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AGC Rivebrog: The Age of the Dinosaurs

AGC Rivebrog: The Age of the Dinosaurs

Summary: Raph says embrace the niche, bitches.  (Or get out your Wile E. Coyote umbrella.)

The slides can be found on Raph's website here.  Read on for the unedited and somewhat disjointed notes I took during the talk itself.

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I am always interested in Koster has to say. However, I always wind up thinking........"so what". Lots of platitudes, lots of lofty ideas that are fun to think about and perform mental gymnastics over. However, that doesn't mean any of his assertions are correct or even valid.

Is the market space really that convoluted? Does the wheel literally have to be reinvented? Or is it more plausible that good games will always do well, and bad games wont? Many would say this is too simplistic a view. I would counter that Koster's view is way, way to convoluted.

I noticed the notes specifically call out 'social worlds' as being important. To whom? Why create a 'social world' when chat room, irc, etc have been around forever? Are those not social worlds in their own right?

His argument about niche is a good one, I think. I disagree that someone can't out-WoW WoW. WoW - to most consumers - is the best choice in WoW style games. If a better WoW comes out, people will reward that game with subscriptions. If it's mealy equal or 'good', they will not. To many people WoW is simply the best choice for their gaming dollar. It isn't any more complicated than that - mental gymnastics aside.

Let me make a simple analogy. American car companies are hurting because the average consumer feels their cars suck compaired to the competition. It's just that simple. Make better cars, more people will buy them.

Bottom line: make it (good) and they will come. Mental mind-twisting can be fun, but the solutions are much less complicated.

Talking is easier than doing.

Like I said in another thread, these panel discussions annoy me. People who screwed up in the past say some good things then go screw up again.

For a bunch of people on F13 to say that SOE keeps releasing crappy games is fine. For SOE employees to say it is just lame, especially when they don't try to correct the problem.

Instead of saying "yeah, we keep releasing unfinished games" just release finished ones. Or just stop talking.

A lot of these guys have had multiple chances to make good games and failed. What they say is no longer relevant, because either their advice sucks or they don't bother to follow it themselves.

To whom?  Not to you, and not to me, but to all the people who aren't going to embrace text-only interfaces.  The other 75% of the pie, in other words.  Apparently Habbo Hotel has more concurrent users than WoW now, and Habbo is literally a glorified chat room.  The fact that you can make money just by prettying up IRC a little bit seems significant to me.


To be clear: when Raph said you can't out-WoW WoW, he said specifically that you can't do to WoW what WoW did to EQ.  WoW got what, twenty times the numbers that EQ did?  Something around there?  So to do to WoW what WoW did to EQ, you'd have to put out a MMORPG that got twenty times the numbers that WoW did.  Is the MMORPG market that big?  Will it ever be?

You might be able to put something out that steals away most of WoW's subscribers, and maybe grows the market a little bit more, but nothing is going to bitchslap WoW as hard as WoW bitchslapped EQ.  Also, remember that WoW's genius was essentially just polishing the turd that is EQ/Diku gameplay.  You can only polish a turd so much.

What seems to be getting lost is the point behind the Habbo/Gaia comparisons to WoW. It's not that "Habbo is more important than WOW" or "Habbo is a better game than WOW". The point is that there's applications out there that have subsumed some of the major points of functionality that MMO people essentially created (graphical virtual spaces) and they're larger, in terms of user base, than what many of us regard as a Holy Grail number of subscribers. And, further, that we - as technologists, designers, participants, a subculture - are in danger of being re-marginalized both culturally and financially as the popularity, profitability and social importance of these non-game virtual spaces grows.

I believe that back in the day, we didn't think anybody could bitch-slap EQ the way WoW did. We didn't even think an MMO could do half as well. But it happened. I wouldn't say "never" to that sort of thing happening again.

And by the way, is that avatar a pic of you IRL? cause LOL! funny

If Myspace/FriendSter/FriendFinder/Facebook impliment a 3D something you could possibly see 10x of WoW. 20x is pretty steep.

Keep in mind, it's frequently not up to the people actually building the game to determine when the game is actually released.  Most of the people doing this talking likely would LOVE to release only finished games.  But, as was said in the MMOG Rant panel, telling your publisher 3 months before release that you need more time is a career altering decision.

