BioWare On Why Making a Blockbuster Game Is a Poor Goal 192
BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk spoke at the 2010 Develop Conference about the current focus within the video game industry on making huge, blockbuster titles, and why that is the wrong approach. Quoting Gamasutra's coverage:
"'While blockbuster game creation is everything that most game developers working today growing up wanted to do, it's precisely the wrong thing to chase in gaming's contemporary landscape.' Risk-taking from publishers and investors has dramatically declined in recent times, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age studio-runner noted: 'As a result, innovation and creativity [are] being squeezed. Where the bottom of the market had dropped out at one point, now it’s the middle of the market has dropped out. Unless you can be in the top ten releases at one given time, it's unlikely that a triple-A game is going to make money.'"
Zeschuk also commented that consoles aren't necessarily the future of game platforms, and that BioWare is experimenting with smaller scale MMO development in addition to working on their much larger upcoming Star Wars title.
Translation (Score:2)
"Stay away from our turf"
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Correction: "Making a blockbuster is harder than you think and if you screw it up you won't make a profit therefore doing something innovative yet unproven is sort of risky so your publisher would prefer if you didn't do that and instead stick to what has worked in the past so basically creativity in the sense of doing something new gets thrown right out the window and you'll just be making an iteration of something you've already done."
Re:Translation (Score:4, Funny)
No, more like 'Bioware doesn't aim to make a blockbuster game.. we've just been remaking KOTOR ever since we discovered it was a smash hit!'
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Jade Empire, Mass Effect, pretty much the same as KOTOR. Different setting, same game. Not that that's a problem. It's a great formula, I hope they keep plugging different values into it.
BioWare has thrived with "blockbuster" games (Score:2, Interesting)
Strange that it should be BioWare of all game studios to claim such, as they are one of the few creating huge games with a 40+ hours time investment, such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Also these games have been performing very well.
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What? As in 40+ hour "play time"? Is it just me, or do those estimates always seem like rather poor value for money?
Re:BioWare has thrived with "blockbuster" games (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends. If you see it as an investment (it costs you, and you want something back for your precious time), then it's poor value. If you see it as "play time" (you pay $50 to enjoy yourself for 40+ hours), then it's excellent value for money.
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Yeah. I got Oblivion shortly after it was released (4 years ago, I think), and with all expansion packs and mods, I'm 120 hours into the game, and I still have completed only half the quests and not even the main storyline (my second playthrough, so I wanted to check out all the sidequests and skip the main quest).
So for me, a 50$ investment has bought me 120 hours of entertainment and I'm still into it after 4 years. If you compare it to cinema, or bubble gum, that's unbeatable value, from a "blockbuster"
Re:BioWare has thrived with "blockbuster" games (Score:4, Insightful)
You're absolutely right of course. The question now is, what is the purpose of life? To indefinitely create more value, or to have fun and enjoy yourself?
At some point in my life I decided that life is very enjoyable without being a millionaire and that being immersed in fantastic game worlds is something I enjoy. So my equation is: enjoyment > more value than necessary.
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I bet you are fun at parties.
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Re:BioWare has thrived with "blockbuster" games (Score:5, Insightful)
Millionaire asks Fisherman, "Why do you just sit there fishing and relaxing, making just enough to get by, when you could apply that time toward something profitable?"
Fisherman replies, "What would that get me?"
Millionaire says, "It would expand your business, bringing in even more money."
Fisherman asks, "To what end?"
Millionaire tells Fisherman, "As you bring in more money, your business expands further. Your initial time investment will bring in exponentially more value."
Fisherman prompts, "And then?"
Millionaire states, "Once your business is large enough, it can stand without you. The money you make just by having the business exist means you can just sit back and..."
Fisherman finishes, "Relax? That is what I'm doing now."
And Millionaire was enlightened.
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And then the millionaire dumped millions of barrels of oil into the fisherman's waters.
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Except of course, when the fisherman's boat sinks he's screwed, but if the millionaire's boat sinks it's no biggie.
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From an economical standpoint, you could've spent those 120 hours into creating more value which would exponentially enlarge your initial investment and pay someone 50$ to be entertained in your place, so you could free up those 120 hours for a decent return-investment.
Just saying...
