Why the hell is it that whenever this topic comes up no one mentions the game designers? It's always programmers and artists and writers... It's like crediting Einstien's genius to his heart, liver and lungs and ignoring his brain (OK coders, maybe more like ignoring his soul, but still).
Game designers design the world, game designers design the missions, game designers design the gameplay, game designers design the interactions the engineers implement, the game objects teh artists create and the characters the writers write dialog for... what is is that you play these games for again?
So, where's the designer love? Where are their millions? Nowhere - they're amongst the lowest paid developers in the industry. It's ridiculous.
I get what you're saying - but presumeably there is no way to stop people who know the guy is a cop from saying so, yes? Why would the fact that it's said on the web make any difference at all?
It wouldn't. The safety issue exists either way, so this is an overly inflated argument. Besides, one could just as easily argue that the concept of undercover police work in and of itself was the source of said danger and thus we should move to strike that -- especially since there's no specific constitutional protection of undercover police work (is there? I've never heard of it, if there is).
The cops are not some higher order of citizen just because their job is dangerous. They signed up to be cops. Undercover cops sign up to be undercover cops on top of that. The whole point of police work being voluntary is so that the assumption of risk is firmly in the hands of the person taking the risk, right? How does people communicating more effectively (e.g. via the web) change that at all?
It doesn't. If you're afraid of being killed, don't take a job that is known world-wide as dangerous and life threatening. I think this particular aspect of this conversation really is that simple.
quick bar slots? Surely you played Diablo, right? The quick bar is simply the evolution of the "speed belt" from Diablo as it pertains to the pre-packaged attack based gameplay ("pound the hotbar" play) prevalent in MMOs. Well, Diablo and other games of the time; Blizzard still doesn't get props for originality, here.
Are you really that naive? As a game designer I can tell you flat out that piracy has NOTHING to do with why EA pumps out Madden after Madden... MONEY is. It's not about how much they're losing to piracy (though it is a ton, like you I'm not in favor supporting piracy) - it's about how much they're making by doing the smallest amount necessary to get the naive, gullible and apathetic market to buy their game. They make shit games because you BUY shit games. It really is that simple. The same is true of music and movies. I recently worked for Warner Bros. on their game side (WBie)and can attest to this.
Piracy doesn't affect quality - it affects price. However, even then its effect per unit is minimal... Price, content and quality are largely factors of the market - we make the minimum the market will bear because to do any more means we make less money, piracy or not.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to shower myself clean... for hours. I feel dirty admiting that in public.
So, based on what you're saying... wouldn't extrapolating the applications of time travel from current cosmological theories that allow for travel through time and then building a story around that be... science fiction?
Science extrapolated... Just because they might turn out to be wrong doesn't make something not science fiction... it just makes the author... wrong.
Getting an author to admit that is the hard part, of course.
- Bet
Everything I say could be wrong.
IT's probably worth pointing out:
BetaMax failed because the tape lengths were too short at first, so VHS with its 2 hours tapes got support from the studios. In other words, the awesome people wanted (movies on a single convenient tape) didn't exist in BetaMax. In otherwords "technically superior" does not mean "better." BetaMax lost because it didn't do what the market needed and by the time they fixed that it was too late, the stigma of it not serving the market was already firmly cemented.
Why do I quibble so? Because the same principle applies to macs. The original mac might have been prettier than 3.1, it might have been easier to use, it might even have been faster, but what it wasn't was capable of running the applications the market at the time wanted. I used to run the mac lab at the university I attended, back then and running that lab was a dream - the macs practically took care of themselves and the network was incredibly easy to manage. However, it was also a nightmare: I was lucky if I saw 3 students on any given day because they flat out couldn't run the apps they needed for their research on my macs. The apps didn't exist. People wrote off macs then and many of people still remain unconvinced - the pricing on a Mac only helps reinforce the stereotype of the mac being an "artsy computer" in their minds.
Yes, that's totally not true now a days, but like BetaMax, it doesn't matter. The damage is already done. It's not a paradox, as you imply, it's human nature. Once we make a judgement it's very hard to change our minds. Apple's definitely on the right track, though. There's no doubt Macs are way more accepted than BetaMax ever was. That's the difference between a company like Apple that tries to keep in touch with what the market wants, and Sony, which tries to dictate what the market wants.
Sadly, I don't think what you're suggesting is actually possible, as much as I would also like it to be. Like the earlier poster who claims you can make top quality games alone, this is wishful thinking. The fact is that you/do/ need a team of top talent working with you to make great games now a days, this is because what we consider a "great game" has changed vastly from the days when those of us now in our 30s experienced our first "great games."
It's not just a perception issue, either, sadly. It's also a production issue: The smaller the team, the easier it is to allow production inefficiencies to grow.
