Category: Audio&Games

Man, that is wild. A good friend of mine worked with Viktor back in the days.

There’s something extreme about someone dying at an early age when they have a job that mostly have them, their entire lives, in front of computers or going through books.

Physical jobs where folks die in their 50s, although sad, has some sense. Wear and tear. The idea that non-physical jobs will allow folks to live a longer life seems to be more and more untrue.

So many game folks dying in their 50s. I guess we’ll never acknowledge how stressful that field is, but I don’t recommend doing it if you want to have a healthy life.

Take Satoru Iwata.

Incredibly important person in the world of games. He’s the Wii and DS’s father but before that, he worked absolutely relentlessly as a programmer for HAL and Nintendo. I’m pretty sure his health deteriorated the second he started to be a programmer. He worked all the time, helped on countless, very hard problems. Passed at 55.

Game culture is reaching a wall. Its business doesn’t make any sense anymore and its heroes and icons die half-way through their lives.

I was reading about the PC-Engine, refreshing my memory. It’s incredible how everything went wrong internationally for NEC, a company born in 1899.

It’s the 1990s and most things are still local and national, but on the verge of getting international. In a way, the 90s business-wise were all about how to scale to the world. And it’s a daunting task.

NEC is very successful in Japan with its console. It’s well designed for the local-first Japanese market. NEC thinks about expanding worldwide. Everything goes wrong:

• They change the name from PC-Engine to Turbografx-16, big mistake.
• The console’s small size is a great feature in Japan, it’s not outside (though to this day I still can’t believe how small that console was).
• The console only has one joypad port, which is kind of wild as competitors doing really well (Nintendo and Sega), have two ports since the mid 80s.
• NEC is super conservative on the chip design which stiffens game development a lot while asking customers to buy add-ons.
• 17 models were made. Imagine the costs. Meanwhile Sega and Nintendo had one 16-bit console for all markets, for 10 years. One casing, one design, just different A/V outputs.
• Horrible marketing due to massive cultural differences I imagine. They tried to set up holdings to market their consoles better, it didn’t work.

Despite all those issues and the fact that the console was never successful outside of Japan, the PC Engine stays in most game aficionados’ minds as the future. As the “one day, I’ll have it and I’ll play CD-ROM games in your face.”

This still looks dope. Late 80s tech has tons of charm. When manufacturers could mold plastic as much as they wanted, when toxicity to the planet didn’t matter, when economies of scale were not tight, when it was still possible to design, build, and see what it does.

What it could have been.

Google releases a demo:

Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model – Google DeepMind

Immediately, people are excited about the idea of creating video games from a prompt. And I’m like:

• To do what? “Make money” by making video games?

• Hoping that it gets viral?

• Do you know that the game industry is crawling under worlds that require hundreds of hours of play?

• Do you know that some of those worlds are far better than this and still don’t make money?

• Do you know that they’re laying off at an unprecedented rate these days?

• You want to compete to thousands of games thinking that your idea and Genie2 will make you “win”?

• Why would I play your game if I can access the same tools and creating mine with a picture and a prompt?

• Who’s going to actually pay you? People are suffocating under the weight of unlimited entertainment and you think that you can get their attention with your AI-powered quick game?

Please.

What’s ailing Ubisoft? | Opinion | GamesIndustry.biz

“It has a solid set of well-known and popular IPs – Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia, Tom Clancy, Far Cry, etc. – but it has consistently struggled in recent years to translate that into serious commercial success.”

Because those IPs are the same game over and over with a change of aesthetics. Strong IPs have memorable characters, settings. Those Ubi IPs are the definition of generic dude stuff. It’s a miracle they worked for so long. Probably due to questionable marketing and PR stuff.

Also there was over 10,000 new games in 2023 on Steam alone. It used to be a few hundreds.

Good luck with the future, y’all.

The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside | by Monica Harrington | Aug, 2024 | Medium

Fascinating read.

“I had another conversation with Microsoft execs about my role and the conflict with Valve, and again I was essentially told, “it’s fine, we’re OK, we like where you’re at, don’t worry.”

So. Wild. It was clear that Microsoft had something to do with Valve’s success but it actually was way more than I thought. And a bit sad how Valve did Windows 8 and its app store wrong while they’re indeed the de-facto game store. A bit of competition would have been great.

“All of this came from the collective Microsoft experience about working with OEMs and seeding product in mass quantities to spur user adoption.”

I often think about this experience with OEMs. That collaborative power where MS gets to stay at the top but works with everyone all the time? That’s huge, and that’s hard to maintain. But you get to learn, to change, to pivot and to stay on your toes I guess. Dictatorship is a lot easier.

“About a year earlier, I had worked with Gabe to set the audacious goal of Half-Life winning at least three of the top industry Game of the Year awards. We very consciously thought through what it would take, including breakthrough technology, a compelling new angle, and broad industry support. It was going to be especially tough for a game that some insiders initially dismissed as “Microsoft developers building on id’s technology.”

Planning works, folks. Visualizing is massive. I remember Half-Life, the Doom “mod” and how the game that shipped was really good and really different from anything at that time. That first grenade that lands at your feet, OMG. Iykyk

“I’m also proud of the work I did while recognizing that my biggest contributions to Valve’s business went largely unnoticed and unrecognized within the industry. Part of that was due to the bro culture of the software business, part of it was that I receded to support my husband in a partnership where he was effectively the lesser partner, and part of it was that women, especially in tech, often seem to disappear when the story gets told.”