Then create a realistic schedule and keep to it, or cut features when you are behind.

There is no excuse for things like SWG, where Raph was posting on the boards that the game was ready to release in a couple of weeks when the reality was that it was a year away from being complete.

Publishers do enforce dates but they usually don't move them up halfway through production. If you get to the end of your schedule and the game is not even close to finished that *is* your fault, not the fault of the publisher.

Think about SWG again for a minute. One of the main guys in charge of the game literally had no idea what state it was in. None. You can't blame that on someone else.

Agreed.  At that point you're not really out-WoWing WoW, because you're going after a different market entirely.

It's going to happen.  It's the Elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about, though, because we - as participants - largely only care about games.   It also doesn't help that the majority see the days as when we WERE marginalized to that degree as 'the golden days.'  When 'stupid shit" didn't get put-into the experiences just to broaden the customer base.

I knew where we were... I told people internally we needed another year, and we were not given it (we were given extra time though).

Well then, I have two things to say:

1: That isn't what you said on the boards. Obviously there is pressure to mislead there and that's what you did. I'm not going to preach and say how awful of you, that's understandable. But it does make you look pretty foolish for people reading the boards.

2: How did you get a year behind? When you have a date and you are in danger of missing it there are exactly three things you can do:

a: Cut features
b: Push out the date
c: Release at low quality

Usually b isn't an option, and out of the remaining choices a) is usually far preferable.

How do you fall a year behind? People like to blame things on publishers pushing games out before they are ready but from their persepctive it is quite different. They give you deadlines, you meet them. There isn't any excuse for being a full year behind. Everyone makes it sound like the publishers say "hey, you know how we said how you would have 24 months for this project? Well now its 12!"

The reality is "you know how we said you would have 24 months - well this is month 24!"

Inability to make a mutually agreed-upon date is not the fault of the publisher.

Someone's apparently never heard of feature creep.

If you're still playing SWG stop, you obviously have too much of an emotional stake in the game, one that isn't healthy.

If you have already stopped, I will poorly relay a story I heard once:

Two Monks (Teacher, Student) were walking through a Forest, when the saw a woman who was unable to cross a river.  The Teacher let the woman climb on his back, and he helped her safely cross the river.  5 hours later, the Student asked why he helped the woman, as it was against their religon to have contact with members of the opposite sex.  The Teacher replied, "While I stopped carrying the woman 5 hours ago, you seem to still be carrying her in your mind".

Okay a pretty crappy story, but the point is still there, SWG is a game, move one, you're still alive, and probaly in good health.

Oh and if you bitch about MMOs not being able to be kept on schedule, I would like to ask you what was the last MMO you designed.

This should be fun.

Nah, I'll nip it in the bud. Ookii, you missed "it." Margalis isn't being an SWG-ninny. He's actually saying the same kind of thing I was saying at the convention. It's as much (if not more) the developers fault as it is the publishers fault when shit gets fucked up.

I work in software. I've shipped products 9+ months late, and also exactly on time.

As far as SWG goes, I'm not bitter over it. I've never even played it. I've just seen other people play it, talked to other people, read boards, etc. I don't have any emotional investment at all. I just think its weak for a publisher to get blamed for "pushing it out the door early" when they are actually pushing it out the door *on time*, according to the schedule. When a game goes over schedule it also goes over budget, and the publisher is typically footing the bill. They are just supposed to give you an entire extra year to pay for your full team? Its a game development houses play - overpromise, under-deliver, then ask for more time and money and bitch when it isn't given to you.

Yeah, schedules slip and features creep. You have to balance those things. If you absolutely have to hit the schedule then you just can't allow feature-creep.

At work right now I'm working on a project with a very aggressive deadline, and people are trying to throw in new features. But I tell them flat out I'm not even going to consider what they are proposing unless they agree to chop out an existing feature, because we aren't willing to move the schedule and that's the only way things are going to get done on time. I'm not going to investigate their proposal or even think seriously about their emails until they come up with something else that I no longer have to spend time on.

Most of the projects I am in charge of get finished on time and of reasonable quality. It really isn't that hard. The most important thing is being honest with yourself about what you can accomplish in a given timeframe. Being a year late on a project is a complete failure of product management and development.

