Audio&Games : h. Play

Scrolling game news, I went to some conclusion about some games and their relative success.

I’m talking about story-driven games like Heavy Rain or Red Dead Redemption or Alan Wake.

These games are made –I mean directed- by people around 35-40. What was huge when they were young? Movies. Blade Runner, Alien, Star Wars you name it. There’s a shitload of groundbreaking movies made mid 70s mid 80s when you think about it (post classical cinema Wikipedia says).

1982, a crazy year: Thriller, E.T., Conan the Barbarian… And Blade Runner

These games are appealing to people of the same age, 35+ people who are searching for this “I want to be the hero of the movie” experience they dreamed about when they had pimples all over their face going to the theater to watch Indiana Jones. Game reviewers are often part of this generation and that’s why they always love these games to death.

What was the state of computer games during the eighties? It was still rough. Computer games were just starting to have a comprehensive graphic representation and movies were the obvious inspiration: Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981. Pitfall!, 1982. So future game developers in their teenage years growing up with that ended up making something like Uncharted? Makes sense to me.

Now, where do I fit? I grew up in the eighties too but I was a bit too young to go crazy for the early 8bits games. Stiff controls, lack of depth.

But then it was the 90s, my teenage years. We saw groundbreaking games all the fucking time. Here, Populous. Here, Doom. Here, The Incredible Machine. Here, Magic Carpet. Here, Sonic and Street Fighter II. And Mario 64. Here, flight simulations. You get it.

I feel I’m part of the very first generation who really has grown up with computer games as main entertainment food. Therefore, I developed a sense of loving movies (unfolding stories/editing combo) only way after becoming an adult and studying cinema in 2000. I just craved for the experience of playing, watching people play, understand the system, learn. Hacking it or trying to.That’s what the game culture was, is for me.

So my teenage years were not about being passively watching a movie over and over again, it was about being actively trying new things in a computer game over and over again (LucasArts!) or trying new things on a computer over and over again.

I’m not surprised that all the big names in the game industry making these story-driven games wanted to be movie directors when they were young. They still want to, and try with computer games. It doesn’t work well and costs millions of dollars but whatever. It’s so much easier to sell to a publisher compared to a game with a new gameplay (“so uh, the goal is uh you can.. You have to play it it’s really fun”). 

So IMO that’s why despite having in the industry some strong voices toward the importance of gameplay crafting and search of new experiences, themes, despite knowing how we need to focus on that because it’s the power of computer games, we still have these weird hybrids, attempts of creators who don’t really have the computer game culture in them, making a game about Western movies in 2010. It was just a new support for them, not their main thing like I feel I, and an entire generation had. Now we’re all in the same industry, my game generation is under-represented and it’s a mess. 

That also explains why there’s in the industry this hate of social gaming. It’s not just because it uses psychological tricks to make you play more. It’s also because it relies on pure gameplay rather than technical progress, makes millions and makes publishers wonder about the AAA business viability (answer: there’s almost none).

It’s funny.

Also, I celebrate ten years working for the game industry this month. July 2000-July 2010. I’d like to write a long post about it but I don’t want to get you depressed, neither do I.

30 minutes in line and then I could have a 20 minutes session playing games and get the Nintenthingy in my hands.

Yeah yeah yeah

3D works. When it does, it’s pretty amazing.

Problems: eye view distance, ambient light are changing the 3D effect from not working at all to outstandingly “real in your face”. Of course you need to look at it straight, no angle are allowed: no spectator can watch around your shoulder if he or she doesn’t want to lose sight.

It worked much better with gameplay than with movies and trailers. I guess the brain is believing in it more when you are moving things around.

Two games who were clearly astounding in 3D: Metal Gear Solid and Nintendogs. It works perfectly with slow gameplay, not so much with fast action.

Overall, I’m not that impressed by the 3D because it doesn’t provide that much to the experience: doing a portable console with touch input was changing the game, doing a motion controlled console was changing the game, doing a portable console with pseudo-3D is nice and cool, but not game changing. For now.

But the 3DS is not just the cool 3D effect. For the rest I love it: the analog pad, new d-pad position is better IMO (big hands, cramps on my DS Lite), the L and R buttons have a better shape and are easier to press and overall I don’t know what hardware is in it but it seems capable of stuffs. Graphically it’s between the PSP and the Gamecube /Wii-ish I would say. The new retractable stylus is great. The sliders are shitty though. I want + – buttons. And sound is much better but we’re coming from far away.

