Category: Audio&Games

First thing I thought was “bye Cell” and immediately had 2 minutes of silence for all the guys who fucking died on this stupidly complex architecture. For nothing because now the PS4 sports a X86 architecture like hundreds of millions of PCs. That’s right no PS3 games (including PSN games, apparently) can run on the PS4, it will happen through streaming. Sounds like a lot of problems ahead.

I can’t help but draw a comparison with the arcade era and its massive custom chips, expensive machines designed around games in its heydays. But then the business side took over, 16 bits consoles brought an “unfair” advantage and these crazy machines needed to be profitable: arcade cabinets became Pentium powered PCs. Same running code everywhere, easy to upgrade. Today touch devices and $1 games brought “unfair” competition to the ridiculously complex and “innovative” PS3. Sony had to solve that.

The moral of the story is that developers’ support is much more important than engineering beauty. People, first. Business, first.

That’s what I keep being amazed at, how business doesn’t seem to matter to developers when they hear about a new platform. It should! Dev kits to rent? Check. Certification to pass? Check. Price, availability, prototype non disclosed? Check. And the thing is a PC.

I am supposed to get excited? Which developer is excited, the ones on Sony payroll? Sure it makes sense, good for them but for the rest of us I think it looks pretty damn bad.

I keep thinking about this dream I had of me and @lejade running to catch a bus and me asking “no seriously, what the fuck happened at That Game Company?”

The co-founder left right after Journey came out. Lead producer left too. That was so weird, no one asked anything in the industry like why are you leaving a studio that just released a masterpiece, a critically acclaimed game? That doesn’t make sense.

We learned this week that a lot of people in the team didn’t get paid for six months at the end of the long, six years of development. Sony paid two budget extensions and it wasn’t enough, the team had to use their savings too. That’s madness.

It shouldn’t happened. I feel like when it happens in the movie industry, it makes sense. Shooting on the other side of the country/world, paying actors, building props etc. It can be hard to follow a budget (and yet they mostly do).

To build a very linear game with very few interactions cannot take six years to make, as great as it is. I mean, we need to get much better and faster at that.

Because we’re the slowest creative production process ever and it’s really frustrating.

Stories are making a strong come back these days. The Walking Dead, Double FIne’s projects, Dreamfall, Kentucky Route Zero, Twine games, Valve and JJ there’s a lot going on.

I think it reinsures the industry. It’s been a good business in the past, stories are as old as humans and if we can dig more games around them, it should stick on the wall, right? In some extent, yes.

But I have a hard time believing it simply because stories demand you to be passive. That’s when they strike the strongest, your entire self is absorbing it, situations characters what’s going on and what is going to happen. Maybe it’s just me but I feel like the best delivery possible is through a passive mode. Interactivity doesn’t bring anything but breaks the flow.

On the game side, games are about decisions, interactions. Stories never really add anything. I’m always a bit sad at all the work I skipped in games because honestly, fuck your stupid story I’m playing Angry Birds there’s no story come on now.

The most complex game stories are all diminished by power fantasy phantasms that I can’t connect to: there’s nothing captivating for people who saw/read a lot of classics, except with games like Dys4ia, personal, talking about an unspoken side of human life. Coen brothers just kill me with their movies, all their stories hooked me up in seconds, all so simple and dumb on the paper. But the delivery, man. The sound design. The depth.

Kentucky Route Zero seems to be the closest to that maturity and honesty, as well as Ron Gilbert’s work so special for growing up in the 90s kids like me. But it just creates some kind of dull games with great stories. Or great stories with tedious delivery. Twine games make me feel it this way too. If your story is great, I don’t care about choosing I want to listen. Write it, direct it with multiple angles if you want to get away from the single lonely, traditional story path. Me inputting? Unnecessary.

So I kind of want to buy KRZ and at the same time, I don’t.

– After big names like Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, Cliffy B, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Will Wright… Who’s next, Warren Spector? Miyamoto? Warren Spector just lost his job at Junction Point, he might retire.

– Miyamoto, maybe after limiting Wii U damages to Nintendo and an outstanding career.

– Smartphone games are going down. Over saturated market since mid 2009, better experience on tablets, developers can’t make a profit, bye.

– More big studios consolidation/death. Soon in the west we’ll be left with Acti, Ubi, EA. Japan will have Capcom and Square.

– Activision is going to take a financial toll from Blizzard’s panic: Diablo III, their future MMOs and WoW. And CoD is going down in sales and karma too.

– Social games are going down. Because Flash and browser games are horrible and people don’t want to annoy their friends anymore. Virality is so 2010.

– A lot of little niches and successes spread out across more devices than ever. Success randomness is high and freak us all out.

– Gaming on 15” or larger Win8 tablets could really open a world of possibilities. If they don’t cost an arm and don’t sport some shitty ass Intel Atoms.

Just to point out another thing going wrong with computer games. We build game audio with tools aiming this:

When people actually play using these:

or

or

It’s clear in 2013 that what audio enthusiasts were hoping to see as a multi-channel systems home invasion never happened and never will. Too annoying to set up. Too big. Too expensive. I think I’ve never seen a proper 5.1 system anywhere outside theaters and my crib in Paris.