The one thing I worked on that shipped very late was a clusterfuck of epic proportions, because we never really knew what state we were in. We thought we had 2 weeks of work left when we actually had 6 months. That was entirely our fault. (Mostly due to the lack of any organized testing and QA effort) Sometimes I would guess we had a month left, sometimes 3, sometimes 3 weeks, in the end we had to admit we basically had no idea.

That's a situation that anyone with a reasonable degree of experience on development should be able to avoid. In our case the person(s) in charge of development had no real experience, and it showed. These days a major slip for us is two weeks or so.

My point is that when you miss your mark by a huge margin instead of looking for someone else to blame look at your development effort. You either agreed to an unreasonable schedule or agreed to a reasonable one and then blew it.

I don't think we actually had much feature crap. Rather, I think we overdesigned from the get-go. :)

:-D

Best. Freudian. Slip. Ever.

Of what complexity and team size are your products, compared to video games? Not a bait or a troll; honestly curious here.

this was very good, but left me confused. In fact so did Ubiq's and maybe every other designer session.  Raph is the only one who seemed to acknowledge the dominance of the non-traditional MMO's.   I have to post my notes to see what it was that left me confused.

6+ devs, 5+ qa, a couple other random people. (Doc guy, website guy, etc)

The main difference would be we have no real content creation people.

The slides are now posted on my site.

http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/ageofdinosaurs.shtml

Article updated with link.  Thanks!

Hm, most game studios I've seen have about twice that number. So...yeah, no big difference. I dunno what to say, except...if every development company hired Margalis, their products would be PERFECT!

There is only way to find out no?  :evil:

Now a lot of times people agree to a schedule knowing it isn't realistic, or the people doing the agreeing are not the people with the best grasp of what needs to be done or the people doing the work. When I talk about agreeing to a schedule I mean an organization as a whole - you can be in the situation where your organization agreed to something that you know can't be done.

I understand slippage but a year's worth of slippage is a LOT. What is also scary is that a lot of times people don't seem to realize how far behind they are until very late.

Coming in 10% over schedule I can understand. That's about my limit before I start saying there was some bad project management.

Estimating schedules and then sticking to them is something most people are not good at. I don't know why, but that's just the way it is. Even when people have been wrong 10 times before, they'll be wrong that 11th time.

Well...maybe. I think something to bear in mind is, just because you can produce a new word processor or operating system doesn't mean you know how to produce an MMO. I used to think that my work in theatre would be useful working in film. Some things were helpful, like...yeah, there's actors. There's music and lights. There's a director. But that's about it.

I hear ya. It's strange. Film is more an art of the closeup, and silence. While theater more about the body and elocution (of course, that's not a rule or anything, but a general distinction). Many of the things you might employ in one would make you look like a blundering idiot in the other.

What?

Speaking of film, we've heard games bringing in more money than movies these days, yet devs are still paid crappy salaries, and it's getting prohibitively expensive just to make a game now. This REALLY confused me for a long time. If games are making more money than movies, devs should be making movie-star salaries, and nobody would be worried about the rising costs of game content.

I have yet to hear an answer to that one. I want the books open, by cracky!

There is movie-style alternative funding. We don't get Warcraft Happy Meals here in America. So I figure it's either that, or someone up top is finding more and more expensive hookers.

I think the point that people miss when Raph gets to pontificating is that he is speaking in wildly generalist terms.

Glorified chat systems and personal 3d spaces will not replace games like Wow for gamers.  The most obvious reason for that is that hey, we, they are gamers not glorified 3d chat system users.  Sure we use chats sometimes, like when I need a buddy to invite me into his Skype connection or when Im at work and babbling to a buddy, usually about games.

Point is that Raph, in this case is talking about an essentially un-tapped market, but not necessarily a gamers market.  He used to love games and making games that he would love to play.  Now he seems to be firmly in the religious oracle segment of the gaming making profession.

Tell me gamers.  When was the last time Pontiff Koster actually made a game that:
 1.  A company could actually implement and support.
 2.  That you could actually play as he intended it.

Answer, never.  Why on earth do people spend so much time listening to this guy.  Hes at best an entertaining and thought provoking fella but he is almost purely academic, but he is no where near say...a Will Wright in actually producing something people want to buy.

Raph describes the gaming universe in Broad strokes, throwing around prophecies like Nostradamus, his predictions from what Ive seen have been no more accurate than the great alchemists. 

