Wideload's Seropian Talks Indie Game Freedom 34
simoniker writes "Wideload's Alex Seropian, who must recently finished wacky Xbox title Stubbs The Zombie, but also co-founded Bungie, has been chatting about how big-budget games are made, and noting: "I had a great experience at Microsoft. But being on the other side of the fence, there were a lot of developers that were making games for the Xbox for launch time, and a lot of them were struggling for one reason or another... a lot of them were struggling with trying to manage their finances, that cashflow, because they were living under the milestone payment system. And a lot of them were going out of business. And I thought, 'Gee, if I weren't doing this for a living, I'd think this is totally a loser business to be in.'" Seropian now suggests using a small internal group to make games and staffing up with independent contractors when each project starts. Why aren't all games done like this?"
Busy World (Score:3, Funny)
I have the same problem
Re:Busy World (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Busy World (Score:1)
I'm like that now, too, and I'm only nineteen -- no wife or kids yet.
I love games that allow me to save at any point in time; without that, I wouldn't have the time for most games.
The Nintendo DS's sleep feature is nice, because if I need to pause because I haven't saved, I can at least close the thing and save a lot of battery life.
Where'd the good ol' days go, where I could just sit on my ass for six straight hours and play something? *Sigh*
Re:Busy World (Score:2)
Just wait for college! You can trade each point of GPA for three hours of gaming time each week. The scale is exponential! To go from 4.0 to 3.0 grants college student 3 hours. But from 3.0 to 2.0 grants the student the same 3 hours, but also an additional 27 hours. And from 2.0 to 1.0 and below is about 81 hours. Basically because all week you're skipping every class just to play WoW and C
Re:Busy World (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Busy World (Score:1)
Re:Busy World (Score:2)
Oh dear, not THAT argument again (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus, in my book it's not the vendor that should tell everyone what the consumer really wants. Ask a consumer, if you want to know what the consumer wants.
It's getting on my nerves already, the way the games industry seems to think that just repeating some bullshit often enough will eventually make it true. And not just about the game length, but I'm already digressing.
Do gamers want shorter games? Since when? The usual complaint I hear from actual gamers is that some gamer was too short, not that it was too long. Buying, say, an RPG used to keep you entertained for something like 70 hours. (And I'm not even getting into the _good_ replayable ones like Fallout 2 or Arena or Daggerfall, which I've sunk _hundreds_ of hours into.) Now we're down to games which one can finish in one sunday afternoon. It's already getting 1/8 as much bang per buck. Is any actual gamer actually demanding that they become even shorter? Did anyone finish, say, Fable and go, "man, I so wish it had only half as much content"? Or did anyone who's played a Gran Turismo game find themselves thinking "man, I so wish this had only 2 cars and 3 races, so it doesn't need more than a couple of hours to see everything"?
I mean, seriously, wtf? Since when and where did consumers start demanding less for their money?
So I'll tell you what it is: bullshit PR. The vendor wishes they could sell you half as much stuff for the same money, or at least not much less money. So they proceed to tell you again and again that you really want less stuff. No, seriously, you do. Trust us. Would we lie to you? Again?
And since the same bullshit fallacies pop up again and again, let's dismantle them once and for all:
1. "But I don't have 20 hours in a day!!!" Well, guess what? That's what save and restore are for. Unless he has a bad case of Alzheimer's (so tomorrow he won't remember what he's been doing or why), he just doesn't have to finish a game in one day.
2. "But I'm no longer a teen who has all the time in the world!! Only those can put 20 hours into a game!!!" Well, that's bullshit. I've seen casual gamers sink more than 20 hours in a game. E.g., mom isn't gaming 16 hours a day either, yet that didn't prevent her from putting a lot of total time into playing Mercury or Lumines. She just did it in smaller bursts, spread over almost a year. E.g., there are a lot of casual playing moms and pops in MMOs, who did manage to put in as much as 200 or 300 hours into maxxing their character's level. It just was spread over several months, in some cases even over a year. So excuse me if I don't see 20 hours as some unreasonable total time for a game. You _can_ do that even without being 15 years old.
3. "But look how many games you've never finished!!! It just shows that games are too long!!!" Well, bullshit again. If a game reaches the point where it becomes too boring to continue, then that's the real problem, not the length: it's just a boring game. Yes, having too little content dilluted to fill some hideous number of hours is one way to make a boring game, but sometimes it's not even that, it's just badly designed. But even when that's the case, the real problem isn't the length, it's the lack of interesting content to fill that length.
Re: (Score:2)
Independant contractors (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Independant contractors (Score:3, Insightful)
smaller devs do this a lot (Score:5, Interesting)
The movie industry learned years ago that this fixed-staff system was nonsense and moved to a contractor system. Big games need to do the same. Us little guys already have.
Re:smaller devs do this a lot (Score:3, Funny)
-Rick
Re:smaller devs do this a lot (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:smaller devs do this a lot (Score:2, Informative)
Re:smaller devs do this a lot (Score:2)
either you pay animators to do not very much for 3 years (bad)
or you shoehorn some excuse for animation into the game (bad)
Re:smaller devs do this a lot (Score:2)
For the first release of TinyWarz [tinywarz.com] all the art was contracted for. While it took a long time sorting through resumes and candidates, the end result was some top-notch art and great working-relationships with the artists.
Several were called back to work on the next release (now in-progress).
_f
So what's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen it happen a few times in business software shops, and I'm not sure why games would be any different.
Subcontractors (Score:4, Interesting)
So yeah, if you don't need these production workers all the time, then subcontracting is cheaper. But if you use them all the time then it could be cheaper to just hire some more people and cut out the middleman. Of course sometimes the reason for subcontracting is to reduce liability. I wonder if Rockstar would have been as liable for Hot Coffee, if they subcontracted out the game.
Authorized development (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, you can code up homebrew games, but doing so requires hacking your console (which is something most people don't know how to do, and in many cases requires expensive/pseudo-legal mod chips or other hardware).
Next time you see an article about "indie developers", don't get them confused with the ordinary shareware/freebie game developers you see online. The consoles have no indie developers, and probably never will have indie developers. Nintendo, MS and Sony are all afraid that people will code up porn games (which they will) and will disable the console's anti-piracy features (which they will).
Re:Authorized development (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Authorized development (Score:2)
There were crap games by the bucket load for NES, crap games for Genesis and crap games for every other console.
Re:Authorized development (Score:1)
Re:Authorized development (Score:2, Interesting)
I think a good number of indie console developers would be rather surprised to hear that. What with the low cost of Wii dev kits and Xbox Live Arcade, that's no longer true. Yes, you have to know what you're doing, and have some sort of business plan, but small teams making small games have a nice niche in the current generation.
Seropian Levels (Score:3, Funny)
[rimshot]
Re:Seropian Levels (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Seropian Levels (Score:1)
Sorry if that caused you pain.
Re:Seropian Levels (Score:2)
At least, that's what the Japanese doctor told her.
sellout 1. n. Alex Seropian (Score:1)