Have you examples from the software market? I'm particularly interested in this customer that would demand a superior product, but be willing to pay more and/or wait longer than for a sucky product.
Well, the game software market is full of examples (Blizzard). It's quite different from the software market you're discussing, of course, but it's also plagued by crunch time, and tons of horrible, bug-ridden crap.
Packaged software in other arenas also has some examples: businesses will choose between, say, Maya and 3DSMax based on price, quality, and current needs. (Quality, as you pointed out, being difficult to quantify: they may be shit engineering-wise, but people in all areas make poor quality judgments all the time.)
It seems that the problems you're referring to are much more prevalent in contracted or internal software development which, admittedly, is a cesspool right now from all I've heard.
Disposable executives + stock-option compensation = short-term thinking = execs don't care if the company develops a reputation for not delivering on promises; they'll be somewhere else by the time that catches up with the company.
This seems like a separate problem to me, and I agree it's a very large one. It plagues all public companies, and leads to some behavior entirely contrary to what one would expect if one were under the impression a company would act to sustain itself.
"Crunch mode is inevitable because the market demands it."
It does? Funny, we must be in different markets. The market I'm in sometimes demands a superior product, or a lower price, or a quicker delivery. Those requirements are generally fulfilled by maximally efficient production: more quality and quantity produced for less time and money.
Now, if the market you're in somehow demands products completed well beyond schedule, or way over cost, or ridden with bugs, that's a curious challenge to current economic theory. You should probably get someone to study it.
Are people really arguing the merits of bad comments versus no comments? Clearly, anyone would rather have no comments than bad comments.
If you'd put a line up top that stated why the structure contained those elements, or what it was written to be used for, or something else similarly high level, that might have been useful. Certainly, adding a comment that says your struct is, in fact, a structure is not a good thing to do.
While Walmart and Best Buy might not be all that great either, they are ALWAYS, WITHOUT EXCEPTION cheaper or equal in pricing to GameStop/EB for new games.
I've also found EB usually has the games earlier than WalMar and BestBuy, and at least the ones near me are more likely to have some niche titles. They differentiate in different ways-- price is one area of competition, but not the only one.
Once again, the answer lies somewhere in Internet distribution.
I think that's part of the solution, because it's tied to budget. Here's the main problem with different/original games right now:
Non-mass-market titles should not get mass-market budgets.
That's taken for granted in movies. If you're spending $100 million, you need to be making Armageddon. If you're spending $10 million, you can make Gods and Monsters. In games, though, most games get similar budgets. A studio often allocates $8 million for its gangster sci fi horror shooter, and $8 million for, well, Oddworld.
Part of that problem is distribution. Shelf space is a bitch in the games industry. Go to BestBuy, you'll see a ton of old DVDs on the shelves. You won't see nearly as many games, and certainly not old games-- and the old ones will be at 1/3 the price of a new one. This totally different approach to stocking and selling games means you need to spend a lot on up-front marketing, and sell a ton of copies in the first few months-- and if you don't do that marketing and spending and pitching to retail chains, your game won't even see the shelf in the first place.
So, it's nearly impossible to make a niche game, sell it in stores, and make money (successful budget publishers have made quite an exception, with sharply curtailed development costs, and good relationships with big retailers like WalMart).
Internet distribution, if it grows to reach a larger market (and I think it will double or triple over the next couple years), will be a huge help for these smaller budget, more niche games. There are already people successfully selling niche RPGs, mainstream puzzle games, and fun shooters over the internet.
You still don't see a system capable of supporting the mid-sized development I'd like to see: 5-10 people over 1-2 years. That's what would enable innovative, compelling games, and would create a sort of test market among the more game-savvy before a large publisher decides to dish out $15 million on an unproven concept.
Side note: the big-time publishers should be pursuing these concepts anyway. They're being quite stupidly conservative, given the cost of keeping a dozen people on payroll, prototyping new game types. EA's backing the Sims team, of course, and Nintendo does some experimentation, but for the most part you don't see publishers chasing after the next Sims. Given the huge piles of money it's generated, it's almost negligent.
The last E3 demo they had was an awesome idea for a demo: the game has voice comm built in (about time! all MMOs from here on out should be voice), so they had a "tour guide" take groups of people through a mission. How could that go wrong?
