I work in production for a 3rd party developer, and I made a guess a week before the strike that we'd see a surge in resumes for production jobs. Why? Well when the TV shows shut down, all the PAs and other production personnel all lose their jobs as well. There's a lot of shared skillsets between TV production and game production.
So the strike happens and what do we get? A surge of production resumes. Ding!
I think you are confusing "game developers" with "game publishers". They are not necessarily the same thing. From the publisher's point of view, they want to sell lots of games. From the developer's point of view, they want to make good games.
It's like the difference between a book publisher and a book author.
Obviously I'm grossly oversimplifying but the difference does exist.
The license for the movies and the license for the books are two separate licenses.
In addition, the license for MMOs and the license for non-MMOs are two separate licenses.
So that's four licenses total. Vivendi had the licenses for the books, EA had the non-MMO license for the movies.
Additional detail, based on articles I've read on the topic:
EA has been churning out tons of games based on the movies since Fellowship hit theaters, and in 2005 they got the non-MMO license for the books as well. I'm not sure whether or not EA ever had the MMO license for the movies, but that license is not particularly valuable without the MMO license for the books as well. (You'd only be able to show things depicted in the films, NOTHING else.)
Turbine started developing the LOTRO MMO for Vivendi, this was when it was called Middle-Earth Online. Turbine eventually bought the license from Vivendi and re-branded the game as Lord of the Rings Online, they're self-publishing but Midway and Codemasters are handling distribution.
I imagine that Turbine must have investigated getting the MMO license for the movies as well, but I do not know if that ever happened. My understanding of these things is that if they went with that, they might have to rework all of their art assets to match the films, which would likely be a nightmarish PITA.
So now we've got EA with the non-MMO license for both the movies and the books. Turbine has the MMO license for the books. I have no clue who has the MMO license for the movies, not that it'd be valuable to anyone other than Turbine at this point.
Also please note that this is JUST the Lord of the Rings trilogy I'm talking about here. Silmarillion and The Hobbit are their own messy subjects.
I think that the people who are calling this BS aren't reading carefully, or are otherwise not paying attention. This is not percentage of PROFITS. This is percentage of gross.
Yes, the biggest bulk of the cost goes into development. For a next-gen title like a Gears of War, you have several dozen personnel working for multiple years on the project. For a typical game, that 45% chunk goes back to the publisher, who fronted it to the developer during the years of development. It's not like the game sells and suddenly the devs are rolling in money. They've already SPENT that 45%.
Not per-capita, and not spread out over the time required to generate the content.
How many music albums require 50 people 4 years to complete? And that's just dev, that doesn't count marketing or any other publisher activity.
Hmmm... I don't think it's a safe assumption to pin these closures on anything regarding the gaming magazine industry. Check out Troy Goodfellow's blog entry on the topic. According to him, the magazines were doing fine, but theglobe.com simply couldn't deal with the massive fines dealt it in the MySpace suit.
Rygar is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated but important games to hit the original NES.
* Side-scrolling platformer with RPG elements, pre-dating games like Metroid and Kid Icarus.
* Non-linear gameplay, with the ability to go back, the exact thing that the article says that SMB3 is noteworthy for. Yet Rygar predates SMB2, let alone 3.
* Both side-scrolling and top-down gameplay segments, prior to Bionic Commando.
* "Teasing" the player with areas that appear unreachable, but which must be returned to later in the game once the player has acquired the appropriate item. This pre-dated the Legend of Zelda by about a month in the US, although Zelda had come out almost a year earlier in Japan.
These are just a few of the gameplay elements that Rygar did, and did WELL, long before they were mainstream. If the game had only had some form of password savegame (like in Metroid or Kid Icarus) I think it would be much better remembered. As it is I think many people got an hour or so into it and then were turned off by the difficulty.
Saying that you're making a Lego MMO is like saying you're making a wood MMO, or a stone MMO. Lego are just building blocks. OK, I can have some idea what the things will look like when they exist, but I don't know what the things ARE. Spaceships? Medieval knights? Dinosaurs? BIONICLE?!
"they didn't provide enough quests to actually level all the way"
I don't understand this statement. I leveled to 60 and never did any grinding.
On further thought, this is probably due to heavy use of rested state. I don't play every day and I play lots of alts, so my main typically had almost a full level's worth of rested whenever I took him out.
If this news gets distributed to retail employees as well as the information about the products that they sell does... there's going to be a lot of people fired due to ignorance.
Having lived in Boston for 5 years, and now living in LA, I can totally understand why no one in LA would ever freak about something like this. Hell, I could be heading to work and actually SEE A BUS EXPLODE and my first thought would probably be, "Oh, I wonder what they're filming?" If I saw bombs on the MTA, I'd probably assume it was a new reality show.
