talking about your game. Not many people have achieved
this. If you know a sure-fire way to do it, please tell me.
The Vaccine?
So, it seems that given the current channel to market situation, publishers can not survive
while paying developers enough to allow them to survive as well. We are stuck in an
economy where someone, somewhere has to fail on a regular basis to let the industry as a
whole survive. This doesn't sound right. Besides pushing salaries down (and we all know
that salaries in games are typically quite a bit lower than in the rest of the software
industry), it wastes a tremendous amount of talent and effort.
What to do?
First, since success in the retail market, which depends on the press and on a few major
retailers, is so difficult to achieve, we might want to look at the alternatives. Online
distribution, via high-speed networks, might be an interesting avenue. Virtual shelf space
is basically unlimited, so a game's life cycle could be multiplied by a factor of 10 easily.
Unit prices might also go down (or, alternatively, more of the unit price could go to
publishers and developers, reducing the sales volume required to break even.) Bundling
can be extremely lucrative as well, and you don't have to spend on advertising.
Second, it is high time to stop sneering at low-cost game development, and the mostly
untapped markets they represent. Face it: your grandma will never play Quake or Total
Annihilation, but many, many older people would love to play simple, social, relaxing
family games with their friends, children and grandchildren. And guess what: you can
write them for a pittance, and make money with them. Low-cost games can also be
distributed as part of multi-genre packages, along with magazines, web sites, books, etc.,
and publishers may be able to carry more of them for longer, giving developers a chance
to produce titles somewhat out of the ordinary.
Third, realize that games do not have to be hard. Deer Hunter is not complicated, it is not
difficult to play, and it is not overly flashy, but despite (or thanks to?) this, it appealed to
far many more people than most big-budget titles.
Fourth, we need more games that appeal to a general audience, so that the regular
computer press (and even the mainstream media) start paying us more attention. The
gaming press is good at promoting a certain type of product destined to a certain audience,
but if we want to reach mass-market penetration, we must generate awareness in the mass
market! If games with a broad appeal become common instead of being oddities, access to
the pages of high-circulation press will be ours. This is why I welcome traditional
board-game publishers and media companies, like Hasbro or MGM, into our fold; if they
can associate their market savvy to our talents, everyone will be better off.
Maybe, by implementing some of these ideas, we can increase the market profile of
interactive entertainment as a whole, and allow more people to make a better living in this
great business. Who knows, maybe by increasing the appeal of games in general, we
might generate more demand, and even gain access to more of that elusive retail shelf
space!
Francois Dominic Laramee
Toward the end of the article, he mentions that he works for an E-commerce company now. Did you see that part?
-lee
I'm sorry if the article sounds whiny. I consider myself to have been quite fortunate in my career and in the success of my products. Part of what I was trying to get across is that the industry has changed quite a bit from the 1980s. If you really want to be a game programmer, go for it...but I want you to know what it is you are getting into. If you can find the right company, it can make all the difference in the world. But the glamour that surrounds the games industry is a bubble which I feel is badly in need of popping.
I apologize for not supplying as many real-world examples as people would like. I did forward this article to about a dozen people in the games industry (including two former chairmen of game development conventions) and they "mostly" agreed with my conclusions. (The part about the profitability of the industry was the most contraversial.) Other data can be found in back issues of the CGDA report. I don't want to name specific individuals or companies for obvious reasons.
As far as starting my own company: "Been there, done that." It was a fun five years, but we never actually made a profit. During the last year of the company, I got maybe half of my paychecks. I managed to avoid personal bankruptcy...barely. Words of advice: Don't reallocate power during a company crisis, no matter how attractive a solution it seems. Don't let an adversarial manager drive away good talent. And learn the business side yourself, don't hire an outsider to do it for you.
With respect to Quake: As I mentioned, I think that Quake (and DOOM, Half-life, etc.) are great games. DOOM was revolutionary, not just in it's graphical presentation, but in everything about it. Even the way that DOOM used sound was subtly different than anything that had been done before. But what was revolutionary five years ago is now "the standard".
I played multiplayer Quake with my co-workers very heavily for about two months while working at Dreamers Guild. After two months I said "OK, that was good, now I'm done with that." I enjoyed it for a short time, but I can't see myself playing it over and over again, even in multiplayer. To be honest, I find the customizability of Quake far more intriguing. Being able to create different games (like Team Fortress, Jailbreak, etc.) is what I really think games are about. When I was little, we "made up our own" games, and I think that's exactly how computer games should work too.
With respect to the issue of game demographics, and supply and demand: One thing that has to be borne in mind is that every game has to be sold 4 times - once to the publisher, once to the distributor, once to the retailer, and once to the customer. (Obviously, direct internet sales are a different model.) Each of these organizations has a marketing staff that studies what it's current market is. So even if you came up with a game for 60-year-old golfers, or 12-year-old girls, you have to get it past all these people that say "we know what our market it, and this isn't it." Even if you could get it through all that, what 60-year-old golfer is ever going to visit the games section of CompUSA or Fry's? You'd have to invent a whole new distribution channel. This is what Purple Moon tried to do, and they failed. Chris Crawford predicted ten years ago that the computer games industry, by pursuing a single demographic, would create a "ghetto" for itself, so that adults would consider them to be "childish" and "for kids". Most adult Americans percieve comic books, animated movies and computer games as "kid stuff", despite that fact that we know that adult comics and anime exist.
The comment about 14-year-old boys was perpetuating a stereotype, it's true. But I have noticed that almost all popular games are based on the exploitation of some well-defined primate behavior: Dominance hierarchies, grooming behavior, maternal instinct, fight or flight, etc. Even games like Minesweeper can be explained as nit-picking (popping the gnats on the skull.) (This also explains the popularity of bubble-wrap popping. :-) Although I've yet to see a good flirting (not porn!) game.
I should note that companies like id are the exception rather than the rule. Working at Electronic Arts, for example, is a very different experience than working for id. Even Carmack paid his dues with the Commander Keen games and Wolfenstein before creating DOOM. Had Carmack started working at EA, Quake would not exist.
To the people who suggest working on their particular open source game project: Actually, what I'm doing for fun at the moment is porting my game creation tools (animation sprite editor, for example) from the Amiga to KDE.
"politeness doesn't scale." -- Talin
I used to play The Faery Tale on my friend's Amiga a decade ago!
The problems with schedule, lack of software engineering (even when having read those classic books, it's true!), etc. are endemic. I just left such a company...
...for a new company doing data mining (www.molecularmining.com). Good development process, respect for ideas, decent hardware, opportunities... the list of advantages goes on.
I just tinker with open source games on my own time (www.cgocable.net/~mlepage). I've never been in "the industry" and I suppose have no real need to.
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
I spent a year in the games industry. There was nothing in your article that I hadn't seen in that year.
I call it my lost year. All I saw was the office until I dared to take a weekend off (to go to a convention and promote the company - at my own expense)
We were working on two Super Nintendo games, which are just as "Christmas-driven" as the rest of the toy industry. The schedule was toast before I was involved, and it only got worse. One of the games I worked on finally shipped the following Christmas - I never saw the other one.
During that year, the company churned through almost twenty people. Management was a joke, as was technical training. All for peanuts. I actually made better money the following year working for state government.
About the only good that came out of that job was that it looked good on a resume. I'm currently an Oracle specialist, building database-backed Web sites on the side (for fun!!). A DBA looked at my resume at one point and told a hiring manager to hire me because if I could program 68k assembly AND Oracle, I could do anything. Must be true - I later got his job.
Patrick Connors
Give the guy a goddamned break will ya? Most of you nay-sayers are probably still in college anyway. The man was expressing his OPINIONS of the conditions in the game industry and a bit about the software industry as a whole.
Being a software engineer myself for these past 3 years, I can sympathize. I've got a general idea of where he's coming from.
You ultimately get forced into a position where you have to constantly battle between caring about doing the Right Thing[tm] in your code, and just going with what your PHB (or his) wants you to do.
On the one hand you feel better when you do the Right Thing[tm], but it's an uphill battle and sometimes a mine-field of powerful egos to avoid stepping on (lest ye be fired).
On the other hand you feel crummy for doing it the wrong way, and yet still take the flak when it does go wrong regardless of the fact that you were herded into it by your superiors. But initially there's no resistance, and no chance of bruised egos (unless you count your own).
It's a crazy, mixed up world. Just because you're not in this kind of situation now, doesn't mean you won't be some day. So give the guy a break and stop nitpicking him to death.
And enough with the "So get another job." lines ok? Sometimes it just isn't that easy. Coding is my thing, in anything else I'd be much more miserable. But I have a right to complain about the conditions inside the machine just like everyone else, regardless of what I'm doing.
.oO[ M$ Strategy: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy. ]Oo.
Talin is well known in the Games industry as one of the few people who have the multible talents to create an entire game single-handedly. Complex Role Playing Games built by one person take several years to complete. So we added artists, sound designers, and a Producer to manage it all. The people who became game producers are largely the ones who attempted to impose the Hollywood culture on to an engineering process. In Hollywood productions, _everyone_ gets laid off at the end of the production. However, engineering companies make every attempt to retain their talented engineers and re-use the technology they create. In my view, it is the Hollywood wannabees that have ruined the game industry. Most of Talin's complaints about the industry can be traced directly to the mentality of the Hollywood wannabees that become game producers. BTW, the last game company that I worked for (The Dreamer's Guild, co-founded by Talin) still owes me two months salary that I will never see because they filed for bankruptcy after bouncing paychecks. Hey Talin, Now that you are being paid better, could you _please_ send me that back-pay? Cheers, smithdog "Roll out the spaniel." "We'll have a spaniel of fun!"
Please! Sure the typical programmer demographic is a large one but there are other populations of users out there who might want to play computer games also. I think its important for programmers to take pride in their work but its more important for the intended audience to enjoy a game than for the programmer to enjoy the game.
-ccm
Phone answerering people, legal, and accountaing are all already budgeted for and being handled - outsourced. legal firm and accountant on retainer to do the normal things such as handle payroll and look over contracts. We will need management once the project gets bigger, but the project will never get bigger unless it is sucsessfull...
I will, however, take your advice and ask Talon for some advice and opinions... We've tried to think of everything, but thats just not possible... I more then appreciate the concern, thank you for the sugestions - hopefully with some advice we'll be able to work things out.
man is machine
When the road gets rocky, when you see things being done wrong - in your workplace, in buisness, etc, there are 4 things you can do about it:
1) accept it
2) complain about it
3) reject it (leave, have nothing to do with it),
possibly find someplace else where things are done right.
4) fix it
The author doesnt do number 1, as many game developers have. He instead does 2 and 3.
I'm doing number 4... several other developers and I, with great creative talent, etc, are founding our own game company. No CEO. No managers, ecept ourselves. We have artists, modlers, programmers, and more. Getting funding will not be easy because we dont have any non-technical staff, and our buisness model has been called 'crazy', and 'revolutionary' because of our staff structure, but at least we're trying #4...
T, maybe if things pick up for us we'll give you a call...
Also, with some open source projects going on now, engine design is being removed from game design...
For example, our first product is utilizing the CrystalSpace 3d rendering engine, an open source quake/halflife type engine. We're adding things to it, yes, but with foundations like it in place, it will be easier to reuse tools just like producers and other industries do...
