On December 10, 2003 I posted a topic about a second crash coming to the industry in 2005, and offered some suggestions to what needed to be fixed.
http://planetgamecube.com/forums/messageview.cfm?catid=28&threadid=7254&FTVAR_MSGDBTABLE= The thread contains a lot of mistakes, rhetorical questions, and bad puns, but there were some good ideas I feel that are being confirmed now. Now it is 2005, and some things have changed; and some new evidence is on the table. There has been much talk about the new systems and where the market is going. In several days the GDC will finally happen and all ears will be bowed down to Nintendo’s President. Recently a new interview with him has hit the web and caused fear about what the man has to say.
http://cube.ign.com/articles/593/593733p1.html The following was found on another board concerning the direction the industry. This was on David Jaffes web blog. He is the director of God of War and the good Twisted Metal games.
1. Quote:
Had an interesting discussion with Dan Arey the other day. He’s the creative director over at Naughty Dog and he’s putting together a talk at GDC (Game Developer’s Conference) about what it takes to make a AAA game these days. For some crazy reason he thought I’d be able to provide some insight for his speech so he stopped by Monday and we had a nice chat about games.
One of the questions that came up was this: how can publishers mitigate risk in an industry where games are costing more and more to produce but the audience for games is not growing anywhere near as fast as the budgets.
A DAMN FINE question I think, and one of the most important issues facing all of
us in the gaming biz.
In talking to Dan it seems his research shows there are mainly two schools of thought on this vital issue:
School A (and I include myself in this camp) thinks that fewer games will get made in the coming years but the games that do get made will cost more to produce and have the market much more in mind when the games are being designed (i.e. focus testing the concepts like EA and ACTIVISION are reported to do). To me, this method seems more like the movie biz (as far as I can tell) in that the studios don’t put a gajillion flicks a year into theaters; instead they put their focus behind a handful of movies with mainstream elements: stars, proven directors, and stories that your average person- they hope- cares about.
School B- Games will get smaller, production value will get less important, and budgets will get scaled back to account for the fact that- while budgets are increasing- the audience for games is not (at least not increasing as fast). This could go a few ways. It could translate into more unique games (i.e. the logic being if we are only going to sell 200,000 copies, we may as well focus on pure gameplay and not worry about the production sizzle and mainstream concepts/themes and just market our titles out to PURE GAMERS, like in the 8 and 16bit days) OR it could translate into an attempt to still create mass market games but without the amazing production values, long play times, and – in many cases- needed play tuning.
In some ways, this ‘make smaller games’ theory seems to already be occurring in Japanese game development (as far as I can tell, don’t know actual budgets) because you see games like CASTLEVANIA: LAMENT OF INNOCENCE and NANOBREAKER which- while being cool- clearly lack the kind of polish, length, production value, and tuning time that games used to have coming from Japan. This is not to say the whole country has gone in this direction as we still see the big $$$ titles like GT4 and RE4 hitting shelves. But smaller and less polished games coming out of Japan are seeming more and more prevalent. And I’m not talking Mahjong and strip Pachinko games that have always littered Japanese game stores and never get sold in EB’s and GAMESTOPS of the USA. I’m talking about wannabe mainstream titles from big publishers like SEGA, NAMCO, and KONAMI that are finding their way to American game shops.
Now- to me- there are pros and cons to both schools of thought and certainly School B (smaller, less expensive games) is the safer school because we can at least keep the industry alive by heading down that path. If the game industry embraces school A and it fails, we could be in for a mighty crash. That said, you will probably still see fallout with School B in terms of people in the biz losing jobs because games that now take 50 people to make will soon only take 12 (like PSone days)….so that would be sad….but not as sad as a bigger industry crash.
You may also may end up seeing a mix where MOST games fall into category A, but 10% of the games per year are from school B (ala the Indy Film market).
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Dan and I also chatted about creativity in games and how games brimming with creative ideas and fresh, unique worlds are having a tough time on the market. In specific we talked about Oddworld’s new game STRANGER.
I played this a few nights ago and so far, I dig it. But I gotta tell you, the first thing that went through my mind upon playing it was: man, it really sucks that this game is not going to sell.
Now I hope I am wrong. I really, really do. I dig the Oddworld games and really appreciate what Lorne Lanning and his guys do down there in San Luis Obispo (so-cal town). And this new game is really cool and unique and just full of clever stuff.
But there is a good lesson here, a lesson that game makers really need to embrace if they- in my opinion- want to have a good shot at commercial success.