So it’s going to work. People are going to love this little effect (especially while taking pictures), there’s the DS huge compatible library, hardcore gamers will enjoy Nintendo’s old school games, a couple of third parties will be able to do good games too and for the rest it will be showelware, like usual.

I wonder if they updated their gamedev tool chain with this new console because it was pretty damn awful with the DS (at least for the sound and music part).

Anyway.

Except the 3DS what struck me on this second day was that the Kinect Dance Central game and overall how all of the dance games available are enjoyed by people, a lot. It’s like geeks discovering that dance and body expression are fun! That’s cool.

Also, there were these obscure F2P MMOs from Nexon and others running on PCs. I was walking around and was always struck by the flowing of these. It’s not that they’re looking better than console games, but they’re running on high end computers and it’s so fluid it’s beautiful, attractive. It was the same at the IndieCade booth. That’s why I thought about Epic Mickey on better hardware than a Wii. I’m not crazy about having the best hardware possible but when you watch something running at more than 60fps, rock solid, it really catches the attention. I just don’t want it to be only that:

 
Wow wow wow 

So Ubisoft lost two of its big name game designers in two months (Clint Hocking and Patrice Désilets, creative directors on the Splinter Cell serie, Far Cry 2, the Assassin’s Creed serie, the Prince of Persia serie yeah, the biggest Ubi games) while Prince of Persia in Hollywood flavor is a disaster? Gotta love the movie/game convergence BS. During that time, it must be sweaty at the Paris Ubi HQ. Don’t worry. Just dance!

*yawn*

Kinect. Well if commercials are trying to sell it this way, uh. It’s creepy! It feels so me-too product four years later with the launch lineup and its seven sports games out of fifteen… For what I saw live, you look a little bit like an ass in front of the TV waving your arms. And I hear about lag issues. And no price announced. And people hijacking the voice command in the future.

It sounds like a nightmare for MS.

The 360 Slim. Good move, not surprising looking at how it worked well for Sony and Nintendo (DS and PS3, the Wii was perfect and the PSPGO was something wrong), but so late: first time I thought MS needed this slim factor so bad was in September 2007. June 2010 it happens but the upgrade seems sort of obvious for a console known for making a fucking damn noise. It’s not what I would like to show in my living room but it’s dark and small so you can hide it easily. I don’t see it selling Kinect hardware.

New Old Zelda. New Old Kirby, New Old Donkey. Silent Hill 8, Portal 2, Final Fantasy XIV… New Old Mortal Kombat, New Old Splatterhouse jeez I’m overwhelmed with innovation.

Child of Eden. It seems awesome for sure but what strikes me is that the concept is almost ten years old (Rez, 2001) and that it’s the same game designer for both games. It feels like we could have had so much more of that since years while publishers were thinking that this is a niche game. Guitar Hero and a desperate need of a killer app for a new device pushed them to go on the music-abstract-visuals game road despite the fact that thousands of people across the world wanted more of that Rez experience, even with a gamepad. Anyway.

Warren Spector’s Epic Mickey. Again, it’s a veteran who’s stealing the show. The ambiance seems great, it’s actually the game that captured my attention the most at the Los Angeles Convention Center. It doesn’t seem to revolutionize anything but it’s pretty dreamy and I love that. Also there’s this how-to-hack-the-system feel to solve problems in the game, like Deus Ex you know? Multiple choices. I just wish it would be available on PCs so that it would be at 100fps on a three years old laptop. PCs seriously need these weird inputs that are Wiimote like devices and camera technology. Camspace, application to use any webcam as input is getting better, but it’s not here yet.

Also, thatgamecompany’s next game has leaked. Seems dreamy. I love dreamy.

Journey. This picture screams Shadow of the Colossus so hard.

Tomorrow, 3DS test damnit.

Why would we have app stores when we have Internet, why would we go for that? (Google is doing a web store, even Asus is doing one for netbooks).

How Apogee Software, Epic Megagames and ID could make at the peak of the shareware business, 100,000$ a month by selling and sending floppy discs to much less gamers that we have today?

Why would we go to support one, probably not compatible with nothing in 6 years platform when we have around 200 million computers sold each year around the world?

It wasn’t the finest way to market it but anyway, shareware made ID Software a huge independent success.