Also, while I'm here, anyone in the audience know where some Free, or cheap, marketing analysis type stuff for the game industry exists? The buis plan we have needs more concrete numbers, and we dont want to pay 4k for a basic industry report...
man is machine
Hey, why not check out the World Forge project. They could use some help from someone with good experience.
http://www.worldforge.org
Finally, an article that addresses the ever-growing slush pile of pc video games visible at any computer or department store, with insight from the inside.
The few games I buy, let alone play, are from companies (Id is the supreme example) who are soley devoted to the cause of pushing the gaming envelope, as opposed to countless others who look to see "what's hot" and then throw in some knockoff based on yesterday's technology. I like to feel that a given game (or ANY piece of software) was created by folks who intellectually and emotionally invested in its success.
Like HolloWood, features created by corporate investment committe to address a percieved 'trend' ring false in the eyes and ears of the kind of dedicated gamers that must be appeased for a game to become a real 'hit'.
**>>BELCH
Which brings me to the question:
Why did Infocom give up on text-based adventure games? Their switching to graphics was the kiss of death. They cornered the market on text adventure but lost faith. I'd LOVE to see someone bring back and then push the envelope of text-based gaming the same way Doom/Quake did with graphics based gaming. To do so would take at least the same level of engineering creativity as Id puts into 3d games.
Hmmm...
**>>BELCH
He didn't write the article to complain as much as he did to WARN those who dream of such work to be on their toes. The Dream of being a Game Designer is a holy grail of sorts for a lot of kids these days, and this article is a good and insightful wake-up call.
Your point about moving on instead of complaining is right on tho'. Brush the gravel off those buttocks and git busy!
**>>BELCH
Having worked in a game-development company (although telecommuting) and watching the industry quite a while, I have to mostly agree. Although my experience was good as a whole, and I have absolutely no hard feelings towards the company or the industry in general, I could see a lot of the problems the author lists.
I think to succeed in the gaming industry you REALLY have to love the stuff. I mean A LOT. Live and breathe games. Anything else and you'll get tired and burned out soon. I personally don't care much about games, and realizing that was one of the main reasons I left. I find the technology behind them pretty interesting, but the games themselves tend to bore me quickly. This is NOT good. Even if you only do engine/technology development, a lot of the stuff is still tedious tracking of Microsoft's API-revision-of-the-day.
Interesting technology is not limited to games, although a lot of people seem to think that software is either cool games or boring financial database stuff, maybe add internet-java-perl-hype nowadays. Myself, I'm nowadays working on some very cool embedded stuff, and getting paid more for it too. It would take a lot to get me back to the game-development world.
Petteri
Sounded like the first moron to me.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
My my, you are an ego driven defensive little scrote aren't you.
It really gravels my buttocks that items like this even get posted.
There could be a thousand of these: "Why being in product support sucks." "Why being a electrical engineer sucks."
Blah, blah, blah.
If your job sucks, move on to a different one.
I did that very thing, took a pay cut to do it, and have found myself way happier ever since.
hippie
F /...
This is America. This is American life. You are the one who is whining and complaining. As a country we worked damn hard to get to this super comfortable life level, so we deserve it. You need to stop passing your guilt on to the rest of the world.
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
Playing a game you've written yourself is a lot like reading a book you've written yourself.
Sure, you can appreciate the quality and talent (or lack thereof) that went into it, but you already know what will and will not happen, taking the adventure and excitement out of the game.
Not to mention, some of the best commercial games took waaay more than one person to create, what with all the artwork, coding, quality assurance, filming (if the game has video capture), etc that goes into it.
So, we must rely upon the gaming industry to supply us with quality entertainment. Money talks though....geeks are getting tired of putting money into half-assed attempts at unoriginal game ideas. Why do you think software pirating is so prevelant? Sure, a lot of it is because it's underage kids with no money and a lot of time, but mostly, and I know this is the reason *I* cruise the warez sites and friends' ftp sites before buying a game: I HATE WASTING 50 BUCKS ON A POORLY CODED PIECE OF CRAP. If I like a game, I buy it. I won't buy a game and pray that I like it. I work too goddam hard to throw my money away on them. I do a good enough job of that at the bar.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
But you do have a mass exodus from the industry. I work with several ex-game programmers, most pretty burnt out. The good news is that you've got far greater numbers of easily exploitable teenagers throwing themselves at the misshapened vision of what the industry is supposed to be.
I know I have been somewhat exploited these past few years. I'm not 19, I'm 27, but the concept is the same. I could make a lot more out in the so-called real world, and in some ways it would be more rewarding. There is probably a much greater temptation for game programmers to jump ship than their Hollywood counterparts, simply because our talents are in such demand in other places. Yet I find I am happy where I am, and that these issues in my own life have become better, not worse.
Yes, game development is sloppier than business development, simply because the competition is fierce and profits are so low. The best games these days come from well-funded companies that have the luxury of elbow room. However, like movies, just having a large budget guarantees nothing. And on the lower budget end, it is like movies too, for every Blair Witch winner you have a thousand losers, some deserved and some undeserved.
Open source game development is a neat idea, but is somewhat hampered by the fact that it is much easier to get engineers for such projects than artists. We may still see some winners in this area.
Alternative publishing sources are a neat idea too. You can check up on how the g.o.d. (gathering of developers) is doing, that may prove fruitful as well.
I do not fault you for the decision to leave, and sympathize with the reasons. If finding a good game development job is a matter of luck, then I am among the lucky, although it took a few years to get to that position. And a few years of software development with published titles and associated experience is an investment in myself, and one that I do not regret, even when there are lucrative alternatives. But I recommend that you do not discourage those who want "in" completely, because even though it is difficult to manage, getting a rewarding game job is much easier than winning a lottery.
Best of luck
Sam Kalat (happy at Red Storm, which does not necessarily agree with anything I post, but probably would today)
Basically, when people code games just to get a paycheck, the result is invariable boring and stale. But when they code games because they want to play them, there's a much better chance of something new and great coming along.
I have a sneaking suspicion that open-sourced games/engines (ala Freeciv) will be appearing soon for that very same reason.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
As for interactive fiction, the Zork games (and almost all of Infocom's interactive fiction) were platform independant. With the data files (included in the "Masterpieces of Infocom" CD) you can play them almost anywhere. I've gone through the entire Zork trilogy on my PalmPilot, for example :)
Oh, and interactive fiction is still being written. Just finding it takes a little work, but it's still going. I doubt it ever truly left :)
Good luck!
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I had more fun playing 4 to 8 person doom2 in 94 in the computer labs on my university than any other game in my life. Why?
:)
Multiplayer was unheard of then. Granted, iceclimber, the orginal mario bros, etc let two people play at once but that is not the kind of multiplayer interface I'm talking about. The whole idea that each person had his own screen was great. The other thing was that 3d-shooter games were new. You put those 2 really big concepts in one game and wow!
I also had more fun playing C&C than starcraft. Why? Because it was one of the first stragity games of that type to allow people to play over the internet. So again, there are 2 news things. One, I didn't have to go to the lab anymore to have the 4 people playing at once since I could use ppp from home. Second, it was a new type of game with a great soundtrack that didn't hurt it any.
Now, everthing gives me the "Been there; done that" feeling that leaves me wishing that subspace would be ported to Linux. Xpilot just doesn't have the graphics and sound. Maybe I should shut up and join that project
Good day,
Civ CTP is awesome! Thanks Loki!
Romans 10:9-10
Waa. Get a job flipping burgers or herding sheep, then.
This may be coming in a little late, but anyone interested in developing their own open-sourced video games with the minimum of fuss might be interested in checking out the COG Engine:
http://cogengine.linuxbox.com
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Does anyone know where most of the money from a successful game goes? That's right, it goes not to the people who made the game... It goes to the publishers first, then the distributors, then what is left over trickles into the hands of the developers.
In this way, the once exciting art of making a game has gone the way of TV, movies, and to a certain extent, books.
Until publishers stop insisting on being able to make the creative decisions AND swallowing up all the profits, the game industry will continue to go the way it has been: Hundreds of crappy games, all clones of each other, competing for space on a ten foot long shelf.
I think text-adventures and text-worlds in general are still fairly popular. There are many MUD's, many types of MUD's, and many people who use them. Most of these people don't even remember Infocom and Zork, I'm looking for a PC or Linux copy of Wishbringer myself, but they still find they love these games. These games take the old stand alone text-adventures and add multi-player abilities and some even allow the player to program new parts to the games as they go along. I think this is as much, if not more, the future of games than Unreal, Quake, and Half-life.
In recent months I have done a 180 so that I now think games are perfectly suited to open source design. The majority of games use some other games engine with maybe a few tweaks to it and even new games are usually just small improvements here and there on older engines. With the engines of games as open source research is sepperate from game design and content creation which shortens the time required to create the games and empowers game players to quickly create and distribute their own games based on others. My favorite two games, Quake & Civ II, do this to some point by allowing aspects of them to be programmable and redistributed. Obviously this has helped increase the life cycle of the games as well as creating cult followings.
I am less interested in creating open source engines than open source game libraries that have virtually everything needed to quickly create a bug free game engine of my design. Prehaps even a module game engine that allows you to hook in a module to process your data files (images, sounds, scripts, etc) and then whatever modules you want for your games. A sort of Visual Game Creator. Since IMO the logic of the game should be in a script file, not inside the game executables, creating a VGC shouldn't be that hard. Pick the kind of menus you want to use, pick the type of game it is, add a few chosen extras from the library and compile. Possibly include a simple code editor for creating the default scripts and tools for importing and packaging your sounds, images, and other data. You could start by supporting the basic well established game types: text-based, scroller, card, bricks, 3D, and empire-building games and just add new types as they were invented or someone bothered to add them to the library. I think this would make Linux quickly become the OS to have the most new games coming out for it. They may not use cutting edge new engines, let Id fill that niche and release their code when they move on, but they'd be fun and stable which IMO is what matters most.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Yep, I've got both an Amiga and a K6 Linux box on my desk. The best of both worlds.
"I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
"All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS
Hey, wow. I have fond memories of Might and Magic II myself. The interface was pretty grim, but
I thought that as a game it was better than MM3:
you had to choose your skills and items more
carefully since you could only have very
limited quantities of them.
Still not as wondrous as Dungeon Master, though.
-- You've got to get a hat if you want to get ahead.
I think the real key to any software project is teamwork, not money. If you have 5 or 6 smart people that can work together very closely then you are more likely to succeed than if you are working like a lone ranger. Look at id - You don't just have not just one or two wonderful programmers, you have a whole team that work very well together. Look at slashdot. Look at Linux. Ultimately you need a charimatic leader, but it's unity of the group that makes things happen.
I think more hackers need to learn not to be such loners and learn how to work together better. Open source is a great training ground for this.
I would believe this is the situation in game companies. I interviewed with a couple the last time I was looking for a job, and I was too expensive for all of them. I was not looking for a raise, and I am not statistically overpaid, if you look at the industry salary surveys, but game companies want people on the cheap.
However, the description of the working conditions - no specs, no documentation, no process, chaotic development - seems to describe all of the companies at which I have worked in the last 15 years.
I personally believe that it has to do with the mistaken belief that "First to market wins." This was true with Microsoft, but they had a monopoly, and they were not averse to acting in restraint of trade to maintain it. I don't think first to market with something that doesn't work always wins, though that is the way companies believe.
The only lesson I think we can learn from this is the lesson we can learn from looking at any commercial venture. Commerce is Fraud.
I'd like to see the age differences between the people who automatically say "So get another job asshole" and the people with more supportive responses to this guy.
That's a very insightful question. I'd like to see that too. It would also be interesting to compare the amount of development experience (and not just software, but writing or graphic arts too).
