Basically

By seeing this funny picture on the internet I couldn’t help but think about something Roberta Williams said more than 10 years ago:

Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, than they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn’t watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn’t quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one.

Which is a good thing. For some people it might feel like a loss of power but technology needs to spread out over the world to really make a difference and spread the computer entertainment as another source of joy along with music movies books and tv.

The problem was not about more people accessing computers and consoles. The problem was that for economical and technology reasons since the 90s, the game industry suffered extreme genre-ification. Which was also ok on the social aspect of games because people love to put things in boxes (think music styles). The genre-ification pushed certain game design rules that are always the same since then, just getting better at maintaining the player in the game. The graphic sausage fest did the rest to keep eyes off the fact that we can do something more compelling than just a dumb car simulator or a dumb war simulator. For the 1000th time.

Interestingly though, since more than ten years consumers, gamers are getting more and more confident with interfaces, menus and interactiveness: WoW, Internet, Facebook, Nintendo DS, smartphones, you name it.

So saying that people need simplicity because the majority of them are dumb and bored people with boring jobs is not only disrespectful, it’s simply not true. People are getting better at everything, all the time.

People like to learn, it’s a core part of the brain, it’s the natural high we experiment since we’re starting to not poop in our pants and feeling good about it. Games are about learning, that’s where everything is going on. In the 80s early 90s games were awesome because of that, there was a huge variety of games and you had to spend some time to understand and enjoy them, would it be an adventure game on PC or a shoot’em up on console or MechWarrior II. You had to learn how it works and enjoy it. The time to learn didn’t matter, it could be fast with an arcade game or awfully long with a flight simulator but you were always learning something on your own. The only problem with these games was that penalties were usually not cool (die all the time). But that’s not why we were playing these games over and over, trying new things, experimenting. It was because they were open to you to express your smart ass on how to solve this problem in the game would it be a puzzle a boss battle etc

Today’s big games don’t want you to learn. They want you to “have fun” and control it tightly (linearity and achievements). But having fun is after the learning part, it’s when you feel that you groked enough to be able to look back and think “yeah, this is fun” right? It means you understood. For me that’s why so many games feel shallow. You don’t learn on your own you’re now at school, waiting for grades and told that you cannot run in the hallway. How lame.

I regret that you can’t learn to get better at a game by understanding concepts or paradigms by simply entering a new world after launching it. These days, it’s so rare.

It works, it worked. But also I’m sure it would work because people are not stupid. More in the next post.

The business of music games is unsustainable and it’s not really because of the high price of devices or sort of shrinkage of the market. It’s because dealing with music –I mean rights to use it and so worth- is insane, truly insane.

Axl Rose is suing Activision even though I’m sure that the publisher legal/licensing lawyer team did everything they could so that it doesn’t happen. Fail. Not that they’re not qualified but because it’s pure madness and that at the end, the artist/rights owner has the last word.

Rock Band is facing that too. You would have thought that Rock Band 3 track list would be amazing when it’s actually quite limited. The Beatles Rock Band has been an insane amount of work for just one fucking band. And it didn’t even sell well despite one of the biggest marketing campaign ever for a game.

Dance Central has the same problem. If they want to get Michael/Janet Jackson stuff which are kind of the Beatles of dance, Harmonix will have to work not on the game but on legal issues and boring stuff like that. I bet the Jackson family is no joke to deal with.

The only thing they could do would be to use music people don’t know. You know, really go out there and discovering good songs and bands but of course, it’s hard AND people want to play songs they love. But in terms of rights, it would be much more easier to make deals. But maybe the gameplay is not that deep and really requires the “Look! I am so Slash with my plastic axe” to achieve pleasure.

But in general the music business is unbelievable. 

Why the more user threatening region locked online services are always about music? Look at Spotify, losing money despite a business model and revenues. Why the music business is so paranoid and never respected its customers since people stopped buying vinyls? They sue people downloading music, customers for millions of dollars. They screw any streaming service with licensing fees, one by one. A decade after the p2p revolution, they still do it despite that it absolutely fails to stop anything.

They screamed with the tape recording thing and then fucked us hard with insane CDs prices (cost of CD always has been extremely low for them).