According to GameSetWatch, Jason Rohrer made 43 000$ in less than a month with his last game with crazy ideas stuffed in it, Sleep Is Death sold 14$ the two copies. No DRM No middle-person Cross-platform Open Source. Jason gets 100% of this money.

I want the Shareware back. I want medium sized games, not 40 hours or 5 minutes ones, nor 1 minute Flash loading game or 2.5 Gb to download/uncompress before hitting Start. I want my money to go entirely into the pockets of the developers (AAA games? At best 10% cut for the developer, almost as shitty as music deals) because I love their game. Because I know they’re hard to do and that they deserve it.

I want developers to trust me and that even if their games are pirated, they’re so good that it’s not that much a problem (ID during the 90s PopCap during the 00s). I want them to go for it like PopCap did:

K: One thing that certainly stands out now is that pretty much all of our early games that went on to be big hits -- I can clearly remember every one of them having somebody who had stood up before and said, "There's no way this thing is gonna sell."

I remember someone saying that about Bookworm because they said, "You know, word games just don't sell. They never sell." I remember someone saying that about Zuma because they said, "This thing's like an action arcade game. That's not gonna sell."

And I remember someone saying that about Bejeweled; they said, "There's no skill here! That's not even a game. It's not gonna sell." And yeah, I think Plants vs. Zombies, someone said something to that effect: "This is too weird; it's too hardcore."

BF: "It's like a strategy game."

JK: Yeah. So if someone says it's not gonna sell, that's probably a good sign.

I want game developers all over the intertubes, I don’t need a GateKeeper, even when they do a good job. I have friends and social medias, they share and I’ll go to any .com or whatever dot something is providing a good experience, some good games to download or stream. And I’ll be way to proud to share it too. We even have QR Code (licence free) to make apps installation a breeze on mobile platform. Why the hell would we want to share our hard-earned revenue and being treated like lemmings?

This console generation has been a disaster (it was absolutely planned) in a lot of ways. I urge developers to start their business and aim to computers which are making them free, while making money. Yeah, not that much consoles or phones if you want to be more than a one-hit-wonder-with-five-iteration-of-it before being sold to a big publisher and die in its hands (IW anyone?).

It happened, it has existed. I don’t see why it couldn’t be possible for the next decade. Or if it can’t be done this way, I’d like to know why…

I know, the indie term is a bit a thing of the past these days. Nobody really wants to fall into this category, meaning you are living at your parents, geeking out and developing stuff while hoping for a better future and “carrier”.

Sometimes gamedev feels like a big ocean..

Status for Independent Developers: It’s Complicated. Blurst put their Raptor Safari HD to sleep, Fez is still in play test mode, no news for a long time from the dudes –Jon Blow, 2DBoy, The Behemoth- who kind of started this trend of well crafted games back in 2005 2006.

It shows how hard it is to make games and a living out of it. It’s basically impossible to get a good game out without years of development, could the team be two people or two hundreds, it doesn’t matter it’s still complicated.

But enough with bad news, there’s some good. Really good.

First the Ska Studios aka James Silva case. I remember a blog post before he released his first XBLA game, The DishWasher:

“I live in a freezing apartment in upstate NY.  Rent is $750 a month.  I buy groceries at Wal-Mart.  I buy clothes at Target.  I drive a 1994 Honda Accord that was a hand-me-down from my sister.  Yet, somehow, this happened:

MTV.com:

“The guy that made this game is nuts.”

Wired.com:

As the sole creator of the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game Dishwasher, Silva found himself the poster boy of Microsoft’s efforts to “democratize game development” at the Game Developers Conference. The Utica, NY independent gamemaker shared the stage with game design luminaries like Tomonobu Itagaki and Peter Molyneux at Microsoft’s GDC keynote.”

You would say that the dude was lucky. But the game was a huge success with a pretty big follow-up of players loving it. He then released a game that I wouldn’t have bet a dime on, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1 which sold an impressive 200,000 copies and was the biggest sale of the XBLA Indie Game channel in 2009. He’s currently working on two games for Microsoft. I like how he managed to get an audience and a big word of mouth with the music he made for his games. Reviews are good and players have fun.

Charlie Murder. Like Castle Crashers but with punks. Zombies. Unicorn. Lasers. Please?

Erik Svedang did Blueberry Garden, a peaceful and magic little game that you can find for a few bucks on Steam (yeah Mac users, you are so in the future that you’re happy to go back to 2004 to keep up with the rest of us). He just released Kometen.

