Treyarch to gamers: STFU u h8ers

[Lantyssa]

Its rather safe to say that many up and coming MMOs (Something I pay more attention to then other genres), that were technically sound, but had unique things to them likely suffered a great deal of loss in interest or potential sales due to the "Pundits" he speaks of slathering all over the web. Some, simply in defense of the game they are currently playing.

I'd have to argue with "unique" and "technically sound".  There may be a few that offer one or the other, but both combined with an added "fun" I'm going to call you on.

Please name one that meets these criteria and got panned.

[AutomaticZen]

Its rather safe to say that many up and coming MMOs (Something I pay more attention to then other genres), that were technically sound, but had unique things to them likely suffered a great deal of loss in interest or potential sales due to the "Pundits" he speaks of slathering all over the web. Some, simply in defense of the game they are currently playing.

I'd have to argue with "unique" and "technically sound".  There may be a few that offer one or the other, but both combined with an added "fun" I'm going to call you on.

Please name one that meets these criteria and got panned.

I'm guessing he may say APB.

[Mrbloodworth]

I suppose I could, but I have avoided citing examples, as it somewhat misses the point when we will inevitably get in to the resulting views on what constitutes "unique" and "technically sound". Then it becomes a bash the game, bash the poster game that I don't want to get into again with this community.

Many things are lost, such as the point of the conversation, when you start the "one up" game here.

Bottom line though (IMO), Irrational banter on various sites, logical, or truthful or not, directly impact how something is received. True quality is irrelevant. The fire that burns brightest is the one that gets repeated. Entire games can be written off, regardless of execution, for some potential users. Many times, for things that are non-issues or simply community created myths, or even rival community created. The current method of discussion I mentioned simply compounds the issue, and make it all the more violent in its effects. Some "edgy" article can indeed sway people to never even do the own research into a title. It can also very much overshadow true innovation or uniqueness, to the point that affects development, more so in sequels or multi-title franchises.  

But I believe I am just repeating myself at this point.

[Modern Angel]

I remember when the gaming press jumped all over Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, demanding they conform. It was a bloodbath.

[Mrbloodworth]

I don't really count such titles in this, as those are not AAA titles. They are more driven by nostalgia and catering to a niche.  To be fair, Minecraft IS a sequel that was tempered by feedback from its previous incarnation.

[Fordel]

The only thing the internet has done to discourse is given everyone perfect record keeping.


People have always been this cynical and stupid, the internet didn't start that or blow it up. It did make sure you always REMEMBER that they are though.



Everyone has had that retarded conversation at a family dinner, about taxes or politics or how my sports team is superior to yours. Well guess what, you've just had a "flame war", it's just everyone forgets about it after it's done. If you actually typed out the entire conversation, you would do the YouTube comment people proud.

There's also always been those folk, that just hate anything popular. Always that kid that insisted his Turbografx 16 was the best thing ever while everyone else went back to playing their Nintendos. Someone always hates the bands you like and etc.



It's just all permanent now, so you can always confirm what you sorta half remember what someone said.

[Mrbloodworth]

The only thing the internet has done to discourse is given everyone perfect record keeping.


People have always been this cynical and stupid, the internet didn't start that or blow it up. It did make sure you always REMEMBER that they are though.



Everyone has had that retarded conversation at a family dinner, about taxes or politics or how my sports team is superior to yours. Well guess what, you've just had a "flame war", it's just everyone forgets about it after it's done. If you actually typed out the entire conversation, you would do the YouTube comment people proud.

There's also always been those folk, that just hate anything popular. Always that kid that insisted his Turbografx 16 was the best thing ever while everyone else went back to playing their Nintendos. Someone always hates the bands you like and etc.



It's just all permanent now, so you can always confirm what you sorta half remember what someone said.

Yes, you have good points. Does not change the outcome IMO. I think its does stem from social changes, but the rant as a form of question things does not simply happen in games, this is very true.

[Paelos]

I think the social issues are the same. Like people are saying, the forum for voicing displeasure reaches wider audiences. Our awareness has changed, not the inputs.

Everyone thinks the next generation is getting worse while looking at the past for a more orderly society.

That's not reality.

[Mrbloodworth]

No, its rather clear to me that tone and methods have changed. YMMV.

[Modern Angel]

as those are not AAA titles.

Bingo. And now you know what's really stifling innovation, even saying so yourself. It's not because xXVampsterBaterXx fancies himself the H.L. Mencken of messageboards. Also, just because I mentioned him, go look up when H.L. Mencken lived. It wasn't in 2007.

