Money for nothing

[Viin]

Taken from TerraNova, written by Jessica Mulligan:

Money for nothin'...

I’ve been asked to introduce myself with a short bio. You’ve been warned.

Most of you either know me or know of me; surviving nineteen years with an opinion in this veil of tears known as the multiplayer online game industry can have that effect. I’ve been variously described as a pioneer of the industry, an ill-tempered harridan that bites the hand that feeds her and – my personal favorite – “that goat-blowing bitch.” Well, everyone needs a hobby, I guess.

Where did it all begin, you ask? I started out as a third assistant to an assistant of the assistant file librarian on GEnie’s Apple II RoundTable in 1986, played Stellar Warrior from Kesmai in beta test that same year and, with eighty of us blasting away at each other and my hands literally shaking from the tension of successfully defending a planet with a crippled laser cruiser, decided on the spot to change careers. Along the way, I’ve managed to fill just about every rung on the ladder in the development and publishing of these things, spoken at more conferences than I can remember, co-authored a book about developing online games and spent six years writing a rant column to point out the flaws in the industry and, maybe, improve things a bit. I’ve had my successes and failures, learned something from each… Basically, I was fortunate to have snuck in early, when no one was looking and before the publishers threw so much money at the industry that the bar to entry has become stratospheric for most.

And from that vantage point of 19 years gone, involvement in some capacity with over a dozen MMOs and uncounted other types of online games under my belt (or skirt, as the case may be), I raise a question about the height of that bar:

Is money killing this industry?

Overly dramatic, perhaps, but the content of the question is a serious one. From 1986 to about 1997, when the market was still relatively small and development money was very tight, we made quite a bit of progress in the design and development of MMOs. Small groups of innovative developers pretty much had free reign over their designs and it showed in the work. Each new game was, well, different, sometimes in startling and exciting ways. I know this is going to sound like a crusty old broad moaning for yesteryear, but it was a hell of an exciting time to be involved and I rarely see that level of excitement on development teams today.

It was only when millions of dollars started to be thrown at development that things changed. Meridian 59, the game that kicked off the third generation of MMOs in 1996, was made for a relative pittance by today’s standards, built mostly with sweat equity and passion until it was bought by 3DO and it had some very interesting concepts in it, for the time. Then came Ultima Online in 1997, the first MMO to spend over $5 million in development. It was mostly a graphic representation of a text MUD with some neat, but evolutionary, additional features included. It worked; the designers had included some of the very sticky features players love and the game was/is so broad and deep that I venture to guess it will be a long time before another game that comes close to it is developed.

Since that time, while budgets have risen to incredible, sometimes ridiculous, heights ($30 million to develop The Sims Online? On what did they spend all that money, anyway? Not the art, that’s for sure), we seem to have stopped innovating, for the most part. EverQuest in 1999 was a huge success, but it was just a tarted-up DikuMUD and that worked for the times (and came with a built-in audience, which was a smart, business-wise). When I look back between 1999 and now, in fact, the only MMO that had some true innovation to it was the original Asheron’s Call in 1999; the rest appear to me as all evolution, with the occasional flash of brilliance here and there. Not to say that some good games haven’t been developed – Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft and EverQuest II come to mind – but there hasn’t been much true innovation. Mostly we’ve been evolving, getting a bit better here and there, to be sure, but without the blinding innovation that makes one sit and exclaim “Whoa!”

I don’t think it is a coincidence that 1999-Present is also the period when publishers really became interested in MMOs and started throwing around money like a drunken sailor on shore leave. All of us in the Old Guard waited 15 or 20 years for those humongous budgets. To put this in proportion, between 1989 and 1992, I produced six MMOs for GEnie, three of them with graphic interfaces, for less than one third of one percent of the budget of TSO and every single one of those six games had something new and untried in it. Mythic, then AUSI, did its first game for GEnie in 1989 for the lordly advance of $3,000 and GEnie made back well over one hundred times that advance before I left in 1992. Believe me, by the mid-1990s, developers had had enough of living on passion and dreams; the publisher money was welcome, thank you very much.

