Evolution and niches
Raph posted another interesting screed over on his site talking about evolution and how we have to adapt or die as game developers. It's worth a read, so I recommend heading over there and reading it.
Of course, I thought I'd provide some of my own commentary, so read on for my take on things.
Raph is quite correct on many of his comments. Without stating it explicitly, he points out the same things that have been stagnating our industry and that I've been talking about for a while:
- Game genres need to change and expand to succeed in the long run.
- Change is risky.
- People in charge don't like risk.
- Our core audience (the "hardcore") generally don't reward risk, either.
Raph's quote from Neil Young as reported by Gamespot is a perfect example of the developer's conservatism when it comes to game development. As Raph said, "the rating being done by hardcore gamers in hardcore publications for hardcore gamers." EA is focusing on 1-3 innovative features out of several dozen found in a typical game. EA wants to continue servicing the hardcore and making money from them. Who can blame them? It's been incredibly profitable for them so far. And, what is improving the state of the industry compared to making massive profits?
The usual savior referred to by people who want to believe that there's hope is the independent developer. They don't do research on how to attract the hardcore by examining hardcore publications. The problem is that the current audience is equally as unwilling to support innovative/risky new products as the large developers. New independently developed games come out all the time that have the ability to redefine a genre or break out of the stagnation the industry currently faces; however, the large majority of players won't even touch them. They aren't new enough, or pretty enough, or have the latest buzzwords that means "better graphics". So, while a few independent developers enjoy some modest success, most release a product which languishes in obscurity if they even get to launch the game at all.
We see this even more starkly in online RPGs. SOE has been criticized for making changes to two of their games in order to attract more players. People have accused them of making the games more like other highly successful games and killing the original intention of the games. However, from everything I've heard the changes to both games have actually increased subscribers. The audience willing to pay for these games have rewarded SOE for making these changes, for reinforcing the idioms of the genre instead of trying new things. This is the exact thing that Raph speaks out against, but when it's profitable it's hard to ignore.
Of course, even when we get something novel from a creative mind despite the actions of the people in charge of the budgets, that doesn't guarantee meaningful change. Often you see people trying to milk the success of a breakout game with clones (or endless expansions in the case of The Sims) because developing original content is riskier. Of course, this success can be the basis for terrible ideas, or the new and innovative idea can easily become the cause of further stagnation; in other words, the exception can quickly become the rule.
I will mention that although Raph doesn't state it, niches can be good things. I agree with him that game developers can paint themselves into corners catering to the hardcore, giving them iterations of games that refine the template until all novelty has been squeezed out of the genre. In this case you get a niche game that caters to the last remaining faithful niche players. This is generally a bad thing.
On the other hand, you can have good niches as well. Niches which attempt to draw part of the audience in a new direction can be a good thing. For example, A Tale in the Desert is a niche game that isn't just refining and narrowing the meaning of online RPGs. It took an often overlooked part of online RPG gameplay, crafting, and turned it into something the whole game is focused on. These expansive niches are good things, ways to grow the genre in new ways. However, we do want to avoid the reductionist niches which exclude others from enjoying the game by catering to the hardcore priesthood, as Raph calls them.
Unfortunately, the question that we've always had remains: How can we break this cycle? Large companies aren't willing to take risks and reduce their profit, especially public companies with a duty to maximize shareholder value in the short term. Independent developers are unlikely to save us, unless enough people start buying independent games and supporting independent developers.
So, what alternatives are left? Discuss.
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I enjoyed yours and Raph's posts immensely. Although he concentrated more on the nichification aspects of today's genres, you have focused on the industry realities of creating these games. Professional game dev folks probably know a great deal about this, yet I offer my "fresher perspective" from a seasoned software developer (not a game developer, yet). I have two, essentially disparate, opinions on the matter.
In essence, the ceiling of innovation is enforced by Big Media's power to influence popular demand. They raise the bar to such lofty levels that no independant developer could hope to reach it. Want to make the next MMO? Forget it! The server and asset requirements are far too rigorous for five, let alone twenty people! How about a next-gen FPS? Well, you'd better saturate it with graphical lushness or no one's going to be interested. So the axis of sucess for these genres has evolved by a somewhat costly interaction between bigger developers and the people that buy them. Thus, the reality for the indie developer is to simply avoid targeting that axis at all. The costs are simply too high. We've all read and heard about the cost of art assets in game development (both in the your blog, mine, and many many others). These requirements are one of the most limiting factors to independant developers. Agree?
So what *are* the alternatives, indeed?
Well, you're talking about innovation, but you're also talking about "not playing Big Media's game", right? Innovation cannot be achieved by trying to make a game with fantastic gameplay but has terrible graphics. Lets face reality - computer game software exists in a visual medium, and if you're attempting to create a game that overextends your capabilities as a visual developer, then you'd better scale back those designs. If graphics are the primary axis of success for FPS games, then you had better adjust the visual language of your game in order to "shift the bar" of the genre instead of trying to jump over it (and failing).