It compiles! -> Ship it! -> You're fired!
-- familiarity is only skin deep
I'm really surprised he doesn't like Quake! What could be more satisfying than going online and blowing away one of these 14 year olds he talks about.
More seriously, I find I have to be in the right mood to play specific games
Quake) Desperate Need to Let Out Pent-Up aggression
Civ) Feeling creative - what could be more satisfying than building a civilisation all by yourself.
Other Strategy Games) I'm bored, got hours to kill, I want to control the pace of what I play
The author of this message is 36 going on 14.
On another point, I am a professional software engineer, and I realise that games are often designed from scratch, but I'm not scornful of the design approaches that games companies have used to get the game to work. Just because they don't use Shlaer-Mellor, Yourden, Teamwork, UML or anything else doesn't make the achievement less stunning. I'm consistently amazed that games deliver what they do out of CPUs; something a formal design approach is unlikely to realize.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
It seems much software is being developed using investors' money. Perhaps this situation parallels the "savings and loan crisis" of the 1980's: A suave CEO schmoozes some financial backing for (fill in the blank) project, pays himself and his buddies fat salaries for a while, and then, suddenly, the development corporation is bankrupt. Ergo, negative profits.
In all seriousness:
>Sure, more people saw films in the 30s than they >do now (cause of the depression) but in the 60s >and 70s and especially the 80s (cause of two >people - Lucas and Spielburg).
This is not true. In the 30's movies were much more popular because there was no television.
This is just a guess, but perhaps the reason why the games industry is less profitable than other software companies is that, like Hollywood, makes a huge portion of its revenue in the first month of a game release.
Software companies like Microsoft, have a steadier revenue stream since people upgrade their software at different times.
Also, game developers cannot continually make money off of upgrades to games. As Talin said, a game engine had a maximum lifespan of about two years.
There are still some independent shareware companies that make high quality games. Spiderweb Software (Exile I, II, III, Realmz) and Ambrosia Software (Maelstrom, Apeiron, Escape Velocity) are two examples that I can think of off the top of my head.
Ambrosia, unless they have changed thier practices recently, is also a company that encourages independent developers to work for them. Several of their projects began with independent developers proposing projects and showing code to Ambrosia.
When I worked for a company that was contracted for government work, I was informed that my job was to "make the TAMO Chip work".
When I asked what a "TAMO Chip" was, I was surprised by the answer. The engineers had chosen a very cheap, incapable, and badly designed microcontroller to handle a horrendously complex task, and I was to write the firmware. "TAMO" stood for "Then A Miracle Occurs".
Fascinating stuff, government contracting...
My friend (who is reading over my shoulder) and I have been through two different game companies (actually three if you consider the first company before the buyout). While I've never enjoyed a job more, I don't think I'd want to get back into the market. The game market has really closed up a great deal compared to 5-10 years ago.
It's almost impossible for a new shop to take off. You pretty much have to develop a game completely before the distributors take you seriously and the game has to compare to what established shops were producing.
For instance, the first company I worked for made statistically accurate baseball and football games exclusively for the PC. Our boss wanted to go head-to-head with EA and try to add arcade style play and graphics. Well, the investment to make that leap is huge. We tried to do it with a team of 15 people - about 5 programmers and the rest artists and sports experts. We tried to turn out three titles a year - baseball, pro football and college football. We didn't even come close. I later interviewed with EA's division that does the Madden NFL games and found out that they have over 20 people working just on the pro football game alone.
Not to mention the disheartening sight of a streatch Hummer at E3 custom made for EA sports. That damned truck cost more than the production budget of our last title.
I too have moved on to ecommerce development and have experienced all of the benefits that are listed above. Better pay, reasonable hours, female coworkers, and on, and on.
I have also been asked dozens of times what it would take for someone to become a game developer. I always tell them - don't. It just isn't the career it used to be.
I have worked for a company that has a game division for years and I also have friends that work for game companies and I can tell you that this is exactly right.
Game developers get lower pay and loger hours and more grief than any group of developers I have seen. Ridiculous deadlines are the norm for the industry and often the people making the decisions about the games to make have never played any.
Some of the problem with the status quo is the buyers (least common denominator) who all buy the FPS ripoffs, but much of it lies in the industry sweatshop mentality.
Those who open their minds too far often let their brains fall out.
Those who open their minds too far often let their brains fall out.
Although the games themselves are not free, there is a very active "scene" out there making modifications to existing games, sometimes ending up with entirely new look and feel. With possible exception, most of these are free, and often times, breath new life into games that have become dull with use.
My only experience is with quake mods, I'd have to say http://www.planetquake.com is a great place to look.
or are you too scared to show who you are?
Maybe we'll talk again when you become consious.
Retard.
Corndog
I write a response to a pathetic article and get replies which THEMSELVES do not contain any substance! Why the hell do I even bother. Not ONE of you have a mental thought more advanced then a four year old.
I am defensive? HELL YES! Why do such stupid things get said on a site which caters to the 'mentally elite' of society?
Will anyone lacking logic understand my logical arguments? If YOU (whoever is reading this) has any logic, the above statement will reveal it's own answer.
sheesh..
Corndog
Is that at the start of game development you are looking at the newest of the new hardware as well as older equipment.. .. especially if a game is in the pipeline for a year or 2.
After development has started.. depending on how long it is in development..
The "state of the art" moduling/gaming environment you were trying to produce is now working on all old compontent.. unless you take more time and money to make sure any new equipment with new features are incorporated into the game..
This in turn is a vicious cycle unless you say enough and punch it out the door for older equipment..
With the advances time tabling about 4 to 6 months as of late it can be very expensive both in time and financial resources to make sure you have all the newest bells and wistles
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Albert Einstein
Since then, most of us have wandered in because we were friends of people who wore working on stuff there. There have probably been about 50 people total-- some wander in, write a few lines, and wander out, others contribute to project after project.
Right now there are maybe 10 people doing various things including marketing, testing, art, development, and research. In order to keep new blood coming in, some of us teach summer courses to high school students. This is a good way to help out and inspire little up and coming nerds like you once were, as well as recruiting to keep the company going. The people in college can usually drag their friends in the same frat or dorm into contributing, so we meet a lot of high school and college kinds.
It's pretty hard to attract older people. They are burned out by their day jobs and don't want to work nights and weekends on another project. I find that it is really restorative to work in a good environment, but if you aren't already doing that, it sounds like a lot of work to hold down two jobs. Hey, maybe if we get enough people, some of them can go full time Morgan Systems and make the company really grow. It's always one of our fantasies.
Now that I'm in sales mode, I should have mentioned that dead projects (things that are no longer supported) are released as source so that users who write code are never screwed. They can always write to the company and request new features while the project is supported, and can get the source and fix bugs/add features if the project is gone. I really wish big companies would do that. I understand that there are good reasons for keeping source controlled when it is part of a flag ship product, but ditching users by shutting down support for a product and not making the source or specs available really sucks-- it's not a good way to run a customer relationship.
-magic
Take Zelda 64 as an example
Zelda was delayed, missed deadlines, was supposed to come out on the infamous 64DD, and had a serious crash bug on the first head boss..
Oh, that and the game system makes it damned near impossible to beat "phantom shadow beast Bongo Bongo" (though it does have a kickass name)
Lowmag.net
What a great game!
Played that on the ol' A500, and it blew my mind. The flipping pages in the intro... freedom to move around unrestricted... day/night/weather(? it's been a while?).
I think what changes it is that there are a lot of options out there in computer games, even w/in a genre. Compare this to other software. There are very few word processors comparitively, or full operating systems. And it's pretty much impossible to form a monopoly type thing in games. They become so outdated and there's just so much in variety to worry about.
It sounds to me like the guy who wrote this article hasn't worked in the section of the computer games industry that makes good products. I don't know if it's that he's not a good programmer, if he's one of those people who accepts his lot in life w/o trying for any better, whether he's just unlucky, or whether it's the whole age thing, but there are a lot of really excellent games out there and many cool companies making them, including a lot of pretty big companies who /can/ afford to keep their programmers employed. Of course your outlook is going to be that computer gaming as an industry sucks to work in if you've worked on no-name projects that failed, but even if you accept his 10% success rate, then that means that he should've at least worked on a few good games.
This comment is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
I think the real problem is that the industry is becoming more corporatized. Instead of back in the 80s when the designers had most of the say so, it shifted to the brainless managers. No more creativeness, just get the product out the door by the deadline or your fired and somebody who can do it on time will be hired.
I wouldn't doubt that this is the prevailing attitude in the industry.
-- toolie
...about that guy holding the gun to his head.
Why don't you come out here, we need some help writing some billing applications. You may find that really stimulating.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
If you feel the need to something artistic, do shareware in your spare time (assuming you have some ;-) ). I've been selling my 16-bit game, Comet Busters! for over 7 years and am still getting registrations from all over the world. It's a blast, and it's moderately profitable. All you need is a good idea -- or even a good derivative one!
I've now worked in the software industry at large, and more revently at a games company, working on an upcoming PC game. While it's true that development practices suck universally throughout the industry, I have to say that game companies are MUCH worse. They've somehow found a way to take the standard (and piss poor) software engineering of most software companies, and make it ten times as excruciating for the developer. Part of this might be because one has higher expectations going in ("Oh wow! I get to write games!") but I think the author has some VERY valid points here.
It goes even deeper than just the software industry. This happens in virtually every industry in the world. Think back to _The Simpsons_ when Bart & his class go on a field trip, only to find that they can't afford it. The motto of the place is "Sorry, but there's money to be made". Where there is money, there will be business. Where there is business, there will be bad business practices. This is very similar to the idea that after charisma comes bureaucracy. In other words, ideas start out very small and located in one person (Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Jobs, Ghandi, Jesus, and many many others) but becomes bureaucratic and unfriendly when the idea grows. Add to this (in this case) the possibility of becoming rich off of one product, and you get exactly what the author is describing. I don't know of a single industry this doesn't occur in. Enjoy your e-commerce job while you have it. E-commerce is still in its infancy. In 10 years you might find it's very similar to the position you just left. Yes, this will happen to many other similar movements (Linux - probably RedHat is already moving that way).
The only way to escape this is to quit and start your own company. Of course, then you have a different set of rules to follow (like getting enough business to put food on your plate!)
Johnathon
I've worked where I've chunked out code constantly and administered machines. If I did anything creative, no one cared. I was constantly asked to proof text as some people couldn't use their fingers to open Word (sic) and spell check.
But then again, my first job was cool though. Boss and I would go for coffee, people there were mostly nice. We'd discuss what are better methods of doing things.. actually discuss.. not dictate..
I wish I had better examples, but it isn't only salient to the game industry.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
You know.. the point of this isn't to be a whiney little cry baby. Its to give insight. Imagine if no one ever gave you insight on anything, even without asking for it. You know how many times you will do 'dumb things'? C'mmon people...
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
It's a social aspect which can directly and drastically affect morale regardless of anyone's marital status.
Oh! Did he question your illusions?
Oh! Bad guy he is!
Really!
Don't get we wrong, Fallout 2 is an amazing game, but the errors, bugs and slow-downs I got from playing the game without the patch(I got the game when it first came out) really ruined the experience for me.
I just wish that marketing stayed away from the programmers during the creation of the game, and Black Isle released it when it was ready, instead of rushing it straight to market. I think that the time has come to give really good game ideas the time they need to flourish, instead of rushing them to market all of the time.
