The success or failure of a game can not be attributed to one person. Studios like to play up known names to sell their games, but the reality is, large productions are pulled in many different directions due to the differing interests of the developers, publishers and distributors. Sometimes the product development team can balance those needs and sometimes it can't, but there is no one person to blame. Regardless, it's a team effort. Also, I believe Harvey said "we," which is appropriate.
Next year's sequels will come from this year's sequels, just as they did last year.
Anyway, if this guy was right, we'd be spared movies like Tomb Raider, Super Mario Brothers, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
The Xbox's problem does have to do with content, but once Microsoft floods the market with Xbox 2's, the problem will largely vanish.
Right now, though, game developers and publishers tend to be conservative in their choices and go for license deals. They have to make money or face getting a new job. Sadly, games like Enter the Matrix validate license deals.
This guy is a grandstanding doofus, in my opinion.
Outpost was my favorite turkey, because I was duped by it. I was a younger PC gamer, then. My previous experience with PC games consisted of: Pool of Radiance, Wing Commander, Out of This World, Eye of the Beholder and Ultima Underwold -- all, in my opinion, excellent titles.
Then, I saw Outpost on the shelves. Nothing held me back; I just bought it. Why not? t was previewed in Computer Gaming World with positive remarks. Thus, the stage was set and I was duped into buying a bad game.
Outpost was SimCity in space, but with pre-rendered graphics. Pre-rendering was new and eye candy galore for the industry to "ooh" and "aah" at. At release, the game was practically unwinnable unless you followed a step-by-step, a walk-through found on the 'Net.
The experience taught me a lot. Magazines taking advertising money are beholden to their sponsors. There is a difference between a preview and a review, albeit a subtle one (sadly). And, most importantly, great graphics alone do not make a good game.
A few months later, a friend talked me into playing Civilization (a game with awful graphics) and I never looked back.
Actually, this is not a huge deal for Vivendi. When Blizzard was initially bought it was bought for its franchises, which companies can own. Though game companies act like they own employees, they know the employees can leave. Likely, when Blizzard was bought, key figures signed multi-year contracts to stay and ensure the franchise succeeded under the new ownership. Likely, the contracts are up and the key people feel they can do it again on their own, only better.
It's fairly common for key figures to leave the nest after experiencing some success; this is why exclusive contracts exist. Though usually only founders are placed under such deals. It's almost as common, however, for key game developers to start again elsewhere and flop in a large way.
Note that EA, perhaps the most successful games publisher, has been successfully buying franchises for years (Sims, C&C, etc).
Both EA and Microsoft like to acquire independent developers like Westwood and Digital Anvil, not other publishers. This is because publishers need great content and shelf space to sell great content. If a competing publisher goes out of business, neither EA nor Micrsoft minds -- it's less competition for shelf space they want to own. Sometimes, after a publisher sinks, another publisher may swoop in to purchase rights to old games for a song. There's no compelling reason for one publisher to buy another. You'd buy a great game regardless what publisher's name is on the box. Video gamers are loyal to great games, not publishers.
That said, Activision is doing okay. They aren't going away anytime soon.
The problem for independent game developers comes down to this: game creation is a massively labor intensive process, requiring more cash than most can acquire. Worse, many game developers are young and inexperienced making schedules and budgets neigh-impossible to control. When small start-ups begin to hiccup on the development, the end usually isn't far off.
My guess is if Imperial Wars is to last, it'll be picked up by a major publisher. It's interesting to note, the entertainment software market is narrowing down to 2 main publishers, EA and Microsoft, making the market less friendly towards independents hoping for publishing deals.
Schedules for technical efforts at startups are voodoo. Throughout my 10 years, I've watched schedules haunt project after project. Why? I previously thought engineers were optimists, giving unrealistic estimates to please the powers that be. Tonight I just changed my mind. Engineers are literal animals. To the young, unspoiled engineer, the world is a simple and wonderful place. It's the right technology for the right job when you're a young techie. (It's worth noting that once engineers realize this is not so, they become useless, fit only to manage.) When you ask literal people, "How long will a task take?" They budget only what they can anticipate and control. Today, even creating a small 10-line program is a large integration project requiring an operating network, working hardware, correctly configured OS and lots of application software. As the number of dependencies grows, so too does the probability of failure and delay. With each added component in the system the probability of delay through failure increases.