This is always the reality, and a sad one. In the world of music for instance, it’s ridiculous the number of women who managed, cured, helped, protected and cared for dudes who would go on having superstar careers. And wouldn’t have had anything without those women.

TL;DR: collaboration works and women are dope and deserve more.

I’m basically off of them. For most of my life, I thought about games daily. From their cultural impact to the gazillion questions spawned by game development. Not anymore. It’s a big personal shift.

Today I see a “Press R2” or “Press triangle for strong attack” or “Press up arrow for potions” in a YouTube video or in front of me and I feel like heading out to touch grass.

I see a “4/18” orb counter and I’m sick. Another skill tree, some crafting? Fuck my life. Opening crates sure, it’s not like I haven’t done that 48 trillion times since 2000.

War, tentacles, gore and cute overload. OK. I am so bored as hell. Sound design stays the same as it was 15-20 years ago. Slashing bodies doesn’t need to make a different noise, fair enough.

Another abandoned city because game development still can’t do fully alive cities well. So instead of inventing a completely different world without buildings, let’s just make one that used to be alive. But! Something something happened. So unheard of and edgy!

The me-too paradigm exhausts me. The second a game is popular, 300 copycats show up within a year. The second exhausting thing is “let’s combine two very popular things” and we end up with Call of Duty meets Stardew Valley where you can raise zombies and nuke your friend’s garden. It’s just weak brainstorms.

LOL but also what are we doing?

Looking at game culture from the side now, it’s wild how hidden it is. Very few people talk about playing games. Very few play in public! Games are huge and don’t exist at all, simultaneously. Or when the culture does exist in the news, it’s about groomer streamers and silly games like that checkbox one. Ugh.

This is after 40+ years of game culture. A joke! Yeah. I don’t know man.

Games don’t teach much if anything if we want to be honest. They are making folks busy for hundreds of hours for no other benefit than humming that menu melody for the rest of their lives. I’m less and less OK with that.

Gamification has ruined so many things. Another tool for coercion, distraction and control as the article says.

Meanwhile inside the industry, layoffs, acquisitions and mergers bring pain x100 left and right. Another small team of folks who worked at that big studio for 20 years and believes that their ideas and a $1M VC check are enough to sustain themselves (narrator: probably 100% not).

And of course, video games are still mostly about sequels ad nauseam. I think another Tomb Raider is in the work? What the fuck.

Watching Wukong or Star Wars Outlaws, the latest big releases which are not sequels, I’m amazed at the amount of work. The incremental progress on everything (lighting is clearly near perfect today), fluid dynamics getting there, the accumulated knowledge at Ubi (25 years of open world system design), or Unreal 5 in its full glory, it shows and it’s impressive. At the same time it all feels so predictable, pointless, corny (listen to games without watching them and you’ll understand) and unnecessary to spend a hundred bucks to check waypoints, do pew-pew behind a wall and open crates as if –again– we hadn’t done that for decades already.

Having said all that, I could play some Counter-Strike with homies and talk shit all evening right now. It would be fun. I don’t know when I’ll be able to gather 10 folks with similar CS skills around a table or two.

Maybe never. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

Counter Strike, the 25-year-old game which allowed folks to play with a left hand on-screen since 1999, received a massive update last fall in which the left hand option was gone.

What on motherfucking earth is this?

The developers of the game that aims for realism, the game that added legs to the models (probably for a possible future VR version, more realistic), more realistic physics, lighting and more precision in movement and ballistic, said “in our minds, no one is left-handed in the real world”.

As a left-handed person who has always played the game with a left-handed model and who was looking forward to Counter Strike 2, I’m so confused.

After players complained for 7 months, it’s been back since April. Except for the Molotov Cocktail, which for some reason stays a right-hand only weapon. What the fuuuck?

As to why Valve would do something this ill-prepared, my guess is some game director bullshit insisting that players experience the world and maps the same way, thus optimizing everything for right-handed folks. And perhaps because of that, some corners on some maps are more advantageous to lefties. Or it could be that shadows being calculated from one point of view only, changing the model on characters doesn’t properly work with pre-baked environment. Or some technical issue in that vein.

Anyway, CS2’s launch has been a disaster (replacing a game people bought with a free-to-play one that’s missing tons of features is BAD) and this contributed to it.

Another software-as-as-service abusive relationship. I know shipping games is hard but disdain is not good for growth.

Too many games is a good Maze’s song but it’s also the truth:

14,534 new games. In a year. On ONE platform. That is univocally too much. Let’s do some quick math here.

14,534 games. Each game is at the very least a 10-person team and at least a couple years in the making. Let’s say three years.

That’s 145,340 folks working on games since 2020, and who released their game in 2023, right?

Considering how creative industries are all hit-based businesses. 99% of those games will flop. That’s an incredible amount of waste for thousands of people with tunnel vision working hard for years.

Forty years ago, there was a computer game crash. Here’s Wikipedia about it:

The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality. Waning interest in console games in favor of personal computers also played a role. Home video game revenue peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, then fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent).

Looking at all the layoffs last year in companies which are actually making money making games, entertainment competition (streaming and social media) stronger than ever and demographic changes (smaller pool of young players who play one or two games anyway), it’s not hard to see that things are not going to improve anytime soon.

Which means more dependence on whales. Which means more abuse. Oh boy.