Why modern gaming sucks (according to the Escapist)

[Marsal]

When I download some of YouTube movies (the newer ones), I get black screen when playing them. Does anyone know what codecs I should download?

Don't download any codecs, unless nothing else works. Get VLC player and/or MPC-HC + haali media splitter (just google them, they are all free).

 

[hal900x]

"Free market" is a myth from lolbertarian Randroids. The most powerful corporations have the ability to generate demand for their products through misinformation, hype and all other methods you all know about, and in most cases the only reason they haven't literally become monopolies are laws. They define the parameters for the rest of a sector in the market, and thus they rule it and aren't afraid of anything.

LAWS??? Fucking Socialist!

 

[Brotherman Bill]

The reason why I posted this article is that a huge number of people, also on this forum, subscribe to view that gaming sucks because the creators are evil and stupid.

This is of course both wrong and simplistic; it is in many ways related to the way a child thinks a rock is "evil" for hurting them or that the storm is "angry" when it's blowing hard.

By posting this article I tried to show that sometimes things are the unplanned result of impersonal forces.

"7th generation" premium videogames my ass.

For what is all these crazy sums spent, actually? Even at a generous 70.000$ / year 25mil$ is still about 357 man years

Well, Jade Empire had a 105 man team. I don't know how long they worked on it but that game was the previous generation again.

And for where the money goes, it goes to graphics
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article ... d-Graphics

In the original Wolfenstein 3D, the "level editor" was a simple little program that let you draw squares on a grid to create gamespace. You could make a playable room in well under a minute. It was laughably simple and primitive by today's standards, but the game was at least forty hours long because the content was so easy to produce. (It would have almost been possible for someone to make levels as fast as you could play them.) A few years later in the Doom and Duke Nukem 3D era, level design had become slightly more elaborate. It took time to get the textures to line up and make the lighting interesting; that same room of gamespace might take five or ten minutes to produce. With Quake, the bar was raised even higher. Level design was basically 3D modeling, and it might take a whole hour to make the same amount of content.

You can see where this is going. The one hour room gave way to two hours, and eventually led to teams of people working for days to make just a few moments of playable content. Now you have someone designing the level, someone else making unique meshes to decorate the space, a specialized texture artist, and a lot of work being done to set up complex lighting systems, moving machinery, special environmental effects, and all of the other steps needed to take advantage of current-gen graphics engines. That's more than a thousand fold increase in the amount of work required to give players a few seconds of entertainment. This inflation of manhours is obviously unsustainable, and even the amount of work we're putting into games now is probably too much. Taking another step forward is folly.

________________

The main reason for such ridiculous budget figures is that major studios themselves got so bloated over the years, as well as used to ever-increasing budgets, that at this point they have two choices: either justify all their ridiculous expenses somehow and hope the public will buy it long enough for the gravy train to roll until they're ready to retire, or reorganize their studios to be efficient, fire most of the staff, hire more competent staff or outsource, and basically crash the industry.

This is interesting. Do you have any source?

Gaming is a competitive business after all, one should think this would

Apparently some law of physics prevents 2010 developers from making $200,000 games.

Oh no, wait, that's not true. They CHOOSE to make expensive shit.

And why do they choose so? Because they are evil? Because they think it is better to ruin gaming than to earn money?

Personally I'd think it is because people would rather earn 20 million than 200 000, but I don't have all the answers so I'm all ears if you have a different hypothesis.

At the end of the day, it's still all the fault of the proles that buy NexGen and popamole games, or watch Hollywood films.

Pretty much. For all it's flaws, the market responds to incentives.

The most powerful corporations have the ability to generate demand for their products through misinformation, hype and all other methods you all know about,

And yet, big corporations frequently fail. So their ominous powers are not omnipotent, and as such we will need as lightly more sophisticated explanation for the decline than "corporations evil lol"

 

[DefJam101]

just big effects, huge body counts, etc.

If only this were true. Most action games today, especially FPS games, have shifted toward a pseudotactical "realistic" portrayal of violence, resulting in stale gameplay. Point and click like Counterstrike, nearly all of them; find me a mainstream FPS in the last 3-4 years with gameplay elements more complex than hitscan assault rifles and twitch-based gameplay. Even free, indie, or "underground" FPS games are following this trend. Gone are the WarSows, nothing left but CoD, CS, and "Team Fortress" clones.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Personally I'd think it is because people would rather earn 20 million than 200 000, but I don't have all the answers so I'm all ears if you have a different hypothesis.

Which people? Who earns 20 million? Average salary of a video game developer is 66000$, not 20 million.

And for where the money goes, it goes to graphics

Good, I never liked where the post-Fallout/Baldur's Gate game graphics went. Now there's more ammunition against them.