Just saying that the only value in life is in making money? Personally I prefer to see money as a tool to make my life enjoyable, rather than a goal that requires the sacrifice of all joy in my life.
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>>>If you see it as "play time" (you pay $50 to enjoy yourself for 40+ hours), then it's excellent value for money.
I severely disagree. Unless there's a strong compelling story (like Final Fantasy), I think most 40 hour games are boring. For excample I thought Zelda the Wind Waker was dull. Like sitting and watching a 40 hour version of the Matrix. Zzzz.
For me the best games are usually the 10-20 hour ones, like Metroid Prime or Eternal Darkness. Short, to the point, but edge of your seat fun.
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Because it is. A good RPG can keep you busy for 80 hours or more. A good strategy game will offer nearly unlimited replay value. A good shmup may take hundreds of hours before you get that 1CC. I like the 40 hour cinematic game format, but it's hardly the epic some people make it out to be.
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Thing is, before they made them, they didn't know it'd work. Probably not as much with Dragon Age, but definitely with Mass Effect. SWKOTOR wasn't a blockbuster, but you could see the direction BioWare was going.
Thing is, for me, "blockbuster" aimed games are the ones that interest me least. Gears of War, Halo, and others like them really haven't held my attention as much as SWKOTOR, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age.
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Funny you say that. I'm a hardcore gamer and have no interest in them.
Maybe it's the definition of hardcore gamer that's changed these days. I grew up gaming, still game all the time (at 30), play anything from TF2 through to Peggle... I think BioWare's ability to tell a story is the big thing, they don't focus on getting the mechanics squeaky clean, but they do get the gameplay and plot spot on.
I recently played through Mass Effect 2 and loved it. They are refining the play style while still having fresh i
Re:BioWare has thrived with "blockbuster" games (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange not. He is talking about the industry. He say that if you are not already here (on the bioware position), is bad strategy to move to that position, because will probably get you killed.
Lets say the bridge that companies like Bioware have crossed, has burned. Anyway, why I am saying things like this? read the article, or better, assist to these conferences for a direct version and not a second hand one *lowbrownface*
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I don't know. It's still strange to me. Kinda like walking up to a bunch of kids playing ball on a playground and telling them "You know kids - statistically almost none of you are EVER going to make it to the NBA, so you really shouldn't even try.".
While the fact that very few will make it is undeniably true, if no one tries it, we never will get those rare breakthroughs like BioWare or Blizzard.
I say they should go ahead. If they're really THAT good, then they will make money.
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I'd like to play devils advocate for a moment...
If every game maker shoots for blockbuster games, the vast majority of them will fail and the companies will fold. This could lead to a "mediocrity vacuum" where there are no decent developers putting out games that are simply ok. This is bad for the industry, and bad for consumers.
To translate this to your example it would be as if every kid on the playground is aspiring to play in the NBA, and the ones that fail quit basketball altogether.
While this du
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It's more like going to a boxing ring and telling all the people there that pay everything they earn that at most one of them will become world champion, and they'd better not try.
Usually a bunch of kids playing ball on a playground "play" for "fun", and aren't even training or really trying to be the next quarterback or whatever in the next winning team.
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What I take away from the article is that Bioware can make games like that because they have a proven track record of making games like that financial successes, but that a development team with a less powerful resume probably couldn't get it done. Not because the team wouldn't be up to it creatively or technically, but because in the current market, management/investors wouldn't have enough faith in an unproven team to let them take the time to do it right.
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40 hours of video game costs $50 (I only usually buy games after they drop down below $35, but anyway).
40 hours of movies at the theater costs: $200
40 hours of rub downs costs: $2,000 (happy endings not included)
40 hours of watching television costs: your soul
So, the video game thing actually seems like a bargain.
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ugh, replied to wrong post.
40 hours of my being stupid: priceless
Re:BioWare has thrived with "blockbuster" games (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's pretty obvious that BioWare has always intended to create blockbusters. Fully voiced games, professional actors, impressive game worlds, fleshed out storyline, excellent writers... "blockbusters" are BioWares success formula, which is why I'm so surprised about Zeschucks statement.
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Blockbusters is a ad hoc definition, so we all have a different one.