It seems like game audio didn’t get the memo, new versions of new tools aim at surround systems and high end that almost doesn’t exist.

Good thing is, we don’t need crazy surround systems to make better game audio. The priority over highly technical stuff has hit a threshold, what we need now is way more diversity musically and sonically as well as more interactivity and responsiveness to what players do. Headphones, tablet speakers and soundbars are fine for that.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the cause of violence is ourselves in the first place.“ says a Gamasutra comment.

Exactly. That’s why the game industry needs to look at itself and deal -internally- with the fact that we build violent entertainment. Of course there’s no correlation with murders per se, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that we participate into that violent culture, and that we are the most efficient medium at it.

So everything goes wrong. Publishers and lobbies meet with the president when they shouldn’t have (hey US government, how about you meet with gun manufacturers and enforce some shit on them) game developers are not a majority to think that maybe we should think a bit more about the cultural impact we make with our games. Meanwhile, more tax dollars spent on useless “research” that is going to do nothing.

Frustrating.

If you own a Jazz Bass, you’re pretty much set for life in the bass department.

You see, in the audio world we are used to things that last. Technologically once we achieve something, we don’t change it.

A hundred years ago a company invented the microphone, allowing us to record anything, we pretty much never changed it.

Thirty years ago a company invented MIDI, allowing us to control instruments via data, we pretty much never changed it.

Seventeen years ago a company invented the Virtual Studio Technology format (VST), allowing us to have perfect clones of real world instruments. Guess what? We pretty much never changed it.

The VST format is beautiful: you can download the SDK, can build whatever you want with it, distribute it as you want. If you sell your plugin, you need to pay Steinberg back. It is supported in every single audio app on Windows and others, completely and it happened really fast (we still have issues to create and modify Adobe’s PDFs in 2013 ffs). The ease of use is awesome: just drop a .dll in a folder and you’re done. Want to use another sequencer? Just redirect the plugin path to your VST folder.

Imagine if it had been like that with Max, Maya, Toshop, Flash since 2000. That’s right.

So that’s why to me going full open source open format is not so obvious: if companies are not acting like a bunch of dicks, things are smooth. After all, they are people too.

There’s a very nice thing about a format owned by a company or a consortium, its stability (3 versions of the VST format in almost 20 years). No fork, no weird stuff compromising and breaking apps legacy because someone just started to see the Light, none of that. The bad part with companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google or Apple is they break/close stuff and don’t give a shit (probably because they’re so big). That’s why a lot of people believe that we can’t trust companies to do it right.

But some like Steinberg or Flickr do, and we all benefit in the fairest ways possible. I wish Nintendo would share their 3D camera system in a SDK like Steinberg does with its VST interface. Game developers would spend time on more important stuff and know that moving the character around would be perfect on day one. Quality goes up. Nintendo gets royalties if the game sells. Developers and enthusiasts can use it for free. Everybody wins.

Let’s go back for a moment. The Wii introduced and made this thing successful:

Non-hardcore gamers were delighted. It was easy. My own parents who never wanted to use the classic gamepad, played.

Then we got this:

Non-hardcore gamers were delighted. It was easy.

Then this:

Non-hardcore gamers liked it, kids loved it it was easy but a bit early and awkward: no physical feedback on moves will always feel weird even if full body control is neat.

We are now completely going the opposite way.

i

Controllers-that-only-hardcore-gamers-like everywhere: Wii U, Android consoles, this Nvidia thingy. Because hardcore gamers spend ten times more money, it makes sense to appeal to them.

Competing for the same small crowd with more competitors though, doesn’t. Nintendo/Sony/MS bleed money to stay in the race, with “free” competition from manufacturers and “easy” multiplatform from developers, it’s going to be pointless for everyone.

It’s pretty simple: touch is for everyone, gamepads are for hardcore gamers, keyboard and mouse are for both. Developers should keep that in mind and as I always say, aim for the PC/tablet where you can have every kind of input.

I don’t think having multiple $100, $200 boxes doing one thing is going to be the best deal compared to having a big PC and a tablet on which everything is compatible, even the past (I still can play my games from ‘85 on Windows 8). We don’t think so much about it now but legacy support is becoming incredibly important, culturally speaking.

As Electronic Arts prepared to market Medal of Honor Warfighter, the latest version of its top-selling video game released in October, it created a Web site that promoted the manufacturers of the guns, knives and combat-style gear depicted in the game.

NYT.

I’m just saying and I’m going to go with one example,

Call of Duty makes a billion dollars of revenue every year. Hundreds of dudes and dudettes but mostly dudes line up when one of the main Activision franchise comes out. This core target of young males spends time online sharing a lot of interest in guns through discussions about the game or real life weapons. Guns that are accurately modeled and simulated by armies of engineers, sound designers and 3D artists. 40 million monthly active players. in 2011 alone, 21 new “First Person Shooter” games. The army itself uses them for training.

We game developers can’t disengage our responsibilities with the old freedom of speech trick while we know how powerful learning tools games are. We can’t say games build skills and then say of realistic shooters that no, they’re just “for fun”. Imagine 40 million players playing Sim City trying out solutions to make our lives in cities better.

If shootings are so wrong and we want to fix that problem, everybody should get onboard and be ready to change. Game industry included.