Smile! Jesus loves perverts too! (ROT-3 Left to e-mail)
(disclaimer: not a serious coder, more of a benevolent observer and person with money to spend on games)
I mentioned this in another gaming article (more focused on the OSS side) so if this is redundant to you I apologize.
The major problem, as I see it, with creating consistent high-quality games is building the underlying technology. As the author said, game engines have a half-life (yes, pun) of about two years. Now wouldn't the open source model for building software be applicable to creating such engines. The bugs could be worked out en masse and all the nifty features could be added a la carte. This would also provide the community type support that I have found SO extremely helpful in learning Linux and Apache.
Not having to build a quick, proprietary (and therefore buggy) engine for each game would allow designers to work on the stuff that make a great game, level design, art, interaction, sound, etc. By lowering the programming barriers to entry we might even see a return to the lone-wolf style games that bootstrapped the industry. And just might lower game prices into a range where they can be massively consumed, like movies. Personally I think $20 is a good target. With the rise of digital (legal) distribution, and the HUGE proliferation of gaming sites (comes close the pr0n IMHO) would provide all the hype, marketing, and access you need to sustain a comsumption driven product.
Also building a common installer and graphic libs would GREATLY reduce the complexity of getting games running on the wide variety of installations out there, not to mention a conversion of the next generation of gamers.
Just some thoughts on a Frydi...
+&x
This space intentionally left blank.
If you had told me this over coffee, I would urge you to leave your job and find something you could be more enthusiastic about.
Saying that systemic problems are keeping you down is tantamount to giving up. If YOU wan't to change the computer games industry, change it by being successful in a new mode of game development and distribution. Of course, you must be aware of the success of ID, through Internet distribution and freebies. You allude to the "big game companies" with their "first person shooters" but look back five years and you won't see all those first person shooters, you'll see a few guys about to revolutionize an industry with a new type of game and a new form of distribution.
The bad news is that the situation you describe is true of the computer industry as a whole. The good news is that you get to decide: work for Microsoft, or work on free software, start a new company, or work at a bank.
It's your choice.
John
Worked hard? Who worked hard? What I remember from my history is, some old white dudes moved in to a resource-rich land, killed damn near everyone there, enslaved the population of another continent to work that land and since then has been moving on momentum.
Sure, some people worked hard. But to *expect* this great life is the problem with this article. This author expects that everything should be handed to him, that he shouldn't have to work hard to get it. Do you think the people that "worked hard" to bring us our American Dream loved their jobs? No. But now people want everything.
If you think we should all just sit on our asses and live off of the spoils of our ancestry, you've got to give me some of whatever you've been smoking.
ryan
I'm sick and tired of people whose lives center around computers, and themselves. Points:
1) Your dog lives a better and healthier life tha 90% of the people on this planet. Cry me a river for the woes of not having "fun" at work, when in most of the world people are shitting their intestines out because they can't get any food.
2) Stop using hyperbolic exaggeration. If I read one more fucking paranoid computer user talk about "big brother" reading their email, I'll flip. Big Brother is the one that shoots you if talk bad about the government in China, not the one that simply suggests that maybe you don't talk about felching in the Barney newsgroups.
3) I don't care which platform you like. Can we move on to something important?
In short, this article is whiny. I'd lay dollars to donuts that this author is a rich white male. Guess what? No matter what insignificant, lame job you take you're still going to be successful. You can afford a computer! You eat 500% more food than you need to survive! You're killing hundreds of people every day through your incessant consumption!
Get over yourselves!
ryan
... don't just happen in the Gaming industry.
I hear of lots of high-tech companies that "love to exploit 19 year old programmers", "fail to actually apply the principles [of project management]" and slot multi-talented people in a (mismatched) very narrow job description.
Seems to me that it's a quasi-universal problem!
---
Number of drugs on the market that he made: 0. This is actually the typical output for a medicinal chemist- the fraction of compounds that become successful drugs is so small as to approach zero. My Dad was luckier than most- he actually got a compound to final human trials before it was canned.
Oh, and you don't exactly get a lot of latitude when it comes to deciding what avenues to pursue. The saving grace is that at least drug companies are realistic about deadlines- they know it takes years even with an all-out rush, so you don't have the pressure to ship by Christmas.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
You should read more Hollywoon tradepaper, because a mature Game market should very much resemble the entertainment business.
When you read that The Fnglish Patient beat out Fargo, or Babe: Pig in the City bomb in BO, maybe you will feel better.
If you want more fair/stable environment, your hardware upgrade cycle has to be longer than a couple of years. You still don't give console enough credit.
Really want something that can exploit PC's potential, how's this for an idea: A stradegy game that's skinable, user will make their own figure, map and storyline. (kids will make pokemon saga and Slashdoter will make Redmond Monster.) A skin editor that is opensource and modular. You make money off of the host gamename.org.
CY
Pick any industry that produces commercial software and you'll find lack of design, testing, documentation and shorten deadlines.
My advice is to do your 8 hours and do what the pointy-hair managers want and CYA out the wahzoo. Or become an hourly employee and profit from the overtime that will be coming your way when the project managers screw up (and they will screw up).
Back in '94 I started my own company and tried to release a commerical product. What I have found is you have about a 6 month window to design, code test, and release before you miss the window of opportunity. I was my own worse boss and worked 14 hour days, 7 days a week, for 7 months.
I've consulted and done the salary thing since and have seen a lot of companies flush millions of dollars into projects with nothing to show for it. All the same reasons you sited in your article.
I can imagine so.
Although, if I could code a really cool game (i.e., really cool to me)/get it to work/etc... I'd be happy enough with just that. But I can see where, when one is trying to make a living out of coding games and doesn't get very far..well, it'd be discouraging (as the article related). but then, I think i'd do just what he said he might do.. switch to a different source of income, and code for fun. that way, your work is appreciated more, by you, the OSS community, etc..
Insert mind here.
Sorry, but how many people downloaded Q3Arena? It's not quite available in my local bookstore yet, but there are 200+ servers full of people playing constantly.
FPS may not be my favorite type of game, but there will always be a spot on my hard drive for the best-looking, repsonsive, multiplayer FPS.
~ rt ~
yes, Halflife is so much better than quake 2. It really shows that ID is good at producing technology but lousy at making imaginative games. Quake 2 is REALLY BORING and Quake 3 is...more of the same. Quake 2 single player was so utterly devoid of excitement i can see why they are leaving it out of q3.
Juln
Yeah, that is true, but fostering a game for hate is such a bad idea! Try Director Webs t/index.html
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/director/dige
and search July for Pakistan
Hi listies,
I don't think this is too OT since you can make games with Director and devising and programming one are certainly considerations. Since I hang
around Shockrave a lot, hee hee, I have played a few stinkers.
The post about Vishnal's game got me thinking. I have to say I don't like the game, but I'm sure that someone out there has thought of an American equivalent of it somewhere - who knows - perhaps
Hatewatch would know.
I read somewhere once that game programming had to be one of the hardest
jobs there is. When I play old 2600 games on my PC, I wonder how I liked any of them in the first place, and I don't mean Custer's Revenge either! But then, it took an incredible amount of imagination to interpret the games - maybe my brother and I are the only ones who
thought the thief in Raiders of the Lost Ark was a total pervert with the way he came in his trenchcoat and "robbed" you.
I think Americans are pretty edgy about game violence right now. But you know, I live in a pre-dominantly East Indian neighbourhood. During a
provincial election, the PC candidate was Indian, the Liberal candidate was Pakistani. You wouldn't believe how many Liberal signs were defaced!
And I find that somewhat sad, that people can't leave their ill feelings behind when they come to a new country. The same thing happened on
Heritage Day a few yrs ago when Serbs and Croats started a fight at the festival. Now they place their tents on opposite sides of the grounds.
I myself always thought technology was supposed to be enlightening. But sadly, the technology of war is very frightning. Wars in the middle ages
were really great shoving matches, where most of the soldiers were drunk (not to mention accompanied by hordes of people). People talk of the dehumanizing factors of games, but ever since WW2, govts have been trying to find ways of dehumanizing people in order to kill. This, in
fact, extends to slaughterhouses, where people become an extension of a vast and impersonal killing process.
I like the idea of people finding other things to use instead of bullets. Like in Water Balloon drop, you throw eggs and tomatoes! And it
remains a fun game even though no one is ever killed.
Salon recently had a good article on why even violent games can fail (which should be handy for anyone): http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/06/21/game
Vishnal, I harbour no ill will, but one should always consider the audience of the list. I have noticed that there are mostly German, North
American, French and New Zealand/Australian people here. While you made a game with Lingo and Director, people cannot be expected to react
differently than what they did.
It would be similar if I made a shoot 'em up where beavers picked off eagles out of the sky. This wouldn't exactly make me popular with too
many people. Racial intolerance and hatred is not tolerated in most Western countries, and I think that such a game would even be illegal in
the US or Canada. When you deal with a global audience, all sensitivities must be taken into account.
I believe there are different arcade versions of the Battle of Midway (or is it 1945?) for American and Japanese markets. And it pleases me
that games are also marked with levels of violence, such as Pitfall, where one is required to kill animals.
You wanted to know if the game could be improved. Maybe this was meant as a technical question, but the shock might have been less if we knew
what the game was. I'm sure like myself, most thought it was a peace-solving game when they read the post. In North America, at the very least, such a game would be in very poor taste. We may not understand what is going on in India, and it is getting very little press here. While you might not find your game offensive, some people
certainly will.
It would be very hard for most people on this list to suggest any other improvement - they're shocked. What advice can they offer about
something that goes against their ideals? Maybe this wasn't the right forum to look for advice specific to your cause.
I hope this isn't too long, but I think, from the posts surrounding the game, it just goes to show how hard it is to design for games and to
give some thoughts for game designers, programmers and illustrators to think about. I'm not looking for flames or intend this to be flamebait
either. With the global nature of the Internet, the subject seemed appropriate.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of the the article, but it seemed pretty down-to-earth and straightforward.
What I can vouch for, is the quality of the two pieces of software he mentions (Music-X and FTA) - they were both outstanding programs that I would still use today, if I still had my Amiga. Hmmm, I wonder what happened to microillusions?
...Should be Oper-Sourced. They're not going to do anything with that code, why waste it?
.sig this pop I as Watch
+--
stack. the off
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
I spent three years with a game studio, and I haven't seen most of the complaints he gripes about. I think he's right about the industry, that very few development studios make it big, and that it's a constant struggle to survive until you've published one big title.
But i don't share his views on the development environment. Although we did work very hard (a small week was 60 hours), and that pay was crap compared to the corp I work for now, it was a blast working there. The coding team was in it for the code, not for the cash, so we were always pushing ourselves hard to impress everyone else. We'd discuss ideas, and argue them out, and of course play pretty hard on friday nights.
The best thing about the game community is that different departements weren't in competition with each other. You didn't have this air of supremacy that engineers seem to have over other departments, like QA or documentation.
I thought it was awesome. Some of the guys I worked with are now with EA or Activision, and they seem to have as much fun their as they did with our old outfit.
BH
Now, compare that to, say, the home apps industry. Really, you've got only a handful of companies offering similar products, and many times only one (MickeySquish) gets marketed to any degree, and other apps companies without the marketing clout to make themselves heard don't invest in similar apps. Of course, there are the other companies (i.e., StarDivision), but the investment in time and effort in these products is likely to be much less--I mean, which seems more difficult, coding up a matrix transformation algorithm to adjust the game player's view, or writing up a "Search and Replace" function for a system with so much computing power that the user isn't likely to note the time difference between different search algorithms? Plus, they usually cost the consumers more money.
