Some people are wondering why this guy made such a silly comment. Well, imagine if he said "Goddammit, what the hell does the government here think they're doing?"
We get used to saying that kind of thing here in the US, but elsewhere, you just can't do that.
This is a shortsighted and ultimately fallacious argument. If you said the same thing about graphics, everyone would immediately recognize it as specious ("graphics programmers should focus on computer-generated-looking stuff and games should never visually strive for realism"). What is wrong with a string quartet as a soundtrack for a game? That ability is open to us, and you are saying we shouldn't do it because it is not "computery" enough for you? Instead of making a comment on innovation, you are instead trying to dictate style based on your personal tastes, and attempting to cast it as criticism. Not going to fly, in my book.
I forgot where I read this, but when Bill Gates was asked what made him think the Xbox had a chance in the video game market, he replied, "there has never been a dominant company in the game console business for more than one generation in a row." Which was already wrong by the time he said it, but he was proven wrong again soon afterwards. The devil is in the details, guys; I'll believe your market dominance when I see it.
The development hardware may not be final and the specs may change, of course. But the point is that, based on what we have now, real estimates can still be made - not "anywhere from fifty cents to fifty million".
If anybody needed further proof that Bruno Bonnell is an idiot, look no further. After effectively running his company into the ground, he now masks his company's technical inability to provide launch titles for this platform by criticizing Sony and directing attention away from the critical problems at his own company.
EA, Activision, and other US developers do not seem to be having the same problems he is with supporting the PSP. Even without pricing information it's strategically important to have titles on these new machines, just in case they take off - that's why most major publishers decided to put out some games for the N-Gage as well. And if Bruno Bonnell can't estimate development costs, when the technical specs of the machine are already well-known to developers, what is he doing in charge of a video game company?
What a poorly designed "contest". According to the article, the only requirement was to "create a love story". What is this challenge supposed to mean?
- Is it supposed to be a game about two characters who fall in love? That's already been done, dozens of times, in many genres, probably most notably in the Final Fantasy series (as stated above).
- Does it mean that the player is supposed to fall in love with an in-game character? That's probably happened more times than avid players of Tomb Raider or Dead or Alive might want to admit. I think that young men in partiuclar are reasonably susceptible to this. But you can't "force" a player to fall in love with an in-game character.
- Does it mean that two players meet each other in the context of the game and fall in love? That happens already in massively multiplayer games like EverQuest. In fact, I think that any time you have groups of large people doing things together, some of them are bound to form romantic relationships.
The more I think about this, the more empty and pointless the whole discussion seems to have been. Even though Will Wright made an entertaining talk, he did not address any central question about love; the point of his design was simply to meet the other player! Objectives like that already happen in games all the time - meet the professor, meet the hitman and the extraction point, etc. In fact, Wright simply assumes that the love is already there before giving players their objectives!
I respect all these guys, but the solutions they proposed were garbage, and probably due to the fact that the "problem" was not defined in any specific way.
Sorry, but that's just plain dumb. Japan, also a "culture founded on Confuscian(sic) ideals," has been making quite a few of the world's better video games for upwards of 20 years now. And if you think China or Korea also can't absorb and re-imagine American pop culture, you'd do well to pay these places a visit.
Actually, Activision is one of the better publishers in this respect. Most Activision titles that I know of display the developer's logo prominently on the box and show an opening logo move for the developer after the Activision logo. Also, your friend is kind of right in this instance, since True Crime was developed by Luxoflux, a studio owned by Activision.
The company could easily have rebranded all the studios it owns, like EA does, but they don't. It's specifically part of their strategy to let developers' names stay. So instead of Activision Madison and Activision Santa Monica or whatever, there's Raven and Neversoft and Infinity Ward.
Imagine you are some non-tech-savvy investor, and all you know about Infiniujm Labs is what you see here. Not so bad, right? So I think the reason Infinium is so intent on protecting its image is because of this fragile bubble they have built around the stock.
That's an informative and interesting post, NT on PowerPC arcitechture and all, but...well, I couldn't get over the fact that your.sig says "would you like to do titty-f'ing?" in Japanese. What the heck is up with that?
This is not a complete answer, but to generalize vastly, the competition is really fierce. Games are played to be won and to be a demonstration of skill. This permeates a lot of East Asian culture, and I am sure you could delve into history to find all kinds of examples of this, although anyone who's had a traditionally-minded Asian mom* will understand what I mean. Piano lessons, anyone?;)
Accordingly, you "win" at MMORPGs by investing more time into them. I'm not saying their parents are making them do this, of course - just that the idea of "winning" is very important in these cultures.
There are other factors too, of course - high broadband penetration in South Korea and the group-oriented gameplay of titles like Lineage. I might add that being part of a group isn't just important in Asia, it's important everywhere. How many times have you heard people go, "Well, I really only log onto EverQuest to chat with my guild these days"...