Since when someone brought something that fresh in visuals?

I don’t know how much these games are successful but hell, the guy is 20 something, still a student and gets coverage of his nice creations as he was in the gamedev since 10 years. I think that’s awesome.

Interestingly enough, these one-man team made/started games for/with closed platforms (Xbox/Windows, iPhone).

But the most impressive thing is the Humble Indie Bundle story. A 80$ worth game pack download for which:

• You pay what you want.
• No middle-man: 100% of the money goes to the developers (minus merchant fees).
• No DRM: you do whatever you want with your copy.
• Your contribution supports a charity and the EFF.

In a week the bundle raised more than 1 million freaking dollars. A pack of stupid games!!! Most of them in 2D!!! Almost 400,000$ for Child’s Play and the EFF support. According to RPS, each developer made 100,000$+.

This is just fantastic. No TV. No ads, no billboards. No mass market. Just word of mouth, good products, geeks and gamers ready to do it because they know everything is perfect.

I really hope some other pack like this one will come up.

So, there’s hope.

Also, it seems like the game industry is missing $3 billion in revenue from you know, “old people”. It’s been years I want to make stuff for that market. Like the report said, “Baby Boomers -- those born between 1946 and 1964 -- have much more disposable income than younger demographics, adding up to billions in potential revenue.”

There’s so much to do.

What happened: Roger Ebert wrote an article saying “video games can never be art”, dissecting Kellee Santiago’s TEDxUSC speech about games as art (and beyond). She answered.

And it totally exploded on the internet in one day. It’s weird because I’m following a bunch of game developers on Twitter and there’s no discussion between us. Except when a dude who doesn’t play games and doesn’t want to, is writing some stupid shit about our medium. Then almost everybody has to say something about it.

I think it proves the point that we are immature and unconfident about games (and yeah it doesn’t help I’m writing this article and it annoys me but I want to be definitive on the subject). If we were mature and confident about our medium we would be busy and someone would at some point turn around to Roger, like that:

C’mon Roger

And that would be all he would get. But from veteran like Ron Gilbert to young Indie people, everybody went apeshit on this subject. I’d rather have a collective discussion about what subjects/themes computer games could and should approach instead of crying about how games are art, or not. I don’t give a shit about this fake intellectual brainstorm because:

-Games can be art. Period. When someone who doesn’t play computer games, doesn’t have the game culture, have the movie culture in his fucking head while saying that games aren’t art, I DONT GIVE A SHIT. And you shouldn’t either. Because it’s simply pointless. Why?

-Because everything can be art. I don’t get how people miss this reality so often. If anything can be art therefore you don’t have to think about it!! Just fucking do, craft your thing and let time, people, generations, individuals appreciate it or not. Some might call it art, some might call it a big turd. Two seconds after or two hundred years later. It doesn’t matter. Jane Pinckard had the final words a few years ago (yes, about the same Roger Ebert) she said:

It seems to me that the whole notion of trying to define "art" is, first of all, utterly irrelevant in our age. When vulgar homes display those ubiquitous prints of Monet's waterlilies, when insipid pop songs can be desconstructed, when the face of the Mona Lisa is used on keychains sold to tourists, when collectors pay thousands of dollars for the scribblings of a madman who has "found art" - it's a circus. It's like trying to define what "food" is when we have everything from seaweed extract to Velveeta.

There's no "art" anymore. Just categories of creation. And you can either enjoy it, or not. Just as food is simply something you eat. And let's be clear, there is good food and bad, horrible, awful, nearly inedible food.

Scott McCloud (thanks @InfiniteAmmo) wrote about that too yesterday:

If you’re asking if videogames are art, I think you’re asking the wrong question. I don’t think art is an either/or proposition. Any medium can accommodate it, and there can be at least a little art in nearly everything we do.

Once in a while, someone makes a work in their chosen medium so driven by aesthetic concerns and so removed from any other consideration that we trot out the A-word, but even then it’s a matter of degrees, and for most creative endeavors you can find a full spectrum from the sublime to the mundane.

The idea that for the lack of a single brush stroke or word balloon or camera angle, we could consign something as complex as a painting or a graphic novel or a motion picture to the art equivalent of Heaven or Hell does a disservice to the depth and breadth of those forms. There’s no hard dividing line, no thumbs up or thumbs down for these things.