This all seems rather obvious to me. I may be mistaken in the depth of programming issues in the apps industry, and I'm certain the time and effort to develop "Slingo" were relatively low. (By the way, I highly suggest finding a review of this game to marvel at the idiocy. It's single player Bingo with pretty graphics.) However, all the impressions of the gaming industry I've EVER read or heard of has portrayed it in a favorable light; creative, fun and rewarding, even if it is somewhat low-paying. So, as far as I can see, the author raised a perfectly valid, well-stated point. I don't see how he needs to find the reason why.
Ah, the naivity of the young. Sorry, but he's right. In fact, I would have to say that your reply was much more loaded with "illogical banter and emotional nonsense". You seem to be pretty defensive about this.
Wow, this sounds like a very beautiful setup you have going.
Thank you for sharing.
I'd like to know how it is that you all found each other and decided to work together.
Lion Kimbro: http://home.sprynet.com/~snowlion/
I agree with the author.
... I don't know what to call them... It takes time to learn how to be a full-time software developer that writes good code. I have been working at it for 2 years. I still see millions of ways in which my code could be better, I am still puzzling out about design strategies. But, I know a lot more than what I knew two years ago. So, I think that there is still a degree of social merit in failed projects, because it allows us to learn more.
This is my experience working on a computer game for 2 years and having it nuked, no-where near done. We must have gone through 3 iterations of redesign, and a million mis-steps.
After the game development was over, I was moved to working with Web-DB projects. I found these to be every bit as interesting, and quite exciting at times as well. (Special thanks go out to Philip Greenspun, www.photo.net, for making my Bible: Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing.) It also feels a lot better to know that I am working on something that is actually usefull to people, and is not just going to be another shovel-ware game on the shelf.
I cannot say that the time spent on the game was not without merit, however. I *DID* get to see first hand how various projects fail. Why thinking long term is important. I got through a number of
One of my favorite things about this authors post is that he said that he decided to work on games in his off time. I have found myself doing the same, and it *IS* a lot more fun. It is far more rewarding.
Take Care,
Lion
Lion Kimbro: http://home.sprynet.com/~snowlion/
that's simply amazing... but really the only game projects I am interested in right now are Black + White, Civ 3, and Quake 3.
All of these seem to be developed by teams of people that are also in allmost full control of their companies. They are all on the "it's done when it's done" schedule. And they are all using a type of stealth marketing, using their own good reputations and word of mouth to hype their products.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Actually, the gaming industry is bigger than Hollywood in terms of revenues. This includes consoles+PC games - but overall, the gaming industry is bigger.
The gaming business in 1997 was worth $5.1 billion (of which $3.3 billion was console based).
L.
In case you haven't noticed, Alpha Centauri is yet another cookie-cutter game (although a fun one!). Games where you "build your civilization" and "discover new technologies" are a dime a dozen - MOO/MOO2, Outpost, Civilization(1,2), Age of Empires, Lightspeed ; the list goes on.
There are only a few genres - FPS, build-a-civilization, overhead-action (ala Diablo), fighting games, and sports games. And almost universally, all the games within each genre resemble each other to a disturbing degree. New games just mean more blinky lights and neat-o sound effects.
--- A
-- Scream, Dracula, Scream!
>Having worked with >>>Talon a few years ago, I thought I would give my thoughts on his piece.
Doh! Shows what I get for bothering to spellcheck!
Having worked with Talon a few years ago, I thought I would give my thoughts on his piece.
:)
I've been making computer games professionally as software engineer for about six years now. Talin was at the small first company I worked for. I really miss the atmosphere of that little group of people. Although, I've come to appreciate the bigger impersonal and wealthier companies.
I should say first that I'm commenting more from the console perspective than the home computer market, that is where my most recent work has focused.
>Failed products and harsh economics aren't the only reason why
> the games industry has become a miserable place.
I would have to disagree with this assertion. I would agree that there are many game industry people I know how express frustration with the whole industry and their jobs/situation. However, they usually add that compared to digging a ditch maybe things aren't really that bad. I don't really see people getting lower pay than other industries - but I'm not that familiar with other sectors of the computer industry. Almost all game programmers I know who have been in the industry more than a year make a comfortable to very comfortable living.
>It loves to exploit 19 year old programmers who work 10-12
> hours a day, get paid less than the standard wage for
>programmers in other industries,
I believe that this is less a problem with the game industry itself than the 19 year olds. From reading some of the posts here and from personal experience, the games industry is considered, rightly or wrongly, cool to work for. So economical speaking, that 19 year old is trading some salary for the perceived coolness of the job. There are lots and lots of people out there sending their resumes to companies saying that they have no experience but they really want to work on games. I don't think many other computer industries have anything similar. The closest I can think of would be Hollywood and new actors who will do anything just to get their first part. I believe that once most junior games programmers get their first title under their belt and/or have their first lunch with an experienced game programmer and "you're making how much!?!" they wise up.
>I should also mention that the games industry has little respect for experience
I would disagree one this point. The game industry values experience just as much as any other industry. However, the value of experience is weighed heavily towards ones most recent work or platform. One rarely hears mention of the number of years a person has been in the industry - almost always a person is described as a 'playstation person' or we need to get someone with N64 experience/title. The number of years will get one more pay or possibly more managerial responsibilities.
I don't necessarily agree with this valuation of experience - but I would say it is the norm in my experience.
>The whole
> process by which games are budgeted and scheduled, for example,
> is something that I find amazing that anyone could take
>seriously.
I believe this comes from two reasons. First, I believe that at some point in the past few years the average game's natural(not scheduled) development time has gone over year. This is of course because of their increasing complexity. With a so many games trying to hit Christmas, this creates an endless cycle of projects missing Christmas and at the same time putting the next project behind before it has even started.
You hear a LOT of conversations of this sort:
"We need to make Christmas"
"There is no way we can make Christmas"
"You don't understand, we really need to make Christmas"
"You don't understand, there is NO way we can make Christmas"
"You don't understand, we REALLY need to make Christmas"
"You don't understand, there is NO FUCKING way we can make Christmas"
...
Second, because the projects are getting bigger, the amount of money involved in a project is getting into the tens of millions. Scheduling in the game industry reminds me of a plane trip to China a few years ago. I REALLY don't like to fly, and have no plans of ever flying again. While sitting in my chair waiting for the plane to crash into the Pacific, I would shake my knees constantly. I knew that it wasn't going to keep the plane in the air but I still did it. I believe that game company management has a similar reaction with schedules. They know down deep that they aren't going make a project ship on time, but they at least get the weekly feeling of being on top of the situation. I believe that much of the game industry upper management spends a lot of time just like me shaking my legs over the Pacific.
>Alternatively, I think I'd enjoy just develop games as a hobby,
>I've
> found that being an amateur game creator is more emotionally
> rewarding than being a After all, I'm in this for the fun,
>and for the
> chance to express myself creatively.
I find myself working on my own at home doing exactly this partially out of frustration with having to work with other who aren't as brilliant as myself
But seriously, there is nothing stopping companies from coming out with small, creative one person projects. Of course, I doubt that they would sell much. The days of one person doing an entire project - graphics, sound, ai, etc. are over, unless a large leap in the productivity of development tools comes about.
The good old days of games with bad programmer grammar, spelling, and art seem to be gone for good. I miss them, but there's always MAME and my old computers and console systems.
Todd Stewart
macntodd@pacbell.net
todd.stewart@3do.com
Put simply, because they drive the games market! FPS games are all about hardware the latest, most flashy graphics, etc. It is the triumph, as usual, of style over substance. Everyone likes to show off (and its not just 14 year olds). You are supposed to be entranced with the flashy graphics, not with the game play.
Personally, FPS games bore the hell out of me. Why? Because I have fast reflexes and get bored very easily. Unfortunately, there are few games out there these days that engage the mind as well as challenge the reflexes. I hope that this will change eventually (though I'm not holding my breath) and we can get past the latest, greatest FPS knockoff. . .
Do you really think that the games market is bigger than the movie/television market? I don't think so!! A hell of a lot more people watch TV and go to movies that have computers. Not to mention the fact that not all computer users are gamers.
The gaming industry is a small fart by comparison to Hollywood.
Could always pull a Jerry McGuire... got the letter done already
You are assuming that if you quizzed everyone what the ideal game was, they would say 'First person shooters please!". Face facts: not all games are snapped up by eager young pups saying "whoah! this is the game ive always wanted...", a lot of games are shifted just because they are everywhere, over-marketed and instantly avaialble. You can buy Half life in my local book store, but you cant get Alpha centauri there, so your casual gamer (or more likely - someone buying a present for a gamer) will go with the latest bland FPS.
Remember that video games started off with pong and space invaders, the first person shooter was itself an innovation, a risky prospect if everyone was a slave to market forces as you recommend..
Long live the PC, innovation, and small development companies. I certainly dont want to stick with the same half dozen game genres we have for the next 50 years...
Cliffski
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I'm also an "older" programmer (40) who spent far too many years in the game industry. My experience mirrors closely this essay. The hours were too long, the pay too little, and job stability was nonexistent.
I would work 12 hour days, six days a week. They wanted me to work longer and seven days a week, but I refused. I needed a little time to sleep and wash my clothes! There is something wrong in an industry when it is not considered unusual that you keep a sleeping bag and several changes of clothes under your desk!
These conditions were the result of the competitive nature of the business. Most games were "outsourced" to small shops by the big names. The only way you could get a contract was by under bidding the other guys in both cost and time. This meant the small shop could not afford to hire enough programmers and artists to do the job properly, resulting in the long hours and a hastily shipped (incomplete) product.
Now I work on software for finance managers (stock brokers, etc.). I work normal hours, have great benefits, and don't worry about losing my job because the project was killed.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I think we need to make the distinction of gaming companies between game developer and publisher.
;-) Publishers also need to market good games. i.e. Heretic II was a great game, yet marketing seems to lacking.
Can the game developer survive if their current work title and the next one flops? Not immediate financial trouble, but definately in the future.
I think game developers and publishers are both partly to blame. Good marketing can't save a bad game (allthough maybe we need to take lessons from Micro$oft on selling Win95
Games ARE a huge risk, no doubt about that. Spend 2 years and take a shot hopeing that your game is in the top 10. If those odds sound bad, it is because they are. Not to discourage any of the younger talent from entering the industry, but watch your health, and don't get burnt out !
If the game developer where you work doesnt provide a fun environment, and money each quarter is the driving force *cough EA cough (no offense intended to EA employees)*, maybe its time to find another game developer to work for?
I think we do allready have a mass exodus to other game developers.
How many programmes stay with the game developer after the game ships?
How many artists stay with the same company once a project is over?
How many game developers over 30 are still in the industry?
I find this article very topical for me, personally... I have now been in the game industry for about a year and a half. Got one B title under my belt and am now working on a AAA title. The ups and downs are amazing... Somedays the job is great, other days I want to go weep in the corner.
:^)
Lately, though, it's been dawning on me that my friends, my peers, are off making more money, getting more "vertical" responsibility (ie leadership roles), working in healthier environments, learning more, etc...
So, I personally have been debating quitting, and returning to "normal" software development (I worked in that industry for about a year after school, before my games job.)
The money is a real sticking point with me, simply because I took a HUGE paycut to start working at the game company (about 20%, nevermind massive loss of perks from my previous job), and I have recently seen HIGHLY suspicious things, like level designers (people w/o college degrees) getting hired for what I'm currently getting paid, after TWO raises!! On my current project, I would classify my responsibility as "enormous", so, needless to say, I'm feeling a bit... exploited.
