{"id":1258,"date":"2011-03-17T09:58:36","date_gmt":"2011-03-17T09:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2011\/03\/divided-by-gdc-and-2011-trends\/"},"modified":"2011-03-17T09:58:36","modified_gmt":"2011-03-17T09:58:36","slug":"divided-by-gdc-and-2011-trends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2011\/03\/divided-by-gdc-and-2011-trends\/","title":{"rendered":"Divided by GDC and 2011 trends"},"content":{"rendered":"

The industry is facing the biggest crisis I\u2019ve seen since I\u2019ve been involved making games. And more, there are giant conflicts and generation problems within the crowd of game developers. I don\u2019t need to be in SFO to see it. For now it was quite always the same: games for consoles with teams of people doing crunch time.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s much more open. We know innovation comes from little team and that it\u2019s the blood of our activity. We know this generation of consoles \u2013as it was predicted back in 2004-2005- while creating a need for extra specialized people with great skills, killed thousands of jobs. There\u2019s Minecraft. There\u2019s Angry Birds. There\u2019s Steam. Facebook. It\u2019s almost overwhelming.<\/p>\n

Themes that seemed to be big.<\/p>\n

\"GDC<\/a>
Game Developer Conference. Fuck you \u201cVideo Game\u201d. Fuck you.<\/em><\/p>\n

Gamification<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t care at the end.  It\u2019s good and not good at the same time but users will see how they will feel about it. This debate is useless, people will go for it or might find at some point that will and motivation are stronger when not linked to superficial and kind of meaningless rewards. <\/p>\n

Socialization<\/strong><\/p>\n

My problem with Facebook games for now is that they\u2019re not really interesting \u2013I\u2019m trying MouseHunt, meh- and make people having boring jobs something that we, as game developers, enjoy because we can use all this time to make them click and share. Games always have been inherently social and for now, I haven\u2019t seen a game I wanted to play on Facebook. Maybe it will change but with their recent moves about in-app games or how Facebook is getting greedy by being the biggest platform in the world, we\u2019ll see. But for sure, numbers don\u2019t lie and people are playing a lot (half of the 500+ million people on the network). CityVille seems to be much better than the last generation of games. The social network as a platform is definitely interesting and a huge trend.<\/p>\n

Mobile AAAfication<\/strong><\/p>\n

Good news everyone! You\u2019re going to experience unprecedented high technology mobile games! It\u2019s not so good news for developers as the price of entry to make games for 3DS\/NGP is going to be 2 to 3 times more expensive at the very least.  Gamers can expect a shitload of ports from this generation of consoles. Not so interesting.<\/p>\n

This is where I don\u2019t get the game developers fanboism who should be damn concerned about these cost problems, especially after seeing what this generation did to us. Guys, are you blind? 17 years studio dies<\/a>, a game selling more than a million units with layoffs a few weeks later<\/a>, hello?? I\u2019m more and more amazed at the lack of maturity on the business side which is totally connected to what we do guys. Iwata had some really true words about generalist and craftsmanship gone away in the industry and the fact that so many people today are specialized makes them forget and not care about the general aspect of game development. That\u2019s not a good trend and I think game developers are in denial on this subject. <\/p>\n

Distortion of realitification<\/strong><\/p>\n

Walled garden. They smile at you, promise to make a room for you and then screw you and your work, most of the time. Ask SuperMeatBoy with MS. Ask developers working for Nintendo, Facebook or Apple. Trip Hawkins warned people about that and I still can\u2019t believe how game developers just go for the \u201cI always wanted to make my game on the last generation of machines from my favorite manufacturer of all time\u201d. <\/em>I am inclined to make games mostly for Windows not because \u201cI love Microsoft and started with a PC in 1991\u201d<\/em> but because it seems to me, as a developer, that it\u2019s where I can do whatever I want, distribute it and develop easily at about no cost. Nobody, no manufacturer, no hype machine matches that. I don\u2019t care about the aspect of fragmentation \u2013think Minecraft and stop thinking about making complicated things that are not going to work on graphic cards with pixel shaders 1.2-, ease of development, freedom of creation should be I don\u2019t know, praised! But no. Let\u2019s just let these platforms fuck us hard at some point or fill our lives with endless stress we don\u2019t need. That\u2019s how a REAL game developer does!<\/p>\n

Despite really nice successes like The Sims, Half Life, Garry\u2019s Mod, Dwarf Fortress, Bejeweled and so many others, people strike for this game that will outsell Mario and GTA combined so they become the next Miyamoto on the console of their dream. There\u2019s a ridiculous distortion of reality. For a very few games using and in need of a specific platform, a lot should be done on computers, desktops or laptops or mobile. Being platform agnostic should be the default because you should focus on your game and people playing it, FIRST. That\u2019s still too rare. Fuck.<\/p>\n

Indiefication<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the good side, a lot of great, polished games. More than ever and it\u2019s awesome. But the dark side is coming now, which is elitism. Indie has never been for me just a way to describe people who are making games professionally without publishers. Nothing more or less. But of course now it\u2019s a 1337 Club where if you haven\u2019t been coding since the age of 4 while drinking beer or doing design from a trailer park well you\u2019re just not indie at all. That\u2019s not great for the community of people making games and I\u2019m starting to see some strange tensions.<\/p>\n

Hollywoodification<\/strong><\/p>\n

Awards, red carpet etc It\u2019s good to see games getting media attention and all but it\u2019s just a way for the traditional AAA business to show off its voice-over actors and receive awards so that people can forget about quality of life issues, crunching for weeks to release a game of the year. Guys remember: everybody in the industry knows who Notch is, what he looks like and that he made Minecraft. The team behind Red Dead Redemption? Nobody knows who the fuck you are. For the same amount of work, I\u2019d rather be Notch any day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The industry is facing the biggest crisis I\u2019ve seen since I\u2019ve been involved making games. And more, there are giant conflicts and generation problems within the crowd of game developers. I don\u2019t need to be in SFO to see it. For now it was quite always the same: games for consoles with teams of people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}