Gaming for the PC and Mac market is doomed anyway in the near future, look at Mark Rein's talk at develop conference in brighton the pc market is dead with intel putting only low end graphic cards on their motherboards. Everybody's moving to laptops anyway and high end graphic cards are energy wasters. There is just no purpose developing photo realistic games for the top 5% of pc market that can run those games. Look at games like halflife2 and doom3 which costed millions to develop I wonder whether they made a profit (well they do as they license their engine) as I could not run either of those games on my 3 year old laptop.
I would just buy a Wii/Ps3/Xbox360 than at least you would know the next 5 years you'd be able to run any game.
If you like the social aspect of games there are two other games i can recommend:
- Die wervolfe fon dusterwald - its a game about werewolves everybody gets assigned a card (werewolve, citizen, witch, hunter etc). The goal of the game is for the werewolves to kill the citizens and for the citizens to identify and burn the wolves. Its a brilliant game that can be played with up to 18 people. its a really cool game where everybody gets parranoid accussing others of being a wherewolf
- kuhhandel - again a card trading game similar to bohnanza but very complex (you have to get four of the same animals and every turn you can either auction off an animal or force trade with other player and there is no real strategy for winning which makes it such a brilliant game.
I wonder why almost all games come from germany? don't they have computers or tv's;-)
Germans really make the nicest games, I'm hooked to the card trading game "bonanza" / bohnanza (in german; bohn is bean). You basically grow different kinds of beans and when you have enough beans you can trade them for gold. But the player is limited in the number of beans they can grow so you have to trade with other players. Very funny.
but you shouldn't let the user decide for himself what his suit is. Nobody plays the game on easy, the game should just monitor automatically how long the user wants to play and adjust the difficulty to that.
but 75% of the cost of the game is in the art work, so creating all that is not going to change significantly regardless of any development methodology.
All this speculation about which console will dominate, nobody can tell, its all going to be decided whichever manufacturer signs an exclusive deal with whatever game will be the most popular this fall. Look at how many ps2's were sold when GTA came out, I predict the same for any console that comes with such a killer game. We should not look at the consoles but at the games.
I don't like saving, in too many games it just reverts to numerous load-save actions just to beat a tough end boss. Games are simulations of "some" real world. In the real world you can't save why should you in a game? There must be ways around see for example mechanisms like SLOW and REWIND (in prince of persia or Full auto that allow you to slow/reverse time if you made a mistake (e.g. get killed by an end boss)). I think such mechanisms are much better then save/load combo's.
Wouldn't it be cool if there was some sort of razzie award for the worst sequel-prequel- copycat game of the year? Maybe this would also motivate the game industry to develop more innovative games.
yep high costs are a barrier to innovative games. But there is hope, maybe someday some easy game creator kit will be developed which is only as complex as photoshop and still allow one to create innovative games easily.
Costs - keep low to increase profits and attract customers...
Time to market - keep low to reach the market before competitors do..
Quality -....never mind.....
a dual layer blu ray disc can hold 50gb.
Suppose for games we can store multimedia content (graphics / audio) a factor ten to 1 then one each disc we can ship (if we assume the game engine itself is 1gb (a fairly high upper limit in my opinion) 490 gigabytes of art. I mean thats an insane amount, and I think the limitations are not in how much data a disc can hold but can you imagine how many artists are needed to produce a game that has 490 gb of art?
With the ever increasing costs of developing games and the low risk of succes this is just not feasible.
Would be nice to have some figures on how much creating 1gb of art costs.
They should either rename this site to MMORGPchart.com as all games are fighting/rpg based games. Otherwise games like hattrick.org (820k users) and travian.com (120k users) should also be included.
Well to be honest the playstation3 cell architecture is unlike any game architecture that we have seen in the past. I really like the concept, but for a player perspective it only means more processing power and higher quality graphics, they don't care whats under the hood, they only care about games. Taking that into account, a player doesnt really care what powers these games but which games are available.