Well the great thing about this is that the odds of it being a movie or a reality show, EVEN IN BOSTON, are much much higher than the odds of it being a terrorist attack. I mean seriously, I'm pretty sure I'm more likely to be eaten by a buffalo than be killed by terrorists.
I also love the automatic threat of lawsuits. "We're so fricking amped up and paranoid these days that your advertisements made us pass a brick, NOW YOU OWE US MONEY."
I'm waiting for the phrase, "Officials stated that they had no reason to believe this was an act of terrorism," to appear in a news story about a cat stuck in a tree. That's how we know it's time to pack it in and kill ourselves.
I generally use whatever is the easiest for the amount of work I had to do.
When I was in college, I had a small trust fund that my parents had set up to pay for as much of school as possible. During that time, the accountant who managed my trust fund also did the taxes.
When the trust fund ran out and I was a barely-employed college student, I did my 1040EZ by hand.
When I got out of school and had a real job, I did the 1040EZ via the web, I think for free.
At some point, something kicked in (I think the deduction of my college loan interest) so I had to switch to a 1040. One year Massachusetts still let me do it online, the next year they had shut down their own program but sent me a free voucher for Intuit's website.
I used Intuit's website until my 2004 taxes, when I had to prepare federal, MA and CA at the same time. The web interface didn't do this as nicely as the stand-alone software, so I switched to the stand-alone.
Kept using the stand-alone in 2005 when I had some obscure form -- schedule K, maybe? -- because of money I inherited from my grandmother, who passed away that year. I also liked it because I could mess around with numbers for my IRA and see what would work best for me. It was especially helpful when I had to file an amended return -- CapitalOne sent me a form that they were choosing '05 to declare a cancellation of debt (long story), and then, AFTER I'd filed, they sent me another form saying, "We take that back, we're gonna do that some other time."
I'll most likely be using TurboTax again this year. I've got another schedule K, and I think I'll be itemizing my deductions this year. It does a good job of reminding me of the limits on various deductions and the like.
From the rumors I've heard, MTV -- the new owners of Harmonix -- demanded way too much money for GH3. Something like 4X what Red Octane had paid Harmonix for GH2. But like I said, that's just rumor.
Do some research, RTFA, heck read the thread.
Cisco didn't just release the iPhone 3 weeks ago. They had a product by that name as early as 2000 if not earlier.
I dare you to go to sub-Saharan Africa and ask that same "how many do you know" question.
AIDS/HIV is a greater threat than cancer because it is transmissable.
Licensed games are harder to make than non-licensed because of the too many cooks problem. Frequently the owner of the license is more interested in "protecting" the license than making a good game. This is the challenge of making a licensed game, but sometimes it's worth it because of the free marketing you're getting. The best scenario is a solid license and a license owner with a hands-off approach, but that's rare. Generally the more well-known the license is, the more interference you'll get from the owner. Interference decrease quality every single time.
You'd think that this sort of thing -- changing requirements and demanding that the cost/time not change -- wouldn't happen to architects. But sadly I can tell you that it does. My stepfather is an architect. He spends a lot of time in court because of these types of situations.
Many classic games are already being ported to the DS and GBA, for example there's a GBA port of the original Legend of Zelda. Capcom just put out a GBA cart that has the NES Strider, Bionic Commando and Mighty Final Fight on it. I pretty much lost my mind when I saw that one. Bionic Commando!
High level WOW play requires 8 hour raids.
No, it really, really doesn't. I have played my level 60 hunter casually since I hit 60 a few months ago. I'll grind for rep for a couple of hours, or I'll run Scholo or Strat or UBRS with friends, or PVP for a bit. I'll probably sign up for one of my guild's weekly MC or ZG runs at some point just to see what it's like, but that'll have to wait until I have a free Saturday or Sunday.
8 hour raids are only required if you MUST WIN, i.e. must have the best shiniest highest bonus equipment.
When you realize that you don't really need any of that stuff in order to have fun, life becomes much easier.
In PnP you can, to some extent, rely on the GM to ensure game balance. (Or throw it out the window if he or she thinks that's more fun for the players.) MMOs do not have that luxury.
One of my greatest achievements in arcade gaming is that I managed to take one round -- not a full match, just a round -- from Jason Booth in SF2 Turbo when we were both at Turbine. Of course, he was only using one button -- light kick. When he switched to light punch, I was done.
All you need to do is note GW's continued presence on top-ten PC game sales charts. Even before the expansion launched the original SKU was still showing up there.
