Are These People Reshaping the Gaming Industry? 127
Mark Graham writes "An EU game development site has put up a list of the 25 people they think are 'reshaping the games business'. Although they admit the list is highly subjective, it's a debate-provoking piece, and some of the entries (Portal designer Kim Swift and Kongregate.com's founder) are spot on, going for the people that have introduced innovations rather than those that dominate column inches. Miyamoto is absent from the list, for example — although his boss Satoru Iwata is in there. Including Japansese designers like Hironobo Sakaguchi (ranked for his successful prolific outsourced development process) instead of Hideo Kojima is sure to anger a few fanboys. Or at least raise a few eyebrows." Anyone they left off that should obviously be on there?
Yeah they left out some folks (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully the Bioshock guy, Ken Levine is on there. I just read the article but forgot right away. Also they need a guy from Harmonix (Guitar Hero developer) if there isn't one.
Kojima, yeah he's not really big-time on the radar right now. MGS4 is highly anticipated but it's not a reason to slide into the top 25. If you take Kojima then you need to take Itagaki and probably a host of other "fan-fave" developers that push the boundaries in certain genres.
Stardock (Score:5, Interesting)
However, if you look at Stardock as a publisher they deserve the spot even more. If you remember the big stink between StarForce and Stardock back when Galactic Civilizations was released. They continue their style of "don't screw the people who actually pay you."
Also, while there are only a few triple-A titles on Stardock Central, their scheme of 'digital download' + 'mail you a box for shipping costs' is much more palatable to me than Valve's Steam service where you are forced to make your own hardcopies from their backup files. It also get nicely out of the way once you've installed the game vs Valve's ubiquitous TSR style.
http://www.stardock.com/ [stardock.com]
(they mainly do desktop customization and other utilities, but they have an extensive selection of budget games and a few large titles.)
Re:Gary Gygax (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:CCP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Then why don't you demonstrate that his claims are untrue? He argued that Eve is "is extremely simple from a client/server perspective". And in the sense in which he intended this assertion, he's right. Eve's graphics consist of a background of stars (little tiny points of light), with an improbable amount of multicolored gases percolating about to differentiate one solar system from another. There are no animated avatars in eve—the closest thing you get to an avator is the little portrait that pops up when you click on someone's space ship), nothing much of anything that moves or changes except more little points that represent other player's spaceships (unless you're up close—then you do actually see the spaceship, but it looks just like all the other ships of its type)...and huge, spectacular explosions when you blow up some poor sucker who was trying to haul home the minerals he'd just spent hours mining. OK, the explosions are cool. Except, of course, if you're the poor sod getting blown up.
You've got to admit that 50K people logged into a text-based MMO wouldn't be as impressive as even 10K people logged into something like EQ or WoW, so numbers alone don't tell the story. Now, Eve is in some ways a very complex game. It has an admirably sophisticated economy, and a large number or craftable and tradeable items. Tracking those items and keeping up with the transactions may very well be as difficult—or, for all I know more difficult—than running a "traditional" MMO fantasy game with avatars that run around in a three-dimensional landscape, interacting and engaging each other and various MOBs in battle. However, I'd like to see some argument for this, some facts even.
Let me emphasize that I'm not saying that EVE doesn't deserve plaudits for its achievements, but if I'm supposed to believe that running this game with 45K users is per se a triumph of technical wizardry, then I'd like to know why.
And, unless things have changed radically in the 3 months since I quit playing it, there's lots of lag in Eve. Buying or selling stuff is a real chore, as you have to click on each item, then wait for the transaction to be executed...and that wait can be awfully long (10-15 seconds), even if you're not in Jita. And don't even get me started on the GUI. Like, I'm not going to whine about the fact that a game in which financial transactions are crucial forces you to use a tiny font (at 1600 x 1200) in which the characters for zero, eight, and B are indistinguishable...
Aside from merely technical issue, I have a lot of respect for the designers of Eve. It is a conceptually sophisticated game, and I would have continued to play it despite all its defects, were it not for the fact that Eve is inescapably a PvP game, and I just don't like PvP. That I played the game for two years, getting ganked by griefers at least once a week, is a testimonial to just how good the game is. If you like PvP, you'll probably like Eve.