These are just different times with different rules, what worked in the past does not work today. The "space race" in providing ever more realism only costs more money but hardly generates additional revenues. Maybe Nintendo should not learn from the mistakes they made in the past but the mistakes its competitors make nowadays, maybe they are just lucky that the market moves in their favour.
Still I think certain companies can still snatch part of the console market with a small pc based console (like the xbox but cheaper) which just runs ported PC games.
Back in the day, indie games were called "Budget games" and came on an audio cassette. And if they were crap, we'd tape music over them.
I can still remember c64 software being broadcast over the radio in the early mornings... but that is another story.
If indie game developers are smart, which they no doubt are, why would they want to lose money on a publisher (which only spends it on a box and a disc) One of my indie game developer friends just sell his game on his site and it sells remarkably well. (no ferraris yet) With indie games your in a completely different market, and a good game will sell itself eventually.
I don't think innovation will come from one of the big game developers. It will come from the small niche / indie game market. Why don't EA games try to stimulate that by doing things like popcap did with publishing their open source framework that allows anyone to reduce some of the effort that accompanies building games. I just finished a small game based on this framework and its fun to build and to play. How much inhouse frameworks/tools does EA have? If you want innovation you need to create the possibilities for doing that.
consoles do not sell games... games sell consoles
Whoever comes up with the next exclusive-to-particular-console-only GTA:SA or any other blockbuster seller will dominate the market.
I would have expected apple to bring us the 3rd handheld. When will apple open up their Ipods so third party developers can start building games? I mean Ipods have a color screen and good battery life already.
I swear this depends on the weather, winter in canada has been very mild with plenty of opportunity to go outside and enjoy the warm winterweather! they should do this study again with winters with minus 40 celsius.
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And they had boothbabes at the gamefest party!!! I mean what more could you want of a game development framework??
Gaming for the PC and Mac market is doomed anyway in the near future, look at Mark Rein's talk at develop conference in brighton the pc market is dead with intel putting only low end graphic cards on their motherboards. Everybody's moving to laptops anyway and high end graphic cards are energy wasters. There is just no purpose developing photo realistic games for the top 5% of pc market that can run those games. Look at games like halflife2 and doom3 which costed millions to develop I wonder whether they made a profit (well they do as they license their engine) as I could not run either of those games on my 3 year old laptop. I would just buy a Wii/Ps3/Xbox360 than at least you would know the next 5 years you'd be able to run any game.
If you like the social aspect of games there are two other games i can recommend: - Die wervolfe fon dusterwald - its a game about werewolves everybody gets assigned a card (werewolve, citizen, witch, hunter etc). The goal of the game is for the werewolves to kill the citizens and for the citizens to identify and burn the wolves. Its a brilliant game that can be played with up to 18 people. its a really cool game where everybody gets parranoid accussing others of being a wherewolf - kuhhandel - again a card trading game similar to bohnanza but very complex (you have to get four of the same animals and every turn you can either auction off an animal or force trade with other player and there is no real strategy for winning which makes it such a brilliant game. I wonder why almost all games come from germany? don't they have computers or tv's ;-)
Germans really make the nicest games, I'm hooked to the card trading game "bonanza" / bohnanza (in german; bohn is bean). You basically grow different kinds of beans and when you have enough beans you can trade them for gold. But the player is limited in the number of beans they can grow so you have to trade with other players. Very funny.
but you shouldn't let the user decide for himself what his suit is. Nobody plays the game on easy, the game should just monitor automatically how long the user wants to play and adjust the difficulty to that.
but 75% of the cost of the game is in the art work, so creating all that is not going to change significantly regardless of any development methodology.
or a world of San Andreas MMORPG would also be cool :c)
All this speculation about which console will dominate, nobody can tell, its all going to be decided whichever manufacturer signs an exclusive deal with whatever game will be the most popular this fall. Look at how many ps2's were sold when GTA came out, I predict the same for any console that comes with such a killer game. We should not look at the consoles but at the games.
