Category: Audio&Games

Netflix proves the point for MS buying Acti-Blizz; if you don’t own fantastic content, you won’t last.

Netflix knew this and has been cranking up production for years now. But nothing has come close to movies or TV shows that were developed for YEARS. It’s not just about production money and 4K cameras. Now Netflix is raising their prices and losing shows they don’t own. Netflix is feeling the heat in 2022.

Disney knew this. Just their Pixar catalog alone is able to convince me to pay for their subscription service. HBO knows this too and that’s why they don’t want people to binge their stuff. They want people to respect that content, rightfully so.

You need genuine, good, not-specifically-designed-to-chart content for your platforms. Period.

Microsoft knows this too and I would even argue that the reason they dropped the mobile market is to go after juicy content —from Minecraft to Zenimax— while not getting sued for monopoly. Owning content over controlling hardware >>>>

It’s all about who has rich, tasty, prone to spin-off IPs. Nintendo knows this too.

Interestingly, it’s always been like that. The thing is creating those premium IPs is still random, costly sorcery so, it’s easier to buy them.

Dang.

For the people in the back who don’t read about the history of video games, and who don’t understand why Bobby Kotick is still there, here’s a  hint (and more here):

“How could the business press not love him? He turned a $440,000 investment into a $4.5 billion company in 25 years.”

And just sold it for $70 billion. Activision filed for bankruptcy in 1991 with Bobby at the top. Of COURSE business people love that man. He’s been excellent at his job.

Now yes, I know. But when we’re talking about money and that amount, you  already know that characters and toxic culture don’t matter then. Look at Apple.

Anyway, on the Microsoft side, wow. They’re not joking around and it makes sense: the only way for game subscriptions to work is to have so many lucrative IPs that whatever happens, —a game being a complete financial bust— nothing can really go down. It’s simply too big.

I think by buying Blizzard they just achieved that. That Game Pass thing just became ultra attractive to many.

But even bigger is the fact that they own eyeballs, metaverse-ready kids: from Minecraft to Spyro to Call of Duty to Doom and Halo, with a plethora of indie games on the side and Candy Crush with mom? All for one subscription? For any device?

No one will leave that MS Metaverse. It’s too good of a deal.

Great article on Street Fighter II’s low level audio.

Trivia: How does Street Fighter accelerates playback speed when a round situation becomes critical (contestant low health). It doesn’t. These are hard-coded separate music tracks.

My whole life I thought SFII audio engine being “MIDI”-based meant that they could simply increase the tempo/accelerate playback for the low health part.

*pikachu face*

On the other hand, it totally makes sense: tons of stuff are hard-coded in games. Tons.

The bottom line in game development is always, if you can make it a dumb asset instead of using precious CPU cycles to do your thing, please fucking do so.

The light grey is where you operate; green, where you spawn, red, what you aim/protect.

THIS MAP RIGHT HERE SIR

It’s called Dust II. It’s one of the most amazing piece of architecture in games. Designed by David Johnston, released in 2001, it basically never changed.

That’s ridiculous.

To make one of the most perfectly balanced video game map ever made, played by millions, recording billions of hours on it, still one of the favorite of professional players???? And he ACED it on the first try???? And he made it for FREE????

dlfkjgldfksjgldfkjgsdfigozj I can’t.

2000s internet culture was giving left and right.

(Counter-Strike, my review)

I was looking at John Carmack’s Meta Connect keynote and in his notes, talking about VR, he has this:

-Customization for left-handed players

YASSSS PLEASE OMGWTFBBQ

Developers have completely dropped the ball on us lefties. Outside OG games like Counter Strike, there are no first person action game that respects lefties by giving us the option to switch to our favorite hand.

None.

Could a game service have my lefty settings saved so that every new first person action game would be left-handed for me? Because I will never be right-handed in my life. It sure is a basic, probably trivial thing to do, right?

It has never been done to this day. To this day!

Software engineers will just “you’re the minority so you don’t exist” themselves out of working on not so fancy challenges that are really important, like accessibility.

Left-handedness is an accessibility challenge and it’s non-negotiable in VR: it has to exist, and be good. Which means it has to be taken holistically. John Carmack being on the case sure makes me feel hopeful.

It should have been integrated as an option in games fifteen years ago at least, though.

My good friend Richard has a book out!

Learn how to achieve a happier and healthier game development process by connecting the creative aspects of game design with techniques for effective project management.

Award-winning game designer Richard Lemarchand (Uncharted series) shares lessons he’s learned over the course of his 20+ year career creating videogames. This book covers the videogame production process from start to finish, giving the reader strategies to plan appropriately and avoid the uncontrolled overwork known as “crunch”.

Game design is at the forefront of production, any production. Game development is so convoluted and almost unique each time a game is created that processes to achieve a vision while not dying doing so, are very much appreciated!  Those resources are rare.

Richard has the knowledge, experience and talent to write it all down and I can’t wait to read it.

You can preorder here.

“Rest assured, you will have it before Christmas.”

I was relieved. I had never been anxious about buying something in advance because I had never done it before. But this time, I had no choice.

To get the Nintendo Wii for my little sister, I had to be aggressive on my buying intent. Determined, I had entered the store on a preorder MISSION.

The Wii. 2006.

Man, it was c r a z y.

I’m not sure I can remember a bigger, worldwide online hype for anything before. Nintendo had done a master class in marketing here. If I remember correctly, they only had had a teaser about the new controller, but basically nothing else. At that time, I was working on a Wii game and a friend was gameplay programmer on it. I had had access to “project Revolution” six months prior to its official sale.

I miss the Wii. I miss its controllers. I miss our collective imagination around what those controllers could do (narrator: sadly, not much). I miss the ability to play with both hands with the width I want.

