Article: Developers are pissed, not going to take it anymore

[Snapple]

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/596/596734p1.html

This is a scary article if I ever saw one. The Game Developers Conference this year was filled with fuming, enraged people. Warren Spector, Jason Della Rocca, Greg Costikyan, among others, went off on a tirade over the direction of the industry.

Several points are touched on, including the frustration with originality in games, increased production time and costs, lack of product longevity, and they even go so far as to call the industry a collective of sweat shops with Nintendo and Microsoft choking the leash.

Another person noted that the industry would be better if it collapsed on itself and started over again from scratch.

Don't just base an assumption on what little I've said though. Read the article, and take it for what you will.

[Captain Wrong]

What do they plan on doing?

How are they going to change things?

All I saw in that article was spleen venting with few real solutions. The way I see it, "the industry" has the upper hand here. Hell, they own the damn deck.

Just playing devil's advocate here.

[JJNova]

Ok, I couldn't find the transcript on my computer. I tried. I have Iwata's and Raph Kosters if anyone is interested. But here is a link to Alice's notes that she jotted while the Rants were happening. I find it to be a better read than the above article, which is nothing more than a writer trying to spin a transcript into his own peice of work.

http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/burn_the_house_.html

[calthaer]

Transcript of a sorts was right here:

http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/burn_the_house_.html

I thought the article was pretty intriguing. I'd love to be able to download more games right from the Internet. Hopefully independent publishing will establish the PC as a premier gaming platform again instead of the FPS / RTS box it is now.

The first step in solving the problem is analyzing it, which is more or less what these guys were doing. They were doing a lot more than just venting - identifying distribution channels as the main culprit is a big step towards breaking down the restrictive chain of power that keep original, inventive gameplay out of our hands.

The best quote was where that one guy says "Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer...but my question is: out of which chest did he carve it?"

[Sothy]

The Nintendo keynote didn't win Costikyan over, either. "Iwata says he has the heart of a gamer," he points out. "What poor bastard did he carve it from?"

I agree the industry needs more genre smashing original masterpieces such as BEBE'S KIDS from Nintendo.

[ubikuberalles]

Unfortunately, I believe the only way the sweatshop conditions are going to be resolved is through collective bargaining. In other words, unions. That's what ended up happening in the film industry and, unless conditions improve, it may also happen in the gaming industry. The current political environment is not supportive of unionization and so, if collective bargaining is in the future for the gaming industry, it's going to take a long time to happen. Decades, maybe. Who knows? Someday "game tester" may be a union job like key grip or camera operator.

The downside with the unionization of the gaming industry is that game development would become much more expensive and games will take a lot longer to develop. As a result, games will become more derivitive (less original), quality will suffer and the gaming industry may suffer a downturn.

Will a crash be the only solution to the other problems with the gaming industry? I hope not since that means that gamers will have to suffer through years of few or no new games worth owning or playing. Sadly, though, I have no hope for the other solutions offered (internet distribution, etc.) and so I fear we may be heading towards a decline in the industry.

[Sylentwulf]

What do they plan on doing?

How are they going to change things?

All I saw in that article was spleen venting with few real solutions. The way I see it, "the industry" has the upper hand here. Hell, they own the damn deck.

Just playing devil's advocate here.

Ding Ding!

If you don't like it, don't work there. Same thing everyone says when anyone vents anywhere at any job.

[Captain Wrong]

Unions are an interesting idea, but it wouldn't work. For one thing unions just don't have the power in this country they once did. Plus there are so many young people dying to break into this industry, they'd be easy to intimidate into not joining.

The biggest problem would be if the US gaming industry people organized, I guarantee the publishers would just continue their move to foreign and "third world" countries. You'd see an influx of Chinese and Indian developed games. Honestly, I think you're going to see this anyway as pretty much everything we can do, India and China can do cheaper. But if there was talk of unions, expect the timeline to be much shorter.

I don't know. Reading the transcript and all, I still stick by my initial assessment. The other thing is, somewhere along the way these same people who are now up in arms had to agree to crank out this schlock in order for the industry to get where it is. Someone had to make the damn games, right? It's hard for me to take all this righeous indignation seriously when the developer's hands are dirty too.

[kirin jensen]

If the industry were smart, they'd simply create a set of game development software tools, publish them on the net as freeware, with the requirement that the may exercise ownership rights on any game developed using said tools. Why screw people for pay when you can do it for free?

Worked in the INSLAW affair.

Seriously, unions are the answer. The idea that "if you don't like it here work somewhere else" just encourages ever-crappier working conditions.

[goatdan]

Actually, this just confirms what I've been hearing from developers myself. Game companies in general, and especially the programmers are worried about a lack of advancement and innovation in games because their production costs are ballooning and companies aren't sure how to reel them back in.