However, considering the results, I’m not so sure it was worth it. In my opinion, we’ve traded innovation and passion for formula.  I can understand the reasoning, even if I don’t agree with it; if a publisher is going to risk millions of dollars, it wants to do it with as great a chance for success as possible. Many publishers see limiting the risk of failure by following the formula; hey, if EQ has a grind and 450,000 subscribers, we better have a grind, too! And so, we get a bunch of expensively-produced clones that add nothing to the industry and most of which will disappear beneath the waves of history without raising a ripple. It is happening in Asia right now.

We’re seeing another turn of that wheel with the success of WoW; there is tremendous pressure right now on development teams to “make your game more WoW-like!” Never mind that, for all that it is generally a good game, there is nothing much new there and that a significant portion of WoW’s success is built on the brand and the trust that players have in the developer; gimme some WOWsy orcs, biyotch!

So I return to the question: Is money killing us? Is this just a natural part of the evolution of the industry that we’ll get over someday, or do we need to turn on a dime and do things differently?

I leave the discussion in your hands.

[Alkiera]

Wow, something I agree with Jessica Mulligan on.  Bizarre.

Alkiera

[Evangolis]

No.  There is innovation going on out there, but it is happening mostly behind the smoke screen being produced by the combustion of large sums of money.  There are some exceptions, where innovators get access to budget, Spore might be one, but mostly innovation is happening where it always does in every industry, in small budget places with lower risk and lower visibility.

[Viin]

No.  There is innovation going on out there, but it is happening mostly behind the smoke screen being produced by the combustion of large sums of money.  There are some exceptions, where innovators get access to budget, Spore might be one, but mostly innovation is happening where it always does in every industry, in small budget places with lower risk and lower visibility.

She's specifically talking about MMO games, not just games in general - though a lot of what she says holds true in general as well.

There's a ton of innovation happening (been happening) on MUDs because most of them are run by small shops and certainly need innovation + fun gameplay to draw players away from the Shiney. However, no one wants to put a lot of money into a commerical MMO where innovation "might" draw more players. As any "smart" investor would, they insist on proven formulas. (See: All the EA Sports games).

There are certainly MUDs that can be considered "commerical", but almost all of them were created on the backs of people who had other jobs (with the exception of games created by the same folks who are already running a for-pay MUD).. which is why innovation could afford to happen. Labor of love, and all that.

[lamaros]

I think it's a whole load of rubbish.

If we want to we can probably make up a stupid argument that tries to convince us that there hasn't been much innovation in computer games at all; many of the principle aspects of MUDs from 1990, 1998, and MMORPGs of today are still the same.

It might be ego boosting to assume a huge decline in innovation since the "good old days" but it only works if you have an incorrect idea of what innovation really is. I don't like WoW (which is itself considered one of the least innovative of current MMORPGs) overly much, but if you want me to I can pull out a list of ways it innovates over what has come before, and I've played many of the MUDs that would be making up the "good old days".

The fact is that changes aren't going to always follow the same route and won't always be as noticable to the one recieving the changes as those creating them. We might have a period where developers are working most notably with player vs player mechanics, with player interfaces, or with world/quest/creature design. While these period of specific invention are taking place it might looks like the process is stagnating, especialy if you're a pvp player and the changes are taking place in pve areas, but if we take the first and last examples in the chain we're going to see some innovation.

Pointing to some marginal MUDs which happen to have innovated noticably in many areas at once isn't an argument in itself. If those games were never popular or widely played then we might as well compare them it the ideas that get tried in development phases of current games and other games that never reach the market because they didn't work/didn't have funding, etc...

Take Warcraft III as an example. It started off as a 'RPS' title that seemed reasonably innovative (especialy for Blizzard) but got changed down the line and ended up as a reasonably familar RTS game. And even with the changes innovation still filtered through in areas.