[Mrbloodworth]

I do not believe that I have in this discussion said that it was the only or major reason. What is REALLY slowing innovation is a large list of things, but we were not talking about all the items in that list.

[Modern Angel]

And I'm saying that the reactions of mean internet people is so far down the list of those reasons that it's barely worth mentioning, especially when the initial discussion starter is blatant corporate ass-covering.

[Mrbloodworth]

Oh, I agree he should not have even brought it up, even if he felt that way. There was only one way people were going to take it, as has been clearly shown.

[Modern Angel]

See, that puts the onus on us for not seeing it his/your way. That's a little passive aggressive. It might just be that he's wrong.

[Sky]

Suits and big business pressures create Civ IV.

Creativity and freedom create FFH2.

Anyway, about player feedback. There's a definite quality gradation, I'm not sure exactly where the demarcations are, but I'd imagine big budget/high hype games attract the worst of it, especially mmo where you've got a ton of social maladroits ironically being the loudest voices. I enter Haemmy staeb mode when I read stuff like "My whole guild is going to move to (unreleased hypebot)" or "(Unreleased hypebot) will be the game I've been looking for to play the next five years!" The sheer combination of building community artificially, stifled creativity, and insanity of the concept of people playing a game for years on end leads to ze epic lulz deluxe.

But on the other end of the spectrum, when you've got a quirky little mod community like FFH had, where there's a level of intelligence and competence amongst the participants, you almost regain faith in humanity.

[Paelos]

And while you may love FFH2, Sky, a lot of players didn't.

[Azazel]

 

I'm still wondering who these "pundits" are, who hold such sway over both the industry and consumers? Not reviews or reviewers, but their immense power stems from social media sites? Which sites? Facebook? Who on FB is so influential to developers and (hundreds of?) thousands of consumers?

[Jeff Kelly]

Guys, that's basically sales 101. On average a discontented customer tells 6 to 12 other people about his negaive experiences with a product. That was before the internet. Unhappy customers are 'better' multipliers than happy ones and how to deal with them is basic sales and management training.

Yeah, pissed people tend to tell others to not buy your products. And this probably happens since the invention of speech. That's why community management is such an important piece in your marketing efforts. Ideally you only ship products that aren't crap. Since Treyarch have a history of not doing that, they at least need strong CM to offset the complaints, happy people don't spam your forums with 'everything is fine, great game'.

How complaining about crappy games stifles creativity however is the secret of that CM. Usually appealing to the lowest common denominator and lack of funding of creative projects does that.

If I were snarky I'd say that there is nothing particularly creative in making the umpteenth sequel to a franchise that was invented by another studio. Teyarch usually finds creative ways to fuck with the formula or make your experience miserable though. Seems like they get a lot of credit for their kind of creativity on their forums 

The comments to me look more like a burned out CM than legitimate criticism.

[Paelos]

The comments to me look more like a burned out CM than legitimate criticism.

 

[IainC]

Guys, that's basically sales 101. On average a discontented customer tells 6 to 12 other people about his negaive experiences with a product. That was before the internet. Unhappy customers are 'better' multipliers than happy ones and how to deal with them is basic sales and management training.

Yeah, pissed people tend to tell others to not buy your products. And this probably happens since the invention of speech. That's why community management is such an important piece in your marketing efforts. Ideally you only ship products that aren't crap. Since Treyarch have a history of not doing that, they at least need strong CM to offset the complaints, happy people don't spam your forums with 'everything is fine, great game.

Again though, those criticisms happen after the game has been designed and gone gold. Internet criticsim of a released product doesn't make the developer pull all copies of a game so that they can remove the innovation from it.

[UnSub]

In general, it also seems that players will support a theoretical enhancement to a game when described by a dev (e.g. public quests) because it sounds good, but can dislike the actual execution. Very few players ask for less new features, but they will complain about things that are added but don't really contribute to the game or change the gameplay.

[tgr]

I just stumbled onto this article (link's in the quote):

Because the big companies are so focused on catering to the lowest common denominator and trying to emulate past successes, creativity has taken a nose-dive. Making money should be a side effect of game development, not the reason for doing it in the first place. While production values and advertising budgets for AAA games have skyrocketed in recent years, innovation and overall quality have come way down. Unfortunately, deficiencies in the latter are often covered up by overcompensating with the former, which is especially effective in the eyes of a consumer that cares more about outward appearances and celebrity endorsements than actual substance. The sweet irony of it all is that a genuinely good game with virtually zero budget and publicity can be as financially successful as, if not more so than, a AAA title. Corporations have corrupted the industry with their greedy habit of minimalizing risk, and if they don’t change their ways, they will come crashing down in the wake of the indie game revolution.

