So I guess you read the big three stories of the week: EA’s Steven Spielberg game LMNO canceled, The Fall of Realtime Worlds and Keiji Inafune’s departure from Capcom.
Some excerpts that made me jump in my head.
Keiji talks the truth and explains what a lot of folks are experimenting in the game industry outside Japan too. It’s just that in the west, Keiji wouldn’t have been able to do it for 23 years. He would have been fired for fail project and big mouth.
4G: However, although there were many problems, it’s worked out until very recently. Why do you think that things have changed so suddenly?
KI: It’s because there was no competition before. For example, in the game industry 20 years ago, no matter what kind of game you made, you could sell 200 or 300 thousand copies. If you even made a decent game, it’d sell 500 thousand or a million copies. But those days are over.
That’s true. The game industry was very local. during the 80s/90s. Japan, Europe, USA each with its own games, own devices and developers. When the console invasion began, we thought that Japan was full of awesome games except that we received the crème de la crème: with MAME today I can tell how much all these Japanese clones were damn shitty. but they were making money there. After that the game industry became much more a worldwide affair, it changed everything.
4G: What was the most recent internally-produced hit?
KI: That’d be Biohazard 5, two years ago. That also took 150 people. This year, it’s mostly external. Street Fighter IV was external. Monster Hunter Diary: Poka-Poka Island Village, which sold half a million, was external. Dead Rising is also external.
Shit. I knew Japanese game companies were outsourcing heavily (Nintendo does a few of them in-house like Mario, Miyamoto’s projects and Zelda) but I didn’t suspect Capcom to outsource their main IP, Street Fighter. I think the success of games produced outside Japan but managed by Japanese shows their strong experience and game culture.
I’d like to hear more about that.
4G: So it’s not just a problem of money, but it’s that sense of making advances that’s totally different.
KI: Right. People even on the bottom level are working as hard as they can to advance. For western developers, everyone at the director level gets their own office, an object of envy. Everyone says, "I want my own office, too." That kind of hungry attitude leads to going in good directions, so that’s why I love western developers.
4G: So what are the cons of using western developers?
KI: First, you can’t just leave them alone. Even with technical skills, they often lack adequate ideas and concepts for utilizing those skills. That’s exactly why I’m such a good match for them. (laughs)
It’s interesting to see a Japanese view on us. Very refreshing.
4G: People have tended to interpret that as you abandoning Japan in favor of making titles for the global market.
KI: That’s not true. (laughs) As long as I’m Japanese, the games I make will all be Japanese games. So when they sell globally, that’s helping to save the Japanese game industry. It’s not a matter of selling games in Japan for Japan or selling games in America for America. Dead Rising is a Japanese game made in Canada. It’s not a western game.
4G: What you’re saying, though, might be interpreted as western game supremacism.
KI: At the very least, western games are more fun. Using my previous analogy, European soccer is far above Japan’s. You can’t beat Spain on willpower alone. So what we have to do is know Spanish soccer, French soccer, English soccer, and so on. If I say that, people will say, "Inafune-san watches nothing but European soccer." The point is, it’s necessary to recognize our faults and learn from western developers.
Pride in Japanese game making won’t die out so easily, however. Japanese people can make great things when they work together. Because I love Japan, I don’t want it to lose to America and Europe. If I didn’t care about Japan, I would just leave.
I wished something like pride would have made French game developers not go to Canada in these huge game developers farms ten years ago… I really felt like Keiji is saying: I didn’t see why I’d move to do something I could do in my country that you know, I love. sigh
The 5-years EA debacle over an extremely ambitious project that might make you cry? According to 1up,
The idea was ballsy and complicated — a mix of first-person parkour movement with adventure/RPG objectives and escape-focused gameplay, all based around the player’s relationship with an alien-looking character named Eve.