 

[Archibald]

I think somewhere it was mentioned that in EA marketing takes 2/3 of budget.

 

[Twinkle]

And for where the money goes, it goes to graphics

Not anymore. Straight from the horse's EA's mouth http://www.bluesnews.com/s/101634/ea-marketing-66-75-of-a-game_s-budget

And yes, not one forces companies to dump millions into yet another shitty clone. That's the corporate line of thinking "if that shit is popular let's churn more of it". Diablo is popular? Let's make a clone. Call of Duty is popular? Let's make a clone. Halo is popular? Let's make a clone. WoW is popular? Let's make a clone. And so on and so on.

And if that videogame Moore's law is correct next-gen game will require 10 million units sold to break even. Publishers will have to rethink their business approach or suffer another videogame crash.

If you have some steady earners like that, wouldn't it be easier to absorb the damage from when a big game flops? Why does it always have to be "smash hit or huge failure"? Now I'm not very good at economics, so there's probably something that I'm not seeing. If anyone can explain, please do.

Because publishers are interested in genres with maximum revenue potential. Note that the majority of upcoming "big" games are either console actions or MMOs. The New Shit. Turn-based games obviously don't belong to this category.

 

[Zomg]

I thought the budget stuff was conventional Codex wisdom. It was in like 2007 anyway, I guess we haven't repeated ourselves sufficiently since then. And the 2007 solutions were basically correct: More online retailing so you don't have to fight for shelf space/inventory, more indies, more niche, etc. it's just that the marketing and scale of new blockbuster shit is so gigantic and invasive and destructive that it has completely locked down a "mainstream" game culture and everything that uses any other model is counterculture (rather than a truly distinct entity). And it doesn't show any signs of stopping, ever, just like US comic books are always gonna be about superheroes, no matter how shitty the overall market gets.

 

[MapMan]

And for where the money goes, it goes to graphics
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article ... d-Graphics

In the original Wolfenstein 3D, the "level editor" was a simple little program that let you draw squares on a grid to create gamespace. You could make a playable room in well under a minute. It was laughably simple and primitive by today's standards, but the game was at least forty hours long because the content was so easy to produce. (It would have almost been possible for someone to make levels as fast as you could play them.) A few years later in the Doom and Duke Nukem 3D era, level design had become slightly more elaborate. It took time to get the textures to line up and make the lighting interesting; that same room of gamespace might take five or ten minutes to produce. With Quake, the bar was raised even higher. Level design was basically 3D modeling, and it might take a whole hour to make the same amount of content.

You can see where this is going. The one hour room gave way to two hours, and eventually led to teams of people working for days to make just a few moments of playable content. Now you have someone designing the level, someone else making unique meshes to decorate the space, a specialized texture artist, and a lot of work being done to set up complex lighting systems, moving machinery, special environmental effects, and all of the other steps needed to take advantage of current-gen graphics engines. That's more than a thousand fold increase in the amount of work required to give players a few seconds of entertainment. This inflation of manhours is obviously unsustainable, and even the amount of work we're putting into games now is probably too much. Taking another step forward is folly.

As someone who has some experience with level design I need to agree. Developers can spend days and even weeks on stuff that avarage player will rush trough in a matter of seconds. Not many players actually admire the design. I started to pay attention to the little details when I started to make levels of my own. Now you might understand why its so hard to make a game with multiple paths to take. You might spend months on content that avarage player won't even see. So basically developers choose between (for example) 20 hours of linear gameplay or 6-7 hours of multiple path (lets say 3) gameplay.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I'd prefer 2 hours of multiple path (let's say 18) game .

 

[Melcar]

Wasn't this shit like common Codex knowledge? Or has the hivemind gotten a stroke?

 

[Destroid]

I guess it has become this way (as in film) because investors and publishers are looking for the next blockbuster success like GoW or MW that makes billions of dollars?

One thing I don't understand is why the cost of development on PS3/Xbox is considered to be so high due to the level of graphics requried (I know several people who work at a games studio and they mainly create Wii games due to this, I believe they are currently working on their first Xbox game) when the textures and models are not that fancy anyway. It's 2005 hardware.

EDIT: Also, it would be useful to see increase in 'real' development costs of creating the actual product over that time compared to the cost of production including marketing and other non-development costs. Probably cuts the increase by half or more, considering the rise of videogame marketing.

 

[DragoFireheart]

Wasn't this shit like common Codex knowledge? Or has the hivemind gotten a stroke?

The hivemind has broken down. Freedom is now achieved.


Do you honestly think another crash will happen?

