Category: Audio&Games

Rock Paper Shotgun talking about Full Throttle:

On release, Full Throttle was perhaps the first sign of adventure fatigue from critics. It was 1995, and the flawless DOTT and S&M had in years past rightly received rave reviews from everywhere, inducing everyone else in the industry to try to copy. The press were perhaps looking to take LucasArts down a peg, and Full Throttle provided the opportunity. It was short, the puzzles were simpler, and it had some absolutely god-awful action sequences. It didn’t receive a drubbing, of course – but it did represent the beginnings of the tedious decision that the time of the adventure was coming to an end.

They. Were. Trying. Stuff. Out. It’s something that critics get-but-don’t-get most of the time. Creative people try things out, find a recipe. They use that successful recipe for a while. Then they want to switch it up, change things. Consolidate, reduce, add.

Short? Yes, because we’ve known for a long time that people don’t finish games.

Simpler? Yes, because we’ve known for a long time that people hate difficult, convoluted puzzles.

Action? Yes, because we’ve known for a long time that people like action a lot.

Yes, most of the time it doesn’t do as well as previous output but… That doesn’t really matter because the reasons for changes are not stupid and if you want the old stuff, it’s still around.

We’re here now in 2017, where the most popular games have some narrative going on like Uncharted or Thimbleweed Park or Mass Effect. Adventure games never really died, that was a headline trick. That’s what I dislike with journalism/coverage of creative stuff: pushing a narrative when really, there’s none.

We just create entertainment and try to sell it to continue to create entertainment. If you want to write about that, dive into the design and business decisions that are shaping games but don’t go for the kind of lazy and obnoxious “X is dead” or “Y is everything now”.

I mean, I get it. We all get it. Charity, good vibes and unity.

But that’s too much. ACLU just got six times the money it receives a year, in one month. It’s got so much sudden money, they felt like they should join Y Combinator to help manage the enormous wealth –$24M received in one weekend- they got. That’s awesome, good for them. Good for us.

So why game developers feel the need to double down by completely eroding games value a few weeks later? $30 for 30 games –$600 worth at full price- is absurd. We already have such a hard time to make people understand that $19.99 is not expensive for a few hours of enjoyable entertainment that sending them the message that they can get that game for virtually nothing sometime in the future, is not something we should do or encourage. At all.

We already have such a hard time to get enough money to make great games, we cannot afford those ridiculous bargains. Developers who already made more than enough can afford it but it’s such a selfish way of looking at our craft, I don’t really get it.

It’s like no one is interested in sustaining our world, setting up an economy? Other entertainment businesses don’t do that. There are no $1 movie tickets, $2 music albums. Bandcamp run a charity thing recently too but people paid the music full price, Bandcamp just redistributed all the money to charities. There are already tons of cheap or really not expensive entertainment.

There’s no need to bargain our absurdly-hard-to-make craft like that. I think it needs to stop.

The first year the global game jam happened, over 300 games were made over the weekend.

Yesterday it was 7204 games. It’s impossible to curate such a huge output, so what’s the point? I mean I know it’s all about the journey but…

I think it’s time to make the GGJ something smaller, with a game, a team per city. Make more ambitious games/prototypes this way. Working in a team of say 25 for 3 days requires a lot of control and focus, it would probably make the GGJ a lot less accessible but there are other jams for smaller teams and people with less experience.

Also the industry is always like “crunch is bad” but we have an annual event that requires people to crunch? Learning to work with a bigger team while avoiding/reducing extremes would be great training for future careers. Just sayin’

Laralyn stroke again with a great post. I’m going to focus on point #8:

Make the shift from “I make games I’m interested in” to “I’m interested in making games.” Love your craft. It makes you more flexible, more open to unusual games and opportunities.

That’s great wisdom. But that’s also not really how the industry hires these days. The industry does not just want you to make games you’re interested in, the industry kind of demands you to be an expert in those games. it is not rare to be asked which part of universe X you prefer or what’s your favorite moment in campaign Y when applying for a position.

The reality is it’s impossible to play tons of games, extensively. While having a job. While keeping up with technology. While having a life. While getting better at your craft. It’s just a number game.

This is a selection of very different games on Steam. As you can see, simulators are doing extremely well. You would think game developers are interested in developing other simulators, that we are all talking about this trend, right? Nope, not at all. Simulators –and to some extent, Firewatch is one too- are kind of laughed at as… Weak games? Strong games being the ones that are goal-based, with a hardcore mode I guess? I’m not even sure.