Meanwhile, Lum the Mad, Scott Jennings had much more important things to say at AGC than did Koster..in my very humble and unimportant opinion.

-Gooney

I think Raph has made it abundantly clear that he is pitching to producers (the people that pay his salary) that there are more consumers (The people that make the producers want to pay his salary) in non-conventional MMO spaces than there are in the standard Diku-based crap fest we have now.  He's trying to look at the forest and you people keep bitching about how this bush has yellow AND blue flowers.

The answer is that games do not make anywhere near what movies do. I spoke to this in the presentation on the slides about business ecology.

The stats that gets cited is "video games sales including all hardware pulls in more revenue than movie box office domestically." Domestic box office isn't even the largest fraction of the money made by a movie.

The Happy Meals are re-use of IP, not alternative financing. In Hollywood, you borrow the money to make a movie -- you don't spend your own. This model doesn't really exist in the videogame business.

People do not see your face on stage in the same way as they do film (This isn't to say that you don't act with your face at all on stage. There's just a different emphasis in where the subtleties lie is all.). While in film, ninety percent of the time, your acting is limited to the waist up. Especially the face. Secondly, many teachers in theater also moonlight as dancing instructors, or have some interest in some form of choreography like that. You rarely see this kind of thing in film, outside of instructions on where and where not the camera is going to be, where you should and shouldn't move, etc.. Unless you're doing an action movie, how you move is mostly up to you.

Silence: Perhaps I shouldn't have used that word. All I'm doing is contrasting it with how much volume you have to push when doing a play (this has nothing to do with "shouting" either. I just mean that you have to talk LOUD...Which is kind of an art in and of itself). You don't want to walk in to an audition and make an ass of yourself by speaking 100 decibels higher than what people are used to (it's something many stage actors are guilty of). You don't want to do that when a microphone is hanging right over your head either.

Sorry, gonna call bullshit. The games that I have been most directly involved in made over a half a billion dollars. No, I am nowhere near Will Wright. Nobody is, in PC games. But I'm not irrelevant either.


I also think that if you go back through the things I was called "crazy" for, you'll find a startlingly large number of them taken for granted in the games today. Latest example is WoW showing off their dance moves for the expansion.

If you look at SWG and what happened after Raph left, it's clear the project was just riddled with incompetence. Its not fair to blame that on Raph. When he left if anything things got worse.

A couple points regarding Raph's slides:

*  That asteroid is way too big.  One that size would wipe out every living thing down to the microscopic level.

*  Star Trek 2.0 sucks ass.  Get that "Spock Market" shit off my screen so I can watch the fucking show.

No, I didn't have anything topical to say...

We care because his games have the most potential and are the closest approach to the sorts of games we would like to play. He gets harsh words from time to time because he actually tries to hit the target rather than just shooting at an easier target that we're not so interested in. People do want to buy his games, and they buy the compromises that the publishers saddle us with in the hopes of getting them. When somebody produces a more enjoyable and open-ended online world than Raph has, you'll have something to crow about, and not before. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy playing with your dolls house.

I gotta wonder about that. Studio execs can juggle numbers around until even a blockbuster like Spider-Man 2 looks like a flop. LIES I tell you!


Not that's interesting. I thought that devs borrowed the money to make games, and whatever the game made went to pay off those investors.

Point clarified about re-use versus alternate funding. But in Asia, we have Lineage Pepsi cans and Final Fantasy anime. Can't we just go "Hey Mr. Publisher, we're going to sell 10 million of these games in China. Pepsi will pay us another two million just to use our image, see? Lineage is doing it too!"

(Numbers pulled out of my ass, of course.)

And the funny part about the numbers Raph's mentioning? The movie industry has multi-use revenue streams for each product. Video games are lucky if they get a month of sales, other than MMOG's. They have no second revenue stream, even though the EB's and Gamestop's of the world get that second and third revenue stream with used games. If video game makers are lucky, they get one or two expansion packs and if they are Blizzard, they get merchandising deals like PNP RPG's and CCG's. The rest of the industry is left trying to squeeze blood from steel ore buried under the surface of fucking Mars.

