What you're saying is certainly true. But my comment is meant in the context of AAA titles as a business. Most people want to get into games so that they can work on the next great title. It used to be that 5-10 guys could put together some capital, put together a prototype for a cool game, pitch it to a publisher, and then finish it for $1 million. With success (which was far more predictable in the past), you instantly went from a miniature startup, to a small but competitive Name.
The idea is that the days of the small bulldog developer with the next big idea are sort of over. Sure, you may get the occasional anomaly (Bf1942 comes to mind) but in general it's not really a viable business plan anymore. 5 guys don't even make up an animation department anymore. Much less programming + animation + modelling + design + all the sub-disciplines within them.
Sorry about that. I messed up on the submit/preview button:)
What I meant to say was :
Fast forward 7 years. You've got Squaresoft shipping titles with 200+ people on it. Multiple super-games with budgets as high as [50 million].
Was just pointing out the extremes to which we've seen (Shenmue, the various Final Fantasies, etc).
As far as getting into the industry, the short version of my usual screed:
- Be sure you love to program (I'm assuming you're a programmer). This being Slashdot, I'm sure this isn't an issue. There is a lot of hard work involved, not all of which is particularly glamorous or exciting. Be prepared to work very hard early on to earn your stripes.
- Don't get into it to make money. While it is certainly possible to make significant money via bonuses and royalties, chances are you won't in any significant way. You will probably start at a lower salary than your non game industry peers, but if you're good, this will rapidly change. However, good salary != massive bonuses.
- In terms of nuts-and-bolts : put together a demo. A real demo. Not necessarily some cookie cutter gee-whiz graphics demo that anyone with ctrl-C/ctrl-V can do. I cannot tell you how boring and uninformative it is for someone to come in with 'Hey, check out my kewl graphics demo!' Unless you're the 2nd coming of Carmack, you're not gonna start as the Graphics Guy for your company (and if you -do-, you should be incredibly suspicious about the competency of those who hired you). Pac-man. Space invaders. Defender. Something original but simple. Basically, something that shows you can see a project throught from start to finish. That's truly impressive.
- Philosophies : I don't care how many Linux distros you're familiary with or how many Slashdot-approved technophenomena du jours you know - know your C and your basic machine-level basics. Be familiar with all the essential 3d math concepts. For God's sake, know the difference between a dot product and a cross product. Be prepared to abandon cherished modern concepts about OOP and dynamic memory usage. In other words : don't be a Slashdot zealot:)
- Dedication to games. The running joke in the industry is "Oh, you get paid to play games all day!". Of course this is the furthest thing from the truth. It's hard and has plenty of grueling episodes. Be prepared to occasionally commit 80+ hour weeks for 3+ months for the real humdingers. Game developement is for better or worse, a way of life, not a job (at least until you hit the upper echelons in your 30's:)
Preface : I'm a programmer in the industry who has worked on 'cutting edge' titles for the entirety of my career. I started in 1997.
That's only 7 years. In the 7 years I've been in the business, I've become a certifiable 'old man'. That may sound nutty, but our industry moves so fast, it's perfectly sane. An in that 7 years, things have shifted massively.
When I first started, I worked on a project with a budget of about 2.5-3 million $. At the time, that was considered a pretty large amount. Our team was about 20 people, mostly rookies of 1 year (or less) experience, with 5-6 'old salt' types. This was a PC title at the very earliest edge of 3d acceleration. The voodoo 1 was barely out there. Use of floating point 3d math was finally starting to be possible. Our target for 'great sales'? 200,000. If we sold 100,000 it would be considered 'good'. 200,000 would be fantabulous. 300,000 and up would be massive wild success.
50 million. The average game that gets greenlit these days has a budget of 12 million or more. When you pitch a AAA title to a publisher the magic number is '1 million units'. This is of course an insane number that no one realistically expects to hit (especially the poor developers themselves). But the expectation of the top-end people is 'if we don't realistically think this can sell 1 million units, why are we considering it'?
You know what -hasn't- changed in this time? Selling prices. Games still retail for $40-50.
Yet budgets have quadrupled or worse. Technology has leaped forward by a LEAST 10x in capabilities. We went from the Voodoo 1 (cool! hardware rasterizing!) to the Voodoo 2 (awesome! really -fast- hardware rasterizing with multitexturing!) to the TNT (WOO! Even -faster- hardware rasterizing with multitexturing!) to the Geforce (Yay, no we've got T&L) to the Geforce 2 (Hmm, T&L plus a complex layer of vertex shaders) to the postmodern Geforce 4+ cards (ummm, dang, 4+ versions of pixel shaders now with a dump truck full of crazy, complex techniques which all the artists and designers and producers all have a hardon over). Ah, we've also got 20x the memory available and 30x the processor power. Can't ship anything without an ultramodern physics engine, or an endless streaming arbitrary polygon-soup world now can we?