You can't tell me the notable innovation in that example was ruined by the money; we might also argue that it was ruined by the gaming public's demands or by the fact that the concept simply didn't work.


I could go on and on, but...

Look at the number of MUDs that were clones of each other and look at the number of them that really innovated. Now do the same for current MMORPGs.

Note: This does not mean compare current MUDs to current MMORPGs. The argument was making comparing games of today to the past, so look at the MUDs of the past. While the argument might hold up that MUDs of TODAY are more innovative than MMORPGs of today (and even this might not be true), the fact is that Jessica is arguing that MUDs of the past were more innovative compared to their peers than MMORPGs or today are. And this is just not true.

[schild]

I really want to take her seriously, but isn't she at Ryzom? I think money is at the top of the list of "Things Nevrax Needs to Worry About."

I agree with some of the stuff she's saying I guess. Money stifles innovation in a way. Particularly money with lots of strings attached. But this applies to anything. I don't know how else to say this other than "Same shit, new day."

[lamaros]

To be more succint, let me pose a question:

How many games that have come out with NO point of difference to existing MMOGs have been notable?

[Shockeye]

I really want to take her seriously, but isn't she at Ryzom? I think money is at the top of the list of "Things Nevrax Needs to Worry About."

They're releasing an expansion. They'll have their money hats soon enough.

[Margalis]

Adding innovative ideas to an all-text game with a couple thousand players and a couple creators is a lot easier than adding innovative ideas to projects that have 20 programmers and 6 artists.

In a text game, the core gameplay is the only real distinguishing factor. In a modern video game, the core gameplay is only one of many distinguishing factors. There are a ton of things going on the production of a modern game that have nothing to do with gameplay.

CoH has innovation in the movement and combat. Part of the problem is that a lot of people just see games as a set of rules, and the only innovation they'll accept is some obvious rule change. So using the third axis doesn't count, because it can't be codified into an academic sounding statement.

It's silly to say that money is "killing" an industry that is 1000x more popular than it used to be.

[ajax34i]

I think the expectations are too high.  Everywhere else in life, business thrives via repetition and imitation.  You may get an Einstein now and then but you can neither predict nor manufacture one.

Mindblowing games all the time?  No genre has that.  Besides, even if they did have something like that, our expectations would just get higher, and we'd still only play the top 2-3 games.

[Roac]

I think she's full of it.  There are more MMOGs than the ones she mentioned, many of which are fairly innovative.  They just haven't done that well, yet.  MMOGs are also a very small market, and have a high barrier to entry; this slows down the pace of experimentation. 

Beyond that, it she is cherry picking what she defines as innovation.  UO is innovation?  All the features it included were already included in MUDs at the time, and quite often, to a more evolved point in the MUD community.  Meridian 59 was evolution?  It was a graphical MUD too.  MUDs?  They were just D&D dropped into university mainframes, with all the networking ideas about MUDs being taken from existing games.  User-generated content in MUDs?  College students were collaborating on fun dev projects for years before Bartle got going.  It's so much easier to argue the death of innovation when you get to gerrymander the line between innovation and evolution.

The one point she does get right is that investors don't like to take big risk when they're fronting tons of money.  That... shouldn't be a big surprise, honestly.  Not many people like to gamble tens of millions of dollars.  It's easy to write an article and shoot your mouth off on what devs should be doing (I know, I do it too), but it's much harder to back it with your entire life savings.  Even harder after you've seen a couple people try and lose.

The other side of the issue is that the market is conservative as well.  As any industry becomes mainstream, the customer base becomes less flexible.  The most popular flavor of ice cream is vanilla.  This doesn't preclude a niche market, but it makes it niche.

Last thing.  The WoW hate?  I don't think one creative thought has ever come out of Blizzard.  Innovation has never been their strategy.  They take existing genres and write games that include the best of ideas already tested, and polish them to an extreme.  Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and WoW bring nothing new to the table except that they are games where all the existing ideas mesh really, really well.  Way to pick the absolute most conservative, risk-adverse dev shop in the industry to make a point that the entire industry (whether the point be MMOGs or all game development) is floundering on a lack of innovation.

