01.13.07
Hype, glitter and omerta in game industry
Game Truth blog offered some interesting reading. I’m happy not to be a part of the mainstream game development. I don’t think it’s all that bad, but things certainly aren’t as bright as they seem.
Game developers know it. Game developers admit it. “4 out of 5 games lose money, according to one pundit who may be lying, admittedly. Can we do any worse if we just trusted the creative folks entirely instead of the publishers?”
This all is well hidden under glitter of nice webs like gamasutra.com, igda.org, gamespot.com and so on. (I’m not saying that every mentioned site is a complete rubbish.) Thanks to mainstream publications about games (online or other), focus is, well, on mainstream games. Some people still value “HD”, “HDR”, shaders, polygon count and other shallow ‘values’ instead of fun, deep story, playability. This keeps only successful titles on top of the water. The tip of the iceberg. The rest is under water, often literally – but no one will tell you how much they lose on unsuccessful games. No one can count the hundreds of titles that got dumped in favour of bigger studios, or just their experimental gameplay. No one does really have the idea of what does whole industry really look like, give us any precious useless statistics that tell nothing about tragedies and wasted dreams (or talents).
Yeah, some big games are really good. I’m looking forward to see some of them released. I will buy them and play them. Maybe I’ll even try to develop mods for some of them. But at what cost will they come? And I’m not talking about production costs. How many studios can actually offer to do what they want? To channel their creativity into games? Probably only three groups. 1. Huge studios that are trusted; studios with famous designer on front and self-publishers. 2. Indie developers, who don’t give a dung about mainstream. 3. Lucky teams with a really nice publisher.
However, given the momentum video game industry has reached, like an avalanche, like a war that ravages everything in its way, there are silent bodies of thousands of developers whose skill is being marketed and whose passion for game development has mutated into routine long time ago. Congratulations. Game industry has entered zombified state. What’s next? Omerta which Truth Blog mentioned will one day end. Wars will become open. They wanted to be as big as Hollywood, they became as dirty as Hollywood. Soon, there will be gamedevgossips.com, magazines about celebrities from gamedev industy, who dates who, who used to be on cocaine, who got divorced, who says what. Celebrities will become more visible, masses of hard-working developers will be even less significant. People in industry will no longer have to be pacifistic, everyone will feel free to throw dirt at others. Why?
Developers won’t hold together. They don’t feel they’re part of community of developers, because they’re part of the industry now. Industry means competition. Rivals, no longer colleagues. Games will become business like every other. It doesn’t have to be art to produce it. There’s money spinning in the lucky wheel of game industry and just like in any other business, there will be smartasses who’ll try to exploit it. Come, hit, exploit, run.
No, it won’t happen overnight. It won’t be the end of fun in making games. It won’t be the end of fun in playing games. It won’t be the death of the industry. It’s just the beginning of transformation.
game, design, truth, ernest, adams, industry, gamedev, development, decay, omerta