And to top it all off, the trend in actual sales is : instead of a largish array of semi-successful to successful games, we now have a huge bundle of big-but-unsuccessful games and a small handful of monster selling uber titles. With very very very little in between.
Publishers now aren't willing to commit to something unless they think it'll sell a gajillion units. But of course, selling a gajillion units means having lots and lots and lots of risky and expensive features. So doing these big payoff games is a big gamble.
This 'Inflationary Period' (to borrow a term from cosmology) has resulted in a radically different landscape. Programmers balk (for good reason) at the design requirements necessary to make a competitive game. I have the privelege of working with some very smart people even 'older' than I am. One of them once said to me : 'Practically everything we do is worthy of a PH.d thesis'. And he is right. You can't -not- push the already ludicrous technology barrier with a new title, otherwise you'll be putting forward a design with limited sales appeal.
It's an ugly ugly situation. Where I work, we are to this very day struggling with coming up with a design for our next project (one of several) that will satisfy these myriad goals. Everyone is so incredibly smart and dedicated, but it seems to me that we're very fast approaching some sort of upper-bound on complexity.
I don't know where it is going to end, but at the moment, you can be damn sure that the days of the garage-developer are over. Technology has accelerated too fast.
It brings a tear to my eye to see so many/.'ers who have the -correct- understanding of the point of the BOR.
If you actually read the second amendment, there's a subject and a predicate. There's "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state", then a, and then "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Argue all you want about whether a militia is necessary or not, or who's in it, or whatever. Using the rules of plain english, you could change the amendment to
"Because Santa Claus is an avid grapefruit golfer, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." and it would still imply the same thing. The right of the people to own guns. What the heck does it mean to have the "state's rights" interpretation anyway? The state allows itself to own weapons? Wow, good thing that bit of foresight was included by the FF's.
You can argue "the people", but that's completely disingenuous considering that "the people" is the exact same definite article used in the 1st amendment. Unless you're willing to accept a "collective right" to free speech, that is....
The 2nd amendment is about hunting. It's about hunting politicians. No one is going to argue that an armed citizenry is going to take the US Army. But it -will- put the fear of God in politicians. And besides, you gotta like the odds of 500,000 guys with guns tanks and planes vs 80 million guys with "sniper" rifles.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread - if you don't like the 2nd amendment, by all means try and repeal it. Until then, don't try and sell us what are clearly lies.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea is that the days of the small bulldog developer with the next big idea are sort of over. Sure, you may get the occasional anomaly (Bf1942 comes to mind) but in general it's not really a viable business plan anymore. 5 guys don't even make up an animation department anymore. Much less programming + animation + modelling + design + all the sub-disciplines within them.
What I meant to say was :
Fast forward 7 years. You've got Squaresoft shipping titles with 200+ people on it. Multiple super-games with budgets as high as [50 million].
Was just pointing out the extremes to which we've seen (Shenmue, the various Final Fantasies, etc).
As far as getting into the industry, the short version of my usual screed:
- Be sure you love to program (I'm assuming you're a programmer). This being Slashdot, I'm sure this isn't an issue. There is a lot of hard work involved, not all of which is particularly glamorous or exciting. Be prepared to work very hard early on to earn your stripes.
- Don't get into it to make money. While it is certainly possible to make significant money via bonuses and royalties, chances are you won't in any significant way. You will probably start at a lower salary than your non game industry peers, but if you're good, this will rapidly change. However, good salary != massive bonuses.
- In terms of nuts-and-bolts : put together a demo. A real demo. Not necessarily some cookie cutter gee-whiz graphics demo that anyone with ctrl-C/ctrl-V can do. I cannot tell you how boring and uninformative it is for someone to come in with 'Hey, check out my kewl graphics demo!' Unless you're the 2nd coming of Carmack, you're not gonna start as the Graphics Guy for your company (and if you -do-, you should be incredibly suspicious about the competency of those who hired you). Pac-man. Space invaders. Defender. Something original but simple. Basically, something that shows you can see a project throught from start to finish. That's truly impressive.