 

[Damned Registrations]

And for where the money goes, it goes to graphics
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article ... d-Graphics

In the original Wolfenstein 3D, the "level editor" was a simple little program that let you draw squares on a grid to create gamespace. You could make a playable room in well under a minute. It was laughably simple and primitive by today's standards, but the game was at least forty hours long because the content was so easy to produce. (It would have almost been possible for someone to make levels as fast as you could play them.) A few years later in the Doom and Duke Nukem 3D era, level design had become slightly more elaborate. It took time to get the textures to line up and make the lighting interesting; that same room of gamespace might take five or ten minutes to produce. With Quake, the bar was raised even higher. Level design was basically 3D modeling, and it might take a whole hour to make the same amount of content.

You can see where this is going. The one hour room gave way to two hours, and eventually led to teams of people working for days to make just a few moments of playable content. Now you have someone designing the level, someone else making unique meshes to decorate the space, a specialized texture artist, and a lot of work being done to set up complex lighting systems, moving machinery, special environmental effects, and all of the other steps needed to take advantage of current-gen graphics engines. That's more than a thousand fold increase in the amount of work required to give players a few seconds of entertainment. This inflation of manhours is obviously unsustainable, and even the amount of work we're putting into games now is probably too much. Taking another step forward is folly.

As someone who has some experience with level design I need to agree. Developers can spend days and even weeks on stuff that avarage player will rush trough in a matter of seconds. Not many players actually admire the design. I started to pay attention to the little details when I started to make levels of my own. Now you might understand why its so hard to make a game with multiple paths to take. You might spend months on content that avarage player won't even see. So basically developers choose between (for example) 20 hours of linear gameplay or 6-7 hours of multiple path (lets say 3) gameplay.

This is largely bullshit though. If you replaced the tiles used in Wolfenstein with graphics from a modern game, it doesn't take any more time to design playable areas. All the extra cost is for developing completely new textures and graphics engines and tiny details people ignore and the like. I could whip up a lame corridor shooter map using an RTS map editor like WC3 or SC2 as fast as someone could play it too, assuming the engine to run someone through it in first person already existed. Considering the incredibly low cost of that (It'd take like what, 5000 sales to start making a profit if you already had the engine and spent reasonable time on parts you could fly through like a few special areas and enemies, along with a script that doesn't make your brain bleed) it's bullshit to say it's not viable. Slash the price to something reasonable for the time invested, and you have something like a game from ten years ago with 40 hours of content selling for 4 dollars. That'd easily sell half as many copies as a AAA title that cost hundreds of times more money to make. Much higher profit margin.

It simply doesn't happen because the guys at the very top don't give a fuck about the size of the margin since they don't do any of the fucking work. They want the highest net return so they can skim of as much as possible for themselves.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

turning those super high res assets into something usable in game is such a fucking waste. And layering middleware packages upon each other like a stack of cards.

All that bullshit and you still end up with a game that ends up less exciting than something from 1997. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uPmm4jhXgk

What an epic clusterfuck.

 

[Alex]

(...snip)

The reason why I posted this article is that a huge number of people, also on this forum, subscribe to view that gaming sucks because the creators are evil and stupid.

This is of course both wrong and simplistic; it is in many ways related to the way a child thinks a rock is "evil" for hurting them or that the storm is "angry" when it's blowing hard.

By posting this article I tried to show that sometimes things are the unplanned result of impersonal forces.

(...snip...)

The most powerful corporations have the ability to generate demand for their products through misinformation, hype and all other methods you all know about,

And yet, big corporations frequently fail. So their ominous powers are not omnipotent, and as such we will need as lightly more sophisticated explanation for the decline than "corporations evil lol"

I am sorry, but I can't see what you say on the article you posted. Yes, the rising costs are certainly responsible, but to me this seems to be a direct effect of the publisher's greed. It was them that created the graphic loving gamer culture of today. It was them that, by always seeking to create a bigger customer base, made games more like movies every passing year. They changed what people expect from the word "game" and in doing so made sure only the biggest of the companies had enough money to be able to develop games.

Sure, sometimes their own creation may have bitten them on their asses, but right now it seems that gamins is exactly where big corporations wanted it to be. And while I am certainly sympathetic to developers who, for whatever reasons, try to eke out a living out of this industry, it certainly isn't something I would do myself. With the publishers calling the shots as they do right now, it seems impossible to simply design games to one's taste. So, sure, I do believe cost is a major driving force in shaping the current gaming industry. But I don't the reason costs rose so much in first place is because this uncontrolled and short sighted drive to make more money out of gaming.

@Cassidy:

I mostly agree with you. But I don't think things are as grim as you seem to think. I think the current industry is only sustainable as long as it draws in new blood. Sooner or later, something new, something different will appear that will draw this huge customer base away from games. I may be wrong on this, but I think the reason gaming is so popular right now is because it is a fad. Sooner or later, the fad will be over and the big players will either have to focus again on the games or they will go away with the crowds, going after whatever happens to be the new fad these people will take to.