I feel that this quote (found on page 2) underlines a major problem I have with an increasing part of games being released the last 5+ years, initially (around deus ex: invisible war, i.e. sometime in 2003) with regards to in-game complexity and controller-wise. The very best example I can think of is to compare ArmA2 and OpFlash2. Both were "sequels" of the same original game, OpFlash, yet basically the only thing that's been improved was the graphics, every other part of the experience were either removed (freelook, lean) or new features such as respawning your squadmates at 4-5 predetermined points in the mission, and it made me quit and erase the game in disgust after less than an hour.

Personally I feel that PC gaming is also being stifled by the proliferation of online activations etc. I know the last part isn't going to be shared by a vast majority of people, so I'm not going to make a huge point of it, but it is having an impact (however small).

[Sky]

 

I am (probably obviously) on board with the thrust of that article. A couple things, though.

While the author refers to the (again, obvious) fact that consoles are hitting a wider audience, I'd be interested to know the total amount of PC gamers now compared to halycon 1999. Given the impact of things like 800# gorillas (wow) and cheap computers (intel gpus notwithstanding), I'd imagine the PC gamer playerbase is also far larger than it was 12 years ago. And moving into pure assumptionland, that the core pc gamer audience (us) is also larger as a whole. Thus, since most devs got their feet wet in pc gaming, and many of the companies now moving to consoleland also made their names in pc gaming, they could still turn a healthy profit just marketing to the pc market.

Mass Effect 2 is a game the author mentioned with consolitis. I have to say, the sequel plays much better than the first and I'd probably leave it off the list since I think the overall play experience was improved so much (it's almost painful to go back to ME1).

[Merusk]

Pic fail for the artist forgetting to extend Bobby's pinkie finger.

Problem is, despite the proliferation of PCs out there, folks aren't updating them.  If you design a PC game and want to pick-up the largest portion of those cheap computers, they'd better be running nothing much more taxing than WoW in the first place. That just pisses off the guys with the ultra-sleek $3k PCs because.. I don't know, I guess they realize it was a bad investment.

Only geeks keep their machines up to date (and even we are falling behind on that if this board is a good sample.)  Lord knows the family that bought the Best Buy special at X-mas 4 years ago isn't planning on replacing it until it burns out.

You don't have that problem with Consoles.  Folks upgrade them because they're only an appliance and there's clear delineation in regards to upgrades and new versions. 

[Khaldun]

The piece of this that has some validity is that gaming as a subculture has nurtured a sensibility with a big space carved out for various kinds of advanced assholery combined with serious entitlement issues. At the same time developers have no one but themselves to blame because they largely create games for that subculture and that subculture is where most developers come from. If the whole thing feels like a small nursery room full of babies with crap in their diapers, then the answer is to leave the room, not to complain that the babies still doing stinkies or to try to hire some community managers who will occasionally sprinkle talcum powder around the room.

All other mass media have fandoms or devoted audiences who are demanding, but that's often a goad to excellence. More importantly, most other mass media or art forms are diverse enough creative spaces that they sustain multiple communities and audiences, some of whom are less suffocating in their devotion. Games have had moments where they teeter on that kind of broadening and deepening, but for the moment the pull of the same intense, deeply experienced, aesthetically narrow audience who buy a lot of games dominates over a wider audience that might buy fewer games but sustain a bigger possibility space around gaming as a whole.

[tgr]

While the author refers to the (again, obvious) fact that consoles are hitting a wider audience, I'd be interested to know the total amount of PC gamers now compared to halycon 1999.

I'm not quite sure how representative this'll be when it comes to the wider audience, but:

http://www.ubisoftgroup.com/gallery_files/site/270/1042/2387.pdf

Search for "breakdown of sales by platform", and note how large the PC sales apparently seems to be.

Mass Effect 2 is a game the author mentioned with consolitis. I have to say, the sequel plays much better than the first and I'd probably leave it off the list since I think the overall play experience was improved so much (it's almost painful to go back to ME1).

What happened to the ammo? Why do I have to duck infront of a crate before I can jump up on top of it?

As to merusk's post, one of the reasons we don't upgrade our PCs "as much" is probably more the fact that there's no point. After I got this 285 and win7, I've been able to easily play 2-3 eve and 1 wurm at the same time. We've basically hit the point where we're looking at diminishing returns, unless you're looking at games like crysis 2 perhaps.

