Category: Audio&Games

Because it is insanely hard. In terms of logistics, I admire them all (and yes MS a bit more because they entered that space when competition was fierce compared to Sony who entered the console market at a time when Sega was shooting themselves in the knees, NEC was dead and Nintendo was asleep).

‘member 1994 y’all. 20 years ago. fffffuuuuu

OK, think about it this way: you’re building a device that needs to be powerful, that will be pushed and stressed out to the max for 12 hours or more, that needs an original input (gamepad), that will be sold widely and needs to be 100% stable with super simple software to use on the surface while doing super complex things under.

It was pretty easy in the 80s, 90s and early 00s.

A console is billions of transistors today, these are very complex machines that need to behave perfectly, all the time.

No desktop computer or laptop really does that, they all idle a lot. A console is meant to run games, one if not the most horsepower-hungry software developed. A console is either off or burning.

Have you seen the mess that is to make a gamepad? How many patents you need to avoid? How hard it is to find a manufacturer that will be able to make them perfect all the time, millions of them without breaking in customers’ hands and without costing you a fortune?

Making a console aka computer game box is a crazy challenge with unlimited variables, it makes me sweaty just thinking about it.

This is why Steam boxes are not here. This is why Ouya is kind of gone and why so many Android consoles are pretty much vaporware at this time. This is why Apple is not doing any of this (no profit? bye), and why it cost Microsoft billions and fifteen years to get somewhere after living hell with the 360 red ring of death (but they had to rush and take the lead in the race). This is why they advertise their work on their gamepad or Kinect because yeah, they worked super hard.

This is why Nintendo is so cheap on tech and always makes everything possible to not ruin their profit margin because all that R&D shit is super expensive.

That’s why all manufacturers are super cool with developers going 2D or light 3D, or are more than happy to show you the features like watching Netflix or tweeting. That’s so much less trouble hardware-wise than the GTAs and the like which are definitely hitting those machines hard while not coming out fast enough (GTA is basically a generation late, first time ever). I don’t think it’s just to show that they’re cool, it’s a way to use that box for less intensive tasks while making consumers think that it replaces other boxes, that consoles are a deal.

The problem is that people got those machines to have them hit hard, they want some jaw dropping “graphics”. At the same time, they’re happy not to have to spend $60 minimum to have fun while they don’t understand why PS4 games are more beautiful but feel and play the same as the PS3 ones. Look around, people are kind of over it and this is why I see so many people arguing that PCs are the best deal ever on every site I go to. Because, it’s true.

That’s why we only have three manufacturers and that’s why they fight so hard to get exclusives. Good luck, guys.

Growth, in an extremely fast-paced market doesn’t mean squat because it also means that you can shrink very fast. “You’ve been Zynga’d”.

Rovio or Mojang don’t have sluggish growth rates, King and Supercell have mutant-like growth rates. Getting 4,450 times bigger in three years for Supercell is not the norm, nor will it become the norm. In the case of King everything is tied up to one, simple game. Context is everything.

Meanwhile Mojang is making over a quarter of billion dollars a year, is independent and doesn’t have to answer anyone, has a game that has more impact on culture and society than all of the Candy Bird Saga combined. God it’s beautiful.

Nordic game studios have been trouncing Europe gamedev scene for almost a decade now. Highly skilled people in design and programming, no sun 8 months a year and you have everything to make great games.

Sluggish growth rates. Your mom is sluggish you insane greedy Wall Street bastards.

So that was the big story yesterday: Inside the disintegration of a game jam reality show. It’s always great to see integrity.

But to me there’s still a notion that game jams are something you want to show to the world. Zoe Quinn gives us her wishes:

Capture the inspiration, the hard work, the 3am delirium and the dumb jokes that come with it. Show people how we all band together and support each other through the deadline. That’s what I want to show the world about game jams.