She could've picked on Wil Wright's projects, A Tale in the Desert, or (gasp!) Shadowbane.  I recall that, at the time, she hammered WP several times for trying to innovate on PvP, saying it should've been (in effect) more formulaic.  For someone whose job has been to be a strategic advisor, I don't think she gets it.  Strategy can't be off the cuff, haphazard, or arbitrary although she seems to think it should be.

[Kail]

Last thing.  The WoW hate?  I don't think one creative thought has ever come out of Blizzard.  Innovation has never been their strategy.  They take existing genres and write games that include the best of ideas already tested, and polish them to an extreme.  Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and WoW bring nothing new to the table except that they are games where all the existing ideas mesh really, really well.  Way to pick the absolute most conservative, risk-adverse dev shop in the industry to make a point that the entire industry (whether the point be MMOGs or all game development) is floundering on a lack of innovation.

What I personally read into her rant wasn't exactly a disagreement with Blizzard's philosophy of improving on existing ideas, just frustration with the idea that it's what everyone should be doing.  It works for Blizzard because they're Blizzard, but it won't work for everyone.  Back when WoW was announced, I remember Blizzard tried to generate some hype for it by tossing a teaser image on their site, a picture (if I remember correctly) of a world with some slogan like "Prepare for the dawn of a new age" or something, with no info about the game.  I remember a number of people who thought it was going to be Starcraft 2, and were actually disappointed that it wasn't.  Blizzard hadn't announced anything about Starcraft 2, but people were still psyched about it.  Can you see EA getting that kind of a response?  Eidos?  LucasArts?  Where people are seriously excited about a title without knowing anything but the name of the developer?  Blizzard can pull that kind of thing off; Capcom, not so much.  If you're founding your company on the idea that you're going to be able to out-Blizzard Blizzard, you've got a hard road ahead of you.

I'm not totally up on the business side of things here, so I may be off base, but it does look to me like money does kill innovation, at least indirectly.  I look at a stack of NES or Genesis titles, and I see (subjectively) a lot more difference between Game A and Game B than I do on my XBox, or my PC especially.  Part of it is probably due to the changing nature of technical limitations, or that most of the obvious stuff has already been done.  Part of it, though, I think, is just that by increasing the budget of a game, you're increasing the project's complexity, and that is a serious disincentive to innovation.  The original Space Quest was written by two guys, if I remember correctly.  If one of them had an idea, he could spend a few days coding it and give it a shot.  Ocarina of Time, I think, had something like a hundred credited staff members.  If you're in charge of that project, you can't reasonably expect to delay production every time you get a great idea.  It's one thing to spend a few days coding the speeder sequence for Space Quest; it's way more complex when you're sitting on a pile of people, and one person's got to handle the code for the controls, and one person's got to do the graphics, and one person's got to do the map, and it's your job to make sure everyone knows exactly what they're doing, and is able to do it, and is not wasting company time playing Tribes over the network, or it won't come together by deadline, and your game will come off looking like some crappy hodgepodge with your name in the corner.

I'm not sure how much investors are viewing "originality" as a risk that should be avoided; I know that personally, if it wasn't a matter of quality, I'd be less comfortable investing in Generic Quake Clone XVIII, because it's got some insane competition to beat (but then, I'm not a business major).  I do know, though, that if someone said "Here's fifty guys and ten million dollars, go make a game," it would be kind of a relief to be able to just say "All right, just do it like Quake, but with psychic powers.  Can you guys handle that?  Yes?  Good."