I don't like saving, in too many games it just reverts to numerous load-save actions just to beat a tough end boss. Games are simulations of "some" real world. In the real world you can't save why should you in a game? There must be ways around see for example mechanisms like SLOW and REWIND (in prince of persia or Full auto that allow you to slow/reverse time if you made a mistake (e.g. get killed by an end boss)). I think such mechanisms are much better then save/load combo's.
Wouldn't it be cool if there was some sort of razzie award for the worst sequel-prequel- copycat game of the year? Maybe this would also motivate the game industry to develop more innovative games.
yep high costs are a barrier to innovative games. But there is hope, maybe someday some easy game creator kit will be developed which is only as complex as photoshop and still allow one to create innovative games easily.
1000 is a bit steep according to this report http://www.dti.gov.uk/files/file10663.pdf average team size is around 20 people.
Costs - keep low to increase profits and attract customers... Time to market - keep low to reach the market before competitors do.. Quality - ....never mind.....
Hmmm thats interesting but it only shows we can ship another 5gb of art ;-)
a dual layer blu ray disc can hold 50gb. Suppose for games we can store multimedia content (graphics / audio) a factor ten to 1 then one each disc we can ship (if we assume the game engine itself is 1gb (a fairly high upper limit in my opinion) 490 gigabytes of art. I mean thats an insane amount, and I think the limitations are not in how much data a disc can hold but can you imagine how many artists are needed to produce a game that has 490 gb of art? With the ever increasing costs of developing games and the low risk of succes this is just not feasible. Would be nice to have some figures on how much creating 1gb of art costs.
They should either rename this site to MMORGPchart.com as all games are fighting/rpg based games. Otherwise games like hattrick.org (820k users) and travian.com (120k users) should also be included.
Well to be honest the playstation3 cell architecture is unlike any game architecture that we have seen in the past. I really like the concept, but for a player perspective it only means more processing power and higher quality graphics, they don't care whats under the hood, they only care about games. Taking that into account, a player doesnt really care what powers these games but which games are available.
These are just different times with different rules, what worked in the past does not work today. The "space race" in providing ever more realism only costs more money but hardly generates additional revenues. Maybe Nintendo should not learn from the mistakes they made in the past but the mistakes its competitors make nowadays, maybe they are just lucky that the market moves in their favour. Still I think certain companies can still snatch part of the console market with a small pc based console (like the xbox but cheaper) which just runs ported PC games.
Back in the day, indie games were called "Budget games" and came on an audio cassette. And if they were crap, we'd tape music over them. I can still remember c64 software being broadcast over the radio in the early mornings... but that is another story. If indie game developers are smart, which they no doubt are, why would they want to lose money on a publisher (which only spends it on a box and a disc) One of my indie game developer friends just sell his game on his site and it sells remarkably well. (no ferraris yet) With indie games your in a completely different market, and a good game will sell itself eventually.
I don't think innovation will come from one of the big game developers. It will come from the small niche / indie game market. Why don't EA games try to stimulate that by doing things like popcap did with publishing their open source framework that allows anyone to reduce some of the effort that accompanies building games. I just finished a small game based on this framework and its fun to build and to play. How much inhouse frameworks/tools does EA have? If you want innovation you need to create the possibilities for doing that.
You know its much easier but more expensive to create high quality graphics than to provide new types of gameplay.
consoles do not sell games... games sell consoles Whoever comes up with the next exclusive-to-particular-console-only GTA:SA or any other blockbuster seller will dominate the market.
I would have expected apple to bring us the 3rd handheld. When will apple open up their Ipods so third party developers can start building games? I mean Ipods have a color screen and good battery life already.
WOW they even have an adventure based on one of my favourite french comics: thorgal. (that story is 10times cooler then LOTR / STARWARS)
I swear this depends on the weather, winter in canada has been very mild with plenty of opportunity to go outside and enjoy the warm winterweather! they should do this study again with winters with minus 40 celsius.