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child of Thor
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With the OT awash with everything from cosmic catalysims to Iraq and requests for porno, I wanted to start a thread here in Games section about the Games Industry in general(in short i dont think the OT is big on games, like we are here).
I know we cover certain aspects in the various discussions about specific games(the recent RTW non-patch news for example), but as this is restricted to a specific title it soon fades into the depths as new titles come along.
So i decided to do this thread - partially cause i love computer games and have done from the early days, and partially cause i feel its an important issue to discuss, after all the "Games Industry"(tm), makes the stuff many of us consider our hobby/passion etc 
Anyway i'll get the ball rolling with this article from the bbc:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4182455.stm
Its about the responses from developers(in this case specificaly in the uk, but it would also apply to others i'm sure) to the new wave of next-gen consoles.
All of it seems fair enough - we've heard it before and it makes sense for the most part. Then i get to this bit at the bottom:
Fred Hasson, head of Tiga, which represents independent developers:
quote:
"There are still some developers who were involved in games from the bedroom coding days. Some of them are still making games for peer group approval - that has to stop." |
hmmm......for someone who is meant to represent the indies, this seems a strange thing to say? Maybe the bbc quoted him out of context(i dont know why it would want to?)? But does this mean in the brave new world of super consoles that guys like Paradox should just shut up shop and leave it all to the EA's of the world?
Or maybe he meant to say "....that would stop"? which would make more sense, anyway it got me thinking.
If anything the harder the big guns squeeze(could read rip off) the gamers, the more companies like Paradox will survive and prosper, atleast i would hope so.
So when looking at that new shinny $200 something games machine in the store window - have a think of where you want your game playing to go.
Last edited by child of Thor on 16-04-2005 at 03:17
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:24
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The last sentence is indeed not very clear. What does he mean by that? That games should be developped using middleware instead of trying yo do everything from scratch? That they need to target a wider audience? That they must stop making games with dated graphics, technology and gameplay?
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Standup
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I'm not sure it's quite as bad as remakes of the SIms but i think he is saying that developers have to be realistic in what they do. Designing text adventures (for example) may get you postive posts from that small bunch of dedicated fans but it's not enough.
I'm thinking of hex, turn based war gaming as another example. I like this genre but i have certain expectations in terms of graphics and sound (not especially high) as well as gameplay but some of the games i've tried could have been written in 1995. Claiming that they're aimed at niche markets isn't a good enough excuse.
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:24
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1. Its getting harder to develop for consoles, and so that means less indie games for consoles (and more for PCs?) Yup, no surprise.
2. Middleware to make development easier - a logical response, and IIUC happening on the PC side as well.
3. Middleware to let gamers make their own content - see Spore, etc. One way to deal with the cost of making more and more art. Will work for some types of games.
4. Make it for gamers not peers - I dont think this is the casual vs hardcore, so much as customer vs developer - but it wasnt explicit enough to say for sure.
5. Indies need biz sense - this is a meme thats going around, apparently. Not that indies need to become biggies, but that they DO need to focus on channels of distribution, understanding their niche and what it needs, etc. A not unreasonable idea, IMHO. Look, indies CANT afford to do a Halo3, or Doom4, or whatever. That takes lots of bucks for art, etc, established distribution channels, and is the domain fo the bigggies. Indies need to think about what they can do well AND make money at.
6. Knock the Sims all you want, but its brought an entire new audience to gaming, and is giving Will Wright the freedom to try new things like Spore.
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:24
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Another thing to consider about the industry - while we think mainly of console and PC games, there are several other markets
A. Truely casual games - internet games played via a browser, etc - I think Bejeweled is the big one - yesterday POTM played "snowmuncher" on the neopets site - this is a large and growing market, with a non-traditional audience, and is a big potential source of revenue for indies who cant get shelfspace for conventional games.
B. "Serious" Games - IE games developed as training or simulation tools for businesses, govt agencies, and nonprofits, rather than for commercial distribution - this enables developers to avoid the whole distribution, publisher, piracy scene - just sell the game to one customer who contracts for it. Of course some of these games may end up released later to the public. The US army has one such game, IIUC, and ive posted about a non-profit effort wrt to peaceful political change.
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child of Thor
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One of the trends in this recent(last couple of years it seems to me) shift to the mega-publisher and using more 'business sense', is that we get much less of a gaming experience for our money?
Its not a hard and fast rule and doesn't apply to ALL games published these days(as i'll show below), but its becoming a pretty pointless experience, from my point of view; to find it worth investing my Ł40 in a game that i'm going to finish in less than 15 hrs imho.
Its actually one of the prime decideing factors in if i'm going to buy a game or not, and one of the reasons my purchasing quantity has fallen in recent years.
If this is part of this new 'business sense' that many in the industry are talking about, then i'm not 100% convinced this is in gamers longterm interests.
Ok maybe you have a short attention span, or have never read a book in your life? I guess these are the people that the financial wizards have decided to target?
Still it has been proven that there is space available in this kind of artificaly geared market(and i'm sure its a deliberate shift by the big guns to force gaming in this direction).
Games like Morrowind, KOTOR etc show there is still a market for games that offer lots of content and hrs of gameplay.
Partly i think its because the more the film industry has become involved in games, the more 'film guys' have jumped into the games market, particularly in management positions - and coming from that background just get incredibly confused when you tell them about games like Daggerfall for examplehttp://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/e...olls-daggerfall , which ok was buggy as hell, but wow! did it offer a huge gaming experience if you got into it!
To them the thought of giving the customer +100's of hours of gaming is just crazy - i mean you watch a film and for your Ł5 you get a few hrs of entertainment. Games are entertainment right, just like interactive films right? 
So to them offering us 12-15hrs of gaming enertainment for Ł40 is a fair trade, in the movie framework.
