Category: Audio&Games

The Wii, man. Announced ten years ago this week, it hurts my senses.

When I think about it it was so unprecedented and has never been replicated. The hype was monstrous. It was so great to work on it at that time –playing with it six months before the public- and how much people were excited (contrast with way, way superior technology like VR where people are just like “cool”). I had to fight to get one for my little sister. Pure madness.

Three years after its 2006 launch, the Wii was selling more than the PS360 combined in December. That’s nuts.

Ten years later the Wii U is such a disaster that I haven’t had the opportunity to play it once.

What if the Wii had been created to actually cement a blue ocean of games instead of just being a money printing machine for Nintendo after a disappointing GameCube business? It would have been cool I think, let’s see what was missing.

HD

I’m not speaking of raw power but come on big N: at least hdmi output. The entire TV market was switching to digital in/outs and Nintendo was like “nah we cheap and profitable, no digital output”. Which made the Wii a pain in the ass to plug to brand new flat TVs. That probably killed its lifespan more than anything else.

Of course more CPU/GPU power would have been welcome too. It was underpowered but that wasn’t necessarily an issue for tons of games. The Wii’s feature is/was its controller it would have been easy to keep making more powerful consoles down the road. They did just that with the 3DS. Weird.

WiiMotion+

Yesterday I was listening to a 25 year old basketball player – aka the core market- straight up saying that old school controllers are awesome because “you don’t have 16 buttons to memorize”. The wiimote, answered that and then added a piece of tech to make it better. That should have been integrated in the first place. Or at least not make it an extension but switch to Wiimote with built-in Motion+ tech ASAP and encourage developers to make stuff for it. Make it compatible with Windows even. I still think the Wiimote is one of the best controller ever. I miss it. I’ll never forget playing with the entire family, the only one time it ever happened.

Virtual Console

It’s the kind of shit… Nintendon’t do online well amirite. They just needed to release everything we played on 8/16bit, ASAP. That’s it. That and make the process to make games for that channel much more easier for indies. With those two changes it would have exploded in popularity, probably reaching Steam levels if not going further.

If those three points had been taken care of, ready for the future, we would still be swinging da ‘mote.

Independent game development was about professionals making a living making games without the constraint of dealing with a publisher, that relationship being more often than not abusive.

Independent game development became “indie” games, a nostalgia-induced aesthetic both built by small teams of professionals and amateurs. Making a living making games –which is what game developers describe as “being able to make another game”- became optional.

It’s disappointing that we keep forgetting about sustainability in this business. When even to this day really good, experienced game developers with all the privilege required –aka money- barely break even with their games when we never had more players playing games. It is a big big issue.

We need cheat codes at this point.

I was having this little conversation on Twitter with Megan Fox (not that one you idiot) about ageism and an aging gaming population. I think I am a good sample as the average age for a gamer has been basically following me for a decade (late gen X seems to be the cursor for average gamer age, which makes sense).

Right now according to the last statistics I saw, the average age is 35 for men and 43 for women. Developers though still aim at a much younger market as they always did because it’s the age bracket –the 20s- where people spend most of their time consuming/buying games. But let’s dig into the data a bit more:

Millennials right now represent the biggest slice of population. My generation, gen X, is the smallest slice of the adult/workforce/consumer part (between 20 to 60) as you can see below:

At 3.1% of the population for both men and women, that’s not much. What’s that bump at 50 though?

That’s 7% of the population. That’s 22M+ people. If you can sell your game to half that number, you’re doing fine.

So right now, the 20-35 represent 21% of the population, the 35-50 18.9%, the 50-60 19.9% and 60-70 a good 14.8%.

So what developers do? They focus on that “big” 21% and forget that 38.8% of the population (35 to 60) has money and likes games. No one is really making games for us. And if I add the 14.8% of the 60-70 bracket, we’re talking about a quite staggering 53.6% of the population right now who doesn’t feel like the game industry is talking to them.

