h. Play

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.