The movie business is a great racket. :)

They borrow money from banks and suckers to make the movies. They enter production deals with contractors to actually make them film. Then they sell the distribution rights, pay-per-view rights, premium cable rights, TV rights, syndication rights, international rights, and merchandising rights to themselves by selling from one subsidiary to another. That's how they can show a loss, and then avoid paying back the original money. Even the banks are "pet banks."


Not that's interesting. I thought that devs borrowed the money to make games, and whatever the game made went to pay off those investors.[/quote]

Nope.

Indie case: the dev fronts the money to make a "vertical slice." The publisher sees it, and 90% of the time says no, and the dev folds. The rest of the time, the publisher puts the dev on milestone payments, and in exchange for that money to make the game, the developer gets a royalty on the finished product, but the publisher ends up owning the IP rights. The game then typically does not break even, so the developer folds. The rest of the time, the pub owns the IP, so they get to make the sequels, cutting out the dev if they so choose. The dev must wait to earn out the advances to get royalties, and in the meantime, has to start making another vertical slice...

Wholly owned is similar, except the the dev doesn't fold but is paid for out of the pub's slush fund and therefore doesn't get royalties. Should the dev studio fail to make a profit seen as a business entity, however, it will still likely go away.


The Pacific Rim developers are much much better than the West is at creating merchandisable IP, is what it boils down to.

(aside) Turns out there's even a World of Warcraft semi-hardcore strategy board game (http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/warcraft.html). I hear it's pretty good, although I haven't actually played it since neither I nor any of my board game group are interested in dropping half a hundred simoleons on it. And it's not a minor one either - it's being done by Fantasy Flight, one of the major hardcore board gaming companies. It even has an expansion out already.

(Yes, the WoW boardgame has an expansion out before the source material does. Awesome, ain't it?)

Looks like a Warcraft board game to me. Not a "World of Warcraft" one. ;)

The box uses WoW art. Directly. I've looked at it in person at the trademark Local Wall-Hole of Gaming Iniquity and/or Miniatures. You have seminal WoW-box night elf bewbies and various iconography lifted directly from the game.

That's not to say I'm an expert on Warcraft art; if they've been using the same exact nelf headshot for years, then I'm merely guilty of ignorance. :)

Same artists, etc..

The Night Elf pic is from the Warcraft Night Elf Edition box. There was an Undead edition (same graphic as the one next to the Night Elf), Orc cover art (same pic as the one on the bottom of that page), and a Human edition (that had a picture of the pre-Lich Arthas).

Anyways, I'm pretty sure this board game's been out awhile (hence, the time they had to do an expansion). Blizzard has been pushing WC into other mediums before WoW came along (actually, WoW itself would be a part of that grand scheme). They've had books, comics, etc..

We should do games more like they do in Asia. That would be awesome.


EQ has a tabletop RPG, City of Heroes has a comic book, Diablo has toys...and just about every game has t-shirts, even ATITD and M59. I wonder how far this merchandising thing can be taken.




...hehe

The movie industry analogy has always been a terrible one.

Music industry analogies are probably better, as are book industry analogies. (Really)

What few people get about the movie industry is that nearly every movie loses money at the box office. The movie business is not about people going to see movies any more. The movies themselves are just ads for DVDs, HBO, pay-per-view, on-demand, happy meals, toys, etc.

The book industry analogy is a great one. A few bestsellers dominate all sales. There are no alternate revenue streams. Once books lose shelf space most are never heard of again. The industry is dominated by sequels and hype. Used books are common and have no value to the original publisher.

On the production side obviously writing a book is very different than making a computer game, but the overall industry is pretty similar in the economics. If a book cost $12 million to write the two industries would be basically identical.

I was about to post that it's World of Warcraft, not Warcraft.  Glad I went and took another look at the link, because that one IS Warcraft.  However, I recalled there being a WoW game the WoW main page when it was available for preorder.  A quick google and sure enough I remembered right. (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/17223)  Different publisher (Dragon Talon Games) but your little plastic avatar can level-up and you can get "drops" to equip from the cards.

The WoW board game is supposed to be fun, according to a buddy of mine.

I imagine it is.. it can only accurately reflect the 1-60 game.  How does one have an "endgame" in a board game? "Woo, max level, now we start playing Axis & Allies: Warcraft Edition!  Go outside and find 36 other players so we can kill the dragon card and I'll start inflating the spirit healer!"