So here’s the lesson: 80% comfort zone, 20% new.
If we are aiming for the mainstream (which I imagine a title like Stranger OR Psychonauts OR American McGee’s Scrapland OR many, many other original titles that probably will never sell over 200,000 copies would like to do), then you need to take a lesson from the movie biz. Unless you are that rare title that gets an ultra **** load of marketing dollars behind you, you really need to design your game so that the vast majority of it can be related to by your mass market. As cool as the ammo system is in Stranger, that unique ammo system MIXED with the odd looking creatures MIXED with the strange looking hero MIXED with the totally unique world is WAY too much for the mainstream to stomach.
It’s not that I don’t dig it Stranger…I DO! I DO! I totally applaud Oddworld…it’s a cool game. BUT it’s just not commercial because they are trying to do TOO MUCH and the game is overwhelming the mainstream gaming audience. No matter how cool the ideas are, the average player can not relate. And he doesn’t want to try to either. He wants it pre-packaged and- to some extend- pre digested. And as game makers we should not be mad about this. We should embrace it. These people are looking for easy entertainment and if we don’t give it to them, someone else will.
Often- if the developers I know are any indication of the developers in the rest of the biz- game makers tend to be inspired by the movies. And- thus inspired- they will argue: Hey, ICE AGE was a hit…what is relatable about that? The answer is nothing is inherently relatable about ICE AGE…but that flick had the marketing machine of 20th Century Fox to shove the ICE AGE characters on every Burger King cup in the country; they had the dollars to put the ICE AGE posters on every bus stop (and every bus) in the nation! That much in your face branding, and ANYTHING because relatable because you see it every day! It’s relatable because it becomes part of your ****ing life cause you can’t avoid it!
Interesting to note that HALO 2 seemed to be marketed like a giant, big budget movie. They spent the cash on getting that game out there and it paid off….granted it was a sequel to a massive game (which helps) but I bet many more people played HALO 2 than HALO 1 and were brought into the franchise BECAUSE of the marketing dollars spent this last XMAS. And I gotta say, they needed the marketing dollars because the theme, setting, and story of HALO resonate with the mainstream only a bit more those elements in the ODDWORLD STRANGER game.
Interesting to note even some of the biggest influences to the game artists I know (PIXAR, DREAMWORKS ANIMATION) make movies with the 80/20 rule. Check it out:
TOY STORY- everyone knows and loves classic toys.
BUGS LIFE- Ditto (but not as much)
CARS- people love cars almost more than toys!
SHREK- Classic Fairy tales with a spinINCREDIBLES- Super Heros with a twist
They’ve ALL got something the average person gets, knows, and- in many cases- likes/loves.
Now compare those flicks to these recent animation bombs:
TITAN AE- Who knows what this about?
SINBAD- Ok, ‘classic story’ but not really…most kids don’t know Sinbad
PRINCESS MONONOKE- Great flick (to some) but no one could relate
Not one of these dealt with anything (in it’s main concept) that most people could grasp just by looking at the movie poster. Or watching a 20 second commercial.
And they all paid the price.
So there ya go…that’s my point: 80%,comfort zone, 20% new…that’s my motto.
AND PLEASE, remember the 20% portion! Because YES, a game can sell with a higher ratio on the 80% side (for example: 100%/0% is a damn good ratio) and many games embrace the 100/0 rule and sell like gangbusters. GTA, SOCOM, GT4, MADDEN, and NEED FOR SPEED are great examples of this. BUT there are two things to watch out for if you stack the 80% too much higher:
a- The closer your left side is to 100%, the bigger the chance that someone else has the same idea as you and- sooner than later- you are going to be swimming in very crowded waters (i.e. underground street racers; modern war games with soldiers and Navy Seals; sports games; urban hip-hop culture games). So you either gotta discover the next great cultural groove AND get it to market first OR come late to the party but execute the **** out of the idea and get some good/great marketing behind it.
b- Who the **** wants to make 100%/0% games?!?! Notice I didn’t say who the ****s wants to PLAY these games. Hell, I totally understand why those above listed games are hits and I LOVE some of those very games. But man, I don’t want to work on the ****…too dull and dry for me. I’d go nuts!
Right now the majority of the market seems to be embracing (or preparing to embrace) the 100%/0% rule and- because of it- the market is getting very, very cluttered with ME TOO titles (how many more army sqaud games can the market support)?!?!
It will be interesting to see if games stay at 100%/0% ratio or open the valve just a bit to let some imagination in.