[lamaros]

I'm not sure how much investors are viewing "originality" as a risk that should be avoided; I know that personally, if it wasn't a matter of quality, I'd be less comfortable investing in Generic Quake Clone XVIII, because it's got some insane competition to beat (but then, I'm not a business major).  I do know, though, that if someone said "Here's fifty guys and ten million dollars, go make a game," it would be kind of a relief to be able to just say "All right, just do it like Quake, but with psychic powers.  Can you guys handle that?  Yes?  Good."

All things being equal I'd always spend my $10 mil on a team with its own ideas over one planning to copy an existing game...

How many mindless clones do well? If it's a straight copy then people will just play the original, and if it's a copy with half-baked innovation then it will just fail.

Blizzard innovates in the way they take other ideas out there and work them together in such a polished package. This is why Blizzard has such a good record, why their fans get excited over every new title. To imply that they just copy others is silly. They know they're going to get something that has familar elements but still gives a new experience, and they're going to get it presented in style.

Innovation comes in many packages.

There are so many titles out there which are innovating that the whole discussion seems a bit silly. Sure there are also a whole lot out there that aren't, but who cares?

[Kail]

How many mindless clones do well? If it's a straight copy then people will just play the original, and if it's a copy with half-baked innovation then it will just fail.
...
{snip}
...
There are so many titles out there which are innovating that the whole discussion seems a bit silly. Sure there are also a whole lot out there that aren't, but who cares?

The point is not that games are all exact copies of each other, it's that the changes they make are (often) extremely minor.  A quick flip through my CD racks show eleven games which are all "Tactical FPS" games where you play as some couterterrorist/police operative, choose your loadout from a number of different realistic guns (all eleven of these games have, I believe, the MP5, for example), and play through a series of "real life" locations like airports and so on.  A second survey shows eight games which are all "Dungeon Crawl" games where you play as some sword swinging chap whose goal is to move from one end of the world to the other while clicking frantically on a million monsters in the hopes that one of them will drop a sword that's a slightly different color and has slightly better numbers than the one you're currently swinging.  A third survey shows seven games all set in World War 2.  Another seven are all RPGs set in almost identical Fantasy worlds.  And so on.

These games don't have zero innovation, but nor are they really the kind of thing you want to point to as an example of how awesomely innovative games are (and I don't know that it's really that atypical of a sample, but feel free to call me out on that).  Yes, they all have slight improvements to the interface, yes they all have different maps or different skill systems or different storylines, but at core they're all just slight modifications of the same game.  Are you really trying to say that this is the height of innovation?  That these games don't have massive overlap?  I don't know how I can argue against something like that.

[lamaros]

Why would you buy all these games that are basicly the same?  :-D

The argument isn't that there aren't a whole horde of reasonably uninnovative games out there. The argument is that there have always been lots of uninnovative games around and always will be; that money has not brought this about.

Turn the clock back to the 'golden age of innovation' (1990-1998? lets say) and take a sample of the games then. I'd wager you'd find a pretty similar representation.

-----

You also seem to be expecting too much in the way of innovation. Ideas don't come from nowhere.

If you compare 15 FPS games that come out in the same year of course the differences aren't going to be obvious. Looking for innovation by comparing games to others within the same genre isn't going to yield the best results.

Compare C&C to Warhammer, has innovation taken place? Would still think it has if we compare them only to their chronological peers?

Would you say Gunz Online is innovative? It's just Diablo2 as a FPS without a single player mode!
Was Thief innovative? It was just a FPS with shadows.
Is Battlefield 2 going to innovate? It's just... etc

[schild]

GunzOnline has absolutely nothing in common with Diablo2 other than the fact it's a video game.

If you're going to be contrary and cute, at least be more reasonable. GunzOnline is persistant online Rune.

[lamaros]

GunzOnline has absolutely nothing in common with Diablo2 other than the fact it's a video game.

If you're going to be contrary and cute, at least be more reasonable. GunzOnline is persistant online Rune.

Never played Rune, can't compare. But I wasn't being contrary.

Diablo 2 allowed you to create characters that were stored on the server and then individuals would create games. Gunz is a game where characters are stored on the server and individuals create games.