My problem is, I'm afraid that nothing out there is going to be as fun as games. The job before this, which was vaguely e-commerce related, but really more of an intranet application, just bored me to death. I know there has to be happy median somewhere.
I know this is... naughty... but I would be interested to hear what the other game engineers who have sounded off on this thread are making, because I honestly have no idea what a fair wage for an engineer in this industry is... which is pretty bad, considering I'm employed in it.
Oh yeah, if you know of any cool job openings in the greater Seattle metropolitan area, send me an email
I'll second what was already said in the article. The game industry isn't for the weak or timid. I just recently exited from the game arena myself for some of the same reasons. I didn't leave the company because of "The Man" was putting us down (The Man was actually good to us, having sold over 2 million copies of our game.) but rather over the lifestyle that I found myself having.
The game industry thrives and breathes on young, single workers right out of school or art institutes and uses them as indentured servants more or less. Although I was young, I was married and had a brand new baby. I couldn't put in the 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week that the job requires. And I wasn't the only married guy at the company with his wife calling up in tears because she hadn't seen her husband in two weeks. I'm almost convinced that if you want to truly enjoy the industry, you have to accept the fact that you won't have much of a social life outside of games.
Was it fun? Gosh, yes. It's almost like a drug working in the game industry. You get to hang out with people with exactly the same interests, work with some of the hottest technology and play games when you're not under a deadline... but for me it wasn't worth missing out on family and having a *LIFE*.
Working in the game industry isn't for everyone. If you want to work in the field, be prepared for what awaits you. It's very much like a manic depresive. There are some real highs and terrible lows. You don't get paid very well and job stability is iffy at times. But there is that moment when you go to the software store and see someone pick up your game and head to the cash register.
For those guys over thirty who can stick it out being married and putting up with all the stress working on games... my hat's off to you.
>...so, it shifted to the brainless managers.
I wish we could get rid of brainless managers and replace them with managers who new something. I worked for a Computer Based Training (CBT) company and we did animations and stuff. I would have gotten burnt out very quickly if it wasn't for the fact that my manager had a brain!
jmccay
_____________________________________
Assume ignorance until otherwise...
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
I loved that game! IMHO it was one of the very best games for the Amiga. I spend many an hour walking around the world, staggering from hunger, dodging Wraiths. :)
:)
You should be proud of yourself!
There is a good chance that I will be getting in the gaming industry very soon, and comments like yours worry me. I see the truth in it and I hope I have a better experience. Its not just game companies, a friend of mine had VERY simular things happen to him when he was doing some Java development. I also figure, what the hey, it will be an interesting ride in any case. I can always get a job somewhere else if I can't stand it...
Ribo
I wear pants.
Whenever I see a games programmer, I want to bow deeply and shout "I am not worthy!" with a look of awe.
But I understand, if games types are the film stars of our industry, then it's quite logical that their work scenario should be comparable to hollywood.
And from that it follows that there should be an underground/alternative/independent game industry, with it's own distribution channels and rules and problems.
So the question is: does it exist? then where is it? Does it not? Then it's time to make it! Games are so immersive these days. Developers deserve to have the choice to be completely creative, arty farty, cliquey or in general to share the traits of underground film makers!
The youngest guy in my Action Quake clan is 30 and most of us work in the high tech industry; I would say our gross income is close to a million a year (for 10 of us). Though I do agree that many of the people that we play are teenagers many of the better and more highly respected players, in the AQ2 community, are in the their late 20's early 30's (and we have all kinds of fun slapping around these punks that think they are l33t)
LRJ
but thats life anywhere, not just the games industry
sigh
-I go to Rice, so figure out my email address
Computer games push the envelope of pc hardware...thankfully. Unfortunately, the industry is as the author of this article states, somewhat flawed. However, i still see hope in the industry as being viable: the recent rise of Valve from nothing to creators of the most immersive FPS i've played , Half Life, bears testament to the fact that quality still exists in this industry. Id is a fine example of an excellent game company that delivers. But sometimes, a botched game is more of the fault of the "suits" rather than the talented individuals that worked on it.
forgive my mindless ramblings.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
Finally, I see someone else with the same experience. I used to run a games publishing house. We did our own development and some really cool technologies. The company did not survive the early 90's when they refused to pay the chain computer dealers Spiffs for every copy sold PLUS pay for the shelf space. On top of that, we had to discount the product.
The gaming industry is in for a rude awakening soon. I just want to be around to see it.
- We dream of the stars. Now let us return to them.
It takes a lot to be successful in the game industry. There are a lot of things to worry about when writing a game. Not only does the game itself have to be a good product (and I find many today aren't), it has to be distributed well. If a game is a good game, but not distributed correctly, it won't sell enough copies to be profitable, and if it just isn't a good game, it (hopefully) won't sell either.
It takes a lot just to make a game in the first place: you first have to have an initial game idea, and then you have to spend lots of time coding it, drawing the graphics, writing the music and doing the sound effects.
It takes a few years of hard work at least, to make it in the games industry. I find a lot of people today who want to get into the game industry don't know what it takes. It's not all fun and games (no pun intended). It takes a lot of perseverence, talent, patience, and a little bit of luck to make it in the games industry. Not everybody can be a game developer, because if you don't have these traits, you can't be.
You can't get discouraged - sometimes being successful means starting over after a few years of hard work. Game development is a big risk, and the rewards of success can be good, but most underestimate the "risk", and don't use the right strategies to lessen that risk. If more people knew what it took, I don't think we'd have so many teenagers thinking that working in the game industry is all fun. I believe that most new game companies fail because they don't have what the pesrseverence and the courage for taking risks it takes to succeed, as well as possibly because they're being too ambitious at first and trying to make games they are incapable of making, or making games for the money instead of the fun (this doesn't mean that you can't try to make a little profit off your game, just try to concentrate on the "fun" part the most.) Don't try to make Quake if you don't like FPSes - it'll only turn out to be a bad game. I also find that too many game developers don't thoroughly plan out their games - it's worth it in the long run, and gives you a better time estimate of the project. It pays to plan ahead.
There are some game companies that succeed, but many, many more that fail, for these reasons and more. So, don't make a game and expect to get rich off of it right away - you'll only fail. If you do everything right, you just might win out in the end. I've seen everything in this article before, so it's not news to me. The game industry can certainly be miserable, but it can still also be fun if you do it right. (Not many people in the game industry today do.)
To be a successful game developer, you really have to make the most of yourself.
This is a world of compensations, and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. -A. Lincoln
I loved Dungeon Master. I never really wanted to get into the DM2: Legend of Skull Keep, though. It looked kind of dippy. Actually, I think the question to ask, though, is what happened to FTL in general? They did release a better version of DM later for the Amiga (with multiple language support, plus it runs on my A1200 without having to degrade the OS), but that's the last I'd seen of them.
Eh, that is partly true. But also the movies were a form of escape during the Depression. Theaters were so cheap then, that it was worth walking into one and immersing yourself in a fantasy rather than walking around hungry singing "Brother Can You Spare A Dime."
-----------------
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Reading this article and seeing the comments has made me sad. This is because I was raised as an avid game player, and hope to one day start game developing myself. But I like to look as game developing as an art, and this is where many people differ in opinion.
Let me make this comparison to the film industry: In the beginning of the century, film was new, exciting, and had much to be discovered in it. There were many entertaining movies that the wealthy watched, but then certain people started discovering new methods - ways to make a film more expressive. Pioneers like D.W. Griffith and John Ford began to make films that would pave the way for those that would follow. This is like the beginning of the gaming industry - consider this the Pongs and the other low graphic (but still fun) titles. Then, up until the late 30's, the industry was unchecked and was based on technology. What I mean is the discovery of color and sound was the basis of many bad movies (color a little later). But there were classics then, yes. Movies with real quality. Sure, they were silent but Chaplain and Buster Keaton made real good movies. I like to compare this to the early text based games. Some of these are classic and are still enjoyable to play. Yes, they are not visual games but they are quality.
In the 40's a revolution occurred. Now that we were past the wonder of sound and color, people started making even more creative films. Citizen Kane is the most notable. But there was another problem. Filmmaking at this point was impossible for anyone but those within HUGE studios. Well, doesn't this sound like the big console boom in the 80's? First Atari and then Nintendo. These were the "studios" but damn did they make some good games. Atari had Pac Man and more, but even better, Nintendo created Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Final Fantasy - games that today I still like to play and have artistic merit. But where was the computer industry in this? They were still rather small, as the Microsoft revolution was just over the corner. Sierra made decent games but they were certaintly flawed.
In film, the big boom happened. Sure, more people saw films in the 30s than they do now (cause of the depression) but in the 60s and 70s and especially the 80s (cause of two people - Lucas and Spielburg). Film had become mainstream - action films were the norm now, not musicals and comedies. But what happened to those independents who wanted to make an artistic film? Well, they got a little lucky. One, some studios now look exactly for those types (Miramax, etc). Two, some universities allow you to use their equipment. And three, 16mm is rather cheaper than 35mm, and digital video is just around the corner in garnering popularity. So these movies still exist, they are just a little harder to find. Also, every once in awhile a studio makes a good movie themselves. The video game industry isn't so lucky.
They have made this same transition. Started by things like Playstation, Doom, Quake, Unreal, Tomb Raider, etc. The gaming industry now appeals to the mainstream shoot em ups and repetitive games. YES I know that the technology is better each time, that there is advanced multiplayer, etc. but c'mon these games depend on your same desire to run around and shoot people you know in their digital forms. But unfortunately, as the article above mentions, it's not so easy for an independent gamer to make their own creative feats. There is little room for Coppola's in the gaming industry. So most games suck or are repetitive. There are some good "studio" games - Civilization, Blizzard games - and on the console Final FAntasy games, Zelda again, etc. But if you are creative, there is little room for you.
As I say, game developing should be an art. Good games should be like good literature and good films (I don't mean inaccessible/em). So how can this happen? When game engines are easily reproduced and used? I don't know. BUt I know one thing - games on the market mostly suck (or at least those that one sees right when you walk into the store) and finding the good ones are hard. What's the solution?
-----------------
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Wait, you mean you think that this isn't an accurate description of the gaming industry? Ok... here we go...
The gaming industry is part of the entertainment industry, theatre, arts, etc...Your company lives and dies by its patrons, who for the most part (in this case) are the stereotypical teenage boy. Try and please a 5th grader sometime (like say with a clown for birthday party, etc) and you'll find what a hard audience is. If it's in today, by the time you put it to press it will be old hat, no longer dope, homey won't play that, or whatever the posh thing to say is.
These kids think the video game market is cool because they think of the good games, not the bad ones...People flock to the industry and want to make games like Quak(insert "e" here), C&C, etc...
Entry Level programmers are not thinking "Sticky Bear Math", or "Billy Bob's F9829 Flying Fighting ACE!" (the last one is made up). They accept those kinds of jobs as their "way in" and if their succeed they will get picked up by Id, or Ig, or Ug, or whoever. But as stated, the fickle audience usually rejects. Do this once or twice, and you see if you like your job. See if anyone likes their job...see if you wouldn't want to jump out as fast as you can...
You say you want a revolution?
I really doubt that this is the prevailing attitude in the industry. Yes, a lot of gaming companies are in a lot of financial trouble, but I'd shift most of the blame to the companies themselves, not their distributors. Look at Ion Storm, for example.