Wow.

So how to cater to that growing population? Because this is what we have to offer right now:

Those games don’t click with older people. We have played those. We almost have three decades of experience playing those. That’s a long time. Here are points that I think you should consider if you want to aim at that juicy 38 to 53% of the population in the near future:

Older people don’t have time anymore

We have lives, things to do, kids to feed bills to pay etc. Give us small chunks of gameplay, things we can finish in a couple hours. It’s fine. We spent our 20s with hundreds of hours playing games. So don’t try to artificially up the difficulty. Don’t make us grind, don’t give us bosses, we have real ones to deal with. Your game will be fine without bosses, spend that extra time to flesh out a new mechanic or apply a bit more polish instead. We love those. Respect our time by giving us a good time, not frustration and infinite repetition. Adr1ft seems to be a game that goes in the right direction, offering a maybe short experience but one that you don’t forget. Oxenfree is around 5 hours long with excellent, “mature” (meaning on par with other entertainment) dialog. They’re on my wishlist. Kentucky Route Zero does it perfectly too.

Older people don’t have twitch reflexes anymore

Especially you. Just kidding but you know what I mean. Frame-accurate synchronization on 16 buttons gamepads is not making us happy. That’s why we play on computers too. We’re good at using those because of all those TPS reports we have typed. I still love playing Counter Strike but it’s really hard against those young aim bots. I was enjoying Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet –Metroidvania- and then I had a boss that requires perfect, fast moves. Tried for a while. I could do it but I didn’t care enough. See first point.

Older people love “chill” co-op

You know the kind. One player plays and the other helps out, without crazy tension or excitement. It’s not necessarily an older people behavior but I think we like it even more getting older. People do it with all those 60+ hours Tomb Raider-like games but like I said, we have seen those two billion times already. We need new settings, new themes, new heroines and ditch our stereotyped canvas a bit. Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime does it well but I suspect developers wanted to cater to hardcore gamers. Co-op but not chill co-op.

Older people have a broader culture than you

That’s the cool thing about aging, you get all those experiences and now you know more! It’s a little bit always the “been there, done that” argument but seriously, we did go and did that: Heroic Fantasy, Sci Fi and WWII war. A lot, probably too much. We need more themes. Invisible Inc brought some fresh spy-like, Batman the animated series-looking game to the masses and did well. Just a bit of difference makes all the differences!

I am certain that some game genres would be super successful to some people if they could up their aesthetic game. I see XCOM 2 as a very interesting game to play but it looks far, far too generic. Those 90s aliens are… Depressing as hell there, I said it.

I picture a XCOM 2 game in a Shameless/Weeds/Breaking Bad setting and I’m sure it would interest far more people than a generic alien taking over the world theme does. I think game developers abuse a bit too much escapism. We are older, we don’t need that. Actually we are more interested if it has some kind of connection with the real world. Give me a game where I need to be careful controlling a mecha in a city. Where is my game about crashing drones into monuments? Where is my Empire game where I build a hip-hop empire and screw artists? Give me an Assassin’s Creed type of game in 80s Lebanon with a simple yet lovely love story.  Don’t try so hard to outplay linear entertainment! Just make me have a good time by giving me something fresh yet familiar. Explore things most mediums haven’t. You have all the latitude.

You know what they say: if you build it, they will come.

Older people like all kinds of aesthetics: which is why I have an issue with cuteness: I am going to be 37 this year and I’m sick of cuteness. It bothers me. It’s a cop-out. I know perfectly why it works –everyone goes “aww” and forgets what it could be- but yeah, decades of cute made me stabby. The Witness is a perfect example of a “cute” game that is appealing to me aesthetically. It feels grown up. Thimbleweed Park looks cute but the theme and dark humor are totally shifting the comic book feeling. I want more of that.