I guess whichever way it goes will determine if games stay GAMES (the 100%/0% split) or if games- in the mainstream’s perception- become works of great pop entertainment (the 80%/20% split) like the movies….
I am pushing for the 80/20 but that’s just me.
If I had to hedge my bets, I would say the 100%/0% is on a hell of a roll…Can it EVER be stopped?!?!
Guess we’ll find out soon enough!
David
I was right with some of my thoughts on rising costs and slowing market growth in the industry, and there are only so many strategies around the situation. David was only thinking from the software side. My solution is to approach things from the hardware side first. Like I said in my original thread about the possibilities of another crash; the industry is only seeing the symptoms of its own disease and not the actual disease. Throwing money at something will get you nowhere in my opinion. There is not a big enough market for these beefy new consoles MS and Sony are releasing. I would pay $500 for a console from Nintendo with a vr helmet with internal gyro, two one handed controllers with internal gyros, a modem, a harddrive, and at least half the graphics of the NextBox. That is right, I think that graphics are not the problem of the hardware, but of the developer lacking the time and money to use the next gen hardware when the market is not growing fast enough and maybe even shrinking. Assuming noone causes a paradigm shift in gameplay, and the three companies get uber conservative releasing only safe games and sequels because of rising costs in development. We would also have a market split between PCs, three handhelds if the GameBoyEvolution comes out and is hopefully backwards compatible with Cube software, and three consoles. Do the elementary math, and you will figure out there is no room to breathe. There is no room for innovation. People will not be impressed and will not buy games. How can someone who is mainstream exist in tomorrow’s world of gaming. How can one person own one system and be able to play plenty of exclusive games with the efforts of developers focused on fewer safer games across all the available hardware.
Some have expressed doubt about Nintendo’s current strategy, or at least pieces of it. Editorials like this one
http://www.planetgamecube.com/editorials.cfm?action=profile&id=151 show concern with the DS and what it says about where Nintendo is going with the Revolution. IGN and EGM also have been vocal about disappointment in the DS. On forums some seem to believe that the DS hardware is a failure. I personally feel that the software is the problem right now and that the hardware can do any gameplay that the PSP can do as well as do shooters, rpgs, and rts games better than the PSP. The DS software though right now is not aimed at traditional gamers. The DS’s best game right now is a port of a Mario game that early adopters of the handheld likely already own, and the game is not built to use the touch screen like the upcoming Metroid Hunters is. If Nintendo were planing to attract traditional gamers they would have released some games that used the touch screen and were appealing to hardcore gamers like the genres I mentioned several lines up. They seem intent upon digging up a market of non traditional gamers with the DS. Girls, retired gamers, gamers who like 2d games, and PC gamers will be attracted to the DS for the DS’ gameplay capabilities. They just need to put out some games that are complete games that are designed for the touch screen as opposed to the plethora of mini games hitting the system. There is no reason the PSP should be adopted for its graphics by third parties. Third parties did not flock to the GameCube because of its graphical abilities, why should they do it with the PSP. Am I missing out on some huge obvious conspiracy to hold Nintendo down in the industry?
Graphics need to improve, but what exactly about graphics needs to improve. Well if you are Sony, then you are thinking, “everything.” Nintendo though is not out to compensate for a small joystick. Ok, horrible pun; let us move on. Sony is pushing the idea of vectors, blue ray, and CELL technology. This all equals high end graphics, but will we be able to play with those pretty games? Will there be half the interactivity with the environment that the other two “inferior” systems have? I do not feel that polygons are as big of an issue as Sony is making them. It is too much too fast. Maybe next next gen we can start having games with characters that look this good
http://fits.depauw.edu/aharris/Courses/ArtH132/galleries/images/fullsize/fs_Sluter_Moses.jpg but right now we need to be reasonable and use our imaginations
http://filmstills3.netfirms.com/nightma1/ The difference is that the moses statue would be comprised of more polygons than even present movies feature in CGI effects. The fountain is a timeless piece of sculpture and shows exactly how to tackle the idea of hair and facial expression. The pictures from A Nightmare Before Christmas are of stop motion animation. This is how developers should be approaching their game worlds presently. The character models do not require high numbers of polygons to portray their lifelike nature. In Burton’s film it is the animation and real world lighting effects that separate this piece of art from the piece of trash Shrek. Character animation and lighting are more important to next gen graphics then all the bump mapping and photo realistic texturing they can fit on a blue ray disk. High polygon counts are a given for all three of the new consoles and surely it won’t matter that the PS3 can push more polygons than the Revolution if the Revolution uses the polygons it has and lights them better than the PS3's polygons then the Revolution’s fewer polygons will be of higher quality and feature more depth. Some developers just want to map scars and wrinkles onto the character models, but with the PS3 they maybe able to create the wrinkles in 3d with polygons.
