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Amy Hennig: "Triple-A development an arms race that is unwinnable"

Hobo Elf

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And this is why I dodged the video game industry as a career choice. One of the best decisions I made in my life.

As a young kid I used to dream about working in the vidya industry, especially with "visionaries" like Peter Molyneux. I can't even imagine how badly my asshole woud've been blown to bits had I actually followed that path through.
 

DragoFireheart

all caps, rainbow colors, SOMETHING.
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And this is why I dodged the video game industry as a career choice. One of the best decisions I made in my life.

As a young kid I used to dream about working in the vidya industry, especially with "visionaries" like Peter Molyneux. I can't even imagine how badly my asshole woud've been blown to bits had I actually followed that path through.

I'll take the more boring ass job that pays decently over shit-slavery in the game industry.

I keep my games as hobbies and with my back log I'll never run out of stuff to play either.
 
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vonAchdorf

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You kinda talk out of your ass right? Passion is abundant and the reason this abuse works so well.
The delayed projects are usually the fault of some higher up changing his "vision" or not having a clue when to feature freeze. Or outsourcing parts of the project to random 4th world sweatshops and then having to rewrite them from scratch while management keeps sending emails reminding everyone how far behind the project is.
Or the very common one when deadlines are blurted out by someone without any information regarding the status of the project.

If you are a little cog in a machine of 1000 people producing the next Assassin's Creed, I don't really buy the passion thing for most of them. Modeling three dozen rocks and ferns doesn't seem to different from someone filling and filing spreadsheets in a cubicle. I think it's more the hope to be awarded a senior role in the next project, and being upgraded to modeling 3 dozen passersby.
 

Plisken

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Isn't it same in Hollywood? Lots 100+ mil misfires, some people keep talking about incoming crash and how this can't work long term, but if you look at the release schedules we are getting more of these big blockbusters. I guess key difference is that movie can recoup some costs with DVD release and merchandise sales even if it flops/underperforms in theatrical release while game that flops on release is very unlikely to get any money back.

If you look at the release schedules, yes.

If you look at the real profits, you can see why doomsday stories are being spelled out. Hollywood is spending more than ever but taking home less.

This is how people behave in every failing system ever by the way; the smart ones see the writing on the wall early, tell others, get laughed at, shrug and leave for greener pastures. The idiots who "know better" keep doing what it do until they notice it too, at which point they don't bail out, they double down. Pretend it isn't happening and maybe productivity your way out of the rot. Hollywood won't ever "die" of course, but we will probably see the death of the blockbuster in our lifetime, which was actually a modern phenomenon anyway (character dramas were still the bread and butter focus of big studios right up until the 1980s. The "old" blockbuster if you could call it that, was to take a character drama and shove an ensemble cast of big names in it)
 

Nirvash

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Hollywood and movie blockbusters will never die since they can find almost unlimited investors and subsides.
Since people will always want blockbusters, blockbusters will be made.

But AAA gaming? Good luck with that.
 

Jarpie

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Hollywood and movie blockbusters will never die since they can find almost unlimited investors and subsides.
Since people will always want blockbusters, blockbusters will be made.

But AAA gaming? Good luck with that.

If enough blockbuster films stop producing profit for investors, they might stop financing them. It has happened before, in the 50s and early 60s there were many huge epic films made, but people grew tired of them and box office numbers dopped, so studios stopped making them. Near disasters like Cleopatra didn't help either.
 
Self-Ejected

Davaris

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Thread is a year old. lol

Hollywood has to compete with the Internet for entertainment dollaringos now, so the slice of the pie they can get is shrinking. Used to be radio was king until TV came along. Newspapers used to be king until TV news appeared, then the Internet with its citizen journalists ended newspaper profitability. So Hollywood is dooooomed!

Re the OP: The graphics arms race is meant to be unwinnable. Making it unwinnable is how the big fish keep smaller fish out. It is a competitive industry. You beat the other guy or you die. Players don't care about game developer midlife crisis problems.