They screamed with Napster and then fucked us hard with insane file prices (cost of mp3 storage, hahahahaha).

The music business is just greedy as hell and deserves to bleed. Natural selection style.

Then probably music games will come back, stronger than ever. Because Music is one of the most intense play in Life.

I have a hard time dealing with or can’t stand

Voice over

“Shooryuu-ken!”

It’s probably because I’ve been behind the scene watching and recording uninspired actors (hey it’s really hard to act without nothing but a few notes and pictures) who don’t give a shit about games but still. Scripts usually are ridiculously corny and phony and what is considered good (GTA IV, Uncharted) is not that great in the real world of screenplays. I hate all of the moments in Half Life 2 where NPCs talk to you. It feels so artificial, forced even if it’s well executed. I really prefer sound effects with voices, ala Arcade (Torchlight’s “Your pet, is overburdened”) and light text I can quickly skip. Is it wrong wanting to play when you’re playing a game? Right.

Japanese RPGs

It just feels archaic to me. I mean, always felt this way.

Talking about text. I just don’t understand how players can bear all these text boxes everywhere, all the time and move around with a goddamn gamepad. It’s just totally getting the fun out for me. I feel it as totally disrespectful. I admire people who can deal with it for dozens of hours for the sake of a cheesy romantic story and a sense of power. Or do I?

Grinding

Persistence wins but persistence for persistence is not a goal.

I waited for a well crafted action RPG game like Torchlight to get into it and try it at least, even if I saw so many souls lost clicking forever and beyond in Blizzard’s crack cocaine games. I don’t like the grind because I feel quickly bored after having a system in the system (dungeons, selling, enhance, repeat). Also, I feel cheated or artificially maintained in scarcity. The grind is so present in games today it’s… Depressing. I know it’s also useful but still. I have enough to deal with in real life, thanks.

3D third person view

Makes me want to stab him in the neck.

3D. Because in bitmap I don’t know, it’s fine. I already said it, I hate it. A nightmare for developers because gamers will always say that it’s not good (I only see Mario/Zelda as pretty much perfect), a nightmare for gamers because somehow in the game they will lose because of the freaking camera. The use of TPV is useful for sports games and simulation/race games but otherwise, it seems lame to me.

Stories

Some artwork is enough for me to create some theme and make me believe.

Don’t get me wrong, as a human being I love stories. I freaking love a good story. I don’t have any movie I like better than the Cohen brothers ones and they’re always pretty simple but how characters, lines and editing are unfolding the plot is pure awesome. But in games, oh boy. Unfolding a shitty and painful I’m-taking-myself-way-too-seriously story every time I stop playing –cutscene-, is totally useless in term of game experience. Serialized coitus interruptus, worst design ever.

Platform

The Mickey of the last 30 years, Mario.

OK, I’m pretty bad at them, always been (I’m pretty good at shoot’em up). I know that the genre is really part of the culture. But even with new nifty mechanics like in Braid or VVVVVV, there’s something utterly boring about playing a “new” platform game that I’ve been playing every year since I play computer games. If people are tired of FPS they should be from platform games too because seriously.

That doesn’t leave me with a lot of choice out there but I have enough nonetheless.

You?

Because industry analyses certainly suck.

Nintendo

The river of money is over. After selling loads of Wii and DS, they announced the 3DS so that everybody can forget about a new console for the living room. They’re screwed with their prices: the simple Nintendo DS is still 129 bucks and they can’t lower their prices on everything, that would badly cut their profits and send a message that they’re sweating. They still don’t sell colored Wii with the new wiimotionplus-ed wiimote. And the 3DS is going to be expensive while only Nintendo is going to make the 3D screen something awesome. People won’t jump on it. There’s competition in this price range of mobile game devices to which we can add the Apple, Windows Phone 7 Android combo and maybe Playstation Phone too by the time the 3DS is available.

Sony

Still losing blood. People wanting to have motion control in the living room already have a Wii. Others don’t really care. I mean Sony is communicating on shipped numbers (as usual) and “consumer purchase intent” being better than it was before. How weak is that. You see, if you start from 0 and sales go to 1, that’s an increase of 100%. But it’s actually still shitty. The big problem is they don’t have any big title for the Move or even for the PS3. They have nothing for the end of the year and are barely getting out of the red financially. The PS3 is IMO, since the first announcements, the biggest entertainment product failure ever seen. They failed everybody in the chain. Sad.