The example of Diablo 2 isn't the clearest, but I mentioned it to demonstrate that anything you might see as innovation can be seen to come first from somewhere else. Real innovation happens in very small steps, what some people seem to be calling innovation is merely new ways of putting together existing ideas. We shouldn't be so quick to grab these more obvious changes as being innovative while ignoring the more subtle ones.

Yes, they all have slight improvements to the interface, yes they all have different maps or different skill systems or different storylines, but at core they're all just slight modifications of the same game.

So why shouldn't we consider this as innovation? Is it only going to count as innovation when someone borrows this new skill system and uses it in a platform game?

Anyway... exaggeration to make the point...

[schild]

Exaggeration has more in common with exacerbating than making a point. Really though, the obvious changing are what most will notice. Subtle doesn't work in today's graphics heavy marketplace. Unfortunately, that's just how it is and until we're the ones funding the industry (as if), we can only sit and watch and choose NOT to spend our money.

[Hoax]

I think your looking in the wrong place to see her point.

Here is why I think she's at least half right, and that aint half bad.

How many features are in UO that didn't make it to EQ?  Then how long did it take for them to start showing up again?  I mean seriously, who here hasn't said "didn't we get this brand new innovative feature way back in AC1/UO/whatever?".  We did, it sure as hell feels like we keep taking 1 step forward at best and 5 steps backwards at most.

I'm going to bring up 10six again, a game from sega that nobody played.  Sure it was like GW in that the world was divided into "camps" instead of large sprawling maps, but guess what.  It had fps combat with your character, and rts unit control, and overhead control if you owned the camp being fought in.  What the fuck, thats leagues ahead of any genre mashing I've seen sense.  Battlezone was the closest we ever got and it wasn't even persistent.  I dont see how they could do that, but now 7 years later I hear "you can't make an fps mmog because the netcode can't handle it" that can't really be true can it?

I think her point can be boiled down to something like this:

Developers stopped trying to wow you with something different and started trying to reel you in with something that you would recognize once all the money got involved.


Also to those who say that we've got all the time in the world to innovate with tiny tiny baby steps, let me introduce you to the RTS genre.  Thats what happens when you stop trying anything new for 4 years.  People stop fucking playing.

Total Annihilation had downloaded new units, 100+ units per side and a persistant online campaign that involved battling over planets, ranks and a storyline.  Why the fuck is it that I see so many RTS now and I think, why would I play that without good features I've already tasted?  Thats pretty much the point I'm at with MMOG's these days, why play WoW when I've played (ghetto) games with fps combat where /played > skill doesn't apply?  Why would I play MMOG's with 1/10th assed pvp when if somebody would just innovate on SB with some money backing them and real coders instead of zombie hampsters it'd work pretty damn well?

[lamaros]

The original point seemed to be that money was NOW stifiling rather than encouraging innovation in the industry. What I come back with to that statement is:

1. There is just as much (or little) obvious and notable 'innovation' now as there was before. It might not seem like it because as the industry has gotten larger the microscope is having a hard time seeing the forest for the trees.

2. Innovation isn't just restricted to flashy changes and overpromised experiments such as Black & White. There is innovation in the detail as well, and it is often these subtle innovations that allow the flashy ones to come about.

Developers stopped trying to wow you with something different and started trying to reel you in with something that you would recognize once all the money got involved.

The argument isn't that large parts of the industry act this way, the argument is that they're acting this way NOW when they didn't before. Which is just silly.

We get attempts to justify this argument through limited examples using UO, WoW, EQ, and EQ2 but they all completely ignore both points I state above.

Look at EQ, UO, SWG, WoW, GW, SB, AC, DAoC, EVE, etc. Look at them ALL. If you seriously think there is no innovation a happening then there isn't much more to say.

The fact is you can take this complaint and go back 10 years and say the same thing, about nearly any genre. You can't blame money then, why blame it now? It's just a lazy way out; if you find yourself in a situation you don't like, blame it all on the money.

