The industry is facing the biggest crisis I’ve seen since I’ve been involved making games. And more, there are giant conflicts and generation problems within the crowd of game developers. I don’t need to be in SFO to see it. For now it was quite always the same: games for consoles with teams of people doing crunch time.
Now it’s much more open. We know innovation comes from little team and that it’s the blood of our activity. We know this generation of consoles –as it was predicted back in 2004-2005- while creating a need for extra specialized people with great skills, killed thousands of jobs. There’s Minecraft. There’s Angry Birds. There’s Steam. Facebook. It’s almost overwhelming.
Themes that seemed to be big.
Game Developer Conference. Fuck you “Video Game”. Fuck you.
Gamification
I don’t care at the end. It’s good and not good at the same time but users will see how they will feel about it. This debate is useless, people will go for it or might find at some point that will and motivation are stronger when not linked to superficial and kind of meaningless rewards.
Socialization
My problem with Facebook games for now is that they’re not really interesting –I’m trying MouseHunt, meh- and make people having boring jobs something that we, as game developers, enjoy because we can use all this time to make them click and share. Games always have been inherently social and for now, I haven’t seen a game I wanted to play on Facebook. Maybe it will change but with their recent moves about in-app games or how Facebook is getting greedy by being the biggest platform in the world, we’ll see. But for sure, numbers don’t lie and people are playing a lot (half of the 500+ million people on the network). CityVille seems to be much better than the last generation of games. The social network as a platform is definitely interesting and a huge trend.
Mobile AAAfication
Good news everyone! You’re going to experience unprecedented high technology mobile games! It’s not so good news for developers as the price of entry to make games for 3DS/NGP is going to be 2 to 3 times more expensive at the very least. Gamers can expect a shitload of ports from this generation of consoles. Not so interesting.
This is where I don’t get the game developers fanboism who should be damn concerned about these cost problems, especially after seeing what this generation did to us. Guys, are you blind? 17 years studio dies, a game selling more than a million units with layoffs a few weeks later, hello?? I’m more and more amazed at the lack of maturity on the business side which is totally connected to what we do guys. Iwata had some really true words about generalist and craftsmanship gone away in the industry and the fact that so many people today are specialized makes them forget and not care about the general aspect of game development. That’s not a good trend and I think game developers are in denial on this subject.
Distortion of realitification
Walled garden. They smile at you, promise to make a room for you and then screw you and your work, most of the time. Ask SuperMeatBoy with MS. Ask developers working for Nintendo, Facebook or Apple. Trip Hawkins warned people about that and I still can’t believe how game developers just go for the “I always wanted to make my game on the last generation of machines from my favorite manufacturer of all time”. I am inclined to make games mostly for Windows not because “I love Microsoft and started with a PC in 1991” but because it seems to me, as a developer, that it’s where I can do whatever I want, distribute it and develop easily at about no cost. Nobody, no manufacturer, no hype machine matches that. I don’t care about the aspect of fragmentation –think Minecraft and stop thinking about making complicated things that are not going to work on graphic cards with pixel shaders 1.2-, ease of development, freedom of creation should be I don’t know, praised! But no. Let’s just let these platforms fuck us hard at some point or fill our lives with endless stress we don’t need. That’s how a REAL game developer does!
Despite really nice successes like The Sims, Half Life, Garry’s Mod, Dwarf Fortress, Bejeweled and so many others, people strike for this game that will outsell Mario and GTA combined so they become the next Miyamoto on the console of their dream. There’s a ridiculous distortion of reality. For a very few games using and in need of a specific platform, a lot should be done on computers, desktops or laptops or mobile. Being platform agnostic should be the default because you should focus on your game and people playing it, FIRST. That’s still too rare. Fuck.
Indiefication
On the good side, a lot of great, polished games. More than ever and it’s awesome. But the dark side is coming now, which is elitism. Indie has never been for me just a way to describe people who are making games professionally without publishers. Nothing more or less. But of course now it’s a 1337 Club where if you haven’t been coding since the age of 4 while drinking beer or doing design from a trailer park well you’re just not indie at all. That’s not great for the community of people making games and I’m starting to see some strange tensions.
Hollywoodification
Awards, red carpet etc It’s good to see games getting media attention and all but it’s just a way for the traditional AAA business to show off its voice-over actors and receive awards so that people can forget about quality of life issues, crunching for weeks to release a game of the year. Guys remember: everybody in the industry knows who Notch is, what he looks like and that he made Minecraft. The team behind Red Dead Redemption? Nobody knows who the fuck you are. For the same amount of work, I’d rather be Notch any day.