I came to the realization a couple of years ago that vast majority of the effort that goes into games is art, be it artists making tons of content or programmers trying to impress with the bestest 3D engines and effects. Since relatively little effort is spent on the game part, is it any wonder the games are uninteresting?
 

Dexter

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Hollywood has to compete with the Internet for entertainment dollaringos now, so the slice of the pie they can get is shrinking. Used to be radio was king until TV came along. Newspapers used to be king until TV news appeared, then the Internet with its citizen journalists ended newspaper profitability. So Hollywood is dooooomed!
https://celluloidjunkie.com/wire/global-box-office-remains-strong-in-2016-reaching-38-6-billion/
MPAA-2016-Global-Box-Office-Chart.jpg


https://newzoo.com/insights/article...-108-9-billion-in-2017-with-mobile-taking-42/
Newzoo_Global_Games_Market_Revenue_Growth_2016-2020_April_2017.png
 

Nirvash

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Hollywood and movie blockbusters will never die since they can find almost unlimited investors and subsides.
Since people will always want blockbusters, blockbusters will be made.

But AAA gaming? Good luck with that.

If enough blockbuster films stop producing profit for investors, they might stop financing them. It has happened before, in the 50s and early 60s there were many huge epic films made, but people grew tired of them and box office numbers dopped, so studios stopped making them. Near disasters like Cleopatra didn't help either.

But they never stopped making those epic films, they just made less for a bit or a different kind, is about fads.
And 50-60 market/investor pool was way smaller and different.

Huge flops like cleopatra are actually very common now, that kind of "that huge movie bombed, let's stop make those" crash is happening pretty often now. (like the young adult craze now crashing and burning, whole sci-fi genre falling off a bit with trans/alien/thatfrenchdud underperforming etc)
 

vonAchdorf

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In the US, the box office has been rising because they increased the prices, the number of tickets sold has been declining for a decade now and the revenue seems to have hit a ceiling as well. All the while the number of releases has increased as well, which means the prospects of the average movie are declining too. Recently China and other foreign markets have been a boon - but only for a fraction of the movies.
 

DragoFireheart

all caps, rainbow colors, SOMETHING.
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Oh by the way:

To add to how my job is still better than the games industry, I have gained more on-call days. But I am also valuable and got a 9% raise recently. Still not an ideal job but still better than anything in the game industry.
 

DragoFireheart

all caps, rainbow colors, SOMETHING.
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Oh by the way:

To add to how my job is still better than the games industry, I have gained more on-call days. But I am also valuable and got a 9% raise recently. Still not an ideal job but still better than anything in the game industry.

yeah but can u smoke weed at ur job? i can.

yes and no. Not in the office but they don't test my urine.
 
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It's ironic that this thread was bumped - wasn't Amy Hennig head of the Star Wars game that was in production at Visceral, which EA just shut down? I wonder what happened to her.
 

PlanHex

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Beastro

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Bullshit. They DO care about race and feminism, because that's their religion. And they keep at it even as their ventures tank financially.

They care about both, it's just in the air which one is ultimately more important to them, but they fail to see the inconsistency of wanting both.

It's run of the mill hypocrisy where people's ideals and interests don't meet at all.

Reminds me of a clip I ran across of Adam Carrola talking about one of his grandmothers who's always for a good Left-leaning cause to help out the less fortunate and minorities, but constantly bitches about her illegal gardener and house cleaner asking for minimum wage, because suddenly those nice, fluffy ideas run headlong into her interests, but God forbid she'd sort the mess out and be consistent.

IMO, this is also the heart of why so many like that are so bloody racist and yet think they are the antithesis of it.

I didn't mean on a personal level. I mean how she got that far peddling her SJW bullshit. How can you not know there is no money on that shit? I'm not buying those people only care about money, sorry. The ideology runs rampant among the elites and the financiers.

Name companies where their success was explained by their ideologies, or at least they received a direct and notorious benefit because of being ideological.