It isn't such a problem of the fact that the costs to make a game is getting much higher, but there isn't really a cheap way out. With movies, a blockbuster movie may take $200 million to film and it may or may not succeed. But once in a while, a creative, cheaply filmed movie can do extremely well because of its creativity. Blair Witch anyone? The problem is that game developers are getting less and less of a "cheap" way to make a game.

I have heard that a lot of company big-wigs are following the development of the Dreamcast titles we are working on as a possible future, but they aren't taking them as full releases right now -- mostly because the games haven't been ESRB rated. Other than that, the games are made in a development environment by professional-quality development teams and released in a full package that is at an equal level of production values as the actual games. Production houses have shown some interest in what we are doing because:

- The games that are being made are not region-encoded. A GOAT Store Dreamcast release can be played on nearly every Dreamcast made, whether PAL or NTSC standard.
- Along with the fact that the games aren't region encoded, this means that we can sell the games anywhere in the world. While the games have so far been programmed primarily in English (although Maqiupai has five language options), the biggest market to sell to for us so far has been Asia, which accounts for over 60% of each release's sales. By doing this, we don't pay any localization fees.
- The small number of games released and the small amount of people on a development team mean that these games don't pose too much of a risk. In other words, if a company gets one "Blair Witch" and 49 games that don't cause a stir, they will easily recoup their money.

So the possible solution of the future would be to do stuff just like what we are doing, interestingly enough. The fact that developers could also do these on slightly 'out-of-date' consoles (like the Playstation, Dreamcast or soon Xbox) for a cheaper price could keep prices even lower while allowing those consoles to continue life for longer.

Apparently, the companies that have been alerted to us by their developers have basically said that the GOAT Store releases are "amateur" because they don't have an ESRB rating, which is part of the reason we are looking at actually having the games rated. The GOAT Store is a member of the ESRB, so all that we need to do to rate them is pay the fee, and away we go. The problem that I have with that is that we have no real reason that we feel we need to do it or that it would benefit us, and while I like the industry, I'm not just going to throw money at getting our games ESRB rated so that larger companies can start copying what we're doing, even if it would benefit the whole of the future of gaming. I simply don't have the money to do that.

After saying all of that, we are looking at getting at least one of our future releases an ESRB rating because we do want to shed the "amateur" image that a lot of places seem to have of us. But that is all down the road...

I agree with what they are saying, I hope that the industry can allow back in truly excellent, creative niche games in the future and I think that they do have an idea of what to do... but it is hard to express without the worry of a large company stomping on it now...

[Daniel Thomas]

Scott Rosenberg wrote about the GDC in his Salon blog. Here's the link to his piece, which includes a number of external sources worth reading.

http://blogs.salon.com/0000014/2005/03/11.html

[Daniel Thomas]

Here's the tramscript from Greg Costikyan's speech, from his weblog (which can be found via the above Salon link). Read on:


"<disclaimer>
My opinions are emphatically not those of my employer.
</disclaimer>

I don’t know about you, but I could have been a lawyer. Or a carpenter. Or a sous-chef. Before I get rolling here, I want to ask all of you a question. Who here is here because, you now, developing games is, like, just a job, doesn’t really matter, whatever, it pays the bills. Put up your hands.

And who’s here because you love games?

Yeah.

I don’t know about you, but the things I’ve heard here at GDC have made the future of this industry clear to me. With the arrival of the next gen consoles, the whole cycle is about to be ratcheted up another notch. We’re going to go from $5m budgets to eight figure ones. We’re going to go from dev teams in the dozens to dev teams in the hundreds. It’s all going to be BIGGER, as Iwata-san says.

Is it going to be better?

I’ve been doing some research recently into the history of British and American boardgames in the 18th and 19th centuries, and I’m seeing an interesting pattern—one that persists into the 20th centuries, into the digital era, and through the modern day. It’s a pattern that Dan Scherlis describes rather cynically this way: “Genre is what we call one hit game and its imitators.” Jeffreys publishes “A Journey Through Europe,” and suddenly we have a whole genre of track-based travel games. One fishing game appears, and we have dozens. Mansions of Happiness begets dozens of games of moral improvement, George Parker creates the business game, Little Wars spawns miniatures. Charles Roberts creates the board wargame, D&D produces the RPG, Magic: The Gathering produces the CCG. Donkey Kong appears, and we instantly have dozens of platformers, Akalabeth and Wizardry produce the digital RPG, Dune II and we have RTS, Doom and the FPS, The Sims, and the autonomous agent game.

Games GROW through innovation. Innovation creates new game styles. Innovation grows the audience. Innovation extends the palette of the possible in games. The story of the last twenty years hasn’t been, as you’ve been sold, the story of increasing processing power and increasing graphics; it’s been the story of a startling burst of creativity and innovation. That’s what created this industry. And that’s why we love games.