For me just looking at that, I’d say ditch the alien-looking sidekick BS! The first part is already utterly complicated to deliver (Mirror’s Edge showed the potential but failed because of a certain lack of variety for a single player game). But of course, it’s EA, they have an excellent game designer named Doug Church and Steven Spielberg so they can do it. sigh
"The point of LMNO was to basically take all the AI that would go into a normal Sims title, and compress that down into one character that could learn and remember and change the way you play the game on the fly, and not be totally scripted," says another former team member.
How people are going to tell the difference? What is the crazy amount of solutions that an AI needs to solve in a game where you’re escaping (find an exit and ??)? Do you really need a super AI for that? No way.. And I don’t see anything where I could cry with that.
The spoiler was, as the game went on, players would discover that Eve wasn’t actually an alien but an evolved human from thousands of years in the future who had traveled back through time.
Oh I’ve been lied to, I’m so excited! Also, what a plot!
"Because basically, here they are. We’re working on a game with some similar mechanics, but we’ve got Spielberg. And so if [EA is] going to cancel a game, which one would it be? It would probably be them. So they were a little concerned. And we wanted to be like, ‘Well let’s, you know, share some code.’ And they were like, ‘Ah, yeah I don’t know.’ [Laughs] They were a little more nervous about it."
EA should have merge teams working on the same mechanics and do another game around the super AI sidekick that make you cry.
You could play it for quite awhile and do a bunch of different things. The difficulty we were having was we were trying to coalesce all those different systems into like, ‘Here’s five minutes of play that’s representative.’ When you can do so many things, it’s hard to say ‘that’s representative.’"
You can talk about the “infinity” of experiences and do some video editing showing some scene done and redone differently. Of course it needs to be exciting. 10 different ways to open a door is
useless and doesn’t make opening a door less boring.
At this point, though, every EA employee named in this story has left the company.
Disgusted, I guess. Working hard on something ambitious with money, skills, great environment for years only to go nowhere…WTF.
Realtime Worlds APB is sad and makes me angry because, it was totally predictable. When I saw how much they were showing artworks and the customization system, I could tell that the game would be shitty. If you don’t rely on true gameplay to present your game at events, you fail.
"But at Realtime it was like, ‘Wow, they’ve got a pool table!’ And the building itself was impressive. And they were really good to us. Even the QA positions were six month contracts. I was talking to family who warned me that it was still a little bit unstable, but it beat the zero hour contracts by a mile."
When Keiji talks about western slave game developers, he talks about people like that. Being sold on pool table and building, I know what’s like I’ve slightly been there too. It’s manipulation to make you work on passion and being badly paid. Classic but not classy.
RTW had secured a huge $101 million in venture capital
Spent. Now no one is going to lend us money, game developers.
"Not at all. At the end of the day, the feedback was there, it was recognized," says Bateman. "But whether it was due to management, time, money, whatever it was, they just didn’t get implemented.
What’s the point to get the feedback and not use it to improve a complex game like a pseudo MMO? I fucking don’t get it.
But the writing was on the wall. Each of RTW’s many offices boasted monitors streaming live player figures direct from the servers. At any time, the company’s employees could glance up and see APB’s failure written in cold, dispassionate numbers on a graph. It was a constant reminder that simply not enough people were buying and playing the game.
I can only imagine how soul crushing it must be…
In total, 157 staff were to be made redundant. "They essentially said, ‘Here are the 50 people that we want to keep on. Please go to room X,’" recalls Bateman. "It was tough."
I guess when you know that there was 100 millions on the table, that the feedback to do a better game was not implemented and that you’re laid off with no paycheck, you must be effing mad.
It wasn’t nice at all. The layoffs ripped a hole in both the town of Dundee and the lives of those affected. Over 60 per cent of RTW staff had relocated to Scotland. Suddenly cut adrift, families and individuals were left without work and had little hope of receiving either wages or redundancy pay. For them, it was catastrophic.
For Bateman and his friends the only answer was to drink. A lot. So that’s exactly what they did, drowning their sorrows until the early hours. "It’s what we all needed to do, to consolidate, recover. We got absolutely twatted."
No wonder why people stay less than 10 years in the industry with shit like that happening more than often.
The question is when are we going to learn?