I still have a less than 3 year old PC, whereas the 360 I have is from either 2005 or 2006, I don't know. I got it as a bonus for doing something at work, and I've bought ... 5? 10? games tops. It's still not dead, so there's no point in upgrading it yet, and last I checked, MS was saying that the 360 should last 8, maybe 10 years before they release an update, to milk the hardware investment as much as possible, and I think sony is saying the same thing.

[Sky]

Problem is, despite the proliferation of PCs out there, folks aren't updating them.  If you design a PC game and want to pick-up the largest portion of those cheap computers, they'd better be running nothing much more taxing than WoW in the first place. That just pisses off the guys with the ultra-sleek $3k PCs because.. I don't know, I guess they realize it was a bad investment. 

Scaling! Scaling is also a hardware seller, since people see they can play the game perfectly well with good graphics...but there is still another 33% or whatever shiny left in those sliders. Rather than take the course of action of just removing the 33% overhead (because of hardware QQ), tell people to buy better hardware, since the game runs at 'console' level graphics at the 33% mark, thus giving them better graphics with a mediocre pc than they'd get with a console (twice as good). Using GTA4 as a reference (because I looked up the settings to emulate the 360 graphics and tweaked up from there).

Tgr; missing my point entirely. Yes, consoles are huge. My point was that the pc gaming market is also bigger than it was in 1999. Just because the console market got ridiculously huge doesn't mean that the pc market is an afterthough. It's larger and more accessible than it ever was, we should be in the middle of an amazing pc renaissance, rather than in the midst of an era of cast-off ports you hope the third-party ported decently (Saint's Row 2, I'm looking at you), or console 'exclusives' you hope make it to the pc despites claims from the devs (RDR).

I get it's a business, make your Black Ops and your console bajillions. But fund a solid pc development sector focusing on pc-only titles (that aren't mmo). Thank god for the eurorpg.

[Ingmar]

What happened to the ammo? Why do I have to duck infront of a crate before I can jump up on top of it?

Design choices you don't like are not the same thing as "consolitis".

[tgr]

Design choices you don't like are not the same thing as "consolitis".

There's no way in hell I'm going to ever concede ducking in front of a crate before I can jump because they've decided to map that to the same button, as "design choices". That's consolitis.

Ammo I can to a point live with (it didn't annoy me, but it did annoy a cousin of mine vOv), but it's still a simplification which I'm going to attribute to consoles.

[Ingmar]

The decision could easily be down to animation budget rather than button mapping, though.

[tgr]

The decision could easily be down to animation budget rather than button mapping, though.

That sounds like a monumental stretch to me. If it had been a small-time gig then I wouldn't be so surprised if they didn't add high-detailed animations for jumping, but I would still assume they'd let me jump. ME2, however, has so much animation literally everywhere else that them not adding a jumping animation due to an animation budget sounds unlikely. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'd be very surprised if it was actually the case.

[Azazel]

Making money should be a side effect of game development, not the reason for doing it in the first place.

Basically, the writer of that article is a fucking idiot with a rather romanticised view of the games industry and the way that it works, and apparently a bit of an entitlement whore attitude. While I do think it's great that indie games have been revived with platforms like Steam and XBLA, I don't see anything wrong with people wanting to make money from their work. He seems to have that "you need to starve for your art" attitude as a subtext, or if not that extreme, that it's still a good and acceptable thing to starve for your art.

also...

The sweet irony of it all is that a genuinely good game with virtually zero budget and publicity can be as financially successful as, if not more so than, a AAA title.

Does he give examples? Of course the word "can" is always an out. I know Braid did well, as have Torchlight and Monday Night Combat (are those indy games, though? They certainly had publicity..) And APB was a AA title that crashed and burned... the latest GH games have fizzled... so I guess if you take both extremes, he might be right. But I can't see a quiet no publicity indy game doing Black Ops numbers, which is what the insinuation is there.

edit - spelling

[Sheepherder]

If game developers were as a whole catering to what people liked, there wouldn't be such a massive library of shitty games and monumental fuckups too broken to be graced with the label game out there made by people considered to be goddamn oracles of game design a mere decade ago.  More often than not developers show they lack even a basic understanding of what fun means.

[Paelos]

I'd often wondered what developers could do with unlimited funds and time, but they didn't have the knowledge that there were unlimited funds and time.

[Azazel]

If game developers were as a whole catering to what people liked, there wouldn't be such a massive library of shitty games and monumental fuckups too broken to be graced with the label game out there made by people considered to be goddamn oracles of game design a mere decade ago.  More often than not developers show they lack even a basic understanding of what fun means.

The problem there is that they're making things that they think will be fun. Another problem is that the industry is immature and incestuous, as you suggest. Also, that Bill Roper/Hellgate thread.