Complicating the situation is the fact most components -- network, operating system, application software -- are invisible due to the forest for the trees effect. Even if you wanted to take into account all dependencies, how do you factor in the failure rate of your DSL line or operating system? Some failures, like user mis-configuration, we assume will never happen again, but due to poor interface and lack of process, they do. Regardless, accurately scheduling the frequency of component failure rates is not possible. The best you can do is pull numbers from your butt, but what good is that?
Established companies, like HP & IBM, mitigate risk by integration of existing technology. Startups, however, develop new technology and do not have that option. A better tool than the schedule, in my opinion, is a priority-based task list with a business plan. Make sure all your resources support your business goals and your goals support the business plan. Schedules, in my opinion, are most often used as tools for budgeting. Do early startups, driven entirely by venture capital, require a budget for the technology development? I don't think so; there's already an implicit budget - the bank account. Every venture-given penny a startup takes is accepted with the promise to the venture capitalist, "We can deliver the technology on time." Therefore, every action a responsible startup takes reflects that promise.
Now, back to schedules as misused tools of the devil. If every action a startup takes reflects the timely promise and schedules determine what is to be done and when, you have problems. Personally, I think schedules used in this manner are only useful to discover just how bad your engineering team is at estimating work time requirements. This all goes back to risk, research and a high number of dependencies in today's technical work environment. Far better, I think, to know when your company needs to acheive milestones to support the business plan and ensure, at any time, the top priorities support the upcoming goals. The schedule is only useful to rate your current engineering processes and not for predicting the future. When it becomes clear the business goals are not being met in timely fashion, it's time to audit the current processes used for effectiveness and problems.
Don't expect to see such an audit at a startup, though. Engineering processes, like "invisible" dependencies contributing to failure and delay, are taken for granted. Additionally, these processes are put in place by the startup's executives. Due to insecurity, most startup executives would rather run their companies into the ground than admit fault.
So what happened tonight? We have an upcoming release of our product next week. Late last week, the CTO authorized swapping out the foundation of our technology with an entirely new sub-system without a means to back out to the previously working system. Given this large, complex system had never experienced either specification or quality assurance, I had doubts the integration would go smoothly. Now, a week later, with days to release, nothing is working. The CTO asked me to collect completion time estimates from the staff after he said to the engineers, "It is too late change our plans, we must finish on time." As I collected the estimates, I knew they were all bogus, supporting the timely promise. After receiving the list, my CTO said, "Items 1 & 2 seem a bit optimistic to me." I bit my tongue and said, "You're right," though I was thinking, "If you're going to be picky, they're all unrealistic."
The traditional way to entering the game industry is 1) know someone or 2) fight your way through QA.
The latter is a tough road, but not as long as you'd think. Typically, I saw people fight their way out of QA in 1-2 years or they would quit -- it's a hard job.
Success is a matter of hard work, intelligence, and the ability to communicate good ideas. Understanding good game design helps, too. For example, what makes Starcraft a great game, but Dune 2000 only average?
I have a warning though, it's a hard life with a lot of sacrifices. You essentially have little life outside the and unless you date or marry someone from work, your sex life is on holiday for the duration.
I can't beleive many of the suggestions posted. While all the books are good, I noted younger women who read sci-fi don't often go for stories dominated by deus exmachina, instead going for character motivated plots. So my suggestions, lean towards books with detailed characters and plots not dominated by technology. Many young women enjoy McCaffery's Pern books, especially the Harper Hall series. Both Bujold and Brin have engaging characters. Brin's Startide Rising is fun. Two greats would have to be Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress and Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I've also noticed a lot of women like the Edding's elgeriad books. (Never read them myself.)