Such things rarely, if ever bring success, but profit is sacrificed for it knowingly. You start up a Christian book store, you know you're know not going to be able to rival the success of a company that deals in all books, but you suck it up because your religion matters to you and you want to focus in that direction whether it works out or not.

The issue here is people thinking their ideals are universally held by all, or rather should be, and that unbridled success should come with it, not sacrifice by catering to a niche.

"I pretty much worked seven days a week, at least 12 hours a day"

And this is why I dodged the video game industry as a career choice. One of the best decisions I made in my life.

Devs/Pubs need to consider making smaller games and/or less graphically demanding ones. Games from 1984, even with their crappy graphics, still have excellent gameplay.

Imagine if someone took the Daggerfall game, used it as a base format, made a new FP-role playing game, sharpened the graphics, tweaks the controls but filled in all of the empty space and tripled the size of the world AND all of that was done in such a way that it'd take less time than making a typical AAA-game with bloom-shade pretty graphics.

Imagine the amount of extra gameplay that can be achieved by focusing less on graphics.

IMO, much of the the past 15-20 years of game development has been a dead end. I remember back in the late 90s thinking graphics had improved well enough that devs could focus on making other areas of games more complex and interesting, like adding far more depth to the Civ series than Civ2 had, but I failed to recognize the pah of least resistance that graphics are.

We need a game industry crash.

Hollywood and movie blockbusters will never die since they can find almost unlimited investors and subsides.
Since people will always want blockbusters, blockbusters will be made.

But AAA gaming? Good luck with that.

If enough blockbuster films stop producing profit for investors, they might stop financing them. It has happened before, in the 50s and early 60s there were many huge epic films made, but people grew tired of them and box office numbers dopped, so studios stopped making them. Near disasters like Cleopatra didn't help either.

IIRC, more films were being made yearly in the 20s and 30s than since then (like 500-600 per year whereas by the 60s it was 350ish), which declined because of the small return on profit from each individual film. The blockbuster has just been the continuing of that trend.
 
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Love

Cipher
Joined
Dec 31, 2013
Messages
371
When asked if making AAA games was worth the lifestyle that goes along with it, she replied, "I don't think so."

Makes you wonder why EA didn't relieve her from her suffering a year ago after that statement. Would have saved them a lot of money too.


Does anybody remember the reactions to the interview John Walker did with Peter Molyneux? I remember poor Peter not getting much sympathy for complaining about the lack of time he got to spend with his family. After all he was on the backer's clock! But our dear Amy couldn't even raise a family because of those evil higher-ups who have enslaved her in the AAA development!
 

J1M

Arcane
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May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
If Amy actually decided to write Uncharted instead of having a family, she is one of the dumbest game devs ever.
 

Love

Cipher
Joined
Dec 31, 2013
Messages
371
This made me look up the doll Ubisoft hired over ten years ago to keep adolescents from straying from their PR efforts on the internet, because I was hoping she didn't waste her fertile years. Ironically enough she's working for the same company as old Amy Hennig now. I guess the latter didn't take her into her confidence to explain her the crucial parts of female biology.

Jade, sweet honey babydoll, modern medicine can perform miracles but the clock is ticking!
 

Wirdschowerdn

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This is what Rockstar Games has to say about single-player games:

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...on-reaffirms-commitment-to-single-player.aspx

[...]

The good news for story fans? Rockstar not having the bandwidth for an expanded story campaign in GTA V doesn't mean no Rockstar games will have them going forward. "We would love to do more single-player add-ons for games in the future," Sarwar says. "As a company, we love single-player more than anything, and believe in it absolutely – for storytelling and a sense of immersion in a world, multiplayer games don’t rival single-player games."

:positive:
 

vonAchdorf

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13,465
Rockstar makes a good SP game to milk the players in the longer lived MP (and can sell them a full price SP game every time they get banned).
 

Kitchen Utensil

Guest
Then why was SP in GTA V so fucking bland?
 

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