Microsoft

On the roll. Whatever you think about the Kinect, it’s the next step: after having stuff in your hands, how about having nothing? MS gets the technology edge with their product and unlike Sony, they have a killer app: Dance Central. They’re also selling the new 360 stealth like hot cakes (I wonder the detailed sales with women and minorities) here in the US and the 360 has the widest catalog of games hands down. Oh and on the mobile front, WP7 is out, works well and games on WP7 phones are already way better than their counterpart on Android (who’s the big thing these days). And Live integration. And XNA. I mean, they have something absolutely huge in their hands and it’s called Momentum.

This end of the year probably will not escape Redmond giant’s supremacy.

So I guess you read the big three stories of the week: EA’s Steven Spielberg game LMNO canceled, The Fall of Realtime Worlds and Keiji Inafune’s departure from Capcom.

Some excerpts that made me jump in my head.

Keiji talks the truth and explains what a lot of folks are experimenting in the game industry outside Japan too. It’s just that in the west, Keiji wouldn’t have been able to do it for 23 years. He would have been fired for fail project and big mouth.

4G: However, although there were many problems, it’s worked out until very recently. Why do you think that things have changed so suddenly?

KI: It’s because there was no competition before. For example, in the game industry 20 years ago, no matter what kind of game you made, you could sell 200 or 300 thousand copies. If you even made a decent game, it’d sell 500 thousand or a million copies. But those days are over.

That’s true. The game industry was very local. during the 80s/90s. Japan, Europe, USA each with its own games, own devices and developers. When the console invasion began, we thought that Japan was full of awesome games except that we received the crème de la crème: with MAME today I can tell how much all these Japanese clones were damn shitty. but they were making money there. After that the game industry became much more a worldwide affair, it changed everything.

4G: What was the most recent internally-produced hit?

KI: That’d be Biohazard 5, two years ago. That also took 150 people. This year, it’s mostly external. Street Fighter IV was external. Monster Hunter Diary: Poka-Poka Island Village, which sold half a million, was external. Dead Rising is also external.

Shit. I knew Japanese game companies were outsourcing heavily (Nintendo does a few of them in-house like Mario, Miyamoto’s projects and Zelda) but I didn’t suspect Capcom to outsource their main IP, Street Fighter. I think the success of games produced outside Japan but managed by Japanese shows their strong experience and game culture.

I’d like to hear more about that.

4G: So it’s not just a problem of money, but it’s that sense of making advances that’s totally different.

KI: Right. People even on the bottom level are working as hard as they can to advance. For western developers, everyone at the director level gets their own office, an object of envy. Everyone says, "I want my own office, too." That kind of hungry attitude leads to going in good directions, so that’s why I love western developers.

4G: So what are the cons of using western developers?

KI: First, you can’t just leave them alone. Even with technical skills, they often lack adequate ideas and concepts for utilizing those skills. That’s exactly why I’m such a good match for them. (laughs)

It’s interesting to see a Japanese view on us. Very refreshing.

4G: People have tended to interpret that as you abandoning Japan in favor of making titles for the global market.

KI: That’s not true. (laughs) As long as I’m Japanese, the games I make will all be Japanese games. So when they sell globally, that’s helping to save the Japanese game industry. It’s not a matter of selling games in Japan for Japan or selling games in America for America. Dead Rising is a Japanese game made in Canada. It’s not a western game.

4G: What you’re saying, though, might be interpreted as western game supremacism.

KI: At the very least, western games are more fun. Using my previous analogy, European soccer is far above Japan’s. You can’t beat Spain on willpower alone. So what we have to do is know Spanish soccer, French soccer, English soccer, and so on. If I say that, people will say, "Inafune-san watches nothing but European soccer." The point is, it’s necessary to recognize our faults and learn from western developers.
Pride in Japanese game making won’t die out so easily, however. Japanese people can make great things when they work together. Because I love Japan, I don’t want it to lose to America and Europe. If I didn’t care about Japan, I would just leave.

