Category: Audio&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.

Start of a game development.

Game audio designer: Need some music?

Game developer: Fuck your music, I need sweet ass SFXs baby!

Game audio designer: Sure! Can I make some for you?

Game developer: Fuck no I’m fine with free samples, free is good for now.

Fine.

End of game development.

Game developer: DAMN I’M BURNING.

Game audio designer: still need some SFXs?

Game developer: YES, NO, MAYBE, PROBABLY, DEFINITELY.

Game audio designer: maybe some music too?

Game developer: NO, YES, NOT SURE, FUCK YOUTUBE KILLED MY TRAILER I NEED ORIGINAL MUSIC YESTERDAY.

You should stop seeing game audio people as vultures trying to make some paper on your back dear game developers, we’re all in this together. Whatever the project size, you’ll need audio. You’ll need someone to do it/deal with it, very quickly. Embrace it. Become professional in your output and dev process. Reduce the scope of visuals and pay attention to audio if needed, the resulting layer of polish will be more than worth it.

We are going toward a world of fanless computers as phones and tablets are showing us. It’s all about the Experience.

Audio is not an option, it’s required.

Awesome article from Greg Costikyan and yet, a bit obvious right? It says a lot that we need to discuss how to be ethical with F2P games when the main advantage for developers is sustainability of their jobs which translates into not screwing over users. How would you be against that? I don’t know but I’m glad that the word is out and generates comments. Because F2P is an important business model, not just for games. It’s getting better.

But I tend to prefer the “Pay Once, Play Forever” model discussed in a Jason Rohrer blog post on game pricing, the race to the bottom in app stores, to the back to back Steam sales and super lucrative bundles.

Jason wants to get money on day one because it makes sense when you’re working on a game over a couple of years. The simple fact that we in the industry feel that it’s normal to go on and on without revenue is crazy. Also, “free” means assholes trolling you and making you feel miserable after some hard work. We see those comments on app stores all the time.

Games doing well with this POPF business model (Minecraft, Terraria, Garry’s mod) all share something though: they’re almost like tools. They are not just games, they let people create and make stuff. That’s very interesting because not only those games are ethical in their pricing, they also allow their users to not just grind or escape, but build and design things.

It means that once you have your game core concept pretty solid, a prototype, you should think about how to monetize that shit while being fair to both you and the user. You need to balance out your evilness and it’s a pretty cool game in itself.

Perfectly said. So if I am building something it pretty much has to have sound. Sometimes I see the audio designer like a costume designer in games. We dress games sonically and it gives them everything they don’t have without sound: a life, a vibe (any game without audio feels desperately flat) and of course excitement. As costume designers, nobody gives a damn about our work.

This is why it makes me cringe when I see developers using SFXR for every-thing, even when it doesn’t match the game at all. I mean at this point with seasoned developers it’s just offensive: respect audio, behind the go big with sound because it’s part of making a game polished there’s the need to understand sound and be able to set up audio placeholders as much as with visuals. Learn how to communicate about sound, get some serious understanding of audio. Learn to determine your game audio intention, not the technical 3D part, don’t worry about that. You need to have a sonic idea of your game as much as you have a visual one.

If programming takes so much resource that we deliberately cut the audio out of the equation very early on, it means that programming needs to get simpler or better so that it doesn’t happen. We made a lot of progress but it’s still a massive problem with prototyping.

It was bad. Not just business wise but as Raph Koster points out in his blog post:

But this was the year when an editor at a games publication actually said to me “stop writing.” This was the year that the metaphors of violence were the most popular way to describe what we should be doing to each other’s life work and passions. Burning down. Destroying.

The game industry in 2013 felt like that to me too.

I’m a game developer and reading that an editor at a games publication can actually say “stop” to someone who contributes to the game design community as much and as hard as Raph does (and when people minimize that I just think STFU you don’t know shit), says it all. Something is super rotten in the game industry. I don’t know how to react except prototyping on my own and reading arguments.

I’m a game audio designer and all I heard about all year long was audio implementation and 3D sound and HDR and things that are absolutely not core to a great game audio experience. Tons of games don’t use that at all and have great audio. Needs for more audio interactivity and flexibility are shared by all my peers in the field and yet, nothing changes. We use the same inherently broken audio stream design. It’s been a while now. Like over a goddamn decade. It became taboo.

We like to remind ourselves of how a couple of people pretty much had solutions to seamless, atomic game audio end 80s or how Nintendo masters game audio design since Mario but the game industry is not about mentors or spreading knowledge, it’s about being violently childish (Fmod vs Wwise yay). Back to Raph being humiliated online, back to Chris Crawford –kind of the father of us all, amirite- treated like “fuck that old weird dude”. Back to that article where professional game developers can’t wrap their heads around the idea of people having fun driving a cleaning truck in a simulation. I don’t know, jumping on platforms for 30 years seems pointless to me too and also, your mom albeit being old is still a ton of fun. You get the point, to each his own. Good designers know that. They analyze, they don’t laugh at taste or worse, bully you (super condescending title, Gamasutra) because you don’t play the last AAA or the last indie darling. There is no hierarchy in games, it’s like music.

Anyway, a lot of people profit that situation of intellectual stagnation and game design idling. From that editor to Raph to guys selling sound banks and focusing on how important having $50K worth of microphones will change your game audio forever, it’s not about games. It’s about business and I’m just as naive as ever: if we move on, their business will fail. If tomorrow someone comes up with a cheap, responsive audio engine that does what games need and not what sound people want Fmod and Wwise would bleed.

Computer games complexity is such that a lot of people are living out of it, without asking the good questions or caring about where it goes, what we can do with them. The mutation is slow. I blame rent and living wages.