I don't mean to be painfully obvious, as this seems to be a basic truth. Yet, I constantly see unpolished, overambitious indie fare, created by a developer who "languishes in obscurity" and wonders why they didn't gain wide acceptance. I don't want to name names, but if its a buggy piece of software, being "just a computer game" does not excuse it. Expect your offering to remain obscure - not only because it simply looks terrible, but chances are you've missed a million other things in basic software design. I've always loved Wyatt Cheng's concept of the Five second rule (I'm not sure if he is the originator of that meme), where a majority of developer attention goes to the tiniest window of interaction to create the "perfect feedback loop" for a player. Although this notion applies to gameplay, I believe it also can (and should) be applied to purely visual elements as well. If you can't realise your game's visual objectives within the developmental resources you have, then you had better alter those objectives so that you can. No more cutting corners! Or cut them, but in a way that they allow you better visual appeal. A product may indeed have a good combination of gameplay elements, yet if it has obtrusively bad components then I view them as bugs. Its just bad software for its intended purpose.
You linked Darwinia in your post, and in my estimation its "modest success" is actually huge. They are a tale of independant developers that cut away from the pack in new and interesting ways. They limited the graphical intensity of their game, and instead created "a tightly closed system" (ie. a "world") that provided visual and visceral feedback in a consistent and believable fashion. It didn't stretch its self-imposed bounds or try to leap single-handedly across the uncanny valley. It just simply innovated. And these guys did it all within their means as a small development group. The result? They now have a publisher (other than themselves) in Valve's Steam distro system. What a major win for what started out as two people! Can you think of other modest successes that were achieved by small indies that restricted their visual requirements in similar ways? Conversely, how many examples of great gameplay have been betrayed by loads of bad graphics? I'm betting a lot more.
My second thought on this might be a little "out there", but you asked for alternatives and well, talk is cheap. :-)
If you, as the independant, absolutely positively need to tackle a design that requires a large amount of art assets... in other words, to get it on within "the Big Media game", then there is really only one way to do it : to group up. In essence, we are all better together than we are alone, aren't we? So if you're entering a genre believing that you have that "killer idea" that refines or nichifies it (in a positive way, of course), then my feeling is that people need to wrap their heads around the idea of consolidation on an independant level. This makes the idea possible, doesn't it? Your team has two artists. My team has three. And so on. I totally realise that this is a classic "easier said than done" idealogy (the biggest problem being renumeration of each team member's efforts) yet, it does solve the problem of creating art assets (and might help you figure out that other nasty detail : distribution!). I'll let you smart people figure out the "how" in teaming up a bunch of indies. Maybe Greg Costikyan has some good ideas. :-)
BTW, mod teams seem to muddle through this methodology all the time without dying out altogether.
My thoughts,
Kafka
Comment by Kafka — 13 January, 2006 @ 2:59 AM
For the last few years I remember lots of breastbeating by game industry luminaries about the lack of innovation among big studios, and the difficulties small studios and indies have in breaking out with something genuinely new, both because of the presence of the big studios and the reluctance of gamers to embrace innovative gameplay.
I've yet to see how this is any different from the normal market forces that other product segments struggle with continually. We hear the same complaints from the movie industry about Hollywood dreck preventing the winners at Cannes from being shown in the local cineplex. We hear dark rumours about the auto industry conspiring to crush the Tucker car. Great new novels are hard to find in Barnes & Noble because Danielle Steele and Tom Clancy crowd the shelves.
It's normal for large, established players to dominate marketspaces and to exploit incremental improvements in products, rather than introduce innovative new products that risk cannibalizing their existing market. It's also normal for plucky young challengers to risk everything bringing something dangerous and new to the market, and to fail in high numbers. I don't see why the game industry views itself as any different. On the contrary, the fact that the game market behaves this way is a sign of its commercial maturity and significance, and should embolden young indie developers: The pattern of the young and nimble overthrowing the old and lumbering goes back hundreds of years.
Comment by Just another gamer — 14 January, 2006 @ 9:04 PM
Kafka:
Computer games are a visual medium like books are a visual medium. You need eyes to read the book, but soon you forget the details of the black ink forming specific shapes on white paper to convey information. While the industry has been focusing more and more on visual presentation they've also forgotten that most of the "work" in entertaining a person happens inside the mind. A game with clear but outdated graphics can still be fun; you generally stop noticing the graphics once you really get into the game. Reading a crisp, new hardback book could be called a better experience than reading a yellowed paperback from the public library, but both can still tell the same great story.
But, of course you can't just ignore market realities. I find 80's and 90's arcade games to be more fun than the latest graphics-fest FPS, but one type of game sells to the market and the other doesn't. You can make the absolutely most fun game ever, but if no one buys it you'll be looking for a new job quickly. However, to insist that video games are purely a visual medium is to fall into the same trap that the larger industry has over the recent years.