Wired? This is the same Wired that gave us 101 Ways to Save Apple, with such great suggestions as "Admit it. You're out of the hardware game," "Sell yourself to IBM or Motorola," "Relocate the company to Bangalore," and "Invest heavily in Newton technology." Hilarious. Although there is one prescient thing in the article, which I'm not sure was intended seriously or was menat to be sarcastic (this was 1997 after all) - "It's Netscape we should really worry about."
My first thought was - isn't this affected by the quality of the game? What if people downloaded the game demo and realized it sucked? In order to make this slightly more scientific, one would have to try this over many titles, not just one.
Also... large publishers like Activision release free demos all the time: if it really weakened demand for the final game, I think they'd be able to detect that and they wouldn't be doing it anymore.
"The same mistake the RIAA and MPAA are making?" Don't make me laugh. Roland isn't suing Grandmas and children who live in a housing project. How many customers do you think Roland will lose because of this? The several of you? Anyone with any connection to classic game emulation? A horde of righteously indignant Slashdot users, who will rise up and firmly resolve to never again purchase Roland products? Sorry, I don't buy it.
Activision cancelled their Star Trek license by suing Viacom for not "keeping the license active enough," I wonder if White Wolf is next on their list for ending the World of Darkness before Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines ships! Or maybe they'll just end up with another dead license... heh...
But unfortunately, I agree that the blame here lies solely with the consumer. Not YOU, reader, but just the average consumer -- the same one who goes to see the latest idiotic "blockbuster" movie without having read any reviews.
Game companies are businesses, and they don't have any obligation to make awesome games. Their obligation is to make games that sell, and to sell, they sacrifice everything else: time, money, quality, anything.
To the people who say that delayed games that are great sell better than crappy games that are on-time: this simply not true for licensed properties, especially ones based on movies. There's only a very small window of opportunity for a movie-license game to worm its way into people's wallets, and that is while the multimillion dollar movie campaign itself is arresting people's consciousness for just long enough to make them buy all the related junk. Rant all you want -- that's just how the human mind works.
"...that's what happened to the Dreamcast in the face of the PS2, and now everybody sits around a talks about what a great system it really was."
Except the Dreamcast actually was a good system. This article fails to mention some of the fatal design flaws in the N-Gage. Like this one: in order to change games, you have to take the back plate off the N-Gage, remove the battery, take the old game out and put the new one in, put the battery back in, and replace the plate again.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people are wondering why this guy made such a silly comment. Well, imagine if he said "Goddammit, what the hell does the government here think they're doing?"
We get used to saying that kind of thing here in the US, but elsewhere, you just can't do that.
This is a shortsighted and ultimately fallacious argument. If you said the same thing about graphics, everyone would immediately recognize it as specious ("graphics programmers should focus on computer-generated-looking stuff and games should never visually strive for realism"). What is wrong with a string quartet as a soundtrack for a game? That ability is open to us, and you are saying we shouldn't do it because it is not "computery" enough for you? Instead of making a comment on innovation, you are instead trying to dictate style based on your personal tastes, and attempting to cast it as criticism. Not going to fly, in my book.
I forgot where I read this, but when Bill Gates was asked what made him think the Xbox had a chance in the video game market, he replied, "there has never been a dominant company in the game console business for more than one generation in a row." Which was already wrong by the time he said it, but he was proven wrong again soon afterwards. The devil is in the details, guys; I'll believe your market dominance when I see it.
"I built a game console"? If by "built a game console" you mean "put a PC into a set-top box," then I guess you could be correct...
The development hardware may not be final and the specs may change, of course. But the point is that, based on what we have now, real estimates can still be made - not "anywhere from fifty cents to fifty million".
EA, Activision, and other US developers do not seem to be having the same problems he is with supporting the PSP. Even without pricing information it's strategically important to have titles on these new machines, just in case they take off - that's why most major publishers decided to put out some games for the N-Gage as well. And if Bruno Bonnell can't estimate development costs, when the technical specs of the machine are already well-known to developers, what is he doing in charge of a video game company?
That's funny... that translucent green "special edition" color is the exact same color that all Xbox test machines use.
- Is it supposed to be a game about two characters who fall in love? That's already been done, dozens of times, in many genres, probably most notably in the Final Fantasy series (as stated above).
- Does it mean that the player is supposed to fall in love with an in-game character? That's probably happened more times than avid players of Tomb Raider or Dead or Alive might want to admit. I think that young men in partiuclar are reasonably susceptible to this. But you can't "force" a player to fall in love with an in-game character.
- Does it mean that two players meet each other in the context of the game and fall in love? That happens already in massively multiplayer games like EverQuest. In fact, I think that any time you have groups of large people doing things together, some of them are bound to form romantic relationships.