Why would we use so much energy to prove an irrelevant point? It is irrelevant and useless to answer a film critic stupid claim that is “computer games cannot be art”. Game developers should just say with one voice: WE DONT CARE NOW PLAY OUR EXPERIENCES AND/OR STFU. We have the craziest medium ever, touching hundreds of millions of people in less than half a century. Game development is a goddamn complex and lightning fast world. As game developers we should collectively focus on and talk about where to go, what to do. Debate on that kind of stuff. Of course, nearly nobody does.

I will not talk about computer games as art ever again.

So Infinity Ward loses more staff after Jason West and Vince Zampella created a new studio, Respawn Entertainment. Lead game designer, lead software engineer, senior animator, not everybody is joining the new game studio but the thing is, Modern Warfare as an IP is sort of dead now. It didn’t take long.

So Activision, biggest game publisher in the world is in trouble: Guitar Hero is going down, DJ Hero has never been a success and Modern Warfare is no more existing. Developers, be prepared for more layoffs.

About the iPad. I think it’s the endless Apple pattern: they hate games. They don’t understand gamers. They sell and unveiled their new product as a thing to read digital stuff on it while everybody go crazy for the game possibilities. 2/3 of iPad apps are games. They unveiled (at last) the social gaming network and claim they have 50 000 games against 2 500 on the Nintendo DS.

Well, as a consumer 2 500 games is already a hell of a lot. I have like, ten of them. As a developer battling against 2 500 others is hard, battling against 50 000 other games is just not interesting. The noise is gigantic and you can’t really find a niche market on an appstore like Apple did (there’s not even categories for iPad games).  And they want developers not being able to do cross-platform? Did I say that they don’t give a shit about developers? It just makes sense: developers, as musicians for iTunes are just appealing products to sell more Apple hardware. They don’t care about developers making say, a living by producing apps. They don’t care about the software economics of today where any app needs to be on as many platforms as possible (except for three or four lucky early iPhone developers) to make money. They just want to dictate you and screw you.

For the sake of innovation and freedom, no thanks.

Hi Robot!

Beatnik Games launches their first game, Plain Sight. They’re working on another game about Ada Lovelace (amazing story!), produced by Channel 4, english TV.

Please take note, France.

Market wise, Nintendo announcing the 3DS is really smart. No useless Wii HD that would confuse consumers, no Wii motion controller add-on that would say that they are scared by Sony/MS upcoming Move and Natal. No, something new and hot like mobile 3D screen, setting a new trend in discussion and putting the motion control and touch control (iPhone) so last year while staying true to the good old gamepad scheme that millions of people know.

Now, let’s see what it’s going to be in real world. Maybe that.

 
24 minutes about Sid Meier and his career.

Music Master: Chopin is sort of a Romantic Band or Piano Hero I guess.

That is all for today.

• Platform agnosticism

I wish developers would be much more on the side of not giving a fuck about the platform except in terms of input for their games. Yes, you make RETRO 8BIT looking games because you grew up with these, I get it. Yes you make a game focused on narrative because you always wanted to be a movie director and that the Playstation brand is your 20s forever in your mind, I get it too.

I wish we would not be emotionally tied to a console, a manufacturer, making us wanting to develop for it, even if it’s not a good business decision. Ultimately games should work on any platform input-wise without that kind of subjective bullshit that is getting these games out of people scope. We should not push people wanting to buy a machine just for a game or two even if in terms of masturbation about how good a game is, it must be heaven. That’s how we missed the rise of the netbooks (imagine your great game packed with each one sold)  and the Android market right now (I’m too busy doing an iPhone me-too product!zomg iPad with wings!). We need to make good games, providing money as directly as possible while being free, independent as much as possible. Ban any other reasons to choose a platform for. Fuck exclusivity. Fuck the “console war”. Fuck the AppStore. We are the creator, we are the people adding value to a goddamn machine. Never forget that.

• Change for real

In ten years, two generations of machines and in some way some progress too. Tools are better, we know the gamedev Dos and Don’ts.. I know doing games is hard and unpredictable every time but still, when I hear or read stuff around that it’s still a mess, it’s still the crunch, it’s still the same milestones shit and people burning under it. In fucking 10 years we’re still having these problems, thanks to the massive turn-over with fresh and new blood every five years when the undead are escaping this crazy business. The same with games topics. It’s just insane how much we can eat of Mario, the lambda hero punching bad guys with crates around or the obligatory car race game (coming en masse on smartphones). The computer world is so fast, the difference with how damn slow/dumb we are to change habits/topics/themes of our games is driving me crazy.