I think we have to face the fact that this is not sexy or interesting to most people. It’s awesome when you’re doing it, not watching it. Game development like most building processes is not something you want to show people THAT much: it’s messy, it smells like sweat and pizza more often than not, it’s hard, it’s tedious, it’s slow, it’s nerve wrecking. Did I mention that it was hard? You are a pile of useless shit after a game jam. Really useless.

I mean even with elegant and “artsy” medium like music or movies we don’t care so much about behind the scenes. Culturally, people know that it’s messy and thus are not very interested in the making of, which is why behind the scenes stuff are usually hidden promotional tools. People want to play guitar not because they know Jimi played that part 23 times before having the good one, but because listening to that song make people want to learn guitar.

Documenting how gamedev works is great but that will not trigger a wave of thirsty young folks to join in. Nerds are already toying with code and games and others will be like, ew.

What I would love to see is an app store like distribution of those jam games. If I could install/uninstall in one click and run all the games, share them easily regardless of your platform of course, that would be amazing. I’m sure there are some unheard of gems from the hundreds of games made during jams on top of which people could expand.

I want edgy, unethical, indecent –indie-scent, yes I’m sorry- games in game jams, that’s what I wish we were focusing on more than the community aspect. I want individuals more than tribes. I want games more than jams.

Because ultimately, people and their games will make other people make games.

Well, that made the headlines.

Money and roadmap wise, it makes sense. For so many other reasons, it’s super weird. Worrisome? We can only speculate.

Classic game developer paradox: Be angry at capitalism buying your favorite technology out but adore Nintendo, a capitalism champion. Anyway.

I’m more concerned about VR in itself, seen by a big part of the industry as the savior of the “videogame bastion”, where players get lost and forget about the real world. The Real Escapism.

To me, not including audio as part of the built-in experience is already a big design flaw (that they can now solve, thanks $$). But I have a bigger concern about Escapism. I think we need less of that, instead of more.

I feel like I want way more people playing on 7” to 70” tablets than having them plug VR sets. I feel like there’s still so much to do and bring to people before going nuts for something I have been dreaming of ever since the start of those helmets back in the early 90s. It’s not because I dreamed of how cool it could be that “it has to happen”. In today’s society, already battling a terrible plague of people incapable of not looking at their phones while talking to you, I think VR can wait a bit.

I want 2D. I want sharing. Collaboration, fair competition. Neat games, software, local services etc. I still want to empower people more than making them my bitch, my ultimate bitch with VR. VR is so far away in my head.

I want less excitement. I want people to chill. I want people to enjoy stuff, games, your game, my sound design, on devices that did not even exist a decade ago.

So much work to do. VR can wait.

It’s a nice post on game audio tools.

I’ll go ahead and say that I agree to totally disagree with that.

To me it’s a huge loss when tools are lost. We are not at war. There is no war. We build things. I repeat, we build games and game audio. The better toolset we have, the better teams can make cool stuff. The more we can share our tools, the better. The web industry shows it to us all the freaking time: a nifty WordPress –which is an open cms engine, right- plugin? 15 people show up on the website to make it better.

250,000 websites will use that stuff. Some will pay for extra features some will get the basic version. That’s awesome. That’s how game development should be if we want to thrive because development is hard. Reinventing the wheel is such a waste of time, we don’t need to have another audio engine that fades in/out audio streams which is why news of Fmod and Wwise going free for small projects is awesome. We need(ed) game audio tool standards and those two do a great job.

Starting from scratch without looking around is a mistake. First, to think that it hasn’t been done perfectly before you is kind of a dick move. And second, it is just smart to use the best tools available out there! It’s about creativity, not about how your tool looks like, how many files it can handle or how low you can get that CPU meter while manipulating complex reverb settings for a 3D room. Fmod designer has never been perfect but hell, how awesome it is to type a couple of lines of code, to have a sound designer doing his thing and tada, it works as best as it could while the focus on sound design aesthetic is maximum. I like it. I like it a lot. I like like it.