Slashdot Mirror
The success or failure of a game can not be attributed to one person. Studios like to play up known names to sell their games, but the reality is, large productions are pulled in many different directions due to the differing interests of the developers, publishers and distributors. Sometimes the product development team can balance those needs and sometimes it can't, but there is no one person to blame. Regardless, it's a team effort. Also, I believe Harvey said "we," which is appropriate.
It's safest when the users can't run any scripts or executables. With Vista, you can easily configure the UAC to stop such user nonsense.
Anyway, if this guy was right, we'd be spared movies like Tomb Raider, Super Mario Brothers, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
The Xbox's problem does have to do with content, but once Microsoft floods the market with Xbox 2's, the problem will largely vanish. Right now, though, game developers and publishers tend to be conservative in their choices and go for license deals. They have to make money or face getting a new job. Sadly, games like Enter the Matrix validate license deals.
This guy is a grandstanding doofus, in my opinion.
Outpost was my favorite turkey, because I was duped by it. I was a younger PC gamer, then. My previous experience with PC games consisted of: Pool of Radiance, Wing Commander, Out of This World, Eye of the Beholder and Ultima Underwold -- all, in my opinion, excellent titles.
Then, I saw Outpost on the shelves. Nothing held me back; I just bought it. Why not? t was previewed in Computer Gaming World with positive remarks. Thus, the stage was set and I was duped into buying a bad game.
Outpost was SimCity in space, but with pre-rendered graphics. Pre-rendering was new and eye candy galore for the industry to "ooh" and "aah" at. At release, the game was practically unwinnable unless you followed a step-by-step, a walk-through found on the 'Net.
The experience taught me a lot. Magazines taking advertising money are beholden to their sponsors. There is a difference between a preview and a review, albeit a subtle one (sadly). And, most importantly, great graphics alone do not make a good game.
A few months later, a friend talked me into playing Civilization (a game with awful graphics) and I never looked back.
Actually, this is not a huge deal for Vivendi. When Blizzard was initially bought it was bought for its franchises, which companies can own. Though game companies act like they own employees, they know the employees can leave. Likely, when Blizzard was bought, key figures signed multi-year contracts to stay and ensure the franchise succeeded under the new ownership. Likely, the contracts are up and the key people feel they can do it again on their own, only better.
It's fairly common for key figures to leave the nest after experiencing some success; this is why exclusive contracts exist. Though usually only founders are placed under such deals. It's almost as common, however, for key game developers to start again elsewhere and flop in a large way.
Note that EA, perhaps the most successful games publisher, has been successfully buying franchises for years (Sims, C&C, etc).
This is true if you don't count full page advertisements in major game magazines and lots of media attention as "NO advertising."
Both EA and Microsoft like to acquire independent developers like Westwood and Digital Anvil, not other publishers. This is because publishers need great content and shelf space to sell great content. If a competing publisher goes out of business, neither EA nor Micrsoft minds -- it's less competition for shelf space they want to own. Sometimes, after a publisher sinks, another publisher may swoop in to purchase rights to old games for a song. There's no compelling reason for one publisher to buy another. You'd buy a great game regardless what publisher's name is on the box. Video gamers are loyal to great games, not publishers.
That said, Activision is doing okay. They aren't going away anytime soon.
The problem for independent game developers comes down to this: game creation is a massively labor intensive process, requiring more cash than most can acquire. Worse, many game developers are young and inexperienced making schedules and budgets neigh-impossible to control. When small start-ups begin to hiccup on the development, the end usually isn't far off.
My guess is if Imperial Wars is to last, it'll be picked up by a major publisher. It's interesting to note, the entertainment software market is narrowing down to 2 main publishers, EA and Microsoft, making the market less friendly towards independents hoping for publishing deals.