Older people pay and don’t ask questions

I will buy your game if I want to. Put a decent price, that’s it! Older people won’t write on forums about how two twenties are too much for a game that took seven years in the making. We have shit to do and we know that things cost money. Developers have totally forgotten how PopCap used to make a killing selling puzzle games at $20 a pop to older people. That’s how they grew from 3 people to 400 and did well for the past 16 years like no other studio: by selling games to older people who won’t threatened to kill you if you don’t give them a refund. Older people are cool as fuck. Plus, we have all the money.

Now give me games! (it’s changing, I know. Firewatch is the next one this year)

Helvetica’s proposal about the IGF. I love it. I love the fact that this way we don’t dissect games through weird lenses. Like visual art and design: everything is design and art in games from input, code to audio to graphics. Those categories always felt way too blurry and stuck in an old way of looking at games as “content sandwiches”.

Games are a whole meal, they’re not sandwiches. They are something different. Choosing to separate games based on their length is more inclusive than anything other criteria. We need that and we should try those IGF category changes right away.

Me when I find some fascinating charts:

It’s a great one showing a few things:

– Social Media exploded. We all know when this happened and how we can’t stop.

– Audio (music and podcasts) is still huge. We forget about it because music is so everywhere for free.

– Games are last and barely grew in terms of consumption. Game production on the other hand, exploded.

I am still asking here and there what people play and it’s clear that 25-35 people don’t play games that much, social media is the main game. And if they play, they don’t want to mention it. Saying that you’re using [insert favorite social network] a lot is fine though. It’s interesting.

Slow gaming growth with supply exploding (500 new games a day on iOS, over a billion games available on Steam) means we’re going to hit some harder truth soon.

So when I see a vast excitement about VR, that is demanding a $2K investment upfront to properly enjoy it, cutting you off from the real world and even digital social interactions… Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, social media is making money thanks to games:

Interestingly it’s mostly in Asia. It’s confusing to see all those trends kind of cancelling each other out. The West is not into games like that so I wonder where revenue for WhatsApp and others will be coming from.

One last one that I find interesting:

The sharing experience doesn’t need to improve, it’s easy to share music. It’s just that people don’t want to do it. Why? I think because music is deeply personal. I might listen to the same song for an hour. I might listen to that very, very silly song by a very big artist. I might listen to something you can’t listen to for more than ten seconds. I might be listening to that artist because I don’t know her/him while everybody knows the lyrics to those songs. Music is personal. You share music with people in real life, live. In a notification center? It adds nothing to anyone.

I Miss Watching Other People Play Games.

Me too. I have so many games on Steam, playing them alone. Online gaming? Nah. Latency drives me nuts and the all voice chat thing no thanks.

I remember watching my cousin play that French RPG on my mom’s brand new IBMs. Taking notes on paper. I was amazed. I couldn’t understand shit but it was exciting, he was telling me what was going on. I remember learning the word “to bribe” (soudoyer en français) as you could do that with NPCs. I was like 7.

Then the 16bit era was entirely a bunch of dudes sitting on a bed/couch passing the controller experience. I didn’t have any console at home so I sucked at most games and watched my friends play. Cheering them up “man you were so close next time you’ll have it” following the story unfold together… During the boring parts I would grab a game magazine and talk about that next game page 43 with my dude while he was doing that boss again and again.

I hate bosses in games. Fuck ‘em.

Consoles were awesome at that time. Switch on, boom. These days it’s horrifying. I remember last year trying to play some MarvelVSCapcom on a PS3 with a friend… Controller issues, updates to discard, reboot. After 20 mn of shenanigans I was over playing.

Watching people play ultimately led me to making games because seeing all those smiles and passion during all those years made me want to do that: make people happy through interactive stuff.

I watched the new Unity5 audio system stuff, it’s pretty cool. They don’t dig so much in how performance is when you use a granular synth and sub mixes on top of an actual game with AI and input though. They are going full native avoiding the managed code part so it’s promising but even “offline” audio processing using native plugins is heavy on recent CPUs, I don’t think we’ll be able to use those effectively in-game soon at 60fps.