It’s very weird to me how game audio tries so hard to look “tech” as if we were jealous of 3D and its shaders. The microphone, that very simple and elegant technology mostly hasn’t evolved since its inception. It works perfectly, shitty ass electret mics can do miracles. Y’all know that any under $200 netbook can play 24bit/192KHz? Audio tech is awesomely low profile but we act like we have problems when we don’t. We have massive power. We lack smart tools.

A lot of games don’t have hundreds of sounds (outside voiceover). Hotline Miami has a very memorable game audio that doesn’t rely on HDR, 3D audio or 7.1 output. The need for game audio tools is not in the “more tech, more complexity” but in the “we should rethink the way it works today, was there a tool solving that?”. We don’t do that enough.

When we lose knowledge, tools, problems-which-were-solved-but-not-anymore-because-the-tool-is-dead, that’s bad for us. iMUSE did things that we can’t do with audio engines 15, 20 years later. That’s extremely bad for us. We feel the lack of audio flexibility in AAA games. We feel the weight of audio streams in mobile and mid-sized games.

I’ll go ahead and ask developers to release their audio tools, regardless. For The Love Of The Game, Yo. Let’s share and innovate.

Please fix your hiring practices. It’s a good one, I guess that we could extend to a lot of industries.

I feel the heat too, the more experience you have the weirder it is to sell it to an industry that relies a lot on fresh blood and specialization, the opposite of what veterans bring in.

And of course, experience  means more HR work to understand who this person is. Which means understanding game development at a pretty deep level, which is a difficult and bushy subject that HR people don’t really get into.

But as this excellent article says in three perfect points, it’s solvable if we think differently (nothing new here though):

The studio development model is broken. From an economic standpoint, studios are really just outsourced R&D for larger publishers. There are some exceptions—but for the most part, a studio exists to rapidly scale up an enormous development effort, ship a product, and then shed off unneeded staff quickly. While this model has succeeded at producing huge games like GTA 5, it is a lousy model for creating sustainable businesses for all but the very largest games. Big studio-developed titles usually don’t benefit from the creation of best practices, the institutional memory, or the perfection of craft that is acquired over the course of time.

And yes, game news are surprised when they see Irrational Games going out of business, which shows that game news don’t get it, and don’t care as long as majestic 3D is sprayed all over their retinas.

Unrealized profit potential. Games should be thought of as a type of service rather than a product to be thrown over the wall and handed off to marketers. Every game developed in the ship-it-and-forget-it vein has given up an opportunity to have the original developers continue to innovate and deliver value-creating entertainment experiences to the players who loved it over the long term.

I know right? This is where veterans shine and bring in experience. This is where those people get some stability instead of being fired at the end of the project in the studio development model right? Ten years ago I thought that MMOs and game as services would provide long term work and sustained development. When I see Disney laying off 700 people mostly from online operations last week, I realize that it’s because they still think with the old model, like the music industry with digital music they play with numbers and have some insane cash flow, so they just shift+delete those people’s jobs.

Developers and not just game developers, are pretty bad at business and don’t understand why they are treated as cogs most of the time. Except for one industry, the web. Which is one of the reason why Kentucky Route Zero, made by web guys, is so different.

The web industry changed a lot in ten years. The web changes all the time. Web developers think way more about long term, they know that it’s crucial in a world of tabs and immediate competition. There are plenty of great stories about small web businesses run by a team of two growing to healthy and pretty big companies. Web companies try and fail faster. The same in the game industry? We all look like one-hit wonder so it’s cool when it’s Minecraft, but otherwise it’s not great.

Anyway, I’m just the sound guy. Hire me.

Excellent article on game prices.

I don’t think free will win. For two reasons:

– Hardware is no longer the tractor beam it was once in fact, it’s boring. Today after a decade of digital miniaturization people don’t care what hardware they run as long as they are comfortable with it. All platforms are OK. There is no “much better platform” out there.