If this *were* the prevailing attitude, I'd think you'd see a mass exodus from the industry.
-witz
I wish more people felt this way . . . The gaming industry is a race for the most glitzy graphics, the fastest code, the most realistic sound . . . Unfortunately, true innovations in this albeit volatile area are entirely seperate from the code, the graphics, and the sound. True innovations, the ones that you and I enjoy, are concepts.
I hate conservatives and I hate liberals, but most of all,
I HATE extremists! Kill them all!
-Terov
---
All your old jokes are belong to sigs.
I feel that, while modern technology can enhance and improve games, many games like Quake, etc., use it to make the game. I suppose this was inevitable as the same has occured with many things--multimedia 'books' and learning materials have convinced many school boards that the "wave of the future" is here, unfortunately, all that most of this multimedia 'learning material' did was replace some good textbooks (and bad teachers) with the same glitz that's eating the gaming industry alive.
My sincere hope is that we as gamers will lend our ears to games that may seem unorthodox, odd, and downright insane. I realize that this is unlikely, but you know, there are INTELLIGENT gamers out there. I even happen to believe that they (we, if you count me as being intelligent) are the majority, if the less boistrous fraction. The general attitude on this topic seems somewhat contrastful to the one that was upheld when the post was made about the media conducting a survey to see if gamers actually had lives.
To tie this all together, we need to support originality and creativity--to prove to the industry that it's the major selling point. I honestly believe that if we can achieve that goal, the managers will take a few steps back and let the true professionals handle things.
I hate conservatives and I hate liberals, but most of all,
I HATE extremists! Kill them all!
-Terov
---
All your old jokes are belong to sigs.
Then companies throw co-op/mdf money at the problem, followed by price protection, followed by repackaging as "bargain" software. Ugghhhhhhh. A few large hits keep the whole business alive - barely.
One of the best selling entertainment titles of all time: Myst, would have disappeared from the current game market a few short weeks after its release, because it didn't sell off the shelves immediately. And yet, what has the industry at large been able to do to bring new consumers to the market?
In my experience marketing people are disdained, and seen as dummies. Marketing is not seen by developers as being intrinsic to the business of making their games, with the possible exception of the frequent demand that marketing pay for the hiring of the project manager's room mate as a web developer, so that the pm can throw his dev journal up on the website once and a while. Oh yeah, and don't forget that absolutely gripping "Developers Cam" that points at an empty chair next to the coke machine. I don't know about you, but nothing works better on me as a consumer than visual proof that a large percentage of the development staff obviously doesn't bathe regularly, as evidenced by the candid developer at work snapshots on the website!
What a surprise then, when a game is released and not "properly marketed" thus languishing in the channel.
For example, consider the sad story of Grand Prix Legends. GPL features an amazing physics engine and detailed simulation. Unfortunately, unless you have actually been a GPL developer, or you have driven a GPL car professionally, you probably can't make it around the track once without crashing.
Marketing advised that "you know guys, a training/beginners setup would make this game sell a lot better." No such trainer was included. Hindsight is certainly 20/20, but GPL is both a beautiful simulation product and a financial disaster as of this moment.
Consider the game company with a burned-out expensive development staff. An average game is a multi-million dollar investment just to bring it to market, nevermind the marketing costs. The chances of that game making its investment back are 1-20 against. Who in their right mind would invest their own money in such a thing?
These economic realities now tend to trickle down to developers in the form of management request like:
When Talin states he believes the only project he would find acceptable is one with no time table, I have to laugh. The discipline and devotion to planning and timetables that is described in the software engineering books he claims to subscribe to, certainly don't teach you to start coding, and finish when its done.
Face the facts: game development is a young man's pursuit. Note I stated man, and not woman. We all know that women are too rational to involve themselves in developing idiotic juvenile male teen product.
There is tremendous financial risk for the backers, and no surprise, when something actually makes money, since they payed for the development and assumed all the risk, they tend to be stingy when it comes to sharing the profits.
I don't know so much about this. We did have fun games back then, but a lot of them also were very limited in their scope, to say the least. A game like Asteroids is a classic, don't get me wrong, but it didn't have a whole lot of variety to it.
I'm also not saying that games like that don't have their place anymore...Tetris is about as classic an example that you can find of a game that is super-simple in execution, but is still a great game that you will have a hard time getting tired of.
However, and while I'll probably get flamed for this, one can't deny that games like Curse of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Zelda for the N64, Metal Gear Solid, etc etc are all great games. While something like Zelda may not have been created by one person and one person alone, that doesn't mean that Miyamoto's vision isn't what drove the creation of that game. Most of the greats still come from the ideas of one person...just having a team makes it a bit easier to code everything than having to do it all yourself.
Course, I do agree with the article...the game industry is hurting, and I'm glad I'm working for an e-commerce site as opposed to the game company downstairs.
Tom Servo
I'm relatively new to the industry but already I've been fortunate to produce a hit game and at the same time, see first hand many of the things this article mentions. The gaming industry can certainly stand to be one of the most unfun environments if you let things get to you. If you're a very creative, passionate, driven person, you won't be happy at a company that won't allow you to contribute your ideas.
I believe that after the initial excitement of getting into the industry, the real journey of finding a company where you'll be happy becomes the real goal.
Overall, the article describes many things that are probably not unique to just the gaming industry although this may seem so due to the higher profile of these companies.
Howdy Talin et al,
I just wanted to add my two-cents worth. My career in the games biz goes back to 1983, the days when Electronic Arts ran ads that said "Can a computer game make you cry?"
Back then, the industry was filled with visionaries and dreamers, people who saw the potential of a new medium, and wanted to explore its artistic possibilities. And I have to say, you were one of the finest artists I ever met in this medium.
But now it's a Business. A Big Business, but an inherently unstable one, where lots of people pour money in, and only a lucky handful get money out.
It combines ALL of the risk factors of Hollywood with all of the risk factors of Silicon Valley. Except that the two risk factors multiply each other in a way that is inherently unpredictable and unmanageable. It makes the people who are risking their money crazy. They then pressure the creators, making them crazy as well. And the insanity feeds on itself.
But I got out of the industry for another reason. I left because there seemed no purpose to it any longer. The greatest aspiration most of the Game Industry has is not to enlighten, inspire, educate, or even truly entertain. It's to addict.
What is the greatest "compliment" most game designers get? It's "Man, you would not believe the hours I wasted on your game." Or "I could not stop playing it. My wife threatened to leave me."
And frankly, I just thought there were better things to do with my life than creating high-tech addictions.
Sign me,
Jeff Johannigman
Retired Computer Game Producer
(Producer on "Master of Orion", "This Means War!", "Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire", and about 30-some other games).
There are a few reasons that the market is flooded with fps's : * Less risk than other types of games. The complexity of interaction in a fps's tends to be much less than other types of games, thus it requires less time programming and less risk of missing a goal. The fact that fps's are the only games where engines are routinely used by many different companies would seem to indicate a primary motivation is low risk. * Pathetic designers. Many designers in the industry have very little experience. Some are testers, some used to write for magazines, and some really have no connection other than having walked in from the street. Many people think they have great ideas for games, but they are usually wrong. Synthesis is a much more difficult activity than analysis. Since most haven't adequately analyzed the subject, there is very little chance of developing a good product. * The marketing department. Marketers don't play games. They only know 2 things: TRST market breakdowns and focus group testing. Innovative games rarely get greenlighted because you can't peg a revolutionary game into an existing genre; therefore, you are chasing a segment with 0% market share. Since the marketer cannot evaluate the true merits of the title, it will never pass pcm, get the funding, and get developed. The last two reasons also account for crap games in general, not just fps's.
I think what Talin is experiencing is a standard feeling in the world. I've been a software developer for roughly 3 years now and I haven't been anywhere near developing for a games company except what little I can do in my free time. The experiences he has are everwhere, from Ameritech to Royal Carribean Cruises to small internet companies (all of which I've worked for).
This is the way the world works and I can only surmise that he is finally becoming disenfranchised with it at his age of 41. My father was a chemist and expressed the -exact- same sentiments about his industry, and the whole thing about the industry being aimed at the youth, well that is also how the world works.
The young come in and conquer the old, pushing them back and doing things differently until they too get burnt out and disillusioned. It is the endless cycle of life unfortunatly.
So what to do? Change the world you live in. Work for what you want to work for, and not the people you dislike. I'm only 25 and I already know I don't want to work in a corporate situation anymore, and I don't want to work for anyone else for much longer either. At some point I will start my own company because it is the only way I can be truly happy. Until I can do that, I'm going to continue to deal with other people's crap because that is how I get my paycheck.
Oh, and I'm sure he will get burnt out on e-commerce if he stays there for too longer too.
=I am Jack's general protection fault=
I'm afraid that I am going to have to agree with this editorial. I got into the computer gaming industry at around age 16 and immediately became involved with two excellent, well funded projects. However, after both projects failed due to legal and financial problems just as they were beginning to gain popularity, it was enough to make me go searching for a slightly more stable industry.
I've given this problem a lot of though since then and I believe what the gaming industry really needs is a common framework that games can be "plugged" into. The main problem with games is that in addition to developing the game concept, each company needs to rearchitect the entire way that the game works. We really need to transform the entire computer game industry into "one worldwide Internet game" that various themes, plots, graphics, designs, and interfaces can be "plugged into." Essentially, we need a specification that provides a common protocol (through CORBA?) for all games to interact and share their code.
I do not have the time, nor the knowledge, to implement this idea fully. However, if someone out there wants to take up this challenge, I would love to be a part of it.
I agree with everything you've written here but...whenever I get pissed off about my job (artist) I think about all the abysmal turgid work I could be doing, all the millions of useless terrible worthless low paid crap there is in the world. Then I think how easy I have it (yes I do the three weekends on one weekend off, no overtime pay, absurdly low vacation time, barely any bonus thing, like we all do...). I could be sitting in an office wearing a suit and tie and be in the INSURANCE industry or the CATERING industry or SALES or something equally brain numbing. Instead I get to draw and paint and animate and model and I get paid a lot of cash to do it.
My one complaint is the lack of females in the industry.
Come on birds, watch a load of sci fi and action movies and get your heads around what people want, and you'll be working in games.
Cheers
The Geffel
This article is powerful stuff. It's interesting to consider the implications. :) at any rate, simply _insisting_ that the world is filled with opportunity does not make it be true. In some places there is opportunity. In others there is not. And many of these exploited game programmers will develop physical ailments such as ulcers which are life threatening and _not_ things that one automatically gets by being poor. ;) :) and won't wait until I can release on all platforms to release something. ;) ;)
Firstly. I'm incredibly reminded of the music industry. This is not a compliment. The music industry is incredibly exploitative- ask a Steve Albini, ask an insider, ask an indie player of some sort. It's really quite sick and horrible.
In this light, the kids yelling 'Whiner!' are worthy of contempt- they've bought into the fantasy, but I think none of them are actually living the reality. I'm not living that reality either, but I retain a fascination with the stories of those who are
My own choice? I'm setting out to write free software (i.e. GPL), and expect not to be able to make any money with it- so I have to be devious. I and some fellow techies have founded a web hosting service for nonprofits, we are _becoming_ a nonprofit, and we are setting out to offer ISP services. If we can do that and lose money doing great things, we can compete for grants effectively- and our job descriptions specifically cite 'writing software for nonprofits and people in general' without getting very specific as to _what_ software this would be...