- Philosophies : I don't care how many Linux distros you're familiary with or how many Slashdot-approved technophenomena du jours you know - know your C and your basic machine-level basics. Be familiar with all the essential 3d math concepts. For God's sake, know the difference between a dot product and a cross product. Be prepared to abandon cherished modern concepts about OOP and dynamic memory usage. In other words : don't be a Slashdot zealot :)
- Dedication to games. The running joke in the industry is "Oh, you get paid to play games all day!". Of course this is the furthest thing from the truth. It's hard and has plenty of grueling episodes. Be prepared to occasionally commit 80+ hour weeks for 3+ months for the real humdingers. Game developement is for better or worse, a way of life, not a job (at least until you hit the upper echelons in your 30's :)
That's only 7 years. In the 7 years I've been in the business, I've become a certifiable 'old man'. That may sound nutty, but our industry moves so fast, it's perfectly sane. An in that 7 years, things have shifted massively.
When I first started, I worked on a project with a budget of about 2.5-3 million $. At the time, that was considered a pretty large amount. Our team was about 20 people, mostly rookies of 1 year (or less) experience, with 5-6 'old salt' types. This was a PC title at the very earliest edge of 3d acceleration. The voodoo 1 was barely out there. Use of floating point 3d math was finally starting to be possible. Our target for 'great sales'? 200,000. If we sold 100,000 it would be considered 'good'. 200,000 would be fantabulous. 300,000 and up would be massive wild success.
50 million. The average game that gets greenlit these days has a budget of 12 million or more. When you pitch a AAA title to a publisher the magic number is '1 million units'. This is of course an insane number that no one realistically expects to hit (especially the poor developers themselves). But the expectation of the top-end people is 'if we don't realistically think this can sell 1 million units, why are we considering it'?
You know what -hasn't- changed in this time? Selling prices. Games still retail for $40-50.
Yet budgets have quadrupled or worse. Technology has leaped forward by a LEAST 10x in capabilities. We went from the Voodoo 1 (cool! hardware rasterizing!) to the Voodoo 2 (awesome! really -fast- hardware rasterizing with multitexturing!) to the TNT (WOO! Even -faster- hardware rasterizing with multitexturing!) to the Geforce (Yay, no we've got T&L) to the Geforce 2 (Hmm, T&L plus a complex layer of vertex shaders) to the postmodern Geforce 4+ cards (ummm, dang, 4+ versions of pixel shaders now with a dump truck full of crazy, complex techniques which all the artists and designers and producers all have a hardon over). Ah, we've also got 20x the memory available and 30x the processor power. Can't ship anything without an ultramodern physics engine, or an endless streaming arbitrary polygon-soup world now can we?
And to top it all off, the trend in actual sales is : instead of a largish array of semi-successful to successful games, we now have a huge bundle of big-but-unsuccessful games and a small handful of monster selling uber titles. With very very very little in between.
Publishers now aren't willing to commit to something unless they think it'll sell a gajillion units. But of course, selling a gajillion units means having lots and lots and lots of risky and expensive features. So doing these big payoff games is a big gamble.
This 'Inflationary Period' (to borrow a term from cosmology) has resulted in a radically different landscape. Programmers balk (for good reason) at the design requirements necessary to make a competitive game. I have the privelege of working with some very smart people even 'older' than I am. One of them once said to me : 'Practically everything we do is worthy of a PH.d thesis'. And he is right. You can't -not- push the already ludicrous technology barrier with a new title, otherwise you'll be putting forward a design with limited sales appeal.
It's an ugly ugly situation. Where I work, we are to this very day struggling with coming up with a design for our next project (one of several) that will satisfy these myriad goals. Everyone is so incredibly smart and dedicated, but it seems to me that we're very fast approaching some sort of upper-bound on complexity.
I don't know where it is going to end, but at the moment, you can be damn sure that the days of the garage-developer are over. Technology has accelerated too fast.
If you actually read the second amendment, there's a subject and a predicate. There's "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state", then a , and then "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Argue all you want about whether a militia is necessary or not, or who's in it, or whatever. Using the rules of plain english, you could change the amendment to
"Because Santa Claus is an avid grapefruit golfer, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." and it would still imply the same thing. The right of the people to own guns. What the heck does it mean to have the "state's rights" interpretation anyway? The state allows itself to own weapons? Wow, good thing that bit of foresight was included by the FF's.
You can argue "the people", but that's completely disingenuous considering that "the people" is the exact same definite article used in the 1st amendment. Unless you're willing to accept a "collective right" to free speech, that is....
The 2nd amendment is about hunting. It's about hunting politicians. No one is going to argue that an armed citizenry is going to take the US Army. But it -will- put the fear of God in politicians. And besides, you gotta like the odds of 500,000 guys with guns tanks and planes vs 80 million guys with "sniper" rifles.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread - if you don't like the 2nd amendment, by all means try and repeal it. Until then, don't try and sell us what are clearly lies.
Dig my controversial new nick!