 

[ironyuri]

"Free market" is a myth from lolbertarian Randroids. The most powerful corporations have the ability to generate demand for their products through misinformation, hype and all other methods you all know about, and in most cases the only reason they haven't literally become monopolies are laws. They define the parameters for the rest of a sector in the market, and thus they rule it and aren't afraid of anything.

That is, until someone big does some wrong choice and years later the consequence comes as the bubble blows up and the crash begins.

The 21st century will ironically be a time when capitalism will cause more intellectual, economic and technological stagnation than shitty planned economies with potato shortages did in the 20th.

I really don't know other then that companies like EA probably don't know the niches and don't want to. Not in their business model. It's not like the games they make will ever be obsolete until they make the sequel to said games, so basically the balls in their court so they don't really care what a company like Paradox or Matrix is making.

Actually, there are more interest groups benefitting from the maintenance of the current AAA business model. If suddenly big companies started carving niches and found a more efficient model that reduces their dependence on massive PR investments, several groups would be threatened by such a shift. Besides, they prefer to stick to their comfort zone, to what they are used to do. Corporations are not the uber-perfect flawless business model that some people think they are. Because what is profitable for a corporation is not necessarily advantageous for, say, its PR director, among other things. As a rule of thumb: the larger a business become, the least it will be willing to innovate.

Cassidy, I think I just fell in love with you.

Cassidy can be a girl or a boy's name... so I choose to believe you are in between. Marry me?

 

[Sick Bum]

Apparently some law of physics prevents 2010 developers from making $200,000 games.

Oh no, wait, that's not true. They CHOOSE to make expensive shit.

Because they are fighting for market space at walmart. If a good quality indie rpg ever got made conceivably they could go back to basics and sell it at the same boutiques that sold war game and rpg books, if they even exist any more.

 

[Archibald]

Do you honestly think another crash will happen?

One can only hope.

 

[Burning Bridges]

If you have some steady earners like that, wouldn't it be easier to absorb the damage from when a big game flops? Why does it always have to be "smash hit or huge failure"? Now I'm not very good at economics, so there's probably something that I'm not seeing. If anyone can explain, please do.

Perhaps because turnbased games can be played over and over, and it is not in EAs interest that a game are played longer than a couple days? I mean EA needs people to buy games, not play them.

 

[Destroid]

If you have some steady earners like that, wouldn't it be easier to absorb the damage from when a big game flops? Why does it always have to be "smash hit or huge failure"? Now I'm not very good at economics, so there's probably something that I'm not seeing. If anyone can explain, please do.

Perhaps because turnbased games can be played over and over, and it is not in EAs interest that a game are played longer than a couple days? I mean EA needs people to buy games, not play them.

What?

 

[BethesdaLove]

The reason why I posted this article is that a huge number of people, also on this forum, subscribe to view that gaming sucks because the creators are evil and stupid.

Define creators, huge number, sucks, evil and stupid.

Bethesda is a creator.
They are evil for selling to a common denominator, mass market.
They are stupid because they "fight the good fight with their money"...

EA is a creator in sense that it hires contractors to create what they want.
They are evil for doing the same as Beth.
They are stupid because the common denominator is stupid.

Activision....

Do you need more examples?

There is nothing impersonal or unplanned. They want money.

Is it childish to call a rock stupid and evil if it jumps up and fucking breaks your balls?

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I am sorry, but I can't see what you say on the article you posted. Yes, the rising costs are certainly responsible, but to me this seems to be a direct effect of the publisher's greed. It was them that created the graphic loving gamer culture of today. It was them that, by always seeking to create a bigger customer base, made games more like movies every passing year. They changed what people expect from the word "game" and in doing so made sure only the biggest of the companies had enough money to be able to develop games.

You underestimate the amounts of graphics whores. Most of gamers here are ready to buy a computer that costs more than a minimal monthly wage just to get their next-gen graphics (even if they earn a minimal wage themselves) and they expect these next-gen graphics from practically every game.

 

[Phelot]

Personally, I'm sick of super graphics. I'm still amazed at that polished textures mod for Mount and Blade. It's just textures and yet it transforms the game into a really cool setting without particles and shit flying everywhere. Just art. BAM! That's it, that's what made it look good without requiring mega specs.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Except modern graphics are dumped down too due to console limitations. If graphics is where most of funds are going to somebody is getting fucked in the ass because the results are not there.

 

[Eyeball]

I wonder if there would 100 000 customers for a Fallout-like game nowadays.

There wouldn't be 100K customers, but 100K people would pirate it, the tiny indie company making it would die and people would sit around on message boards bemoaning the passing of a real Fallout-making developer. While playing their pirated Fallout-like games.