The more I think about this, the more empty and pointless the whole discussion seems to have been. Even though Will Wright made an entertaining talk, he did not address any central question about love; the point of his design was simply to meet the other player! Objectives like that already happen in games all the time - meet the professor, meet the hitman and the extraction point, etc. In fact, Wright simply assumes that the love is already there before giving players their objectives!
I respect all these guys, but the solutions they proposed were garbage, and probably due to the fact that the "problem" was not defined in any specific way.
Who mods these pig-headed posts "Informative"?
Actually, Activision is one of the better publishers in this respect. Most Activision titles that I know of display the developer's logo prominently on the box and show an opening logo move for the developer after the Activision logo. Also, your friend is kind of right in this instance, since True Crime was developed by Luxoflux, a studio owned by Activision.
The company could easily have rebranded all the studios it owns, like EA does, but they don't. It's specifically part of their strategy to let developers' names stay. So instead of Activision Madison and Activision Santa Monica or whatever, there's Raven and Neversoft and Infinity Ward.
Imagine you are some non-tech-savvy investor, and all you know about Infiniujm Labs is what you see here. Not so bad, right? So I think the reason Infinium is so intent on protecting its image is because of this fragile bubble they have built around the stock.
That's an informative and interesting post, NT on PowerPC arcitechture and all, but...well, I couldn't get over the fact that your .sig says "would you like to do titty-f'ing?" in Japanese. What the heck is up with that?
This is not a complete answer, but to generalize vastly, the competition is really fierce. Games are played to be won and to be a demonstration of skill. This permeates a lot of East Asian culture, and I am sure you could delve into history to find all kinds of examples of this, although anyone who's had a traditionally-minded Asian mom* will understand what I mean. Piano lessons, anyone? ;)
Accordingly, you "win" at MMORPGs by investing more time into them. I'm not saying their parents are making them do this, of course - just that the idea of "winning" is very important in these cultures.
There are other factors too, of course - high broadband penetration in South Korea and the group-oriented gameplay of titles like Lineage. I might add that being part of a group isn't just important in Asia, it's important everywhere. How many times have you heard people go, "Well, I really only log onto EverQuest to chat with my guild these days"...
*my mom is from Tokyo
They also made Blade II, which was fairly awful.
Empires? It's already out.
Wired? This is the same Wired that gave us 101 Ways to Save Apple, with such great suggestions as "Admit it. You're out of the hardware game," "Sell yourself to IBM or Motorola," "Relocate the company to Bangalore," and "Invest heavily in Newton technology." Hilarious. Although there is one prescient thing in the article, which I'm not sure was intended seriously or was menat to be sarcastic (this was 1997 after all) - "It's Netscape we should really worry about."
I wonder how much attention they're paying to what they are throwing online. Here's a sound effects CD for 88 cents per effect. Bizarre.
My first thought was - isn't this affected by the quality of the game? What if people downloaded the game demo and realized it sucked? In order to make this slightly more scientific, one would have to try this over many titles, not just one.
Also... large publishers like Activision release free demos all the time: if it really weakened demand for the final game, I think they'd be able to detect that and they wouldn't be doing it anymore.
"The same mistake the RIAA and MPAA are making?" Don't make me laugh. Roland isn't suing Grandmas and children who live in a housing project. How many customers do you think Roland will lose because of this? The several of you? Anyone with any connection to classic game emulation? A horde of righteously indignant Slashdot users, who will rise up and firmly resolve to never again purchase Roland products? Sorry, I don't buy it.
A bad idea? In Wired Magazine!? Say it isn't so!
"...the Hollywood-quality back story..."
I know that was meant as a sincere compliment, but it comes off like a backhanded one.
Whoops, I'm dumb. Never mind - I RTFA.
Activision cancelled their Star Trek license by suing Viacom for not "keeping the license active enough," I wonder if White Wolf is next on their list for ending the World of Darkness before Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines ships! Or maybe they'll just end up with another dead license... heh...
But unfortunately, I agree that the blame here lies solely with the consumer. Not YOU, reader, but just the average consumer -- the same one who goes to see the latest idiotic "blockbuster" movie without having read any reviews.
Game companies are businesses, and they don't have any obligation to make awesome games. Their obligation is to make games that sell, and to sell, they sacrifice everything else: time, money, quality, anything.
To the people who say that delayed games that are great sell better than crappy games that are on-time: this simply not true for licensed properties, especially ones based on movies. There's only a very small window of opportunity for a movie-license game to worm its way into people's wallets, and that is while the multimillion dollar movie campaign itself is arresting people's consciousness for just long enough to make them buy all the related junk. Rant all you want -- that's just how the human mind works.
"...that's what happened to the Dreamcast in the face of the PS2, and now everybody sits around a talks about what a great system it really was."
Except the Dreamcast actually was a good system. This article fails to mention some of the fatal design flaws in the N-Gage. Like this one: in order to change games, you have to take the back plate off the N-Gage, remove the battery, take the old game out and put the new one in, put the battery back in, and replace the plate again.