To me a blockbuster title is a big budget game that cater to the more popular taste. Is my opinion that only recently the game indistru has started to make real blockbuster games. Everything created before has ben "training", "growing the industry" and exploring what works better to make a blockbuster. It seems the formula has been found, and is a rail shotter like MW2.
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It seems the formula has been found, and is a rail shotter like MW2.
MW2 isn't a rail shooter, its a FPS. Wouldn't a rail shooter be more like Star Fox.
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The problem is that "Fully voiced games, professional actors, impressive game worlds, fleshed out storyline, excellent writers" is not the blockbuster success formula. Especially as Dragon Age was not fully voiced. But either way, games like Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto have been considered blockbusters without being fully voiced with professional actors, (And one might say that GTA doesn't have an impressive game world or a fleshed out storyline, but w/e). And games like Oblivion, which also featured profes
Hypocrite (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they are remaking the same exact game since Knight of the Old Republic. Take a look at KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect. Always the same mechanics, always the same basic plot. While they are very good at it, they are not very "creative".
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Heck it is mostly even the same limiting engine, just ramped up...
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KOTOR: Odyssey Engine
Jade Empire: "Jade Empire engine"
Mass Effect 1+2: UE3
Dragon Age: "Dragon Age engine"
so, only for Mass Effect did they use an off the shelf engine.
Re:Hypocrite (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is exactly the guys point: when you're spending that much money on a game, you can't afford to be creative, because if your new idea tanks you're left with a huge bill for developing it. Much safer to make something like another game that was previously popular.
Spend a tenth as much developing a game, and you can afford to take ten times as much risk, and maybe you'll get a runaway hit. Probably not, but it doesn't really matter that much...
Takes one to know one (Score:5, Insightful)
So? He knows what he is talking about.
And Jade Empire WAS creative. So was KOTOR. Yes KOTOR was Baldur's gate in Space! but THAT was also creative. An RPG set in space? Unheard off!
Mass Effect married many new elements to the Baldur's Gate style RPG. Sometimes you can create something new by cobbling together old parts. Coat of many colors.
As a side note, I think some people put to much emphasis on creative. Just because something is new, doesn't mean it is good. New Coke was creative, it was new, it was different. You want a bottle?
I wish Lucasarts stopped being creative and released one of their old style games, when you knew when you saw their logo, you were in for a good time.
Same with Bioware. Dragon Age 2 not creative? Who the fuck cares. Give me more off the same.
The plot is indeed always the same. But there really aren't all that many plots that you can put into a game. Yes, I have written a story line for a RPG in which you are NOT the hero. That is creative. I think it even works and might oneday turn it into a simple game. BUT I also realise that JUST the creative bit of you not being the hero isn't enough to make it a good game.
Bioware knows that a hero needs an enemy to overcome. Because the same enemy gets boring there usually is a plot twist that reveals a darker enemy behind the original enemy. There are simple game mechanics behind most of the plots.
Just as in a porn movie, somehow people always find a reason to have sex, often with attractive people. No pizza has ever been deliverd to my door by a randy teenager. Nor have I ever had to discipline a wayward schoolgirl with melons the size of melons.
Fantasy has rules, perhaps even more so then reality.
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I wish Lucasarts stopped being creative and released one of their old style games, when you knew when you saw their logo, you were in for a good time.
Ballblazer! Fuck yeah!
Not to mention Rebel Assault and the whole Monkey Island series. Good times.
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An RPG set in space? Unheard off
Star Ocean? Rogue Galaxy? Starflight?
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In other news.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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"But I want to be know for my acting skills"
"Just take off your shirt and shut up, Mr. Pattinson"
Not 'Why try?' (Score:5, Informative)
This reads like 'Don't even bother trying to make games that are awesome.' They are actually trying to say, 'Don't overspend and try to make a blockbuster game just by spending money.'
It's perfectly possible to make and amazing hit game without the budget that Bioware and Square Enix put into games. Do games care about graphics and cutscenes? Yes. Do they care more about gameplay and controls? Absolutely. It's just a LOT harder to come up with good gameplay and refine the controls, so they throw money at the pretty pictures instead. It's never been a good idea, but they do it anyhow.
The #1 killer for videos games (for me) is bad controls. If controlling the character doesn't feel like an extension of myself, if the character doesn't always do what I think it'll do when I hit buttons, if the character is slow to react or I have to wait on its actions, it's absolutely killer for me. It's the reason I now rent games instead of buying.