Unfortunately, the rest of the demo was a disaster. You had 3 types of attack; enemies were resistant to various degrees against each type of attack. So, use the right type of attack against the right type of enemy. And... that was about it. No interesting combos (in the demo at least), no obvious cases for teamwork, and certainly nothing to distinguish it from Everquest. Even if the game possessed those qualities (which the demo very much made me doubt), the demo didn't show a single distinguishing trait, except for disconcerting art direction.
I lost all interest in the title after playing that demo. The fact that they're overhauling the game (a while back, they replaced a lot of people, and announced they were slipping the release date for massive changes-- I'm not sure how this announcement is different, actually) makes me a bit interested in it again.
Before World of Warcraft, I think some publishers and developers didn't realize their weak Everquest clones wouldn't bring in the bucks they were hoping for. Now that they see who's gonna eat their lunch while they die in obscurity, I think they're realizing they have to step up and do something different. I look forward to seeing if this game turns out to be any good.
One of the main reasons i love console Games is the total lack of patches.
Online games will always require cheat fixes, balance tweaks, and so on. If it really bugs you, I recommend buying single-player games (Halo 2's single player is still fine and essentially unchanged with this patch).
The only online games that don't get patches and tweaks after release are the ones that are unsupported, and hence remain buggy, cheat-ridden, and unbalanced.
Consider car companies tending to close union plants, and tending to open new plants or move operations to countries or states where workers are not forced to join unions.
Actually, they generally relocate to the country they believe will give them the highest production per dollar spent (well, that's not 100% accurate, but close enough for current purposes). There are many considerations, including worker wages, worker productivity, costs to import/export raw materials/products, tax breaks, overhead per worker (including costs to meet safety standards), and more.
Unionization does play into that equation, sure-- they negotiate higher wages. As a country, though, we don't want to be in a race to the bottom of the pay scale. It simply won't support our quality of life. There are many benefits to doing business in the United States; we need to continue to push those, rather than try to shave another couple grand a year off an employee's salary.
The young artists releasing their first game from their basement and moving on to become their own boss seems much more plausible.
Trying to start a game company becomes much more difficult when you have to hire unionized labour instead of going directly online and searching for people with common interest.
I have a few friends who got together and made a few high quality short films. They've occasionally had to pay a good chunk of money for a key position here and there, but generally, they've been able to do it on the cheap, without any obstacles placed in their way by unions. If they make it big they'll need to get a lot more union peeps, but by then they'll have plenty of other funding concerns as well.
Sure, lets have the unions do for software industry what they did for the American auto, steel, & textile industries.
Aren't we outsourcing enough jobs?
They're already outsourcing software jobs. Besides, I haven't seen any convincing evidence of a causal relationship between unions and outsourcing. If you have some, I'd certainly be interested in reading it.
I actually thought the rest better captured the spirit. Wright won by being funny (I had never heard that Simpsons quote before) but not by having the best design. Which is sad, because I actually thought some of the other designs could be quite playable.
Wright's design was innovative, and sounded quite promising-- it could be fun given some tweaking. Hocking's and Molyneux's were both very interesting directions to take, but they ultimately dead-ended. Hocking's would have remained tedious, and the thrill of Molyneux's would wear off after about 15 minutes unless he figured out a way to add real significance to the inter-poem portals. Wright's design was clearly superior.
I was an enormous fan of KOTOR I. I beat it multiple times and loved everything about it.
I think this is part of the reason they thought they could get away with it. Kotor 1 was rushed out the door, with some ridiculous bugs that would never have made it out of MS certification if they hadn't needed it to pump up XBox sales.
Crashes, corrupted save games, save games in areas you couldn't get past-- I had to completely abandon my character 30 hours in, right near the end, because something I did made the game uncompletable an hour or so later (at which point I'd already saved over those slots). Those are just the rare, really big problems. The minor ones happened for everyone-- camera in the middle of someone's head, random guys standing in front of the camera for an entire cutscene so you can't see anything, etc..
Still, the rest of the game was so good, and the savegame corruption was infrequent enough, that people forgave it. Perhaps justified, but then they rushed Kotor II out the door the same way, but even worse this time.