[schild]

\Look at EQ, UO, SWG, WoW, GW, SB, AC, DAoC, EVE, etc. Look at them ALL. If you seriously think there is no innovation a happening then there isn't much more to say.

I don't believe anyone said there's NO INNOVATION happening. This genre isn't about picking nits and those who really love the genre are in search of one thing. Escapism that's fun. The innovations that have been made do little to add to the fun. The grind is still there in EVERY mmog. The combat systems are largely unchanged. Many muds were more interactive than your everyday modern plain vanilla MMOG.

Point being, sure, innovations happen, unfortunately a small innovation != fun++. Sure, maybe, if some company executed everything perfectly the game might come off as the most fun this type of game can be. But that wouldn't even be a step forward, unless every other company said "Whelp. Can't top that. Time to try something new."

....Sigh. Which is what they should have said after they saw the first week of WoW sales.

[lamaros]

But this is the way with all things. I've been waiting for a good RPG with turn based combat and a game along the lines of the original Ground Control. I waited for WC3 to be a RPS in vain. And so on.

I'm not disagreeing with the general scope of things. I havn't found a MORPG to satisfy me since I stopped mudding. I just think blaming our frustrations with the industry on 'the money' is a soft way out.

And I think GW, Dark & Light, D&D Online and some other projects bobbing around are demonstrating that there is some free thinking going on, even if it's not all sucessful, so maybe it will only be a matter of time.

EDIT: RE: schild below: I'm pointing at GW as a good thing! If flawed! Not attempting to tar NCSoft at all.

[schild]

I wouldn't point to Guild Wars, let alone ANY NCSoft group when saying there's little free thinking going on. If any giant mega corp type place promotes free thinking, it's NCSoft. If I wanted to point at devils I'd throw fingers at EA/OSI, Blizzard, and SOE. I wouldn't even point my finger at Turbine. They're definately on the "we're not dead yet" bandwagon.

Anyway, I'm simply defending company here. They've made the first fully functional PvP based MMOG in the history of MMOGs. That's not innovative, but working servers and clients certainly seem to be (SB.exe ^_^).

Anyway, point being, I'm looking to Korean companies like Webzen and NCSoft now before the good 'ol fallbacks of SOE, Blizzard, etc. I want me some Huxley and Exteel plz.

[Pococurante]

For a long time what developers wanted to do was capped by technology.  Not just sheer hardware but also the accumulated achievements in software.  We all know with bitter sadness the products that pushed available technology past the breaking point and traumatized the industry.  The failure points ranged up and down the spectrum from the consumer environment's ability to host the product to the houses' ability to implement/maintain the product.

But for just the last couple of years the number of technology challenges on both sides of the fence has shrunk dramatically.  More houses are using "off the shelf" bits and so are blowing less of their time/money/creativity solving the same engineering problems.  The average game player has the ability to host all but the most aggressive products.

Now that technology is much less of the obstacle on the plan to market we'll see more innovation and variety in gameplay.  I think her rant is mostly accurate - much of the infusion of money comes from people whose experience in interactive electronic entertainment is pretty minimal.  And as we often bitch about here on f13 the people in the traditionally passive entertainment markets haven't shown great vision in their chosen demographic either...

I'm very optimistic.  Jessica did not say anything I haven't read on mainstream sites like CNN and Time.  When these sorts of sentiments hit the mainstream we know the pressure is on to find that competitive edge.

[Stephen Zepp]

I think that one thing people are missing here is the sheer complexity and time involvement to even get a game idea to the point where you can consider it for "real" development. It's been basically 4-5 months since we've had "enough" of WoW to be able to make comparative arguments for and against it, and while there have been quite a few MMOG's of various types out in the last 5 years, EQ was the only "financially very attractive" model to compare to until now.