Some of the better games, like Fallout and Resident Evil, I've never played because I felt like I was fighting the controls instead of fighting enemies. It's just not fun.
A coworker was just saying the other day that Sonic on the iPhone sucks because the controls are so bad, even though it was one of his favorite games. And that Street Fighter is amazing because the controls are perfect. Not a word about graphics or gameplay, just controls. (2 separate conversations, too, so it's not like he was comparing them.)
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Have to agree with the control issue. On the PC it can sometimes be tracked down to games being designed with consoles in mind.
Recent victims of such crippling controls would be Prototype and Dead Space.
Actually, the first thing the summary reminded me of was Duke Nukem Forever.
The company started development in the wake of great successes and the fans were really looking forward to the game. Nonetheless the studio managed to bet the farm on pipe dreams in their chase of the perfect game and successfully de
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Poor controls are also the biggest reason why ports of console games to the PC frequently suck huge donkey balls.
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1) Not re-doing the menus. Assuming that people have a red 'X' to go back, etc. UT3 did this. Their menus might have been good for a console, but on a PC, they sucked ass.
2) Not allowing customized controls.
If you let a PC user customize, there won't be an issue with poor controls - they'll just set it up like the controls for their most played game of that genera. If you don't allow the user to customize on a PC, they're most likely go
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Gaming must go back to its roots (Score:4, Insightful)
Bioware needs to jump ship from the cinematic epic and graphics shell game and take stock of the history behind RPG gaming.
If the Indie gaming scene is anything to go by, funds and personnel do not a great game make. Why don't Bioware practice what they preach and make a low-budget series, with the chief emphasis on hiring talented personnel with experience playing the finest RPGs of the past twenty years. It sure beats hiring expensive singers for your musical score, scores of artists and programmers, not to mention the marketing bill which inevitably follows big budget titles.
Gaming ought to, to some extent, go back to its roots by abandoning the constant, unending improvement of graphical quality to the neglect of gameplay. I started gaming as a kid in 1991 and have more memories from the 1991-1997 time bracket than 2005-2010. The only outstanding memory of Mass Effect I have is of Shephard emerging, alive and well, after a boss battle with a soaring musical score playing and stoical gaze on the part of the character - I wasn't awed or impressed, but amused as it outcome was obvious even before the tension of "Where's Shephard gone?!" played out for a minute.
On the contrary, Chrono Trigger, a simple RPG with graphics not much beyond classic Link to the Past, has so many memories with its 16-bit score and pixelated graphics. The budget and levels of personnel are dwarfed by these cinematic titles out today. I could ramble on about more titles as example but I believe most readers browsing games.slashdot can fathom a few personally.
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Or this: http://www.reallifecomics.com/archive/100709.html [reallifecomics.com]
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If you have played Chrono Trigger, you already know the answer to all your suggestions:
"But... the future refused to change."
Besides, with the filters available in modern emulators, those old SNES games aren't pixelated anymore, but actually look pretty sharp. Hint, hint :).
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If by the future you mean Bioware's future then you may well be right. But since Bioware is one company among many, and other RPGs with less flash and more moderate graphics like The Witcher (once it got its bugs fixed and was expanded) beat the epically-styled stalwart Dragon Age in plot and gameplay terms...I do not think Bioware's pigheadedness (should it stand) will be all that much of a loss. This is my opinion; but in the Witcher with Geralt I saw more appeal than with any of DA's characters.
There's o
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No, not really. If you have small budget, go for sprite-based graphics; don't do 3D unless you have the budget to do it well. Chrono Trigger still looks OK nowadays, while early 3D games look horrible.
Of course you can still leverage modern technology, for example use SVG to create your graphics so they can be scaled by resolution. However, it's only very recently that 3D graphics have
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That's only due to which one you experienced first, I'm sure there's plenty of guys who feel the same with Ultima compared to your Chrono Trigger.
And, honestly, even though I've been playing videogames just as long as you have I consider Dragon Age to be the finest RPG ever made, with only Baldur's Gate 2 (another Bioware big-budget title) coming close. Now, it doesn't mean that low-budget titles will necessarily suck, but it does mean that having a big budget doesn't make your game automatically inferior t
Re:Gaming must go back to its roots (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you enjoy Dragon Age before or after the bugs that were not fixed until late February; close to four months after release in a patch which itself caused further issues?