But it’s over now.

As recently as 1992, the average budget for a PC game was $200,000. Today, a typical budget for an A-level title is $5m. And with the next generation, it will be more like $20m. As the cost ratchets upward, publishers becoming increasingly conservative, and decreasingly willing to take a chance on anything other than the tired and true. So we get Driver 69. Grand Theft Auto San Infinitum. And licensed drivel after licensed drivel. Today, you CANNOT get an innovative title published, unless your last name is Wright, or Miyamoto.

How many of you were at the Microsoft keynote?

I don’t know about you, but it made MY FLESH CRAWL. The HD Era. Bigger. Louder. More photorealistic 3D. Teams of hundreds. And big bux to be made.

Not by you and me, of course. Not by the developers; developers never see a dime beyond dev funding. By the publishers.

Those budgets, those teams, ensure the death of innovation.

This is not why =I= got into games.

Was YOUR allegiance bought at the price of a television?

Then there’s the Nintendo keynote. Nintendo is the company that brought us to this precipice. Nintendo established the business model under which we are crucified today. Nintendo said “Pay us a royalty not on sale, but manufacture.” Nintendo said “We will decide what games we allow you to publish”—ostensibly to prevent another crash like that of 83, but in reality to quash any innovation but their own. Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer—and my question is, what poor bastard’s chest did he carve it from, and how often do they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo HQ?

My friends, we are fucked. We are well and truly fucked. The bar, in terms of graphics and glitz, has been raised and raised and raised until no one can any longer afford to risk anything at all. The sheer labor involved in creating a game has increased exponentially, until our only choice is permanent crunch and mandatory 80 hour weeks—at least until all our jobs are out-sourced to Asia.

With these stakes, risk must be avoided. But without risk, there is no innovation; and innovation is what drives growth in games.

But it’s okay, because The HD Era is here, and big bux are to be made. It doesn’t matter if all we do from here to eternity is more photorealistic drivers and shooters with more polygons on the screen; it doesn’t matter if our idea of innovation becomes blowing into a microphone—because after all, look on the bright side. Bing Gordon’s wallet will be thicker.

I say—enough.

The time has come for revolution.

It may seem to you that what I’ve described are inevitable forces of history, and there’s some truth to that. But not fundamentally. We have free will. And our current plight is the consequence of individual choices.

EA could have chosen to concentrate on innovation, rather than continually raising the graphic bar to squeeze out less well capitalized competitors, but they did not. Sony could have chosen to create a Miramax of the game industry, funding dozens of sub-million titles in a process of planned innovation to establish new world-beating game styles, but they declined. Nintendo could make dev kits cheaply available to small firms, with the promise of funding and publication to to the most interesting titles, but they prefer to rely on the creativity of one aging designer.

You have choices, too. You can take the blue pill, or the red pill. You can go work for the machine, work mandatory eighty hour weeks in a massive sweatshop publisher-owned studio with hundreds of other drones, laboring to build the new, compelling photorealistic driving game-- with the same basic gameplay as Pole Position.

Or you can defy the machine.

You can choose to starve for your art, to beg, borrow, or steal the money you need to create a game that will set the world on fire.

You can choose to riot in the streets of Redwood City, to down your tools and demand an honest wage for an honest eight-hour day.

You can choose to find an alternate distribution channel, a different business model, a path out of the trap the game industry has set itself.

You can choose to remember WHY we love games—and to ensure that, a generation from now, there are still games worthy of our love.

You can start today."

[joshnickerson]

Reading the title of this thread, I had a picture of hundreds of angry programmers jumping on top of their desks and shaking their fists, while Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" blares in the background.

[bargora]

Unions are an interesting idea, but it wouldn't work. For one thing unions just don't have the power in this country they once did. Plus there are so many young people dying to break into this industry, they'd be easy to intimidate into not joining.

The biggest problem would be if the US gaming industry people organized, I guarantee the publishers would just continue their move to foreign and "third world" countries. You'd see an influx of Chinese and Indian developed games. Honestly, I think you're going to see this anyway as pretty much everything we can do, India and China can do cheaper. But if there was talk of unions, expect the timeline to be much shorter.
I hope you're not right. Even though I worry that you are. Hell, why are there even still U.S. based programmers at all?

I don't know. Reading the transcript and all, I still stick by my initial assessment. The other thing is, somewhere along the way these same people who are now up in arms had to agree to crank out this schlock in order for the industry to get where it is. Someone had to make the damn games, right? It's hard for me to take all this righeous indignation seriously when the developer's hands are dirty too.
I think you may be being a bit hard on the developers. I mean, I would argue that improving graphics was innovative, at least up to a certain point. I'm not sure exactly when we passed that point; the historians can dissect that one out. But the thing is, I don't think that most game developers thought "boy, I wanna make some shlock" when they were breaking into the business.