Finally, someone's calling them on it, though I don't know if it'll be enough to stop them from doing it a third time.
In Guild Wars, you're either running around solo or you're joining one of the raids that has a cap of 6 (I think) members per group.
Or you're in a PvP arena, which can at least go up to 12-- I think they mentioned larger? I'm not sure.
Sure, still not massive; the only "massive" areas are the starting areas, which you could argue are only glorified matchmaking lobbies. You never get the situation where you're killing zombies in a field, and some guy runs along and says, "hey, wanna kill zombies together?". And that is a loss-- chance pickup groups can be a lot of fun.
OTOH, I did enjoy the combat of this game versus a traditional MMO. So, terminology be damned, I had fun, whatever genre you want to cram this into. Since it has no monthly, I'll probably pick it up, even though I'm already addicted to WoW.
No kidding. If you raised wages, EA would have to use less programmers to get a given job done, produce inferior work or have to charge higher prices. Then when a bunch of Korean/Indian/Chinese workers started producing higher quality games for less money, you'd have to hear these exact same whiners go on about how we're outsourcing.
If an industry can't produce sufficient wealth to live at an acceptable standard in the U.S., it should be outsourced. There are plenty of industries that no longer have any significant presence in the U.S., and simply send their products here.
If that's the case with software development, let's outsource it already, rather than dragging out the inevitable with shitty work conditions.
Your response to the article is a non-sequitur. The point is, as the headline says, that quality of life issues are holding back the game industry.
Their assertion-- read the white paper for more on this-- is that these practices are resulting in worse products. Even if your attitude is "fuck it, I hate all of humankind, and wish for all people to eternally burn in searing pain", if your goal is good games, current practices are counterproductive. How is that possible? How can it be that demanding maximum hours per day from all employees could actually be counterproductive? First, clearly output quality falls as hours and stress increase. Perhaps more importantly, conditions are driving experienced game developers from the industry in droves.
In response to their QoL survey: * "Only 3.4% said that their coworkers averaged 10 or more years of experience." * "34.3% of developers expect to leave the industry within 5 years, and 51.2% within 10 years."
Do you really think driving away experienced employees is a good thing for the industry? Do you think the knowledge drain somehow benefits game production over the long term? If so, I believe you severely undervalue the types of knowledge that only come with long-term work in a field.
Do you want all your generals to be 25? Do you want all your priests to become atheists at 30? Should all teachers retire before hitting middle age?
In this case, from the EULA, NC Interactive owns the character.
Ah, good point. That certainly opens up a lot of interesting implications for virtual property ownership and user-created content. If they have to back down and give users ownership over their own likenesses... wow.
My suspicion, as I've voiced elsewhere, is that they will be required to remove these characters from the game, and pay damages to Marvel, and probably DC and whoever else, in the end.
Remove what characters from the game? Any character anyone's made that looks vaguely like the Hulk? The color green? Large characters? All characters with claws? Or just ban some strange list of combinations any IP owner anywhere in the world comes up with?
You can make Mario and Luigi with this tool. You can make Pink, for crying out loud. What're they gonna do next-- sue a pencil and paper, because some guy traced the Hulk?
Now, I realize that you'll tear apart my argument because "George Bush is evil" and "the US economy doesn't create any value to the world." Obviously those aren't valid arguments any way you slice it.
While I admire your proactive stance, it's generally considered poor form (not to mention confusing) to set up straw men for hypothetical future arguments. There's a shortage of straw men due to excessive over-use, so please, treat them like an antibiotic: wait to use them until you need them!
This message was brought to you by Straw Men Against the Constant Killing of Straw Men.
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Have you examples from the software market? I'm particularly interested in this customer that would demand a superior product, but be willing to pay more and/or wait longer than for a sucky product.
Well, the game software market is full of examples (Blizzard). It's quite different from the software market you're discussing, of course, but it's also plagued by crunch time, and tons of horrible, bug-ridden crap.
Packaged software in other arenas also has some examples: businesses will choose between, say, Maya and 3DSMax based on price, quality, and current needs. (Quality, as you pointed out, being difficult to quantify: they may be shit engineering-wise, but people in all areas make poor quality judgments all the time.)
