Game Industry Opinion Continues to Burn

The Game Developer's Rant session held at the GDC continues to reverberate through the industry. GameDev.net and Greg Costikyan's site have more details on the session itself, while Terra Nova's original thread on the subject has been followed up by an open letter to the participants from Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms Entertainment. From Matt's letter: "Anyway, please, just stop the whining. Stop telling people about how horrible the games industry is. Stop telling them that they can't succeed without radical industry changes. It's bunk and you should know better. Are you intentionally trying to discourage people from getting into the industry?"

Re:No value

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

The problem with citing Mario, is that mario's actually matured over the years in terms of gameplay. So has Sonic. Sonic 1 is not nearly the same game as Sonic Adventure or even Sonic Heroes.

Here are the key paragraphs

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Here are the key paragraph's from Greg's rant. Absolutely classic stuff!

-Start-

As recently as 1992: games cost 200K. Next generation games will cost 20m. Publishers are becoming increasingly risk averse. Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto. Who was at the Microsoft keynote? I don't know about you but it made my flesh crawl. [laughter] The HD era? Bigger, louder? Big bucks to be made! Well not by you and me of course. Those budgets and teams ensure the death of innovation. Was your allegiance bought at the price of a television? Then there was the Nintendo keynote. This was the company who established the business model that has crucified the industry today.. Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer, and my question is what poor bastard's chest did he carve it from? [audience falls about]

How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can't afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it's ok because the HD era is here right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of Redwood City! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation's time there are still games to love. You can start today.

-End-

Hahahaha, who's heart did he pull out? Just brilliant!

Re:Before replying...

[AKAImBatman]

So, if you have limited resources, and you have to choose between Half-Life 2 or Doom 3, and something independent,

Why does the independent game have to cost as much as Doom 3 or Half-Life 2? Answer: It doesn't. Most Indie games are delivered via the Internet which cuts out the packaging, shelving, distribution, and paper marketing costs associated with the big names. This allows some good games to be available for $10-$30, quite a bit less than shrink-wrapped games.

Re:Here are the key paragraphs

[shadowmatter]

The full rant can be found at his web page here [costik.com]. Scroll down to his post "But It's Over Now" in big blue letters, it's just beneath.

Good stuff.

- shadowmatter

rant transcript

[gbdmoxy]

Hey all -

Sorry to interject - just in case it adds to the discussion I recorded and covered the rant session for Gamespot. The Wonderland transcript is great, just incomplete. If you want to see the whole thing, you can find the full transcript here [gamespot.com].

Galen

Re:Before replying...

[88NoSoup4U88]

Have a go at Half-Life 2 ;

Allthough it -is- a sequel, -and- a pretty engine ; It's not all imo :
With them incorporating the Havoc (gravity) engine, they added a great new layer to the fun the game can give.

That, and of course the (mod)community which surrounded HL1 has almost all gone to work with HL2 , which is going to bring an entire new generation of great new games/mods/ideas on the market.

Bit offtopic ; Mods seem to be of great influence, ifnot test-beds these days : Something that's proven in a mod to be fun/succesful, is likely to see the day of light in the next generation games.

Re:Before replying...

[Spud the Ninja]

Metanet has a cool 2D Ninja game: N [harveycartel.org]

Re:Before replying...

[AKAImBatman]

Try some of these [diygames.com]. Starscape from MoonPod [moonpod.com] is one of my favorites. :-)

Oh, and Cas would kill me if I didn't plug his awesome 2D Shooters [puppygames.net]. :-)

Re:Sorry to cut you off at the knees, but...

[Stonehand]

You may want to have a look at "Space HoRSE", by Gilligames and published by Shrapnel Games. While I have neither M.U.L.E. nor Space HoRSE, there is supposed to be a very, very deliberate resemblance between them.

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/gilligames/Space_HoRS E/1.htm [shrapnelgames.com]

Looks like there's a 42MB demo to download.

Don't know how much the resemblance is, nor if it IS close, how that got past the lawyers. *shrug*

Re:Before replying...

[ptlis]

Darwinia [darwinia.co.uk], made by the same guys responsible for Uplink is mind-bogglingly awesomely fun... I really can't heap enough superlatives and praise onto it.

Re:Before replying...

[Sj0]

They're pretty rough around the edges and simplistic by design, but Star Phalanx and Rambo vs. Kitty Cat are pretty fun, I've been told.

RvK [qbxl.net]

Star Phalanx for Windows [qbtk.com]

Star Phalanx for Linux(requires sdllib) [qbxl.net]