Death to the Games Industry (Again)

Good luck with that. *rolls eyes*

I agree with the problems he highlights but I'm not sure there is a solution.

You cant have your cake and eat it too.

You cant get paid $70k-$100k a year REGARDLESS of whether the game is a turd or hit and expect to get the profits on top of that.

If you want to bankroll your company yourself, nobody is stopping you. If not dont expect a publisher to take a chance on without keeping all the profits and intellectual rights.

Greg has a fundamental misunderstanding of video game development. Most publishers bankroll most of the games they publish. In those cases they deserve the bulk of the profit. Any developer who doesn't like this can already go independant and take all the risk and profit themselves, and many do. This system of publishing is mostly the same as the movie and book industry, a system that has worked and evolved over hundreds of years. No revolution required, and as far as the points he's made, he's said nothing new.

clearly belongs to Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence

http://www.MAVAV.org

Im sorry, but I believe that this article and especially the first article are written from an old standpoint, and written with alot of i dunno how to put this...dreams maybe? He links to the Scratchware article as pretty much his inspiration piece for atleast the first article...and just to quote from that article:

You need millions in funding to create a great game? Garbage! As recently as 1991, the typical computer game lost less than $200,000 to develop

That was before the 15 years of technology advancements, 15 years of patents, 15 years of the reign of the "publisher", 15 years of consoles and thier expensive devkits, 15 years of the gaming masses getting what they want... 15 years of "This fancy engine costs close to a million just to be able to use, and if you dont use it you have to develop your own, which takes months of development and R&D"...15 years of alot of shit.

So that pretty much throws out alot my thoughts for that article, I'm sorry but bringing up the DooM/DooM3 argument is really bad. People rememeber that when DooM was released there was little to NILL competition for it on the market. DooM 3 on the other hand was entering an already saturated FPS market and was held to too high of standards.

The escapist article seems to think that Developers are the ones that are causing the whole thing about us thinking its Mandatory that we use the most top-notch graphics engines, and fill the CDs and DVDs with tons of content...I dissagree with this point, gamers as a whole expect that and if we dont meet those expectations then that game simply will flop...something the typical gamer has now-a-days is too high of expectations which is a curse for this industry now as we unfortunatly are not advancing in technology like we did in the 90s so the giant leaps that people from that generation of gaming has been use to seeing is not happening.....thus IMO causing alot of the most recent titles to be so "dissapointing" because the games before that one were so "groundbreaking" so for the developers to survive we have to match demand....while I know there will be arguments from my rant here about we dont have too....unfortunatly guys you are not the "pure" market, you are the hardcore gamers that make up only a small percentile of the market...for a developer to survive you have to be able to meet the demands of the whole market or atleast strive too.

Developers are trying though guys, you see stuff like Steam and Digital Xtreem (or what ever the 3DRealms guys are supporting) which is offering a distrobution method other then having the deal with the pubilshers. The only problem there is that unfortunatly for titles that are going to come from there are prodominatly self-funded titles and small development cores cannot afford to simply work on those for a longtime without really hurting themselves...so you see them split between other projects so that they dont go under and that increases development time, and sometimes causes those games to be put on the back-burner.

Wow, writing too much....I need to get back to work. I will rant more later.

The biggest flaw in the article is the notion of devs self-funding their projects. The money, whether its from VC's or other investors just doesn't come easy.

I can see some time of a convergance between say Steam and iTunes (not that either of those specific programs need be involved). If PC games were easily browasable via a dead simple iTunes-like interface, and you could download demos, or pay and download direct, things could take off. There has to be a compromise w/ DRM though, because Steam-like access to the games you purchase is not acceptable to me as the standard. The ability to burn your game to a disk and install and play offline is non-negotiable for me, and I would suspect most gamers. A game key that's verified with an auth server, ala the Quake3 series games, or BF2 works well.

reading from the comments you have to wonder where the intelligent shacker has gone...

or has he merely been flooded by a sea of ER and FP posters?

I can't find his name in mobygames.com, does anyone know what his background is?

Good reads, thanks for posting them.

I've seen both ends of the development business, more so from the publishing side until over a year ago when I got hired at Pandemic.

I'd say he has a good grasp of what he's talking about. What he says is far from enlightening, but it's a decent look at the industry. From what I've seen (and I haven't seen it all, mind you), there really is no middle market for games. I can imagine myself being pretty happy doing the "indie" game development scene for not a whole lot of money, but enough to support myself and keep doing it. I've thought about it a lot actually, and it'd be an insanely hard thing to pull off. It's just too risky, even for me with no dependants and the freedom to pick up and move at just about any time.

Surely it's not impossible, as a few development teams have proven. But they should be doing better. I wish they were.

More than half of the games I regularly replay look like total ass by today's harsh standards. Go ahead and release Myth II in stores again, complete with its sprite-based characters. Or try getting away with the likes of a game like System Shock 2 or Thief in EB.

It's not totally the big evil publishers' fault either, as many "indie" game don't even feel complete or polished. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibilities to have a small, three or four-man team create a game that's as graphically on-par with something like Myth and just as good in the gameplay department.

BUT

Making a game from start to finish is an INSANELY hard feat to accomplish, and it's even harder to keep at it when the financial rewards have a high probabability of being next to nothing.

I could probably go on for as long as he could about this subject, and would love to, but work calls and I must return. ;) Thanks again for posting these articles.

I don't know if there could be a planned "revolution" in the business. the real way imo is a developer figures all this shit out for themself, makes a great game, gets rich, and then you get a lot of imitators... some who get it and do as well... some not so great... and then finally way down the line you get the most out of touch... corporate cloneware. If there's a problem in games it really stems from the lack of artists/devs who really care these days... thus the collapse of the middle guys, and the prominance of total corporate crap.

rabble rousing? rabble rabble rabble

The link to part one is the same as the link to part 2. Anyone have the real part 1 link?

Thank god he survived the PnP industry. His games were always well thought out, fun and easy to play. I miss Paranoia.