It seems that the problems you're referring to are much more prevalent in contracted or internal software development which, admittedly, is a cesspool right now from all I've heard.
Disposable executives + stock-option compensation = short-term thinking = execs don't care if the company develops a reputation for not delivering on promises; they'll be somewhere else by the time that catches up with the company.
This seems like a separate problem to me, and I agree it's a very large one. It plagues all public companies, and leads to some behavior entirely contrary to what one would expect if one were under the impression a company would act to sustain itself.
"Crunch mode is inevitable because the market demands it."
It does? Funny, we must be in different markets. The market I'm in sometimes demands a superior product, or a lower price, or a quicker delivery. Those requirements are generally fulfilled by maximally efficient production: more quality and quantity produced for less time and money.
Now, if the market you're in somehow demands products completed well beyond schedule, or way over cost, or ridden with bugs, that's a curious challenge to current economic theory. You should probably get someone to study it.
Are people really arguing the merits of bad comments versus no comments? Clearly, anyone would rather have no comments than bad comments.
If you'd put a line up top that stated why the structure contained those elements, or what it was written to be used for, or something else similarly high level, that might have been useful. Certainly, adding a comment that says your struct is, in fact, a structure is not a good thing to do.
The thing is, Turbine's future is not tied into Asheron's Call. Turbine is developing Dungeons and Dragons Online,
Don't forget their other little-known license. You might have heard of it: Middle Earth Online.
While Walmart and Best Buy might not be all that great either, they are ALWAYS, WITHOUT EXCEPTION cheaper or equal in pricing to GameStop/EB for new games.
I've also found EB usually has the games earlier than WalMar and BestBuy, and at least the ones near me are more likely to have some niche titles. They differentiate in different ways-- price is one area of competition, but not the only one.
Really? That combat system description almost put me to sleep. Sounds like I get three buttons.
Once again, the answer lies somewhere in Internet distribution.
I think that's part of the solution, because it's tied to budget. Here's the main problem with different/original games right now:
Non-mass-market titles should not get mass-market budgets.
That's taken for granted in movies. If you're spending $100 million, you need to be making Armageddon. If you're spending $10 million, you can make Gods and Monsters. In games, though, most games get similar budgets. A studio often allocates $8 million for its gangster sci fi horror shooter, and $8 million for, well, Oddworld.
Part of that problem is distribution. Shelf space is a bitch in the games industry. Go to BestBuy, you'll see a ton of old DVDs on the shelves. You won't see nearly as many games, and certainly not old games-- and the old ones will be at 1/3 the price of a new one. This totally different approach to stocking and selling games means you need to spend a lot on up-front marketing, and sell a ton of copies in the first few months-- and if you don't do that marketing and spending and pitching to retail chains, your game won't even see the shelf in the first place.
So, it's nearly impossible to make a niche game, sell it in stores, and make money (successful budget publishers have made quite an exception, with sharply curtailed development costs, and good relationships with big retailers like WalMart).
Internet distribution, if it grows to reach a larger market (and I think it will double or triple over the next couple years), will be a huge help for these smaller budget, more niche games. There are already people successfully selling niche RPGs, mainstream puzzle games, and fun shooters over the internet.
You still don't see a system capable of supporting the mid-sized development I'd like to see: 5-10 people over 1-2 years. That's what would enable innovative, compelling games, and would create a sort of test market among the more game-savvy before a large publisher decides to dish out $15 million on an unproven concept.
Side note: the big-time publishers should be pursuing these concepts anyway. They're being quite stupidly conservative, given the cost of keeping a dozen people on payroll, prototyping new game types. EA's backing the Sims team, of course, and Nintendo does some experimentation, but for the most part you don't see publishers chasing after the next Sims. Given the huge piles of money it's generated, it's almost negligent.
The last E3 demo they had was an awesome idea for a demo: the game has voice comm built in (about time! all MMOs from here on out should be voice), so they had a "tour guide" take groups of people through a mission. How could that go wrong?