This is something I recently wrote on the topic:
Schedules for technical efforts at startups are voodoo. Throughout my 10 years, I've watched schedules haunt project after project. Why? I previously thought engineers were optimists, giving unrealistic estimates to please the powers that be. Tonight I just changed my mind. Engineers are literal animals. To the young, unspoiled engineer, the world is a simple and wonderful place. It's the right technology for the right job when you're a young techie. (It's worth noting that once engineers realize this is not so, they become useless, fit only to manage.) When you ask literal people, "How long will a task take?" They budget only what they can anticipate and control. Today, even creating a small 10-line program is a large integration project requiring an operating network, working hardware, correctly configured OS and lots of application software. As the number of dependencies grows, so too does the probability of failure and delay. With each added component in the system the probability of delay through failure increases.
Complicating the situation is the fact most components -- network, operating system, application software -- are invisible due to the forest for the trees effect. Even if you wanted to take into account all dependencies, how do you factor in the failure rate of your DSL line or operating system? Some failures, like user mis-configuration, we assume will never happen again, but due to poor interface and lack of process, they do. Regardless, accurately scheduling the frequency of component failure rates is not possible. The best you can do is pull numbers from your butt, but what good is that?
Established companies, like HP & IBM, mitigate risk by integration of existing technology. Startups, however, develop new technology and do not have that option. A better tool than the schedule, in my opinion, is a priority-based task list with a business plan. Make sure all your resources support your business goals and your goals support the business plan. Schedules, in my opinion, are most often used as tools for budgeting. Do early startups, driven entirely by venture capital, require a budget for the technology development? I don't think so; there's already an implicit budget - the bank account. Every venture-given penny a startup takes is accepted with the promise to the venture capitalist, "We can deliver the technology on time." Therefore, every action a responsible startup takes reflects that promise.
Now, back to schedules as misused tools of the devil. If every action a startup takes reflects the timely promise and schedules determine what is to be done and when, you have problems. Personally, I think schedules used in this manner are only useful to discover just how bad your engineering team is at estimating work time requirements. This all goes back to risk, research and a high number of dependencies in today's technical work environment. Far better, I think, to know when your company needs to acheive milestones to support the business plan and ensure, at any time, the top priorities support the upcoming goals. The schedule is only useful to rate your current engineering processes and not for predicting the future. When it becomes clear the business goals are not being met in timely fashion, it's time to audit the current processes used for effectiveness and problems.
Don't expect to see such an audit at a startup, though. Engineering processes, like "invisible" dependencies contributing to failure and delay, are taken for granted. Additionally, these processes are put in place by the startup's executives. Due to insecurity, most startup executives would rather run their companies into the ground than admit fault.
So what happened tonight? We have an upcoming release of our product next week. Late last week, the CTO authorized swapping out the foundation of our technology with an entirely new sub-system without a means to back out to the previously working system. Given this large, complex system had never experienced either specification or quality assurance, I had doubts the integration would go smoothly. Now, a week later, with days to release, nothing is working. The CTO asked me to collect completion time estimates from the staff after he said to the engineers, "It is too late change our plans, we must finish on time." As I collected the estimates, I knew they were all bogus, supporting the timely promise. After receiving the list, my CTO said, "Items 1 & 2 seem a bit optimistic to me." I bit my tongue and said, "You're right," though I was thinking, "If you're going to be picky, they're all unrealistic."
The latter is a tough road, but not as long as you'd think. Typically, I saw people fight their way out of QA in 1-2 years or they would quit -- it's a hard job.
Success is a matter of hard work, intelligence, and the ability to communicate good ideas. Understanding good game design helps, too. For example, what makes Starcraft a great game, but Dune 2000 only average?
I have a warning though, it's a hard life with a lot of sacrifices. You essentially have little life outside the and unless you date or marry someone from work, your sex life is on holiday for the duration.
I hope this helps.
I can't beleive many of the suggestions posted. While all the books are good, I noted younger women who read sci-fi don't often go for stories dominated by deus exmachina, instead going for character motivated plots. So my suggestions, lean towards books with detailed characters and plots not dominated by technology. Many young women enjoy McCaffery's Pern books, especially the Harper Hall series. Both Bujold and Brin have engaging characters. Brin's Startide Rising is fun. Two greats would have to be Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress and Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I've also noticed a lot of women like the Edding's elgeriad books. (Never read them myself.)