A company can combat the graphics strategy of Sony’s several ways. One way is to release a system that is more like an ipod than a cd player. The company could cut out the middle man and become the sole retailer of their console’s software via an ipod type downloading system to a harddrive. This would make things easier for the consumer and create more profits with the gamers buying empty licenced disks to burn games from their system.
One route is to move the market towards developing games. The system could not only play games but allow for gamers to construct their own games, upload, and download them online. The system could launch with a click and drop game maker of either the GameCube’s Zelda games.
Another way to fight Sony is to release a system with a controller that can do things no controller has done yet. Follow the rumors about the Revolution and you will find that the controller may feature an internal gyro that detects tilting as well as turning. It combines the functions of traditional controllers with flight sticks and mice. There may also be additional tweaks to other mechanics of the controller. You can see my ideas on that in my signature.
If Sony can put a large screen on the PSP and sell it cheap I believe that a vr helmet with internal gyro and mic would add $150 to the price of the Revolution. Add that to the hardware, including graphics, modem, and harddrive costing $200. And the dual one handed controllers with internal gyros costing around another $100. Then a game for $50 and you are paying only $500 for what is the ultimate gaming fantasy. Hardcore gamers could be relied upon for the first two years to eat it up causing prices to go down and sells to continue. People would buy games and play them just to have fun, not just to beat them. This is the GTA effect. Where a game is so relatable yet fulfills impossible fantasies like car jacking that it is irresistibly fun to play. The reason maybe linked to the fact that when you play GTA you are not playing the game. You are able to break lose of the story and go do what you want. You are allowed to disrupt the story and the game world, and it is fun. You are allowed to be abstract. In Zelda you spend your time adventuring rather than experimenting with NPCs. While GTA’s adventure does not compare to Zelda, it has taken a page out of Zelda’s philosophy. In Zelda you are able to go and do any adventuring you want at any time, but how often do you find yourself away from the story creating your own adventure doing something that has no affect on beating the game? The new hardware needs to make it easier for gamers to be abstract. In Soul Calibur, instead of pressing down, forward, and b to attack someone you would simply move your arm and swing the sword directly the way you want to. Imagine a vr visor that was optionally translucent and used
http://www.t-immersion.com/ allowing for anything to be projected before you in full 3d such as a lightsaber in your hand. Just an example.
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Okay, this is an edit:
http://www.thehollywoodreporter.com/thr/columns/video_games_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000884458One of my favorite developers is leaving the industry. Oddworld is moving on to movies and tv. I always felt that there would one day be an Abe movie, I just did not think it would mean I would nolonger get to play Oddworld games. Read that interview. I do not know if I am allowed to post the entire piece.
"Lanning: It's an industry-wide problem. As game production costs rise, publishers want more sure bets because with rising costs come rising risks. What we see is an industry which is rapidly discouraging innovation because people don't want to take chances on more innovative types of titles."
"Lanning: Absolutely. Costs are going up, but not because the quality expectation is higher. Costs are going up because of the design of the next-generation hardware. The code that just one guy used to write on the Xbox is now going to take five guys. It's as if the movie camera that you started shooting with 10 years ago has improved some features and now you need 12 people to operate it instead of one."
"Lanning: Which has always been part of the plan. And the reason why today seems to be the right time is that game technology is now moving in an opposite paradigm. Video game systems aren't being designed to be conducive to development, creativity, or content. They're being designed to be cheaper for manufacturing. If movie cameras were made that way, you'd have a rebellion in Hollywood. But this isn't Hollywood and it isn't a movie camera; it's a videogame system and the public wants basically a $1,000 box but only wants to pay $150 for it. I'm not saying that anyone is guilty in this process, but this is the reality of the current climate for development in video games and where it's headed. And because the costs are higher, more ownership needs to be seen on behalf of the publishers and, quite frankly, I don't blame them. They can say, "Look I used to pay for video games when they were $6 million, but now they're $16 million. And you know what? My shareholders are not going to like it if I fund your game, it's a big hit, and then you take it to someone else. That's going to hurt my stock. We need to see a path to ownership or ownership right out of the gate.""
Topic: The Great Crash of 05: Part Deux (Read 15882 times)
