State of the industry. Seems about right...

Maybe i'm just in "one of those moods"...



From penny-arcade of course.

 

Nice ones, true,it's not how it used to be. Back in the day you could be jack of all trades and make a game depending on your level of knowledge, and some good connections for publishing, but ever since they started making video games creation an industry with university courses and degree requirments etc, most of that creativity and happiness in creating a game has been lost to procedural requirments and ever higher demands for technical details, often at the expense of a designer's creativity.

I know many people who are creative enough to make very radical games, but they just can't find a job because they don't fit the mold of the technical requirments.

EDIT: Let's face it, a good game isnt made by a good programmer or a good artist. It needs a good game designer, although he may be anything but a good programmer/artist/engineer. Look at Shigeru

 

The comic strip does point out a few problems, but it vaguely addresses quality of life within the industry.

Industry is about to crash or go through a lot changes very soon. Lots of issues will be brought up, thanks to IGDA for bringing them up. Issues like quality of life and how it can affect production costs and quality of the game. Addressing that and properly taking action on improving it will change a lot of other things in the industry for the better. Publishers just want to publish the game and make sure it meets deadline, a lot of the time they don't realize they are making a crappy game until they reached beta, and that is how you get delay after delay and more money wasted. It's one thing reaching milestone after milestone but making sure the game will actually be fun to play is another thing. The structure on how games are planned needs to be restructured. Publishers and independent developers need to create a close relationship with each other if they want to create a game that is both fun and commercially successful (so that the publisher pays back the investors and everyone gets paid to feed their families). There are already tons of good designers, good programmers, good artists, good sound guys, etc. The designers' job is not to just come up with a great idea, it is to make sure the game turns out to be a fun and enjoyable game as it is being developed as well as meet a fair and realistic development schedule.

Visit IGDA.org. Also, see if there is a local chapter near where you live. Go to their meetings, if they have them, and you will get a great insight on how the industry really works.

The industry, for the most part, needs to realize that it needs to be run like a regular suit-and-tie business where good planning and scheduling is important in creating a cost effective game and also be a fun game in order to for the company to stay alive and make money. The tools and talent are there, you just need a good leader.

 

I was playing Raize's Hell the other day for the xbox. Now i had nothing to do with the development of this game, i don't know anyone who worked on it or published it, but i gained some insights about the development just from playing.

The game just isn't any fun...

Basicly, if i had to guess about the original project plan, they probably wanted to start with a halo style First Person Shooter. Obviously they didn't want to copy halo directly, so they made a few changes to the gameplay. Obviously they didn't consider the actual playability or the fun factor of the changes they made. They basicly took a standard FPS and changed it around until it was different enough to be considered its own unique game. Unfortunately they sucked all of the fun out of the genre.

The game had some real promise, the "killing cute things" aproach was cool, the dialog was funny, but the plot was devoid of life. If i had to guess, there were originally supposed to be pre rendered cut scenes between levels explaining the story that were just removed instead.

Being a Majesco title and all, i highly doubt they had a decient budget... but it's just another example of a publisher killing creativity...

 

Now if Majesco or the developer had a good designer/project manager then the game had a chance of turning out to be fun and still be a low budget game. I edited my first post a bit.

 

Sadly, you pretty much have this problem in any industry. I once worked at a company that hired a "big name" in their industry to run their engineering department. Of course, since he was such a well known person in the industry, he could do no wrong (at least according to him). Translation: he screws everything up, everyone else is at fault, projects get scrapped, more time is spent on fixing mistakes than designing the original products, etc. There was absolutely no concept of planning more than a week in advance (these were typically 6-18 month projects).

I fully expect a game industry "correction" sometime during this next generation of games. The cost for producing the games has just gotten ridiculously (I would argue artificially) high, which means lower profits for similar volume. Companies will be looking for scapegoats as well as legitimate areas for improvement. Now, I think that this could also reshape the independent game market too, as this could cause an influx of people "downsized" but looking to stay in game development.

 

when u make something out of an obligation it sucks compared to what you make out of love for the object

 

Yeh. It really is like that in all industries. It largely depends on the person who's running it. They either do a good job running the company and meeting deadlines, etc. but then there are those that don't know what it is they're doing. I have a friend and his boss is exactly like that where he thinks he's right, that he has to have it his way or the highway and ends up screwing up. He could've gotten more than what he has now but he is that stubborn. Some people just don't have the skill to run a successful business. Creating a gant chart on a game development project can take at least 2 weeks, more if the game is complicated like an RPG or mission based FPS game.

The point I was trying to make in that paragraph was that a lot of studios/developers still run the place like those startup internet companies before the dot com bubble bust, where they played with nerf toys, and just wasted time and money overall. If a developer/publisher wants to be taken seriously, especially in wallstreet, then they need to start acting seriously, most of the successful dot com companies have.