My beef with DA is that it lacked a convincing villain. We had a big bunch of orc-like Darkspawn, led by an infested dragon who periodically rose up to take over the world. The motives therein were not addressed at all; apparently motives were revealed in the expansion but since I never bought that having heard mixed reviews about...the plot.
None of the richness of the Jon Irenicus character; he was just one elf with prodigious talent who had been treated appallingly by his own people and as such became evil and sought revenge. But he felt a lot more intriguing and threatening than the thousands of darkspawn. His dialogue was a major driving point for Shadows of Amn - far more compelling than the grunts of darkspawn and the mighty roar of its Old God dragon.
Don't get me wrong, DA was a good RPG. I got over 100 hours out of it; but it never got me thinking like Shadows of Amn. You're entitled to your opinion, but you have to admit that there's an argument that DA's plot was inferior to Baldur's Gate 2's.
Also BG2's budget was small in comparison to DA's; true it was big budget at the time. But the time was 2000; a decade ago when things hadn't got quite as out of proportion in spending/graphical terms as they are today in 2010.
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Each of the Origins had their own motivations for doing what they did. My human noble warrior was avenging the slaying of her family. She joined the Wardens as a means of getting power to further that goal. Quite honestly, the whole time I was playing that character, the Darkspawn were more of an annoying irritant on her path to that end. When it came time to deal with Loghain, there was no question; he died.
My city elf mage, on the other hand, started out as an idealistic young mage at the Tower, but q
Re:Gaming must go back to its roots (Score:5, Insightful)
"Bioware needs to jump ship from the cinematic epic and graphics shell game and take stock of the history behind RPG gaming."
Bioware needs to do no such thing. They are among the successful ones competing in the overcrowded £35+ game segment. Mass Effect was my least favourite Bioware game for a very long time but it was massively successful.
What they are really is saying is that unless you are as good as them, you are unlikely to make any money in the Blockbuster game segment and you might as well focus on smaller, simpler titles in the £20 range. This is clearly self-serving (they'd make more money with less competition), but it is also true and it probably would be in the interest of gamers.
There are too many games and games studios that fail and go bankrupt, striving for that epic. If they had just taken a somewhat narrower and leaner approach, they might have survived. And us consumers might have gotten a great (although less flashy) game instead of a pretty but bug ridden mess released in desperation.
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I agree with most of what you say; I remember suffering through Dragon Age's RAM-eating problems in which over time it would consume increasing RAM...before loading times ended up around 10-20 minutes on even the most powerful rigs. That this wasn't patched for months was pretty awful, and left a lot of customers wondering why this hadn't been ironed out during pre-release playtesting.
Economically yes they don't 'need' to abandon their cash cows at the top-end. Survival is likely if they remain there. But f
Re:Gaming must go back to its roots (Score:5, Informative)
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That's entirely correct; however we're not talking about the situation with big titles in 1995 here, we're talking about the present day which is different by a long shot.
I don't understand why we divorce the concept of a blockbuster (in the financially well-performing sense) title and the potential success of a title which constitutes a 'modest' budget in 2010:
I think you'd find what qualifies as modest now would certainly be in the realms of Chrono Trigger's production budget and given technological and o
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Call me greedy, but I want both: The picturesque, photorealistic graphics and the soundtrack that carry you through an amazingly detailed, almost lifelike world, and the deep, catching storytelling, the ever developing characters, the immersion into a different universe where anything is possible. CoD 4 and 6 have left me a spoiled brat of a consumer. I will not go back to ugly graphics and crappy MIDI sound, no matter how good the plot. At the same time I lived and breathed through both parts of KOTOR and
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Maybe (Score:2)
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I'd say it's the studios that have given up on the graphics card wars. More correctly, I believe they've all but given up on the PC entirely. There is a much larger market for consoles at this point, which is why the majority of new AAA titles for the PC are just ports of the X360 version with the same plasticy graphics, controls which don't feel quite right with keyboard + mouse, and Games For Windows slapped on for good measure.