They are a bit if not a lot overlapping with well known and used third party solutions like FMOD and Wwise.

Miyamoto once said:

A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather solve multiple problems at once.

I like this quote because advanced audio features tend to solve one single particular problem while adding tons of complexity while simpler solutions can not only solve a sound problem but also a game design, UI feedback problem at the same time.

My focus as a designer is not to use fancy tools to the max. More features doesn’t mean it’s going to make things so much better. Two things make me think that:

– Most game audio that people remember is not related to anything technical, it’s usually from games where audio is played or stopped. No convolution reverb or complex variables to make something duck –4.5 dB in the background.

– As Iwata, a fantastic programmer said after working with Miyamoto: “it’s about content”. Even though technical mastery is useful ultimately it’s about what people will hear, the content.

And that works for me: I’m enjoying Else Heart.Break() made in Unity which has basic audio integration but the content is great: the music is awesome, the foley and little sounds are cool (I really like the fake TV show sound). Content first.

GunPoint has some clever FMOD layering going on but if the music was bad, it wouldn’t have mattered. And the layering (happening when you switch to hacking mode) can actually make it tiresome from time to time.

Kentucky Route Zero is the master of the past few years in terms of ambiance and mood, achieved by fantastic audio design with about zero fanciness or parameter-enabled function. It’s just a great sounding game.

With time I feel like people enjoy and remember two things from game audio: music they can hum, and sound/voice effects they can remember because they heard them a billion time (“KAY-O” and other “the bomb has been planted”). It seems like the loop/repeat paradigm is part of game audio’s DNA and we can’t escape it.

The only games that require massive audio systems and tech are the CoDs and Halos of this world: big battles, hundreds of sounds being played, the need for a robust system to control what’s going on is inevitable.

But for most games? Nah. Audio designers, focus on making great sounds. That’s what will make the game better.

Bad voice acting has been part of games for so long.

First off, we need to get rid of the Creative VS Technical debate. In gamedev both are equally important and usually dealt with by people who are both creative and technical. That’s the default state.

No, your motion capture performance ain’t shit until someone spends hours cleaning it up and integrating “your animation” in the game engine. Your voice acting performance ain’t shit until someone picks the best take, minimizes your mouth noise, makes it sound like you’re in space and integrates it in game.

Do not create classes. We’re all in this together. Flatten that stupid pyramid, please.

Second, union VS non-union and how game developers to this day don’t have any, like VFX houses. Two factors:

   – People are drowning in work and don’t bother dealing with this. We all work insanely hard –we all do but bear with me- at finding solutions to problems that didn’t exist before. People completely forget that: game development really is Research & Development. TV or movie technicians or actors, they swim in a pool of “been there done that”, we are not. Even when things look the same and that we think that we can use an old proven method to do something, it turns out that we still have to write some new code, maybe change an entire wall. It’s fucking nuts, I’m not exaggerating. VFX houses do the same, creating 3D that you have never seen before, dealing with mad constraints etc.

I stand by this distinction: we all work hard in the entertainment industry, but game development is the craziest. Look at cycles: 2, 4, 5+ years of development. Hollywood can churn out a massive Marvel movie employing 1,000 people every 1.5 years. So no time –and by that I mean brain time- for game developers to negotiate and meet with companies which will not help to establish unions, not their interests. Which brings us to the second factor:

   – Not enough older people. In TV and movie production in Hollywood where unions are very powerful you see people of all ages, early 20s to late 60s all the time. We all age and we need more security and less snacks, that’s how it is. But the game industry really enjoys people from 20 to 35. Especially before 30. Obviously young people will never care about unions. In TV you’d BETTER have your union card to get good work so when you start, you don’t see it as a thing that drags you down but as an opportunity to be treated fairly (yeah unions bring socialism all over the place, job stability, nice healthcare etc).