 

But the question is, do we want or need the gaming industry to be taken seriously, particularly by Wall Street? It seems that the closer the gaming industry gets to being taken seriously by WS, the more expensive everything gets. The costs for making games are skyrocketing and studios are consolidating simply to stay afloat, or being outright bought up by bigger studios. Are we better off with a handful of EA-esque companies as opposed to a larger number of smaller developers

 

Gaming companies are companies because they aim for money, they don't do it just for the love of the game. Take nintendo for example. The old man (you know, Dracula AKA Yamuchi) doesn't even like games.

It's the men they pay that they have to trust.

As in every bysiness , there's the quick buck, there's the masterpiece, and there's Barbie's Adventure.

Surely, there's need for generic crappy titles to pad the walls of the industry, so there's enough cash flowing. But the pinnacles of video gaming are only created when there's inspiration. That's why we haven't seen another NiGHTS, or Panzer Dragoon Saga, the creators dont want to whore the titles if there's nothing new to provide.

 

I think that you contradicted yourself. Companies like EA definitely only make games for the money. They constantly turn out sequels without thought (and the idea of a yearly "Madden-tax" comes to mind). But I think that a lot of independent developers, while wanting to make money, do it for the love of making games. Those are the ones who do not crank out identical sequels every other year.

 

He isn't contradicting himself, he's pointing out that at the corporate level, it's all about the money, and that is true whether or not you are are an independent developer. The difference between games being, some teams are inspired and make fantastic product, and others don't (for various reasons well beyond their commercial independence). It might also be kind of presumptuous to say that independent developers are somehow above sequels - I can't think of any obvious counter-examples, though this may be more due to the transitory nature of independent developers; if they're successful, they become non-independent pretty quick.

 

WallStreet is already in on it. EA, Sony, Nintendo, MS all have stock, so they have shareholders who invest in the company. Where do you think the publishers get their money from? Investors/Entrepreneurs. Of course, the big companies have the money because they are more established. I remember when EA Tiburon was a small company with only 7 employees making SNES games. Now they employ a lot more people. I don't know the exact numbers, but they are about to expand their second building and add 650more positions. They work on multiple projects at once and they know the development process so well that they shift employees within a project to another one without messing up deadline. Big companies really don't have room for creativity, thats a fact because they have a bottom line to meet and shareholders to keep please, so promoting a new idea/concept can be rather difficult than in an independent/smaller developer. Again, it depends on who is running the company. You can have someone with great ideas, the knowhow, and the connections to create a wonderful game. Sometimes you get quite the opposite.

 

The game industry seems to be gravitating towards how the movie industry is set up, you get a director who gathers a team of talented people, who all have to work within budget, etc.

 

That is what scares me the most. Have you seen the crap coming out of Hollywood lately?

 

This is what happens when Taylorism is taken too far. They pumped the requeriments so much that now the efficiency is decreasing instead of increasing. Programmerswith no slepp do bad code, artists with low salaries cant focus on the job, and game designers are forced to do what the board wants.

I think the industry is going to crash and burn, either by a number of strikes from the developers, or by becos the costs are growing so much the profits may not be enough to cover them.

 

I don't see a crash, more like maybe a shrinking of the industry until it gets back in step with reality. It's in boom-mode now, like comics in the 80s. I think it's trying to go a little too far, too fast. Like we have three major systems, each one has capabilites that are pretty much the same, now with the next gen each one does a lot more than play games, plus now we have all these handhelds that you can watch movies on or surf the net with, yet with each new release the industry gets sidetracked away from games more and more. But they keep comming, and comming. A new gameboy every year. A new PSP model next year. New consoles when the old consoles aren't even five years old in some cases. How soon before the market is flooded, with too much product, with game systems that do everything but take out the garbage but don't have any decent games? Isn't that why it crashed last time?

But as I said before, I don't think it will crash. One of the systems might get knocked out, and the industry might go into a lull for a few years. Which is good news for us becasue then all of it will be very cheap.

 

That's how its been done before. You have the Designer who makes sure the programmer and artist are creating what they're supposed to create according to the design document, which is like the screenplay is in hollywood.

 

That will also be good for independent developers. Publishers after realizing their old business model no longer works would like to try something different than before and will most likely throw lots of money at it. This is how it was when 3D graphics were emerging. You had publishers where all you needed was a piece of paper depicting your game and before you knew you it, you had 800,000$USD for production (of course back then, games didn't require millions of dollars to be produce) and $800,000 to create a game was a lot back then in the mid-90's actually.

 

Sheeet, give me eighty grand and I'll make you a game.