Dev people still don’t give a damn about games. Sound designers and visual designers want to jump to the movie stardom, coders dream of big pay checks with less working hours in some big corporation and they all do when they got the experience from the hard world of the game industry. This trend has to stop.

• Diversity

18 250 people at the 2010 edition, biggest GDC ever. Robin Hunicke said the population of female developers is about 5% since years which is totally awful and depressing (putting pressure on the few who stand out, also accused –sometimes maybe for good reasons too- of playing the diversity card in a white/asian male hegemony). The Women in Games conference has been canceled due to “low delegate numbers”. Then I tried to get some black people pictures from the conference.

Hey a black game developer! Oh. Nevermind.

I found some others but I can’t say if they’re developers, game journalists or party people.

Nah. Not this one.

The only one I got for sure is Scott Anderson from Shadow Physics fame.

Steve Swink and Scott Anderson, Indie Developers.

Man, I had to browse FIFTEEN pages on Flickr to find my first black man and almost the double to find Scott. 18 250 people. Let’s not even start on the skin shades. It’s fucking creepy. I live this shit and it seriously hurts if I look too much at it. Sometimes I feel that everything that goes wrong in the game industry comes from that fact, that absolute lack of diversity, in every way. The tragedy of it is that I don’t know any industry with as much good and open-minded people so how the fuck does the gamedev world end up with the square glasses/lumberjack shirt/beard nerd fest all over GDC stairs and rooms and nothing else?

• Who are you

I did a few parties in LA and the photo booth is part of the thing, usually. How a big event like GDC doesn’t have an official Flickr stream (there is one, filled with pretty boring panelists pictures and random group of people at parties) with a photo booth of attendees? I can’t believe how it’s still so damn HARD to get pictures of creative and smart men and women who are stealing people time more than sex or drugs ever did or will. Maybe it’s related with the diversity thing, it would show to the world how something is fucking wrong. Or push developers to be careful with the pizza diet (that would be good actually), I don’t know but I regret that you have to search in a hardcore way to see their faces AND knowing who are the people providing THOUSANDS of hours of play, sucking hundreds of hours of millions people’s life.

Indies are obviously more playing this card for marketing purposes and that’s great. It makes me more willing to pay for a game. Sending my money to a bot in a basement or a mega corporation in a store is less satisfying, human.

the good news is that if we solve just one of these point, the others are going to be so much easier to manage and make them trivial. Anyway. I’ll be there next year. Fuck Yeah.

 
Seriously.

Holy Shit.

Sony acquires the independent studio Media Molecule. After Nadeo joining Ubisoft forces, another “indie” absorbed by a big company.

Next one to end up first party Sony developer, I’d say Quantic Dream?

Programmers in Japan dev studios are working like crazy and get paid like slaves. Is it news? I don’t know but it gives a sense of what is going on there (around 1000€ for 60 hours/week) and gives us in the West, a sense of perspective.

Indie Fund is up!

“Indie Fund is a brand new funding source for independent developers, created by a group of successful indies looking to encourage the next wave of game developers. It was established as a serious alternative to the traditional publisher funding model. Our aim is to support the growth of games as a medium by helping indie developers get financially independent and stay financially independent.

We will soon be announcing the names of the projects we are already backing. Additional details about the need for Indie Fund and the rationale behind it will be shared at the Game Developers Conference in the talk titled Indies and Publishers: Fixing a System that Never Worked.”

Why is this so important? Well we have these days a good example of this, starring Infinity Ward the developer, Activision the publisher and Call of Duty the game. Rewind:

Infinity Ward created Call of Duty in 2003, a massive success. Activision published and bought the developer the year of their first game.

Activision of course bought the IP rights and developed some spinoff and expansion packs on every support possible, making as much as possible out of this guerilla game.

During that time we don’t know what is going on between the developer and the publisher but we can definitely guess how it must be a fight every second with the first one pressurized to do a sequel asap. They do two years later, in 2005.

Call of Duty works so well, Activision now wants to get one game each year. Infinity Ward refuses because they know they can’t output the same quality in a 12months cycle.

Activision doesn’t care and because they have the IP rights, they ask another developer to do a Call of Duty game (the third one) which is doing ok, but receives mixed reviews and is definitely not in the heart of the fans of the franchise.