Valve is trying to disrupt that but looking at how hard it is for console manufacturers to ship stable, desktop-class hardware (we’re in the billions of transistors per machine, imagine the clusterfuck) even with decades of experience, it’s probably insane for them right now with Steamboxes.

Why hardware fatigue is important? Because it means we’re maturing and that people will differentiate themselves with apps, not free apps that everybody can get but paid apps that could even be pricey. That’s my bet.

“Yeah, it’s an app to do [X] and it’s really awesome. They respect everything about me, no weird phone book access or shady server connection, it’s all local and private stuff. The experience blows the competition out of the water. It’s quite expensive but it was so worth it.”

See what I mean? Second,

– Developers, now that they know that they are just a commodity for Apple and Google, either they still try hard to get the jackpot with terrible odds against them, or they start thinking about making some money too to sustain their butts. Then they’ll start thinking trial/paid like the good old shareware model or Win8/WP.

They’ll start thinking shipping real nice stuff, SaaS, they’ll start to think about the user experience and how it shapes so many things instead of releasing software with such poor design that it shouldn’t even be released to the world even if it solves a problem for someone. We’re drowning in apps and software mediocrity. There is room for “star developers” that you follow like you follow a band or a movie director and you don’t need to master 3D like John Carmack to make great software or games.

So short term, yes game prices will go down as so many young developers are desperate to get traction and have heard about the ridiculous amount of money you can get from a sale or featured slot but in the long term, if you want to sustain yourself making games and software without depending on sheer luck, you’ll need to bake shit perfectly and sell it with pride.

WhatsApp (sold $16B to Facebook)

King (128M Daily Average Users, $1.9B a year of revenue)

Both businesses at their core are not about niche, at the opposite of what “is supposed to work” (GTA 5 or app only on iPhone).

I think that people don’t like the idea of trying to please everybody but they’re missing the point: it’s not about pleasing, it’s about reaching and showing some respect. WhatsApp became a paid app because the founder thinks ads don’t add anything, it didn’t stop growth because it shows again some respect.

And that, is huge. That’s organic traction, that’s trust.

Candy Crush’s polish and simplicity aim everyone, like an Ikea coffee table. There’s no smugness or snobbery game, like so many developers like to play with exclusivity to platforms. Less and less, because it doesn’t make sense: users feel frustrated not being able to access an app/game on their platform of choice, and the developer who’s supposed to keep platforms competitive against each other is basically becoming one’s bitch.

It’s a rough game so staying out of it by widening your reach, staying independent is smart. It’s also harder, it’s harder to see what’s going to work compared to a niche market of hardcore users/gamers, hence the “small ideas” (puzzle game and sms app). When you’re in the middle of development, you are hardcore, you think hardcore so aiming hardcore people makes sense.

Numbers fell though and sure money and DAU are not everything but damn, it’s pretty impressive. Knowing that so many people use your little software must feel quite amazing.

I don’t really see how a VR set would work (successfully enter mainstream) without sound, you know the thing that really brings immersion.

The developer kit and probably the consumer version too use HDMI, that thing used to transfer AudioVisual signals. But no headphones because it makes sense to ship a product meant to immerse you while you hear a baby crying and your friends laughing at your ass.

Also, wouldn’t motion sickness be better controlled if audio and visual outputs were designed together? And what is this “realistic sound” obsession, I see around? It never will be perfect because ears are far more precise than eyes and no headphones will give you a true sense of “realism”. If we need a 20.2 surround sound system to achieve this, no headphones algorithm will I’m afraid. And that’s OK. We can already make us dodge something with a simple 2D pan. It’s all about being believable, not accurately computerized. Am I the only one here…

Audio is always technically optional and that’s tragic because at the same time, it doesn’t require much. That’s why tablets and phones are awesome, sound is standard. Pretty low fi, but standard and that’s good thing.

It’s important to ship a complete experience and to me, the Oculus Rift should ship with headphones and be a premium product that it already is.