3D Realms' Scott Miller Warns Warner 42
firstadopter.com writes "Scott Miller of 3D Realms, maker of Duke Nukem and non-maker of Duke Nukem Forever, is panning Warner Brothers' recent re-entry into the videogame industry. He cites the lack of focus of conglomerates and aversion to risk-taking on original brands as the heels of Warner's future downfall, suggesting of their new gaming division: 'Focused [game-only] publishers will always lead us in making the best games... It's just not as important for a [diversified into films/TV] company like Warner to really try hard in a area that, in the end, doesn't mean life or death to their company.'"
Re:Yea right (Score:5, Interesting)
You should read the postmortems on Gamasutra, at least half of them admit afterwards to have worked without a decent design document. For Tropico eg. the lead designer found out after a year that his designers all had different ideas about what the game should be about and were implementing all kinds of features and interfaces they thought were 'cool'. This was because the design document was too vague and general.
Daikatana failed in two ways, first because it wasn't that good. It had been in production for too long and by the time it was ready it was not technically advanced anymore. But more importantly, because its creators had such a big mouth in the press (nonsense about making you his bitch) the press were sceptical about the game, which is their right. You can't pretend to be mr. know-it-all and critisize everyone but yourself and expect to get respect for it, if you don't have any achievements to go with it.
Re:Yea right (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Game dev houses do public post-mortems. I wonder what we'd find out if traditional software developers did public post-mortems? Maybe a lot of them wouldn't have the careful planning that you might expect.
2) Games are (I believe necessarily) *somewhat* driven in design by implementation issues that cannot be found out until implementation time. It may be that having 20 goat-riding banshees running around attacking you just plain uses too much CPU time, and the game has to be changed. A design document is *very* useful when you have to interface with someone else's code, but game developers aren't interfacing with code. The game field moves quickly, and they may want to include new stuff that comes out during the dev process.
That doesn't mean that game developers can't improve, but I suspect that there is a *reason* that they don't always work the same way more conventional developers do.
As for the term "unprofessional", I've found it to be a loaded term that rarely conveys useful information.
Re:History lesson: (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who don't get the reference, Atari single-handledly destroyed the home video game market during this time, mainly by glutting the market with crappy games (E.T. for example; several million unsold cartridges were dumped in a landfill. Pac Man had more cartridges manufactured than there were consoles sold.
The home video market managed to stay destroyed until Nintendo forced their way onto the scene; they were very careful to avoid the sins of the father, so to speak, by retaining the right to not allow crappy games, limiting the amount of titles a licensee could put out in a year, and other such practices.
Interesting but naive (Score:3, Interesting)
There is an assumption amongst "focused publishers" of games that leading edge (techniques, graphics, sound, action) counts. It is an assumption that holds true for (probably) most of the gaming market. Nevertheless, the current gaming market is arguably a niche market, and "focused publishers" either aren't aware of this or at a loss to exploit the bulk of the market.
A market means having (a) customers who want your product (b) who have money (c) enough to afford the price which is dictated (at minimum) by your development costs.
The current game publishers are pretty good at (a). There are millions of gamers out there who want the product. The problem is that the vast majority of those gamers do not earn an income. Those that do eventually find that they have less time for gaming in order to do something called "living" or "working" or "getting a wife and kids". Slashdotisms aside, the age profile of gamers is heavily slanted in towards youth and lack of income.
In other words, current publishers aren't a whole lot of good at (b) or (c), or "finding the deep pockets". Games are pirated or obtained occasionally via Mommy or Daddy's money.
So where are the publishers going wrong? To me that's simple. I don't play games anymore because I don't have much time to, and few modern games are entertaining for a person who only plays occasionally. Games are written for gamers, and gamers are highly skilled addicts. This means they get their "hit" from the challenge and, to get value for their money, they require game that is lengthy to complete. Something challenging to a skilled gamer is, even on easy levels, not very entertaining to me when I want to relax for half an hour.
TW is, by comparison, an entertainment company. While many people (especially here) can't stand them, they nevertheless understand how to cater to the mass market ... and I'm guessing they're going to do just that.
Why play in the highly competitive leading edge games market when you can combine non-interactive media with yesterday's techniques (that have been made into a Microsoft SDK), at a fraction of the cost, and target a far larger market that also happens to have money?
Its all about understanding your market. People who earn money (more particularly those who have "responsibilities") tend to be more price sensitive when it comes to products they aren't sure they will get their money's worth from. You may not be able to sell a $50 game to such people except at Christmas, but a $10 game a month will slip right under their radar.
There are also other markets that aren't currently served by game publishers. Do you remember interactive fiction books? They give you a paragraph or two, you decide what to do, and get a "goto" for another paragraph. There's thousands of them out there, and children and young teens love them. It would take one such book, a week of VB, and one day in your average TV series studio to turn the book into multimedia interactive fiction (30 second clips rather than paragraphs). TW could flog off stuff like that at a quarter the price of a game and still make a killing.
Third time's the charm? (Score:3, Interesting)