And since the publishers are in the business of making money rather than fostering the most innovative products possible (since that wouldn't necessarily make money), I doubt that the question of whether the product is "shlock" even crosses the EA execs' minds.

You may say that the developers' hands are dirty, which I take to mean that you think that they should have spoken out before now. Well, they're speaking out now, right? Do you really feel like telling them "too late, bud"? (Besides, it sounds like they already realize that it is--or may be--too late.)

[ghostangelofcky]

You know what it just sounds like every employee meeting I've ever attended, bunch of people that point out all the problems and not enough people pointing out the solutions, if you don't like it, fix it, or leave.

Alot of great game Co's have started this way, ie Activision.

take the hint!

[hezeuschrist]

I agree with a lot that has been said, and especially after reading that "EA Spouse" rant a few months ago, it's become a really scary thing.

The thing I think people might be missing is that ALL the major companies are planning for longer life cycles for the systems. The budgets right now are completely out of control, but they'll level off and come back down after the new hardware is probed and exploited. Dev kits will become far more intuitive and won't require so much demand time for tasks that are difficult now will become simple. There isn't much farther to go to absolute photo realism, and if that ever happens there will never be a need for more powerful hardware. After this next round there will almost be no need for more powerful hardware.

The age of $50 top teir titles is coming to a quick close, and I've got an irking feeling that none of the next systems, execpt possibly the revolution, will be at $300 or under. Movie ticket prices raise, so do game prices.

And since this likely isn't going to happen, let the market crash. this isn't 1983, there aren't just a bunch of fairly simplistic games to play, there are thousands of deep and complex titles to keep us all busy for quite some time. It'll likely never crash, because as long as theres Madden and GTA, the casual gamers can more than keep the market afloat.

[Captain Wrong]

I think you may be being a bit hard on the developers. I mean, I would argue that improving graphics was innovative, at least up to a certain point. I'm not sure exactly when we passed that point; the historians can dissect that one out. But the thing is, I don't think that most game developers thought "boy, I wanna make some shlock" when they were breaking into the business.

And since the publishers are in the business of making money rather than fostering the most innovative products possible (since that wouldn't necessarily make money), I doubt that the question of whether the product is "shlock" even crosses the EA execs' minds.

You may say that the developers' hands are dirty, which I take to mean that you think that they should have spoken out before now. Well, they're speaking out now, right? Do you really feel like telling them "too late, bud"? (Besides, it sounds like they already realize that it is--or may be--too late.)

Valid points. I'm glad they are speaking out now, but it just feels to me like an excercize in futility at this point. I guess if I'd seen anywhere in those links some real and possible solutions, I'd feel differently. But all it looks like to me is "I'm mad as hell and I guess I'm gonna take it because I'm not sure what the alternative is."

No one wants to make schlock. Hell, one of my teachers was one of the guys who made the Deer Hunter games. He certaintly didn't want to keep cranking those out for the rest of his life, but it paid the bills, and pretty well at that. You know I'm one of those people who knows that the reason there's crap out there is that it's selling. (Some times I almost think It's a "chicken and egg" case. Which came first; the crappy games or the people who buy them? :))

Rightly or wrongly, I kind of see things like the music industry, which I'm much more familiar with. Everyone I've known who has been involved with the major labels (where the money is) have had to comprimise and usually the first thing to go is artistic purity.

Someone mentioned Activision up above. Unfortunately the situation is different today. Activision could happen because consoles at the time didn't have lock outs like they do today. I'm pretty sure that's what the guy means by "Nintendo is the company that brought us to this precipice. Nintendo established the business model under which we are crucified today." I think it's cool what you're doing goatdan with the Dreamcast stuff, but could you do it for PS2, Xbox or Gamecube? Unless you got the license from one of those guys, I bet they'd be all over you.

I guess that's why the music industry analogy isn't 100% right. You can set up your own record label with little trouble, if you have the cash. If you want to publish videogame, in the console arena anyway, you are going to have to dance with the devil, at least for a song or two.

So, I don't know. Maybe I am being a bit hard on them, but I kind of feel like they've painted themselves into this corner, to an extent. I don't know how else they could have done things though and I'm not sure either what can be done about it now. I think hoping for a crash to press the reset button is wishful thinking at this point. That happened once and I find it unlikely it will happen again.

It just seem to me like the videogame industry has grown at an accellerated rate compaired to other media and while the music and film industries managed to grow independent channels of production along side the big ones, the videogame people forgot about it until, well, now it seems. I don't know what can be done about it now, but it just seems, to me anyway, that part of the reason things are how they are is the developers who were willing to make the games in the first place.