Anyway, Introversion actually had a much bigger hit with Uplink than they did with Darwinia from what I know. Darwinia was an interesting game and it didn't let graphics get in the way of having a fun little game, but I don't think it did nearly as well as Uplink did. (I could be wrong, though, so anyone with more reliable information feel free to speak up.) Anyway, Introversion is one of the exceptions here. They did the impossible and had a runaway success, relatively speaking. But, Introversion is probably like most other indie developers: they're a few poorly received games away from having to find "real" jobs again. So, while EA can shrug off poor sales of a season of Madden football, Introversion will probably cease to exist if the next game isn't a large success. I admire the Introversion team for their willingness to try different types of games, but I also know that this is a very risky path for them. If I had to lay money down, I'd bet on Introversion not being around in 5 or so years. Honestly, I'd bet the same way about my own company. (It's not just a funny company name, it's a way of life!)
The main problem with grouping up together is that most indie developers have their own ideas. I have the design documents for about 3 games in various stages, different pitches and proposals to different people. I'm sure the team at Introversion are the same way: they have more design ideas than they have time to implement. So, why should either of us give up our ideas in order to work for the other? If I wanted to work on someone else's idea, the larger companies pay much better. Working on someone else's indie game for the sake of working on an indie game might make me feel good, but it doesn't get me out of debt and give me the possibility of affording a house some day.
The other problem is that people aren't reliable. Look, it if were as easy as saying, "Hey, I have a great idea, wanna work on a game with me?" then there would be no problems. However, people might be enthusiastic at the beginning and just fall through. I've had about 3 projects for Near Death Studios, Inc. fall through because an artist and/or some other people in the team just were not reliable enough. These were different people with different expectations, all working for a slice of the earnings down the line. (Artists are better at business than programmers, because most of them want cash up front for their work; us programmers are willing to work cheap up front.) Even people with experience on other projects, or friends that would theoretically die for you sometimes fail to follow through on their work and mess up the project.
So, there's a few more wrinkles in your ideas. Not to discourage you, because I'd like to see a real alternative happen here.
Just another gamer:
The difference is that computer games are a young enough medium that we can look back and see where things went wrong. The time when young filmmakers went out and did risky things for risky rewards is long past us. The last person to really do that was George Lucas with Star Wars, and that's already nearly 30 years behind us. Or, we could look at the history of movies in the middle of the 20th century to see a really wild and woolly time.
Yet, you only have to go back 10-13 years to see a spunky little company called Silicon & Synapse, Inc. (now called by a much more well-known name) create some interesting little games. You can see the rise in popularity of 3D and how graphics, instead of gameplay, drove sales for games. You can see how the larger companies came in to carve their own territories, and how executives came in and imposed business models and concepts like "brand marketing" that they understood from other industries on our industry.
So, that's why some of us independents rage against the order even though it's what's accepted in other creative media. We can look back and see where we got off the track, and we know that we'll likely never quite recapture that again. It doesn't stop some of us from trying to get things back on track, from trying to educate people and point out the rot infesting our industry. The question is, will the average gamers listen to us, or will the go on happily playing what marketing tells them to consume. We'll see.
My thoughts,
Comment by Psychochild — 15 January, 2006 @ 5:45 AM
Psychochild : Your book analogy was excellent, and a better mechanism to demonstrate what I'm trying to say as well. What if your book were miss ng le ters in s me of the words, hAd MiXed CapItalIsaTioN, or had misordered some the pages? For the reader, that would indeed make the experience of imagining the author's intent clearly more difficult (if not impossible). Reading the book would become more like work, and even if the story were the greatest ever told it would be a disaster. This is exactly what I'm talking about wrt many games of recent memory. They may have had brilliant gameplay, but their ambitions clearly exceeded their ability to convey it visually. I never said that games were purely a visual medium, but if a game simply looks "goofy" (even after you suspend disbelief, lower your expectations and stretch your tolerances to their very limit), then I say its a bug. As an engineer I'd reject it, and as a player I wouldn't buy it. In the end, we might say that the story was excellent, but the book sucked. You asked for alternatives, so I'm saying that one of them is to stop trying to claw up the big media ladder. Innovate away from graphic-fuelled frenzies, instead of trying to convince players to overlook this stuff in favour of gamplay. Players are not as stupid as one may think. Its not going to work.
Now in terms of the "teaming up" on ideas, your criticisms are all completely valid. There's no denying that the notion is not without significant problem. But are they so significant that they're unsolvable? Depends, I suppose. If you were to find teams with mutual respect, with similar ideas, and equal ambition, I'd say its possible. In fact, I personally know the members of an independant team that were very close to consolidation with another team for professional game development. It almost happened. And I'd say that the story is likely played out all over the place.
In its most positive form, its a actually a really good idea. More resources, more expertise, an increase in quantity and quality (hopefully). Unfortunately, its marred by the issues you've cited (and more). In short, I believe it wholly depends on the individuals involved.
Thanks...
Comment by Kafka — 15 January, 2006 @ 4:47 PM