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I work in production for a 3rd party developer, and I made a guess a week before the strike that we'd see a surge in resumes for production jobs. Why? Well when the TV shows shut down, all the PAs and other production personnel all lose their jobs as well. There's a lot of shared skillsets between TV production and game production. So the strike happens and what do we get? A surge of production resumes. Ding!
I think you are confusing "game developers" with "game publishers". They are not necessarily the same thing. From the publisher's point of view, they want to sell lots of games. From the developer's point of view, they want to make good games. It's like the difference between a book publisher and a book author. Obviously I'm grossly oversimplifying but the difference does exist.
Not a "forget". A choice, I'm sure. AC's physics are really, really cool, but they're also a nightmarish PITA when developing content.
...it should probably be clarified here:
The license for the movies and the license for the books are two separate licenses.
In addition, the license for MMOs and the license for non-MMOs are two separate licenses.
So that's four licenses total. Vivendi had the licenses for the books, EA had the non-MMO license for the movies.
Additional detail, based on articles I've read on the topic:
EA has been churning out tons of games based on the movies since Fellowship hit theaters, and in 2005 they got the non-MMO license for the books as well. I'm not sure whether or not EA ever had the MMO license for the movies, but that license is not particularly valuable without the MMO license for the books as well. (You'd only be able to show things depicted in the films, NOTHING else.)
Turbine started developing the LOTRO MMO for Vivendi, this was when it was called Middle-Earth Online. Turbine eventually bought the license from Vivendi and re-branded the game as Lord of the Rings Online, they're self-publishing but Midway and Codemasters are handling distribution.
I imagine that Turbine must have investigated getting the MMO license for the movies as well, but I do not know if that ever happened. My understanding of these things is that if they went with that, they might have to rework all of their art assets to match the films, which would likely be a nightmarish PITA.
So now we've got EA with the non-MMO license for both the movies and the books. Turbine has the MMO license for the books. I have no clue who has the MMO license for the movies, not that it'd be valuable to anyone other than Turbine at this point.
Also please note that this is JUST the Lord of the Rings trilogy I'm talking about here. Silmarillion and The Hobbit are their own messy subjects.
I think that the people who are calling this BS aren't reading carefully, or are otherwise not paying attention. This is not percentage of PROFITS. This is percentage of gross. Yes, the biggest bulk of the cost goes into development. For a next-gen title like a Gears of War, you have several dozen personnel working for multiple years on the project. For a typical game, that 45% chunk goes back to the publisher, who fronted it to the developer during the years of development. It's not like the game sells and suddenly the devs are rolling in money. They've already SPENT that 45%.
Not per-capita, and not spread out over the time required to generate the content. How many music albums require 50 people 4 years to complete? And that's just dev, that doesn't count marketing or any other publisher activity.
Hmmm... I don't think it's a safe assumption to pin these closures on anything regarding the gaming magazine industry. Check out Troy Goodfellow's blog entry on the topic. According to him, the magazines were doing fine, but theglobe.com simply couldn't deal with the massive fines dealt it in the MySpace suit.
Rygar is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated but important games to hit the original NES. * Side-scrolling platformer with RPG elements, pre-dating games like Metroid and Kid Icarus. * Non-linear gameplay, with the ability to go back, the exact thing that the article says that SMB3 is noteworthy for. Yet Rygar predates SMB2, let alone 3. * Both side-scrolling and top-down gameplay segments, prior to Bionic Commando. * "Teasing" the player with areas that appear unreachable, but which must be returned to later in the game once the player has acquired the appropriate item. This pre-dated the Legend of Zelda by about a month in the US, although Zelda had come out almost a year earlier in Japan. These are just a few of the gameplay elements that Rygar did, and did WELL, long before they were mainstream. If the game had only had some form of password savegame (like in Metroid or Kid Icarus) I think it would be much better remembered. As it is I think many people got an hour or so into it and then were turned off by the difficulty.
Saying that you're making a Lego MMO is like saying you're making a wood MMO, or a stone MMO. Lego are just building blocks. OK, I can have some idea what the things will look like when they exist, but I don't know what the things ARE. Spaceships? Medieval knights? Dinosaurs? BIONICLE?!
"they didn't provide enough quests to actually level all the way" I don't understand this statement. I leveled to 60 and never did any grinding. On further thought, this is probably due to heavy use of rested state. I don't play every day and I play lots of alts, so my main typically had almost a full level's worth of rested whenever I took him out.
If this news gets distributed to retail employees as well as the information about the products that they sell does... there's going to be a lot of people fired due to ignorance.
Having lived in Boston for 5 years, and now living in LA, I can totally understand why no one in LA would ever freak about something like this. Hell, I could be heading to work and actually SEE A BUS EXPLODE and my first thought would probably be, "Oh, I wonder what they're filming?" If I saw bombs on the MTA, I'd probably assume it was a new reality show.