I wished something like pride would have made French game developers not go to Canada in these huge game developers farms ten years ago… I really felt like Keiji is saying: I didn’t see why I’d move to do something I could do in my country that you know, I love. sigh

The 5-years EA debacle over an extremely ambitious project that might make you cry? According to 1up,

The idea was ballsy and complicated — a mix of first-person parkour movement with adventure/RPG objectives and escape-focused gameplay, all based around the player’s relationship with an alien-looking character named Eve.

For me just looking at that, I’d say ditch the alien-looking sidekick BS! The first part is already utterly complicated to deliver (Mirror’s Edge showed the potential but failed because of a certain lack of variety for a single player game). But of course, it’s EA, they have an excellent game designer named Doug Church and Steven Spielberg so they can do it. sigh

"The point of LMNO was to basically take all the AI that would go into a normal Sims title, and compress that down into one character that could learn and remember and change the way you play the game on the fly, and not be totally scripted," says another former team member.

How people are going to tell the difference? What is the crazy amount of solutions that an AI needs to solve in a game where you’re escaping (find an exit and ??)? Do you really need a super AI for that? No way.. And I don’t see anything where I could cry with that.

The spoiler was, as the game went on, players would discover that Eve wasn’t actually an alien but an evolved human from thousands of years in the future who had traveled back through time.

Oh I’ve been lied to, I’m so excited! Also, what a plot!

"Because basically, here they are. We’re working on a game with some similar mechanics, but we’ve got Spielberg. And so if [EA is] going to cancel a game, which one would it be? It would probably be them. So they were a little concerned. And we wanted to be like, ‘Well let’s, you know, share some code.’ And they were like, ‘Ah, yeah I don’t know.’ [Laughs] They were a little more nervous about it."

EA should have merge teams working on the same mechanics and do another game around the super AI sidekick that make you cry.

You could play it for quite awhile and do a bunch of different things. The difficulty we were having was we were trying to coalesce all those different systems into like, ‘Here’s five minutes of play that’s representative.’ When you can do so many things, it’s hard to say ‘that’s representative.’"

You can talk about the “infinity” of experiences and do some video editing showing some scene done and redone differently. Of course it needs to be exciting. 10 different ways to open a door is
useless and doesn’t make opening a door less boring.

At this point, though, every EA employee named in this story has left the company.

Disgusted, I guess. Working hard on something  ambitious with money, skills, great environment for years only to go nowhere…WTF.

Realtime Worlds APB is sad and makes me angry because, it was totally predictable. When I saw how much they were showing artworks and the customization system, I could tell that the game would be shitty. If you don’t rely on true gameplay to present your game at events, you fail.

"But at Realtime it was like, ‘Wow, they’ve got a pool table!’ And the building itself was impressive. And they were really good to us. Even the QA positions were six month contracts. I was talking to family who warned me that it was still a little bit unstable, but it beat the zero hour contracts by a mile."

When Keiji talks about western slave game developers, he talks about people like that. Being sold on pool table and building, I know what’s like I’ve slightly been there too. It’s manipulation to make you work on passion and being badly paid. Classic but not classy.

RTW had secured a huge $101 million in venture capital

Spent. Now no one is going to lend us money, game developers.

"Not at all. At the end of the day, the feedback was there, it was recognized," says Bateman. "But whether it was due to management, time, money, whatever it was, they just didn’t get implemented.

What’s the point to get the feedback and not use it to improve a complex game like a pseudo MMO? I fucking don’t get it.

But the writing was on the wall. Each of RTW’s many offices boasted monitors streaming live player figures direct from the servers. At any time, the company’s employees could glance up and see APB’s failure written in cold, dispassionate numbers on a graph. It was a constant reminder that simply not enough people were buying and playing the game.

I can only imagine how soul crushing it must be…

In total, 157 staff were to be made redundant. "They essentially said, ‘Here are the 50 people that we want to keep on. Please go to room X,’" recalls Bateman. "It was tough."

I guess when you know that there was 100 millions on the table, that the feedback to do a better game was not implemented and that you’re laid off with no paycheck, you must be effing mad.