I blame World of Warcraft. (Score:2, Insightful)
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I'd imagine it only has a couple more years left in it before some other MMO will take its place. And I have a gut instinct that it will be Blizzard will be the creator of that new game.
That's not really a change - at all - from the current system.
And I could see World of Warcraft continuing for another decade or more. I don't really see why not, its still slowly growing in player base, not shrinking.
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You don't compete with WoW. But Star Wars Galaxies was easily comparable to World of Warcraft - until the developers went and changed EVERYTHING and basically killed the game. They were exclusive in that one was the futuristic sci-fi and the other one was the mystical fantasy type.
The thing that spurs good MMO's is a successful game before it. In WoW's case, it was Warcraft 3 that really spurred it's growth. In SWG, it was every Star Wars game and Movie to date.
If there is anything capable of taking WoW off
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Reason why games "don't make money" (Score:4, Interesting)
WARNING idealism below, Do not read this post if you cannot handle it.
#1 reason = OVERHEAD
The real reason games don't make money is the behemoth corporations controlling the industry and funneling the money into the hands of the pointy haired overlords. It reminds me of an article I read about 4 years ago about how CISCO did not produce a profit that year right before I read the article outing the CEO's compensation: 690 million(Sounds pretty profitable to me, how about you?). Overhead is a made up word managers created to confuse workers and hide the FACT that all of the money is going to them and not the folks who actually create these products. I.E. Overhead = Huge salaries for management.
They are on to something (Score:2, Insightful)
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The term MMO doesn't just mean that it's multiplayer and there are lots of players, it also implies that there's a persistent world and players spend all their time in it. You can have that kind of game with as little as a few hundred players.
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It doesn't "just" mean that it's Massively Multiplayer, but it does mean that it is. Massive. And if it's not Massive, then pick a different word to describe it, you or you might as well just start speaking in your own personal lexicon, you chuwero muptard.
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The term MMO doesn't just mean that it's multiplayer and there are lots of players, it also implies that there's a persistent world and players spend all their time in it. You can have that kind of game with as little as a few hundred players.
No, "persistent" means "that there's a persistent world". Long-running implies that "players spend all their time in it". Massively Multiplayer implies that it's got a massive number of people. Vega Strike has persistence, but it's not massive.
Just because you don't get it... (Score:2)
Just because you can't conceive of the idea, does not mean that it does not, or cannot exist.
In fact, their earlier game, Neverwinter Nights, showed a lot of potential for such a game. The server could support up to 75 players in theory. Many people set up their own "small scale MMO's" using that engine. And before someone starts in to argue the semantics of "MMO", and how it "implies a persistent world", some of these actually did use techniques and software in order to make them into persistent worlds.
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Are the extra periods a substitute for a point?
Please, oh Great Punctuator, tell us exactly what number of players does it take to go between "multiplayer" and "massively multiplayer". 100? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000?
The first MMO style games had less than 100 players online in a given server. They grew to hundreds, and even thousands in some cases. The vast majority of the time, games support even more than this, but they are doing it by breaking up the player population into tiny fractions (world serve
You misunderstand (Score:5, Insightful)
If it was that strawman, yes, that wouldn't be much information.
What he's saying is that is that of the games that try to be the biggest, baddest, most epic ever, only the top X will be making a profit at all. Most will actually make a loss.
And that is something that seems to escape most people, sad to say. From people going into making games with delusions of being paid a million like Carmack, to kiddies who think that pirating a game is some kind of act of resistance to some uber-rich fatcat who's only charging 40$ for it because of greed, to people starting some monumental epic as some mod and expecting to finish it with 5 people in a few months, to fanboys arguing that a publisher is the incarnation of pure Evil if they had an upper limit at all for budget and didn't give the team an infinite limit on money and time to produce the perfect game, to ultimately the devs end publishers who increasingly compete only in that segment. The fact that there's a finite amount of money to chase in that segment seems to be genuinely news to most people.
It's not even a matter of "get off my turf" as some other poster made it sound. We have the equivalent of, say, 90% of the car makers deciding they want to compete only at the Bugatti Veryon end of the market. Or 90% of the computer manufacturers deciding they want to make only supercomputers. Sure, it's great if you do manage to sell the next Bugatti Veryon for 1 million a pop, but there are only so many buyers who will buy at those prices. If actually all major companies, from Ford and Fiat and Volkswagen to Bugatti and Ferrari decided to make only supercars in that segment, that most _will_ make a loss. Same here. There simply isn't enough money in the market to cover the costs of _everyone_ who wants to make the next super-game.
mod parent up, please. (Score:2)
Re:You misunderstand
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Do you have any data supporting your statement that most of the games that try to be blockbusters, most will lose money?