But what I see is that an order of magnitude more people are playing Democracy 3 than Thumper, something that probably a lot of developers don’t think is happening.

Personally in my sound design domain, Call of Duty is the top of the top: the craft and care taken in building audio and sound in that franchise are quite unparalleled. It’s maxed out in a way. On the other hand, so many games in genres that are not trendy would benefit a much stronger and consistent sound design. I love making sounds for any game, that’s the craft!

Anyway, making the switch from “I make games I’m interested in” to “I’m interested in making games” is I think, crucial. Not just for you, but for all of us to get better and foster ideas and innovation.

Shitty title aside on a first impression, I really like it! Then I think of the business side and I can’t help but think that it’s not going to work.

Media and news will never show you that but it’s easy to understand why third-party developers don’t do much on Nintendo’s consoles. The best-selling games on those machines are Nintendo’s. Overwhelmingly. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at games that sold at least 1M units, Nintendo has:

SNES: top 3
N64: top 13
NDS: top 14
Wii: top 17
3DS: top 10
Wii U: top 14

Those tops represent hundreds of millions of games (Wii Sports, 80M. 80M units). ALL NINTENDO.

So good luck for anyone else to invest millions of dollars in a system where you are pretty much guaranteed to not sell enough to break even. Considering the past ten Nintendo years, very tough sale.

Good luck going back to retail with game cards, delays and what about DLC so pervasive now? They’d better not region-lock nothing because hello 2TB microSD card game cards.

The concept and the hardware are cool, way more attractive that this WiiU thing they did in the past. The same challenges remain though.

We always go back to talk about gamedev crunch without talking about its history. There is a history.

Back in the 80s when I was a kid trying to put my hands on magazines with pictures of game machines, Japanese game developers were working hard. Extremely hard. We’re talking months at work. People would not go back home (what’s the point when you finish working at 2am?). Meanwhile I was playing European and American games and all I could see was that they were so often vastly inferior in their polish.

A lot of my friends and people around that time started to fetish Japan but all I could think was HOW. How are they so much better, the attention to detail, the gameplay, the screen title everything demonstrated that Japanese game developers were serious about computer games.

The answer is clear now: they were simply killing themselves –literally- making those games. Outside technical reasons (Japanese machines had more game-dedicated hardware) the reason Japanese games were more fluid, more beautiful, had the best ideas and best designs was simply that those teams crunched and crunched and crunched until there was no bugs left, until the game felt right. I kind of knew that, but didn’t think it would be at that scale: apparently it was just the norm. There’s some sadness in that but also those designers and engineers didn’t quit. If you quit it won’t happen.

And yes, we all still do crunch regularly. For every game made someone or a full team is going to give everything they have at some point. Technology and tools are a thousand times better and easier than the 80s ones but we still crunch because we have a billion times more things to put in one game. Game developers have never been really able to catch up with what people want. People want more, all the time. And we game developers, always want the game to be what it should be.

Which is why IMO there’s no debate to have about crunch, it is not a matter of good or bad: even with seasoned professionals and money it just happens when you make complex things. Even a tiny bit. No one cares that rocket engineers crunch to send a satellite up in space or that smartphones engineers have to churn out a new, superior phone every 10 months and that for that to happen, they probably will not sleep enough or enjoy some family time. We don’t value Play and Games as much as we value getting a new phone or more DirecTV so crunching is bad. Yet people want 200hrs of awesome gameplay.

The only solution is for all of us to hold up and slow down our progress but yeah, won’t happen. Or WILL IT

Reigns, a mobile game that you pay for before playing it –which is a business model that isn’t supposed to work at all anymore ever again, so they say- has sold over 600,000 units in a month. $2.4M.

RPS was running this story last week: Why A Million People Still Play Multiplayer Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Every Month and it comes down to three, simple things:

– No competitive behavior. People just go around, role-play and race. Racing is competitive but in a very light way compared to being constantly killed by bored, kind of psychotic people.

– It runs on old ass computers just fine. Game developers feel grossed out by old hardware I guess but machines are extremely resilient. I’d argue they are more and more because we underuse them so much (your quad-core CPU has probably been under-employed most of its life).

– Freedom+Bottom-Up design. Players do whatever they want, ask for features to scripters, who in turn make them available to players. Repeat. Not having to deal with marketing, PR, IP holders is a blessing to game development.

At the end of the day you need to craft something that people really want, something that you really believe in. Forget trends and media strategy, trust your feelings have good money on the side if possible, and ship.