I know that sounds backwards, but it's not. You gain a LOT with a small team, one of those things is a sort of "private language" that allows the team to take a lot of shortcuts and make what seem like incredible productivity gains, but it comes at a price. That's one of the major traps; these shortcuts are one step away from the bad practices that the author of the article is talking about, and over time they slip into bad practices as these small teams start to take more and more shortcuts. Eventually you start think that you're making productivity gains that you aren't actually making -- you're making your game worse instead, the whole time thinking you're awesome for doing it alone or with so few people.
Trust me, I've worked on small teams with as few as 6 people on them and we felt all powerful while we worked, but when it came time to go to E3 and show our product to publishers we were *always* blown right of the water by the work being done by big teams. The difference in quality was stunning. There's something about a lot of people's livelihood being on the line that makes them all stand up and pay more attention. (in truth it's the "best practices" that you have to adopt to make working on a live team even possible that creates the difference in quality, pardon my cynicism there)
Of course, money does have a lot to do with it, but not so much in a "where's my paycheck" way. We techo-snobs might be perfectly happy with an indy game or mod that looks like it was made in 1989, but joe-sixpack will look at that same game and say, "Sheeeeeeeit, what's wrong with that thang? It's like roadkill, only you can't eats it." The thing is: Joe-sixpack is the guy supplying the revenue for the industry, the rest of us make up less than a 3rd of the pie. That means we have to use the latest technology, spend millions to create hollywood quality (often better on the top tier games) art and invest more millions in the time and hardware required to make any of that happen. Small teams just can't do it; hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, die trying every year. Even the successful ones can only ever manage to approximate the look, feel and quality of the top tier games being put out by the top mega-studios. Sad as that is, it really does take large teams and lots of resources to compete now a days.
Of course, you can slip down that same road with large teams, too. The last game I worked on, an MMO that releases in the next few days, had 48 people on it. (a medium sized team in the industry) We thought we had this great rapport and were making all the right shortcuts and decisions, but when we showed the game to the public, they were so unhappy with it that we had to push the game back almost a year in order to go back to the drawing board and get it right. Even now, as the game's preorder customers get their hands on the retail product, they're finding it's still buggy and the graphics aren't as good as some MMOs made by teams with 3 times the staff and nigh infinite resources. 48 people and we were still making all the mistakes of your typical small team effort...
So, sorry to burst the bubble around all our dreams of cool indy games making a comeback because people get fed up with the grind at the big studios, but it's not going to happen. At least, not on any console and not for any game sold through a store. Platforms like Steam offer som
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Why the hell is it that whenever this topic comes up no one mentions the game designers? It's always programmers and artists and writers... It's like crediting Einstien's genius to his heart, liver and lungs and ignoring his brain (OK coders, maybe more like ignoring his soul, but still).
Game designers design the world, game designers design the missions, game designers design the gameplay, game designers design the interactions the engineers implement, the game objects teh artists create and the characters the writers write dialog for... what is is that you play these games for again?
So, where's the designer love? Where are their millions? Nowhere - they're amongst the lowest paid developers in the industry. It's ridiculous.
I get what you're saying - but presumeably there is no way to stop people who know the guy is a cop from saying so, yes? Why would the fact that it's said on the web make any difference at all? It wouldn't. The safety issue exists either way, so this is an overly inflated argument. Besides, one could just as easily argue that the concept of undercover police work in and of itself was the source of said danger and thus we should move to strike that -- especially since there's no specific constitutional protection of undercover police work (is there? I've never heard of it, if there is). The cops are not some higher order of citizen just because their job is dangerous. They signed up to be cops. Undercover cops sign up to be undercover cops on top of that. The whole point of police work being voluntary is so that the assumption of risk is firmly in the hands of the person taking the risk, right? How does people communicating more effectively (e.g. via the web) change that at all? It doesn't. If you're afraid of being killed, don't take a job that is known world-wide as dangerous and life threatening. I think this particular aspect of this conversation really is that simple.
That will just go poorly. Have you not played Bioshock, yet?! - Bet
quick bar slots? Surely you played Diablo, right? The quick bar is simply the evolution of the "speed belt" from Diablo as it pertains to the pre-packaged attack based gameplay ("pound the hotbar" play) prevalent in MMOs. Well, Diablo and other games of the time; Blizzard still doesn't get props for originality, here.
Are you really that naive? As a game designer I can tell you flat out that piracy has NOTHING to do with why EA pumps out Madden after Madden... MONEY is. It's not about how much they're losing to piracy (though it is a ton, like you I'm not in favor supporting piracy) - it's about how much they're making by doing the smallest amount necessary to get the naive, gullible and apathetic market to buy their game. They make shit games because you BUY shit games. It really is that simple. The same is true of music and movies. I recently worked for Warner Bros. on their game side (WBie)and can attest to this.
Piracy doesn't affect quality - it affects price. However, even then its effect per unit is minimal... Price, content and quality are largely factors of the market - we make the minimum the market will bear because to do any more means we make less money, piracy or not.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to shower myself clean... for hours. I feel dirty admiting that in public.