Infinity Ward says nothing. They’re working on the next CoD called Modern Warfare, which is an even more biggest success in 2007.

Activision does it again and wants a Call of Duty in 2008 made by another developer. It’s Call of Duty, World at War which receives good reviews but not as good as the Infinity Ward games. Sales are good though.

Infinity Ward still says nothing. They are working on the 2009 CoD iteration.

The game is out in November last year: 4.7 million units sold in the first 24 hours. In five days the game grossed half a billion dollars. Fans know the Original Developer did it.

With Activision, it’s damn funky. *cough*

The thing is it’s all about people, not ideas. Infinity Ward has an incredibly talented team for sure. Now the Original Developer is mad. They created an IP, they did an outstanding 4th iteration of it, it seems that they want to develop another game (fuck, can you imagine working on a realistic war game for seven years??!!) and the publisher doesn’t want to listen to the developer who made them gross more than $1B, on one game. Crazy.

And like is noting Gamasutra about Activision:

“For example, now that Guitar Hero is no longer the cash cow it once was, it closed Red Octane and made cuts at Neversoft, despite the way those studios have performed for Activision in the past.”

I hate this war franchise and don’t want to play it. But I think I hate disrespect of people hard at work and greed over an already successful product even more. The laid off co-founders of Infinity Ward are of course suing.

So yeah, when I hear that a developer is bought by a massive publisher, I don’t think it’s that great. It often says that it’s the beginning of the End. Starting by the game.

I’m watching a couple of recent games on YouTube. There’s a lot of resource with walkthrough in good quality.

I can’t believe Uncharted 2 won 10 awards at the DICE thing. I totally respect the amount of work and polishing (but hey, it’s a sequel) and I think that Naughty Dog is a great company.

But ten awards and catch phrases like this:

“A new milestone has been reached in the videogame history.”

No. I’m sure Naughty Dog developers would not agree on that kind of claim either.

The game is well done, how it’s edited is great, scripts are fun, voices are spot-on (definitely the thing that doesn’t work in Heavy Rain) but it’s a fucking Indiana Jones story (the heroes partner is not trustworthy? I didn’t see that coming at all!) with a Tomb Raider gameplay filled with classic dumb AI if I believe what I see. Cinematic are imposed every 5 or 15 minutes of gameplay. Actually it seems everywhere..

I mean come on!! There’s nothing about a milestone here, neither technically or artistically. Artistically if Uncharted 2 won everything, what is it going to be for No More Heroes 2 or Bayonetta? They are just going to be games of the century.

These are crazy. Of course they also are rather classic gameplay and limited too. But these are at least, pushing the artistic part so hard. Pushing aesthetics boundaries, pushing everything about the form to the point where something happens: you have to see Bayonetta snapping her fingers after kicking in the butt a giant monster, moving away from the sucker exploding behind her, in all her sexiness . Results a weird and amazing mix of power, humor and class, conveying an incredible sense of neatness. Like the shop with its beaten Morpheus and its jazz music. Awesome craziness, ultimate pop culture stew. That’s the power of the form in computer games: We. Are. Free. To. Do. Whatever. We. Want.

Uncharted 2 is just doing the opposite. Looking at the past (movies), being predictable, boring. All the time. In No More Heroes 2 you start by fighting a hip-hop assassin with a shapeshifting boombox.

How cool is that?

Anyway, then I realized what these games are: they are single player experiences aimed to multiple viewers. Watching people playing a shoot’em up, a fighting game, a fps or non-action games is no fun –unless you know what the experience is as a gamer-because all the experience relies in having the controls in your hands, it relies in the pleasure of multiple inputs/feedback at the same time: jump/crouch while reloading your gun and checking the map and your mates is not shareable. Getting ready to unleash your combo to finish an opponent after a counter attack is not shareable. It’s pure game joy and you can’t display, watch that.

Hanging around in a beautiful forest or walking on a wall with lava down the street is. You can play that and have people watch it and enjoy it, instantly. Like I do watching Bayonetta and Uncharted on YouTube. Except that the first one is hypnotic when the second is making me yawn like a 90s action movie.

These games are more like puzzle-less adventure games. Boosted with shaders and sound fxs. 3D point&click, without the Gilbert/Schaffer touch (the “Simpsons view” of games) though.

That’s why despite being pretty light on new gameplay features, they have success. You can enjoy them with people around.