It wasn’t nice at all. The layoffs ripped a hole in both the town of Dundee and the lives of those affected. Over 60 per cent of RTW staff had relocated to Scotland. Suddenly cut adrift, families and individuals were left without work and had little hope of receiving either wages or redundancy pay. For them, it was catastrophic.

For Bateman and his friends the only answer was to drink. A lot. So that’s exactly what they did, drowning their sorrows until the early hours. "It’s what we all needed to do, to consolidate, recover. We got absolutely twatted."

No wonder why people stay less than 10 years in the industry with shit like that happening more than often.

The question is when are we going to learn?

So we’re at last escaping the dirty world of retail, embracing freedom of distribution and the walled garden trend of app stores is already strong on our ass to make us again some kind of slaves.

Fuck it. No, I don’t want that. I understand it for mobile devices, for convenience of use. But on a computer, never.

Thanks to the digital distribution freedom of today, users and services are growing up. There are digital stores and there will be more. The distribution with the web is easy, from Linux (packages) to Windows (ClickOnce) nobody can say that it’s complicated to install a new game or a new app on a computer today (while consoles are now far from the plug and play of the 8/16 bits generations). There’s 11 million people updating WoW without problem, people who don’t understand how it works but are able to click an icon and at worse a few menus.

What I hate the most is that this trend tries to really make believe that users are stupid, when they’re not. They learn everyday, they get better and it’s kind of disrespectful to claim “here stupid, your top 10 apps you should get; don’t install anything from the evil outside. It’s warm and sedated here don’t move”. While for developers dealing with that store thing is much worse:

• Lose of freedom.
• 30% cut on profits.
• Back to the Hit or Miss broken and unsustainable business model (it succeeds yes, for a really small amount of people). Be smart, don’t go this way…

People want and love convenience, yes. It’s happening without trading it against all of the above! Why would developers or users be happy with walled garden sprouting like venomous mushrooms?

Hell I’m sure not.

Olivier made me think about the things that make a game get out of the pack, with some sort of passive marketing as I call that.

Minecraft comes from Sweden and if there’s something consistent from North Europe is that indie game developers know how to talk to people and stand out with their game, meaning by the execution and/or theme. From Petri Purho who constantly pushes prototypes with perfect-matching music and sfxs –that adds a LOT to the polishing- to Erik Svedang and his very personal vision of visuals and themes, to the dudes from Secret Exit (Zen Bound’s fame) and their physic-based gameplay to Cactus etc

You’re the same. Your ideas are not better. But be consistent and different.

It’s something I really pay attention to because I’ve always been attracted to everything different and the good thing about it for a product is that it serves as a true and sincere marketing –if done right-, which is pretty much the only one that can work especially with carefully crafted products like computer games.

If you look at the output from North Europe you can see that even if there’s no “marketing campaign”, games have a lot of good things in common.

• A good sounding, attractive and “making sense” name: I know it’s kind of weird but think about it: before even play or see a game, you often hear or read about it. It has to be attractive, it has to feel natural, it has to be special. Kometen, Blueberry Garden, Zen Bound. Sounds like classics, like Mario or Sonic. Minecraft has been the result of a brainstorming on irc and people came up with this name which I find great because it feels like it always has been around. It feels like a huge classic thanks to the craft part (World of War…). It doesn’t feel uncomfortable like Tidalis, it doesn’t sound too generic ala Alien Breed… It’s important.
• A clear, consistent AudioVisual view of it: I still don’t understand how something that obvious is still an issue with gamedev peeps but let’s say it another time: there must be something going on between the visuals and the audio, something must happen between them, something that sparkles some kind of magic. Like Bioshock or Killer7 or the eternal Mario to YouHaveToBurnTheRope. The AudioVisual sandwich is wrong. The AudioVisual sauce is good. Always been the case.
• Near-perfect execution: never had any problem with enjoyable Petri’s prototypes. Any game that fucks up my computer is really not welcome and despite that it’s hard to get to the non-crash state for small games, it’s required. It’s not about technical excellence jerk off, it’s about respect to the player, the buyer.
• All of that must fit with a gameplay or a mix of gameplay. That’s a pretty big question because there are so many solutions! I see Minecraft as a really good example of that: the 8bits 3D representation stands out and makes the first person view (attractive feature for me) an original one, it fits the old school RPG part (not that much an attractive feature for me) and talks to the old school Japanese RPG crowd so hard. The 8bits 3D adds some originality with the physics of the world which attracts YouTube viewers… I have hard times to believe that the developer didn’t think a little bit about all that. Either way, it works because it attracts different people and keeps them around the game. And because of the very low tech, adding new content is simplified to the max and not that limited (remember, limitation helps innovation). That’s a big achievement and it all comes down to a smart mix of things that are pretty standard (first-person, rpg, 8bits).