That is a weird thing: if game development is so much R&D, why would you not create a pool of veterans and use them to mitigate risks? Because they could unionized and sort of demand stuff? That might be one of the answer. Unions in Hollywood can shut down any production at the blink of an eye, I’m sure most big game companies are not looking forward to that.

But yeah as a veteran game audio designer who can barely use his skills outside game development, I feel so overwhelmed by the work (sound design, implementation, new tech showing up etc) that unions –despite looking good on paper- are so not in my head. To be fair in a game studio with a good reputation, salaries are usually good and relationships are flat enough that there’s no need for unions VS bosses.

I tend to think that’s progress. I wish it was expanding and that game culture wasn’t so stubbornly aimed at the youngest, things would change in developers’ favor more probably.

Blizzard’s Overwatch. Competitive shooter, fast paced action.

Bosskey’s Lawbreakers. Competitive shooter, fast paced action.

Epic’s Unreal Tournament. Competitive shooter, fast paced action.

They all are coming soon. After being all the rage around 2000, the arena shooter is back. But there’s a problem: people watch people play now, and it’s a big deal.

I watched Overwatch’s 16 “heroes” and you have to appreciate Blizzard’s surgery at work, how things are readable in a chaos of green, blue bullets, force shields, particles and so forth. It’s amazing how good they are at manipulating color palette.

It is also super fast. It’s pretty much unwatchable for 90% of people if not more. This is what Twitch most watched games are, most of the time:

Those games are slow. If not reaaaally slow. Titanfall is really good and doesn’t appear here. No Quake. No fast paced games. People compare Team Fortress 2 to Overwatch but TF2 is far slower.

Game design wise, what makes Counter Strike far better at being watched is the fact that you can be eliminated in one single bullet from any weapon. Therefore you can’t be running around and you can’t be sloppy in your retreats. You have to be always careful and that creates tons of mechanisms: always move with a teammate, be silent, secure a zone with a flash grenade before entering it,  think how you can surprise your opponent etc.

We watch this, we witness this incredible tension that doesn’t exist in arena shooters because everyone is running and blasting everywhere. It’s fun to play but there is virtually no strategy or tactics compared to CS. It’s too fast! Just kill everybody without getting killed. It’s like a football –soccer- game with only the penalty area and only one side.

The absolute beauty of Counter Strike is its high dynamic: you can rush and play like an arena shooter or you can meticulously form an attack/defense. Everything can work and everything can fail equally. The economy makes every mistake count –if you lose, you can’t buy good weapons-. Which means that watching a match means you never know who is going to win (when teams are about the same level, obviously). I can’t count how many times I watched a game and thought that it was over no way the other team comes back from that oh shit they are fuck that’s awesome they might win!!!!!

Sports fans know what I mean. That’s the core element in watching skill-based entertainment: DRAMA. Automatic, endless respawn kind of kills it, by design.

Second thing that makes CS so good for TV purposes: you don’t have to know classes, there are no classes. Overwatch’s 16 different characters with each different abilities is a lot to remember (and I can’t even imagine the work to balance them out). It’s overkill for anyone not heavily involved in the scene. I don’t want to understand all that. Baseball has classes and like four countries in the world like that sport.

I showed a friend a CS game the other day, it was his first time and in 5 minutes he was into it. Very easy to understand and visualize yet, it’s already borderline pace wise when things get hot.

Arena shooters were the shit and disappear for a reason. Counter Strike is continuously in the top 5 sellers on Steam. They sold over a million copies in August, when the major competition took place in Cologne. 1.2 million people watched the finals (and probably another million watched them later) that’s the score of a modest, successful show on TV. No other FPS comes close to those numbers. It took Counter Strike fifteen years and billions of hours played to be that balanced.

If I was a big company trying to get into esports with a shooter, I would copy the fuck out of CS. Just change the anti-middle East theme and you good for years if not decades.