The core concept –all about gameplay, and to hell with HD- was _very_ refreshing. We just had basically spent 15 years running after the latest tech. More CPUs. More 3D. More esoteric words that don’t mean that the game will be fun. The Wii (and the DS) just dragon punched the hell out of this paradigm.

The music. How my god, the Wii channel and Wii Sports. It was so addicting and so chill. Everything said “just have fun, and relax”.

I had never played video games with my parents before, and I never played video games with my parents after. The Wii was that much of a change. In six years, they sold 100 million of those. This is still Nintendo’s best-selling machine ever and one of the fastest selling tech product ever.

The console was supposed to play older Nintendo games, was going to change how we make games, making games for a broader audience, etc. Unfortunately, those points rapidly fell off the cliff of reality: half-baked features, the Wii being just a little too underpowered for many games that could have been ported to, the buying power of the core 18-30 dudes market. All those variables eventually came back to bite Nintendo in the butt.

But before that? I saw the ocean. I saw it. It was amazing. Thank you, Mr. Iwata (president of Nintendo at the time, who pushed for a broader video game landscape, and passed away in 2015)

Filfre.net writing about Another World, a very famous vintage French game: The French creative aesthetic has always been a bit different from that of English-speaking nations. In their paintings, films, even furniture, the French often discard the stodgy literalism that is so characteristic of Anglo art in favor of something more attenuated, where impression becomes more important than objective reality.

There’s nothing better in terms of impression than Moebius, who I grew up reading.

dat scale tho; you can imagine a million things just looking at this

*what’s in the fucking box meme*

I read this short story a million times over (called sur l’étoile, “on the star”)

The kind of impressionist, surrealist AF type of 80s European comics

Not only he influenced countless creatives, Moebius is basically the father of cyberpunk: in 1975 he draw the biggest cyberpunk influence ever, a short story called The Long Tomorrow. It’s a classic police story but happening in the future. The fruit of Dan O’Bannon writing and Moebius’ imagination, it influenced absolutely everyone from Blade Runner to Akira to Cyberpunk 2077.

There’s a game that just came out called Sable (sand in French).

Jean Giraud called, he wants his Peugeot 103SP back

Yes it moves like a video game and it looks like a comic

Oh yeah, Sable’s developer is English. They needed that French touch though!

(you can borrow Moebius stuff at your local library, and you should)

It’s a perfect example of the perfect storm of history, technology and lack of understanding that there’s no middle class anymore.

Historically, sound is king in the theater. So sound engineers always aimed to reproduce that experience. Because theaters are acoustically far different from standard living rooms, it never made any sense except on paper: let’s try to give folks the best sonic experience. Except that before 00s, everything was standardized through analog technology and sound was fine: you could listen to movies and hear everything perfectly fine even on a mono, 13 inches TV.

Technology showed up. DVD players —finally the TRUE movie experience is at home—, surround sound systems exploded in popularity while movie sets and production transitioned to fully digital.

This is where and when sound became a second thought. Too low? Now people have digital devices, they can crank up the volume at three different levels, let’s not bother. Too loud? Well, it’s loud because you’re using a cheap or not-calibrated 5.1 system and you should be happy about shaking your room! Cinema at home, yay!

No. People are trying to enjoy a movie and shaking the room with basses or filling the room with whispers is not necessary better for the experience. If they wanted that, they’d go to that thing called movie theater.

Broadcast loudness standards are too many: standard TV, movies, US/Europe, Netflix, Amazon. Everyone has a different one or with enough variations that the standard isn’t standard. Why? Because it’s easy to re-calibrate digital audio and do your own recipe, compared to the analog days where you didn’t have non-destructive edit options. So everyone is trying to impose their shit.

That digital edit easiness has permeated video as well: they edit shows as if you were watching them in a dark, movie theater, which is why you need to play with brightness on TV too now. Because the digital panel making your TV really is showing black when it’s supposed to be black: pre-2000 tech didn’t allow you to have perfect black. Yes, perfect tech can be a problem because our senses are variables and differ from one individual to another.

But also, middle class. Producers look at market research that says “well, people bought a lot of surround systems”. And that’s it, they aim that. The reality is that no one really uses surround systems. And hasn’t in the past 20 years. People bought one system, saw that it was annoying, are back to TV speakers usually with a soundbar (which is another level of craziness in terms of sound reproduction because of all those dumb ass DSPs but anyways). The idea that a decent amount of folks use 5.1 systems is a total myth.

People most likely watch shows in good old stereo, through speakers or headphones, aka there’s no need for the movie theater sound mixing paradigm. Just balance dialog, music and effects, you’re done. Don’t try to add so much dynamic (dynamic being the difference between the softest sound and the loudest: the bigger the difference, the better). It’s like artificial dramatization, it’s kind of weird.

Which makes me think that it might be the issue here: there’s just too much entertainment, and people producing it don’t have the experience/knowledge to create “stand-alone” stuff and rely on tricks: dramatization of sound, ultra slow meetings between characters while nothing happens for fucking 10 minutes, very long  and complacent shots etc.

The game finally came out and looks like it’s really good? I really enjoyed the first one, even through its flaws.

I love that character design.

Anyway, Tim Schafer and his team are always on point with universes. He’s a beast at curating them. I was reading on Full Throttle recently, remembering how much I wanted so much more from that weird and interesting setting.

Grim Fandango still sits right up there in terms of originality that just immediately works. That’s hard to pull off and Grim is so unique. Absolutely needs a sequel as well.

Congrats to DoubleFine, the entire team (we love you QA), the contractors and everyone involved. Thank you!