So all of that is embedded in the game development, it’s not on the side or later, it’s now, in the process of building a game, from the start. These points are not that much about the game or you but about the relationship with the player, about attracting him and make him play. Not in a casino way of course :-)

Anyway the game that does all that well then stands out by itself, even before being actually played. Whatever the first contact you have with the game, hearing about it, reading about it, watching it or listening to it, It is already exciting. and dear game developers that is not like an option or a plus. It’s a requirement.

That’s marketing, that’s PR embedded in the game development. That’s what we need and way too often lack in the US and France on small projects. You might argue “Wait, that’s what AAA games do, we’re indie and stuff ,we can’t do that!”.

I don’t care who does it or how “indie” it is, it’s just required to stand out and make some bucks for what I see… That’s the needed “find its way” part.

Ultimately, ship your game too. Fez did it all right but there’s one more thing to be careful of: being on the right time. In a world of over-tutorialized and rigid-like-a-stick games, Minecraft’s freedom and randomness are also part of its appeal and success. That was a good time to appear. For Polytron’s game it’s difficult to say now…

You certainly have heard of Minecraft. The game is in alpha, it’s made by one main developer with the help of some people.

As a description, it’s a world-building game mixed with a rpg system through a first person view. The world is huge and randomized.

The world is mine

The website is telling us nothing special, the YouTube video just makes you think “what the hell is this shit”.

And yet after about a year of development Minecraft racks up 250 000$-a-day of sales via Paypal. Yeah. I can’t fucking imagine that either but I’m just so happy for him, Markus Persson.

Rock, Paper Shotgun has a Minecraft diary (1 2 3 4 5) and it’s just fascinating. You can see how much a deep gameplay combined with consistent mechanics and freedom to the player is more addictive than crack.

But what really cheers me up with Minecraft’s success is that it kicks off pre-conceived ideas with hard facts:

• The personal computer is awesome. Nothing like that would have been possible on a closed platform like consoles are. And there’s a ton of free PC games out there, there’s billions of free flash games. Minecraft just didn’t care and made it through nonetheless.
• There is no such thing as a target market in games (and overall in the entertainment business, it’s been made up). Build your game with a strong vision and the market will be here, whoever they are, little girls, gay nerds, Irak vets. It doesn’t matter.
• The best Technical mantra: Minecraft works on any PC of the last five years finger in the nose (WoW anyone?). It’s a Java game. Works anywhere and beyond.
• Visually interesting and quite original while being the most rudimentary ever (8bits 3D).
• Single player is important. 
• The only channel of marketing/PR has been word of mouth. Word of mouth made this man with his little team and his Java game millionaire. Read that twice and try to find any product in the world that makes people really wealthy without them spending an insane amount of money to make that happen. I don’t know one.

Lessons learned:

• Indie game developers are concerned about getting attention for their games. But it seems that if your game is original and deep (and really, this is the hardest part here) it will find its way. Remember, Minecraft is not even finished yet! The thing is we see the market the wrong way, we see it as traditional publishing sees it: you need to make a lot of noise so that a large part of people are hearing about your product and eventually a share of them are going to buy the game. With word of mouth over the internet, it doesn’t work this way: it ramps up with people aggregating and buying from anywhere in the world, silently. It’s a discrete process, totally the opposite of what marketing/PR are doing these days: being obnoxiously in your face all the time, screaming. Trying to sell an indie game this way is not going to work. Never.
• The insane amount of resources used in games for visuals and 3D is a waste. Focus on your gameplay, more and more and again. Open your game to people early and build what they want too. Nothing better than real world beta test. I mean, we can’t stress that enough.
• Minecraft’s business model is neat: play for free in your browser, pay for the premium version that makes you able to download a client. It’s kind of scary to go this way but it doesn’t stop people to buy a copy at 10euros. As of today, 27,27% of registered users have bought the game. That’s just insane. On XBLA if the rate of players buying a game goes over 10% developers jizz in their pants. Point is: in a direct relationship like that, trust and don’t screw your users. They will do the same to you. They will buy your game. They will talk about it. They will be more fan of your game than you ever will.
• The power of communities. Reddit, a news website funnier than Digg was in 2005 mixed with an extraordinary powerful community ala 4chan (without the nsfw tag) played a big role in Minecraft’s success. Don’t go to them to sell your stuff you moron! Just focus on your game and if it’s good enough, a community, somewhere, is going to take action and spread the word. It worked well for Minecraft, the one-man Java game from Sweden. And it’s the case with every success with digital distribution and indie games.

So while people are wondering about the 3DS CPU or how the Bioshock Infinite “gameplay-rollercoaster-without-AI-lol” video is amazing, while the mobile market looks like an awful clusterfuck as the Facebook game thing, a dude from Sweden shows us that you can make some “substantial” money today with a solid Java game for browsers and PCs.

Jesus fucking Christ. Now that’s something.

I read a lot of comments about Apple’s policies and how they don’t differ from consoles manufacturers policies and how we should be ok with them because we didn’t say anything since the NES.

Well, I believe that:

• Apple’s devices are not game focused devices. They’re now claiming that it always has been the case, you know, Apple’s classic rewriting of events. Their devices are mobile computers where any software can be made and sold, even stupid ones like fart apps. The software ecosystem is wild and large like the desktop computer market. Developers always have been free to do whatever they want in an environment like that (windows/linux/osx/symbian you name it). It generates innovation. So these policies are a big step back (same with Windows Phone 7).
• Consoles are more about 25 years old and they had two advantages over computers: the gamepad and the living room. For some reason gamepads only became common on computers around 2000 and they are still tied to consoles. Computers are more and more in the living room but it’s still early. So Nintendo Sega Sony Microsoft console dictatorship over developers has been ok since 85-86.

Why do we comply nowadays even with Apple who should not do that? Besides having a game specifically thought for an input you can’t find anywhere else (Wiimote, touchscreen), which is the case for a minority of games, it’s only for lousy reasons. Gamedev peeps grew up with dreams of making their own game on the obviously awesome next Nintendo console or next Sony station or because they started on their beloved old ass Apple II, they’re doing iPhone stuff. It’s a fanboy thing. It’s  mostly a non-business made decision, sadly.

Never have been a fan of them…Lefty thing?

But  with the explosion of budgets game developers increasingly didn’t really like to work with Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony. Dealing with expensive dev kits, verifications, approvals, delays and people having absolute power over the work of a team is unproductive. Who wants to spend thousands of dollars on hardware to develop a game for a console, with a smiling manufacturer pushing your game release for the last month of the quarter or not pushing it enough in the store because it would cannibalize their product? Months, years of hard work to witness that kind of shit? Thanks but no thanks.

Even worse, today if you are a third-party developer and want to make money –at least in the classic AAA business- you have to do it multi-platform which is basically, like making a game for computers, with different configurations… Add the dictatorship hassle. To be successful on a console today is an impossible task (look at how publishers just bleed money like crazy despite using huge marketing campaign for their games). It’s ridiculous.

Now in 2010, if you’re thinking without emotions from your childhood, the platform of choice is the classic Personal Computer, like it or not. Because you have 250 millions of these sold each year. Multi-core and hundreds of stream processors, gigs of RAM and more and more similar inter-connection and architecture (laptop to TV connection as easy as a console). Digital distribution. Link sharing and its virality via emails and boards. Because game developers can use whatever the fuck they want to build a game, can use any topic and let their minds explore ideas without fearing that it’s going to be rejected by some stupid and arbitrary organization or committee. Mind you, that’s critical to make a good game or at least, get a good start at it.

So there.