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Scott Miller on...Everything
by Chris Remo, Nov 29, 2006 1:02pm PSTGamasutra has a comprehensive interview with 3D Realms' Scott Miller, speaking on a broad range of topics relating to modern game development. Miller touches on 3D Realms' unique practice of partnering with smaller studios for IP creation, why he's not on board with Steam and episodic content, the importance of game-specific IP, and why developing for consoles is important these days. Despite his misgivings about Steam, Miller does see digital delivery as a crucial upcoming trend both on PC and consoles.
I’d love to see Steam spin off as their own company. That would be a smart move. That removes the conflict of interest issue and it would give Steam focus as a separate company. Since they’re buried in Valve, if Valve doesn’t do well for a game or two, Steam will get cut before their internal game development. They have to consider Steam secondary. I don’t know why they hang on to Steam as an internal thing. They’d probably rule the game industry if they did. A truly independent company is going to come along, and I know of a couple of start-ups. I think one of these companies will emerge as the product leader and they should be able to take Steam’s spot. My overall impression is that digital distribution is definitely going to be a huge force in the future. I’ve said for quite a while that the next generation consoles will have this built in from the start. Day one releases will be available online. I think brick and mortar places will lose a lot of business this way. Microsoft and Sony have to be saying “if we cut out the retailers, we get a bigger piece of the pie.” There’s no issue with it, you just need to get people bigger hard drives. Digital delivery is going to be a key part of console revenue.
Comments
http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php
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hunh? bullshit...not everyone on the planet has a broadband connection...they are still pretty uncommon where I live (rural Missouri) & that doesnt appear to be changing anytime soon...that is a BIG issue in my opinion..
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On the one hand he admits consoles are where it's at to make more money even though they are traditionally a PC house, right? But then on the other hand he's not willing to use something like Steam to reach all kinds of potential customers just because it's his competitor running it. Boo-hoo.
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I imagine online publishing is a very lucrative business. If you can snag (pulling number out of my ass) 35% of the games purchase price while taking almost zero risk, you've got a good business. The devs should be happy to get their share which is certainly much higher than they would've by shipping boxes. So, I have to conclude that Valve has little interest in using their position as an online publisher to smite the competition.
Certainly competition is good. If Steam is the only decent online distributor, they can have all the power to determine contract terms, pricing, and availability rules. So far we've seen no price break at all with online games, even though as gamers we are getting less, taking on risk, and . I think a competitor could easily do it cheaper and still absolutely demolish the share offered to the developer over putting boxes on shelves.
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With Duke3D they had Ken Silverman on board, who created the primary game engine (along with Todd R). With DNF they also brought in young, inexperienced developers. However this time, they didn't strike it lucky as they did with Ken, with is one of the primary factors that we're not playing DNF now.
3DRealms is the modern face of Apogee, which itself it an old company of the shareware era. I see an old fashioned company struggling to adapt to the contemporary practises and standards which exist today.
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Also, I found the comment about "2-3 months of polish" funny.
Tip: Never name your product "Forever"
"How long is Forever gonna take?"
"Exactly."
Hold on a minute there Tex. Im guessing Triton was one of these start-ups you had some confidence about, right? Feel it in your water, did you?
I dont really trust someone to say anything of merit on an issue they utterly fucked up on. Sure, they dealt with the fallout from Triton/Prey admirably, but its a bit worrying to see him still supporting unproven start-ups simply because he doesnt like valve having something to do with steam.
Even if valve did spin out steam into a separate entity, people would still be wary that it could still have ties to valve. It would certainly retain their back catalogue and run all of their mp masterservers.
And of course valve would lose their "buy source, get steam distro free!" deal.
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For it to work, the releases need to be in really quick succession.
Like...a few months apart. Where the hell is my next episode of SiN: Episodes?
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shitting on other's success is so much easier than shipping a game
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Seriously, at the rate DNF is going, it will never get released. It's a pipe dream at this point. It's been feature creeped and restarted too many times and it sucks when massive amounts of work gets scrapped.
It's simply amazing anyone with "10 years in the industry" would even think of working at 3drealms.(This is what they're touting now-that they're finally getting around to hiring industry veterans to star.....errr "finish" the game).
Job security? How about job burnout? Just ask the vast majority of the former developers who've left the company within the last year alone. There seems to be no set path with DNF's development. No internal goals. Come to work, render a few objects, program in a few things, call it a day and repeat daily for 10 years with no end in sight. Sigh.
Fix it George.
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