So, based on what you're saying... wouldn't extrapolating the applications of time travel from current cosmological theories that allow for travel through time and then building a story around that be... science fiction? Science extrapolated... Just because they might turn out to be wrong doesn't make something not science fiction... it just makes the author... wrong. Getting an author to admit that is the hard part, of course. - Bet Everything I say could be wrong.
Neocons? Weren't those those little transformers that turned into the heads of bigger transformers or something?
Yes, you spelled insane correctly... and stop calling me Shirley.
IT's probably worth pointing out: BetaMax failed because the tape lengths were too short at first, so VHS with its 2 hours tapes got support from the studios. In other words, the awesome people wanted (movies on a single convenient tape) didn't exist in BetaMax. In otherwords "technically superior" does not mean "better." BetaMax lost because it didn't do what the market needed and by the time they fixed that it was too late, the stigma of it not serving the market was already firmly cemented. Why do I quibble so? Because the same principle applies to macs. The original mac might have been prettier than 3.1, it might have been easier to use, it might even have been faster, but what it wasn't was capable of running the applications the market at the time wanted. I used to run the mac lab at the university I attended, back then and running that lab was a dream - the macs practically took care of themselves and the network was incredibly easy to manage. However, it was also a nightmare: I was lucky if I saw 3 students on any given day because they flat out couldn't run the apps they needed for their research on my macs. The apps didn't exist. People wrote off macs then and many of people still remain unconvinced - the pricing on a Mac only helps reinforce the stereotype of the mac being an "artsy computer" in their minds. Yes, that's totally not true now a days, but like BetaMax, it doesn't matter. The damage is already done. It's not a paradox, as you imply, it's human nature. Once we make a judgement it's very hard to change our minds. Apple's definitely on the right track, though. There's no doubt Macs are way more accepted than BetaMax ever was. That's the difference between a company like Apple that tries to keep in touch with what the market wants, and Sony, which tries to dictate what the market wants.
Sadly, I don't think what you're suggesting is actually possible, as much as I would also like it to be. Like the earlier poster who claims you can make top quality games alone, this is wishful thinking. The fact is that you /do/ need a team of top talent working with you to make great games now a days, this is because what we consider a "great game" has changed vastly from the days when those of us now in our 30s experienced our first "great games."
It's not just a perception issue, either, sadly. It's also a production issue: The smaller the team, the easier it is to allow production inefficiencies to grow.
I know that sounds backwards, but it's not. You gain a LOT with a small team, one of those things is a sort of "private language" that allows the team to take a lot of shortcuts and make what seem like incredible productivity gains, but it comes at a price. That's one of the major traps; these shortcuts are one step away from the bad practices that the author of the article is talking about, and over time they slip into bad practices as these small teams start to take more and more shortcuts. Eventually you start think that you're making productivity gains that you aren't actually making -- you're making your game worse instead, the whole time thinking you're awesome for doing it alone or with so few people.
Trust me, I've worked on small teams with as few as 6 people on them and we felt all powerful while we worked, but when it came time to go to E3 and show our product to publishers we were *always* blown right of the water by the work being done by big teams. The difference in quality was stunning. There's something about a lot of people's livelihood being on the line that makes them all stand up and pay more attention. (in truth it's the "best practices" that you have to adopt to make working on a live team even possible that creates the difference in quality, pardon my cynicism there)
Of course, money does have a lot to do with it, but not so much in a "where's my paycheck" way. We techo-snobs might be perfectly happy with an indy game or mod that looks like it was made in 1989, but joe-sixpack will look at that same game and say, "Sheeeeeeeit, what's wrong with that thang? It's like roadkill, only you can't eats it." The thing is: Joe-sixpack is the guy supplying the revenue for the industry, the rest of us make up less than a 3rd of the pie. That means we have to use the latest technology, spend millions to create hollywood quality (often better on the top tier games) art and invest more millions in the time and hardware required to make any of that happen. Small teams just can't do it; hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, die trying every year. Even the successful ones can only ever manage to approximate the look, feel and quality of the top tier games being put out by the top mega-studios. Sad as that is, it really does take large teams and lots of resources to compete now a days.
Of course, you can slip down that same road with large teams, too. The last game I worked on, an MMO that releases in the next few days, had 48 people on it. (a medium sized team in the industry) We thought we had this great rapport and were making all the right shortcuts and decisions, but when we showed the game to the public, they were so unhappy with it that we had to push the game back almost a year in order to go back to the drawing board and get it right. Even now, as the game's preorder customers get their hands on the retail product, they're finding it's still buggy and the graphics aren't as good as some MMOs made by teams with 3 times the staff and nigh infinite resources. 48 people and we were still making all the mistakes of your typical small team effort...
So, sorry to burst the bubble around all our dreams of cool indy games making a comeback because people get fed up with the grind at the big studios, but it's not going to happen. At least, not on any console and not for any game sold through a store. Platforms like Steam offer som