Unfortunately, the rest of the demo was a disaster. You had 3 types of attack; enemies were resistant to various degrees against each type of attack. So, use the right type of attack against the right type of enemy. And... that was about it. No interesting combos (in the demo at least), no obvious cases for teamwork, and certainly nothing to distinguish it from Everquest. Even if the game possessed those qualities (which the demo very much made me doubt), the demo didn't show a single distinguishing trait, except for disconcerting art direction.
I lost all interest in the title after playing that demo. The fact that they're overhauling the game (a while back, they replaced a lot of people, and announced they were slipping the release date for massive changes-- I'm not sure how this announcement is different, actually) makes me a bit interested in it again.
Before World of Warcraft, I think some publishers and developers didn't realize their weak Everquest clones wouldn't bring in the bucks they were hoping for. Now that they see who's gonna eat their lunch while they die in obscurity, I think they're realizing they have to step up and do something different. I look forward to seeing if this game turns out to be any good.
One of the main reasons i love console Games is the total lack of patches .
Online games will always require cheat fixes, balance tweaks, and so on. If it really bugs you, I recommend buying single-player games (Halo 2's single player is still fine and essentially unchanged with this patch).
The only online games that don't get patches and tweaks after release are the ones that are unsupported, and hence remain buggy, cheat-ridden, and unbalanced.
Do you believe that some of the modifications may actually make it more dangerous?
:)
Well, shit, that's what happens every time I change my code....
Consider car companies tending to close union plants, and tending to open new plants or move operations to countries or states where workers are not forced to join unions.
Actually, they generally relocate to the country they believe will give them the highest production per dollar spent (well, that's not 100% accurate, but close enough for current purposes). There are many considerations, including worker wages, worker productivity, costs to import/export raw materials/products, tax breaks, overhead per worker (including costs to meet safety standards), and more.
Unionization does play into that equation, sure-- they negotiate higher wages. As a country, though, we don't want to be in a race to the bottom of the pay scale. It simply won't support our quality of life. There are many benefits to doing business in the United States; we need to continue to push those, rather than try to shave another couple grand a year off an employee's salary.
The young artists releasing their first game from their basement and moving on to become their own boss seems much more plausible.
Trying to start a game company becomes much more difficult when you have to hire unionized labour instead of going directly online and searching for people with common interest.
I have a few friends who got together and made a few high quality short films. They've occasionally had to pay a good chunk of money for a key position here and there, but generally, they've been able to do it on the cheap, without any obstacles placed in their way by unions. If they make it big they'll need to get a lot more union peeps, but by then they'll have plenty of other funding concerns as well.
Sure, lets have the unions do for software industry what they did for the American auto, steel, & textile industries.
Aren't we outsourcing enough jobs?
They're already outsourcing software jobs.
Besides, I haven't seen any convincing evidence of a causal relationship between unions and outsourcing. If you have some, I'd certainly be interested in reading it.
I actually thought the rest better captured the spirit. Wright won by being funny (I had never heard that Simpsons quote before) but not by having the best design. Which is sad, because I actually thought some of the other designs could be quite playable.
Wright's design was innovative, and sounded quite promising-- it could be fun given some tweaking. Hocking's and Molyneux's were both very interesting directions to take, but they ultimately dead-ended. Hocking's would have remained tedious, and the thrill of Molyneux's would wear off after about 15 minutes unless he figured out a way to add real significance to the inter-poem portals. Wright's design was clearly superior.
I also had a lot of fun with Gish, which was pretty out there.
:)
And stay tuned for Psychonauts, when we finally push that bad boy out the door.
I am so glad this came up.
I was an enormous fan of KOTOR I. I beat it multiple times and loved everything about it.
I think this is part of the reason they thought they could get away with it. Kotor 1 was rushed out the door, with some ridiculous bugs that would never have made it out of MS certification if they hadn't needed it to pump up XBox sales.
Crashes, corrupted save games, save games in areas you couldn't get past-- I had to completely abandon my character 30 hours in, right near the end, because something I did made the game uncompletable an hour or so later (at which point I'd already saved over those slots). Those are just the rare, really big problems. The minor ones happened for everyone-- camera in the middle of someone's head, random guys standing in front of the camera for an entire cutscene so you can't see anything, etc..