Blah! - rip off merchants more like i say 
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child of Thor
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quote:
Originally posted by Jamski
Its not in the gaming companies' interest to make a game that you will play for years and years - they want you to keep buying new games!
-Jam |
True Mr.Jamski 
Still i think this is the arguement that the accountants have been whispering in the 'bosses' ear, like so many worm-tongues
And its definately being driven to be this way for most recent games.
I actualy think they may have it the wrong way around, or atleast its only a partial truth and doesn't apply all the time(or should!).
I own(or have owned) some of the most indepth games that have been made over the years. The thing is i dont just play one game only at a time and finish it at the first go.
In fact i may never finish it, but what i appriciate is being given the 'journey' of the game. And i want more of the same. So i look around and hear whats being whispered on the games grape vine and whenever i see a potential 'epic', i make a note of it and usualy buy it.
Now i buy other games too - its been a pet project of mine these last few years. I've got consoled up and i've been buying the best console games have to offer. I've spent a good grand on it in this time. I wanted to get a good feeling of the state of the industry and what seems to be making it tick.
So i own Halo1+2 etc, not bad games imho, just too short
a few days ago i got hold of 'Baten Kaitos' http://www.gamespot.com/gamecube/rp...tml?tag=mp_2to9 for the cube, its a +60hr japanese rpg affair. My gf loves it - she's a big Final Fantasy fan, so feels right at home.
I'm half forming the oppinion we may have an east/west divide, when it comes to the ammount of game a certain company offers its customer. Anyway this will be another topic i'll cover in more depth later.
Back to the point in hand - the thing is i dont play many of these stunted games anymore(well apart from the real simple arcade ones like tetris/pac man etc). So i have a growing pile of titles that end up in the second hand section of my local store. I dont feel a 'love' or affection for them as they are not of that 'keep' quality, generaly being short play once only games.
So we appear to have a growing throw-away attitude to our games? This seems a little sad to me, as i have many games i would just hate to part with, but for a recent release to feature in this list is very rare.
I just cant help but think all these new attitudes to gaming, just doesn't equal the one thing i, as a gamer am most concerned about; that of good games being made.
It seems to me that when the whole approach becomes one of chasing the dollar over the quality of the gaming experience(brevity being one aspect of this), then its a slow slippery slope to ruin in the long term?
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child of Thor
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well we have had the casual element since the begining, so its not just a straight forward a+b=c equation imho.
We've always had simple arcade games, good for a quick 20min blast and you can pick them up and put them down just as quick.
In the 8bit days we had loads of them, mostly because the hardware was a difficult limit for the programmer to overcome.
The rise of the console into mainstream use has been responsible for its rise again, but its for different reasons i think now.
We certainly dont have the hardware limit that used to exist. But i think part of this added complexity has brought about its own problem to making games, and might be one of the fundemental reasons behind some fo the problems the current industry faces, and casues some of the issues that myself and other 'serious' gamers find grievences with?
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snoopy369
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Of the Peanuts Gallery
Apr 2004
time: 23:24
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quote:
Originally posted by child of Thor
For example why do so many developers fail these days and how would you aim to make game making a much more succesfull business for more companies? |
Well, in any business, such is life. Think about how many movies are utter and complete flops - how many successful movie production houses are there? In the U.S., something like 5, or maybe 4. (Not the ones who make the movies, but the ones who release them - MGM back in the day, 20th Century Fox or whatever they call themselves to-day, Paramount, etc.) There are like 4-5 highly successful producers, and 10-12 middling successful ones. This is different from gaming only in the scale - the movie business takes more work than gaming, in terms of man-hours, by far; so there is room for a bit more in terms of number of companies.
I don't think we'll ever have a larger number of middling companies (as you probably are looking to aim at). Consolidation is natural; we'll eventually hit a stable number, may already have, more than likely, which will re-stabilize at different levels every time the tech gradually changes - a ton of new startups will occur, and eventually most go out of business, and the good ones remain. I don't think the number of failures should be remarked upon to be a bad thing, but simply ... life.
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child of Thor
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quote:
Originally posted by Skanky Burns
Gaming companies don't tend to last much beyond releasing a few games. |
Which is a ridiculas situation for sure, but part of normal market forces i guess?
Still some in the business are here for good. For who's good exactly, time will tell; or maybe it already is?
I guess our perspectives on all this are based on our experience of buying and playing games, for however long that is.
I've noticed a big change in a number of things:
1. the way games are now made and the costs involved.
2. a growing disatisfaction at many of todays titles.
the first bit we are told is 'our' fault - we demand film quality graphics in our games, and this is the largest money sink in makeing a AAA title currently.
The second i believe is partly because of the first - more effort on the graphics often means less effort on the game in general?
Not always the case for sure, but i've lost count of the number of gorgeous looking games that lasted about 30mins before being cast to one side.
So where does this leave us? I'm not an advocate of having games with bad graphics, when i play them now those oldie world text adventures don't hold up that well. Fun for perspective, and there is still the odd gem for sure.
But i think one option could be to find a graphical compromise - keep graphics decent, but budget them in the overall game design, definately if that portion of the game development is taking up more than the rest(?), then your graphics are too good? - something like that
But here's the problem with that approach.
The customers that the big guys are aiming at - not people like me(or civ fans in general?), are not going to be happy with less graphics than they curently get. And so the circle of spiralling dev costs and failings will continue.
Or maybe there is another way?
And here's another bbc article, this time about 'simple games' on mobiles http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4461239.stm .
Simple is fine imho, and it has its place - where's the 'main course' in computer games terms these days - or are we doomed to become like all those poor models, waif-like and anorexic in our game playing?
Last edited by child of Thor on 20-04-2005 at 18:55
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16-04-2005 03:02
Oh Wesley 
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