If we can have an ISP, then we will be able to release games that use a game server, and that's the plan. I'm thinking in terms of rather low bandwidth- for instance, I've mocked up an interface for an oil supertanker game- simple raycasting view from the helm, but the _depth_ of the game would be much more intense, and one vital part of it is that you'd be setting out on tanker journeys in real time, and your tanker would be steaming away unattended while you slept or tuned out- you'd go on line and fire up the client to control the ship, but it continues to exist without you (possibly running into other tankers if you ignore it). Kind of like tamagotchis only several billion times heavier and filled with oil
There's a whole level of detail in just the oil pipe routing and tank filling alone- this would be pretty nearly a hardcore sim.
There's also a space-based concept I'm putting a lot of work into, that's on a scale way beyond anything anyone's currently doing or contemplating, because it's based on emergent detail rather than the designer playing god and specifying everything accurately.
The common factor here is this: I gotta make these work _first_. I have every intention of releasing all source as GPL and trying to entice Linux ports of it all (and working hard to help that to happen) but I don't believe for a second it'll happen unless there's already a playable game there, so the initial phase has to be 'produce something that plays' no matter how long it takes. It's extremely likely that these will be coming out on the Mac first. That doesn't mean there's no Linux interest, it means I can't program Linux yet
I do have a sample or two of the space engine, at least. What you're seeing in the first one is the universe, which contains over ten million discrete stars (to be exact, 10,884,297). In this picture, every fully white pixel represents 255 stars or more, in an orthographic projection. Every star appears at a specific 32 bit by 32 bit by 32 bit location. The total data file that generates all this is sixteen megs... In the second picture you see a single slice through the universe, one sector deep, which shows the type of aliasing the algorithms produce. This engine is geared for speed of lookup, and the full map drawing program plotted the positions of 10,884,297 stars in about four hours on a 200Mhz 604 using a terribly unoptimised OOP basic (this, despite the fact that the engine is intentionally set up to make maximum use of bitshifts and rapid divides and multiplies, and also optimises the use of a PowerPC 'branch if equal' loop terminator)...
Again- this isn't going to make me any money (and God knows how many people even bothered to follow the link and read my whole, typically-long diatribe). However, it _will_ make a deeper sort of game possible, on lots of levels- I've studied the dynamics of many online multiplayer games (I'm talking Warbirds here, not quake deathmatches- _large_ scale stuff), and am also ready to extend other areas (such as ship automated systems) into mostly uncharted areas, i.e. only RoboWar has done what I'm suggesting, and even that is a very different flavor- I've been designing a special set of opcodes for player assembly language programming for computer aided ship handling- assuming computer cores that run at about 60Hz- again, yes I know I could have one running much faster, but I'm planning on having _thousands_ all running in one large-scale engagement. On having superbattleships built by the cooperation of dozens of players who must get together and arrange duty rosters in order to be able to run the huge beast effectively.... there are really interesting issues involving gameplay and how to get people working together to wipe out others (instead of just trying to go and directly wipe out others)
You'll be hearing about this- and it'll see Linux- but it won't make me money, and it won't ever be mainstream. So much the worse for the mainstream
Oh geeze.. This is almost too foolish bother with... The lottery is based on chance. Pure Chance. Killer games are based on quality, marketing, and consumer needs
But in a complex system, evaluating this isn't easy; moreover, the people in position to do this evaluating aren't necessarily competent at doing so, and may have ulterior motives (getting a bigger budget) that interfere with making the smart decisions. If everyone did competently analyze the situation with full knowledge and understanding, then there would be no lousy games or games that never ship at all. Clearly, given that there are plenty of games in those two categories, there are plenty of people with access to funds who aren't making the smart decisions, and are giving the industry a bad name.
I personally was part of a development team that lost lots of money for Revell...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I'd like to see the age differences between the people who automatically say "So get another job asshole" and the people with more supportive responses to this guy. The fact is he's written some really nice stuff - most of us would be really happy to do anything close in our careers. I have Music X myself, and it's a great package. To those of you with no sympathy I say go ahead, move into management now, because if you stay a programmer you will surely feel the same one day.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Could it be the very nature of games as both software and entertainment products?
I think that's it exactly.
Given the modern-day multimedia, graphics-intensive capabilities of computers, the demand on game designers is greater than ever before. As soon as you CAN have an immersive 3d environment, the bar is raised and people will EXPECT to have a quality 3d environment. That's the software end. The Entertainment end is a whole 'nother ball-o-wax that most developers (let alone suits) just aren't prepared for.
For a game to be successful, it must be engrossing and entertaining, like a good story. Since it's also a visual medium, visual design is hugely important. There's sound involved, and the sounds have to ADD to the 'spell' of the game and not detract, etc.
Storytelling, Set Design, Sound Engineering...sounds like a movie! How many Really Good film directors are there out there? How many of the 'Really Good' ones STILL make bombs half the time? Now add the element of interactivity, and you have an even greater demand on creative resources to produce a successful game product.
There will always be a niche market for 'classic' style video games, which mimic/enhance classic non-video games (cards, mah-johng, whatever) or create their own clever abstract game environments (pacman, Tempest, - I can't think of a modern PC equivalent), but the bulk the market will be led by games that combine front-of-the-line engineering with high-quality and immersive environments.
To do this requires dedication and resources that few companies are willing or even able in their wildest dreams to support. Some try by hiring live actors to do static 'reality' bits, but these generally fall flat, as most gamers don't want live, uninspired actors intruding on their fantasy.
Hungry. Lunch. Good. Go now.
**>>BELCH
You know what, though? It's a total damn shame, too. Unfortunately, not enough people are able to recognize games as an art form as opposed to something guys without girlfriends enjoy. Ask almost any game developer why they create games -- any developer, regardless of the game -- and I think half will tell you they consider it an art form. The other half just plain enjoys what they're doing. (These are my rough estimates, by the way.)
As games have evolved over the years -- in complexity, in technical ability, in sheer impressiveness (and hence expressiveness; at least, that's the way it is for many viewers) -- they have increased the capacity of their art. So it would make common sense that the games industry slow down to reach this art. Nope! Rather, the games industry is run by company boards who, for the most part, view games as a source of income rather than an art form. They'll be blunt about it, too. If they think your game sucks for any reason -- even in the raw prototype stage -- you can forget developing it further. It's gone baby, solid gone. When you get to the development cycle, it's dictated by them, and if you don't keep up to their expectations, you can kiss it goodbye. This is not an environment in which you foster creative, artistic thinking.
Take Zelda 64 as an example. (Console games may differ between commercial strategies, but certainly not their artistic qualities.) The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had a long development cycle with a staff of 200 people. The result: a game which is detailed, enjoyable, and, above all, undeniably a great work of art. That's how everything should be done. Alas, not everyone is a video game genius and are willing to dictate things differently like Miyamoto. However, that's how you make art.
Video games have a great potential for art that no other art form has -- their inherent interactivity. Using this advantage, the art form can be molded to reflect upon what the player has done, and send them the message that the designers want to be sent. We should argue with the game companies to see this reflected in their games. Support games as art; not games as a way to fatten some CEO and give a company a good profile.
-- Stargazer
You are strongly advised to check up on the history of a little-known independent game development house called The Dreamer's Guild, a company founded on almost exactly the same principles you mention. Talin was on the executive staff of The Dreamer's Guild.
Briefly, the Guild started getting some good contracts, and the niggly little details of running a business began to get in their way (things like payroll, benefits administration, legal counsel, answering the phones, leasing office space, etc.). So the Guild had to invent management. This worked sorta kinda okay until, one day, the Guild made a poor choice for their CEO, who sank the company.
I'm sure Talin would be the first to tell you that such an idea can still work, but I think you need to disabuse yourself of the illusion that "management" is irrelevant. Once you exceed a certain size (which is surprisingly small), it becomes necessary. I'd strongly recommend talking to Talin (or someone else in the industry) so you can get an idea of all the landmines you need to avoid in order to succeed.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
This article is full of illogical banter and emotional nonsense. He does not prove anything, and tries backing it all up with false examples covered by a mask of logic.
it sometimes seems like more investment money is actually wasted developing and marketing failed games than is made in profits from successful ones.
What a dumb thing to say! If that were the case, there would BE NO game industry! You want to know why game developers think their's might be the Next Big Thing? Because it might! And if it does, they are set for a long time to come. If it doesn't work out, they just got a bunch of nice paychecks.
The economic realities of developing games induces what I call "The Lottery Mentality".
Oh geeze.. This is almost too foolish bother with... The lottery is based on chance. Pure Chance. Killer games are based on quality, marketing, and consumer needs. If you match those up, you win. He whined about bad marketting, bad this, bad that, well, there is your answer! Your companies sucked!
I don't feel like going on. This article was one of the lamest things I have read in a long time. >:(
Corndog
This has been 100% of my experience in the industry as well. I agree that the best game developers are multi-talented, with expertise at art, design, game scripting, implementation, and good old fashioned hacking.
I ended up working with a small shareware company part time, so that I could still work on games, but do it in a pleasant environment. Your list description of an ideal environment is what I strive for. Our company focusses on the relationship between customers, the company, and "employees". We have no salaries, so we are free to work on or start whatever projects we want, because it is not costing the company anything. If something ships, the profits are distributed entirely among the people who contributed to the product.
The down side of this is that you don't ship sexy, cutting edge apps. The things that ship as consumer products in our case tend to be simple Win32 arcade games, which have accumulated a small cult following and get a few million downloads a year.
However, we do have some sexy things in house-- platform independent (well, really linux, win32, mac, sparc... anywhere codewarrior or gcc compile to) games, 2d/3d graphics engines, languages, etc. that are developed and licensed to larger companies, as well as small but lucrative consulting deals for websites and small apps. We don't get the brand recognition of working on a product anybody has ever heard of, and you don't get the support of having up front resources to afford to hire people and buy art-- everything is through contributors who work for free (plus royalties, of course). We do get to work in an exciting, supportive environment (where everyone wants to be there and finds it fun!). It is comfortable, but I wouldn't say "low-key", though. There are a lot of late nights of hacking or design sessions, because that's one way great things get done in this industry.
FWIW, Morgan Systems is the company. You probably won't be impressed with the games, and they don't run under linux :( Maybe some of our other stuff will start to get out though; we have a simplified Matlab style app/language and ray tracer that are going to be released as open source, and run everywhere. Hopefully some of our libraries are coming to a game near you, but not with our brand on them.
As a matter of fact, I'm looking for a job with at least 90% female employees right now.
:)
I hope my wife doesn't read slashdot.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
... is a lot of fun. No deadlines, no pressures, no managers, and alas, no money. The biggest problem is having to have a real job as well. ;)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
The author's experience is obviously of value here, and his insider's perspective is important. However, I think that he missed the opportunity to point out the bigger issue.
Much of the problems he describes -- bad management, lack of well-understood engineering mechanisms, etc. -- are very widespread in software industry in general, not just the game industry. However, software industry in general is rather profitable -- and gaming industry, according to the author, is not.
There is a differentiating factor here -- there is something about the gaming industry that makes it work by different rules from the rest of the software world. Pointing out that difference, is what the autrhor should have done, rather than just enumerate the problems that plague software industry in general.
What is that difference? I don't know -- but I am fairly certain it's not the fact that the target audiences differ. Could it be the very nature of games as both software and entertainment products?.. It is possible, I suppose, but I lack the knowledge to say this with assurance.
In short, the author raised an interesting problem, but failed to dig deep enough for the answers, IMO.
--
--
Victor Danilchenko