Still, the rest of the game was so good, and the savegame corruption was infrequent enough, that people forgave it. Perhaps justified, but then they rushed Kotor II out the door the same way, but even worse this time.
Finally, someone's calling them on it, though I don't know if it'll be enough to stop them from doing it a third time.
In Guild Wars, you're either running around solo or you're joining one of the raids that has a cap of 6 (I think) members per group.
Or you're in a PvP arena, which can at least go up to 12-- I think they mentioned larger? I'm not sure.
Sure, still not massive; the only "massive" areas are the starting areas, which you could argue are only glorified matchmaking lobbies. You never get the situation where you're killing zombies in a field, and some guy runs along and says, "hey, wanna kill zombies together?". And that is a loss-- chance pickup groups can be a lot of fun.
OTOH, I did enjoy the combat of this game versus a traditional MMO. So, terminology be damned, I had fun, whatever genre you want to cram this into. Since it has no monthly, I'll probably pick it up, even though I'm already addicted to WoW.
PvP is possible on all servers, actually.
No kidding. If you raised wages, EA would have to use less programmers to get a given job done, produce inferior work or have to charge higher prices. Then when a bunch of Korean/Indian/Chinese workers started producing higher quality games for less money, you'd have to hear these exact same whiners go on about how we're outsourcing.
If an industry can't produce sufficient wealth to live at an acceptable standard in the U.S., it should be outsourced. There are plenty of industries that no longer have any significant presence in the U.S., and simply send their products here.
If that's the case with software development, let's outsource it already, rather than dragging out the inevitable with shitty work conditions.
Your response to the article is a non-sequitur. The point is, as the headline says, that quality of life issues are holding back the game industry.
Their assertion-- read the white paper for more on this-- is that these practices are resulting in worse products. Even if your attitude is "fuck it, I hate all of humankind, and wish for all people to eternally burn in searing pain", if your goal is good games, current practices are counterproductive. How is that possible? How can it be that demanding maximum hours per day from all employees could actually be counterproductive? First, clearly output quality falls as hours and stress increase. Perhaps more importantly, conditions are driving experienced game developers from the industry in droves.
In response to their QoL survey:
* "Only 3.4% said that their coworkers averaged 10 or more years of experience."
* "34.3% of developers expect to leave the industry within 5 years, and 51.2% within 10 years."
Do you really think driving away experienced employees is a good thing for the industry? Do you think the knowledge drain somehow benefits game production over the long term? If so, I believe you severely undervalue the types of knowledge that only come with long-term work in a field.
Do you want all your generals to be 25? Do you want all your priests to become atheists at 30? Should all teachers retire before hitting middle age?
In this case, from the EULA, NC Interactive owns the character.
Ah, good point. That certainly opens up a lot of interesting implications for virtual property ownership and user-created content. If they have to back down and give users ownership over their own likenesses... wow.
My suspicion, as I've voiced elsewhere, is that they will be required to remove these characters from the game, and pay damages to Marvel, and probably DC and whoever else, in the end.
Remove what characters from the game? Any character anyone's made that looks vaguely like the Hulk? The color green? Large characters? All characters with claws? Or just ban some strange list of combinations any IP owner anywhere in the world comes up with?
You can make Mario and Luigi with this tool. You can make Pink, for crying out loud. What're they gonna do next-- sue a pencil and paper, because some guy traced the Hulk?
EA is a publicly traded company. They don't care anything about quality of the game
:)
In that case, why ask the employees to work overtime? Seems like they should be able to make a really shitty game in a lot less time.
So, they've improved the detection to tell if your box has been modded. It's really a completely Non-story.
Actually, tips from the board will likely keep me from getting banned. The story's useful to me, anyway. So, it was news for at least one nerd.
Now, I realize that you'll tear apart my argument because "George Bush is evil" and "the US economy doesn't create any value to the world." Obviously those aren't valid arguments any way you slice it.
While I admire your proactive stance, it's generally considered poor form (not to mention confusing) to set up straw men for hypothetical future arguments. There's a shortage of straw men due to excessive over-use, so please, treat them like an antibiotic: wait to use them until you need them!
This message was brought to you by Straw Men Against the Constant Killing of Straw Men.