Thank you for the car analogy, but there are boundary conditions in effect when talking about a 2.5 million dollar Bugatti Veryon vs. a 40 dollar copy of Prototype.
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Do you have any data supporting your statement that most of the games that try to be blockbusters, most will lose money?
I confess that I don't, and of course I haven't actually rtfa yet, but isn't that the point of this whole article?
Games off the shelf are generally $60, and a title with paid content add-ons can easily double in price. Compare this to some great titles from smaller developers which have narrower focus but only cost $20-30, or small-scale MMOs that are only $5-10 (hrm, actually I can't say I've seen any, but it's a good idea).
There are only so many families that can fork over $100 every month for a game, or
there are no 'segments' in gaming. (Score:2)
for the masses, there is a 'computer game'. and thats the only classification, apart from their genre differences. they either buy it, or, they dont buy it. they dont classify themselves like 'hmmm, i like short, easy to complete games. so, i should go for that segment. let me see, what games are out in that segment nowadays'. no such delu
Of course there are segments in gaming (Score:2)
for the masses, there is a 'computer game'.
Really?
I like long-term games with depth, like RPGs with good single player storylines. I also like things like FPSes and RTSes, but the back-stories to these are mostly irrelevant and it's the game play and immersion that really count. There are significant exceptions and cross-overs with other genres, of which Deus Ex remains the most obvious example to me and perhaps things like Oblivion also count, but most FPS or RTS games are pretty straight-up these days.
In all cases, these are fairly high-end titles
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At the same time, these are market segments. I know you allowed for this, but it's like you don't see the importance.
Secondly, there are segments beyond genres. Some people want cheap and quick games (ala the iPhone). The actual genre of the game is irrelevant, it's the novelty of these games.
To say people don't buy games depending on there need investment is also ridiculous. People might not think to themselves 'hmmm, i like short, easy to complete games. so, i should go for that segment. let me see, what
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I would say this was true a few years ago, and still true for a portion of the gaming population, however I wouldn't even say it's true for the majority any more.
There ARE non-AAA titles, and people do look at them differently. Indie developers are growing in popularity, and are viewed differently than the AAA games. There are also casual and those games you find on XBL Arcade, the PS3 store, etc. They might not be casual, or really indie, but they aren't AAA games, and people do view them differently.
I
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That last one is a particularly interesting topic to me...I don't have any personal experience in the space, but by all accounts working for game companies is an absolute grind. The death march is standard operating procedu
Not really (Score:2)
Not really. The keyword there is "only". Volkswagen for example still makes models like Fox and Polo and Golf for the low and mid-range, or largely the same as Skoda models for the even lower end, and as Audi models for the mid- to upper-mid-range models, and as Seat for, well, I can't really figure out for whom. Or its famous beetle. Well, "new
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great points however consittantly mispelling the model name of one of the most astinishing cars of all time... well come on guy, yer smerter than that! as the rest of the post shows
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bugatti_Veyron
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god that car is fugly.
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however there can be no doubting it's technical excellence!
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Why waste your money on developing an add-on and hence an additional source of revenue when you can develop an out-of-control DRM system which adds problems for the paying customers and will be cracked within days???
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I find myself infatuated with Fantastic Contraption [ragdollcannon.net]. It seems simple [fantasticcontraption.com] enough but once I got through the levels and was able to view other player's designs [fantasticcontraption.com], I'm just staring at my computer muttering, "No fucking way.... Ju- oh what. the. fuck?"
Simple. Awesome.
Simply awesome.
Nah: (Score:2)
So, you better have a good workplace culture or else no one will work for long there.
It's still the case that a lot more people would like to be video game developers than the market will support, and it's still the case that most employers place a very high value on having shipped titles on your resume.
These things seriously distort the video game dev job market from what it might otherwise be; as long as those things are the case, it's going to be easy to replace any turnover for cheap, and there are goin