Well the great thing about this is that the odds of it being a movie or a reality show, EVEN IN BOSTON, are much much higher than the odds of it being a terrorist attack. I mean seriously, I'm pretty sure I'm more likely to be eaten by a buffalo than be killed by terrorists.
I also love the automatic threat of lawsuits. "We're so fricking amped up and paranoid these days that your advertisements made us pass a brick, NOW YOU OWE US MONEY."
I'm waiting for the phrase, "Officials stated that they had no reason to believe this was an act of terrorism," to appear in a news story about a cat stuck in a tree. That's how we know it's time to pack it in and kill ourselves.
Gamasutra has a brief article up including a quote from Harmonix producer Daniel Sussman. Harmonix Talks Guitar Hero, New Music Franchise
I generally use whatever is the easiest for the amount of work I had to do. When I was in college, I had a small trust fund that my parents had set up to pay for as much of school as possible. During that time, the accountant who managed my trust fund also did the taxes. When the trust fund ran out and I was a barely-employed college student, I did my 1040EZ by hand. When I got out of school and had a real job, I did the 1040EZ via the web, I think for free. At some point, something kicked in (I think the deduction of my college loan interest) so I had to switch to a 1040. One year Massachusetts still let me do it online, the next year they had shut down their own program but sent me a free voucher for Intuit's website. I used Intuit's website until my 2004 taxes, when I had to prepare federal, MA and CA at the same time. The web interface didn't do this as nicely as the stand-alone software, so I switched to the stand-alone. Kept using the stand-alone in 2005 when I had some obscure form -- schedule K, maybe? -- because of money I inherited from my grandmother, who passed away that year. I also liked it because I could mess around with numbers for my IRA and see what would work best for me. It was especially helpful when I had to file an amended return -- CapitalOne sent me a form that they were choosing '05 to declare a cancellation of debt (long story), and then, AFTER I'd filed, they sent me another form saying, "We take that back, we're gonna do that some other time." I'll most likely be using TurboTax again this year. I've got another schedule K, and I think I'll be itemizing my deductions this year. It does a good job of reminding me of the limits on various deductions and the like.
My feeling is that if you are at MIT, you can be expected to do this.
From the rumors I've heard, MTV -- the new owners of Harmonix -- demanded way too much money for GH3. Something like 4X what Red Octane had paid Harmonix for GH2. But like I said, that's just rumor.
Do some research, RTFA, heck read the thread. Cisco didn't just release the iPhone 3 weeks ago. They had a product by that name as early as 2000 if not earlier.
I dare you to go to sub-Saharan Africa and ask that same "how many do you know" question. AIDS/HIV is a greater threat than cancer because it is transmissable.
Licensed games are harder to make than non-licensed because of the too many cooks problem. Frequently the owner of the license is more interested in "protecting" the license than making a good game. This is the challenge of making a licensed game, but sometimes it's worth it because of the free marketing you're getting. The best scenario is a solid license and a license owner with a hands-off approach, but that's rare. Generally the more well-known the license is, the more interference you'll get from the owner. Interference decrease quality every single time.
You'd think that this sort of thing -- changing requirements and demanding that the cost/time not change -- wouldn't happen to architects. But sadly I can tell you that it does. My stepfather is an architect. He spends a lot of time in court because of these types of situations.
Many classic games are already being ported to the DS and GBA, for example there's a GBA port of the original Legend of Zelda. Capcom just put out a GBA cart that has the NES Strider, Bionic Commando and Mighty Final Fight on it. I pretty much lost my mind when I saw that one. Bionic Commando!
High level WOW play requires 8 hour raids. No, it really, really doesn't. I have played my level 60 hunter casually since I hit 60 a few months ago. I'll grind for rep for a couple of hours, or I'll run Scholo or Strat or UBRS with friends, or PVP for a bit. I'll probably sign up for one of my guild's weekly MC or ZG runs at some point just to see what it's like, but that'll have to wait until I have a free Saturday or Sunday. 8 hour raids are only required if you MUST WIN, i.e. must have the best shiniest highest bonus equipment. When you realize that you don't really need any of that stuff in order to have fun, life becomes much easier.
In PnP you can, to some extent, rely on the GM to ensure game balance. (Or throw it out the window if he or she thinks that's more fun for the players.) MMOs do not have that luxury.
One of my greatest achievements in arcade gaming is that I managed to take one round -- not a full match, just a round -- from Jason Booth in SF2 Turbo when we were both at Turbine. Of course, he was only using one button -- light kick. When he switched to light punch, I was done.
All you need to do is note GW's continued presence on top-ten PC game sales charts. Even before the expansion launched the original SKU was still showing up there.