I personally do think that we are going to see some extremely amazing innovation in several spaces over the next few years--we've seen several indie projects (funded externally, or self-funded) that have been trying like crazy, but haven't quite gotten to full out AAA production quality yet: Wish, Mourning, Darkfall Online just to name a few (and I'm not trying to inject them into the conversation, good or bad, just pointing out examples here of some type of innovation).

It takes an indie company years to do what a AAA company can do in a couple of months from the technical perspective, but indies do have an advantage in that there is little to no corporate inertia to overcome...they can just decide one day, "Hey, I want to give this innovative idea some effort, because it's never been done before"--and they do it. But actually getting it done is on the order of years instead of months--so we've not even begun to see what the "bleeding edge" next generation games may be like.

[Margalis]

But for just the last couple of years the number of technology challenges on both sides of the fence has shrunk dramatically.  More houses are using "off the shelf" bits and so are blowing less of their time/money/creativity solving the same engineering problems.  The average game player has the ability to host all but the most aggressive products.

I totally disagree with the sentiment here. Tons of money is still spent on engineering, and tons more than before is spent on art. The costs of making games is continously rising much faster than inflation, and that cost is not design cost.

Again, in the days of 4 bit graphics innovation was one of the few differentiating factors. Now you have engineering, art production, voice talent, motion capture, etc etc.

[Pococurante]

/shrug

I didn't say the issues were licked and available for a quarter at any gumdrop machine.  They're just not the overwhelming issue they once were and the trend is towards packaged asset.

[HaemishM]

Though I agree with Jessica, I can only say: Wow, what a goddamn hippie.

[Pococurante]

Heh.  Actually she said several times the money was welcome.  Just that it came with strings attached.  Something so many startups find out, usually after their dreams were fully raped by deathspiral loan sharks.  Or murfled by people with more wallet than balls/brains.

[Arnold]

Wow, something I agree with Jessica Mulligan on.  Bizarre.

Alkiera

Yeah, same here.  Amazing.

[Sairon]

Well I think she certainly has a point. I own an amiga 600 HD which I aquired A LOT of games to, just picking a number from the top of my brain I would guess at atleast 200. Out of all these games the majority of them are pretty damn unique. Just mentioning a few from the top of my head: Lemmings, Chaos Engine, Syndicate, Speed Ball, Sensible Soccer, Wings of Fury, Cannon Foder, the list can be extremly long. From then until now the percentage of innovative titles has greatly reduced.

I had a course at uni where we were supossed to design a game which we then supossed to pitch to a jury consisting of publishers and dev studios. During this course we had a lot of guest speakers coming from all over the industry, 1 of those were a producer from vivendi. He made no secret of the fact that publishers these days doesn't want innovative games, they just want a copy of some other game with very very few features changed to help marketing out. This was something which I already suspected but I find it quite sad.

All in all I can think of only 2 well known developers doing innovative games and that's Lionhead Studios and Nintendo. Of course there's the occasional suprise, more than often that particular game being a puzzle game of some sort.

When it comes to MMORPGs there's very little innovation going on, there's some low budget ones but naturaly the quality stinks. There's only 1 game worthwile mentioning really and it's already been mentioned, Shadowbane. That game truely shines and even if the execution is poor it has opened up a new path to end game content which atleast I haven't seen before. I'm amazed that so few games in development doesn't try to copy the empire building aspect of SB because that's something which is a whole lot of more fun than just equiping your avatar.

I think the market will demand more innovation in the future when the average Joe feels ripped of geting the next installation of FIFA, finding out that nothing really has changed.

[HaemishM]

Here's the thing about those games on the Amiga. It's real "easy" to do innovation in a genre when there is almost no design vocabulary extant on the genre. I think we look back at some of these innovative classics with some serious rose-colored glasses. When there is little formal standards for design, when there are few written and unwritten rules about what makes a successful design already existing in a field, it's easy to innovate because you don't have to break rules that don't exist. It's all being played by ear.

But these days, there are a lot of design rules already written and unwritten in the minds of both developers and publishers. Publishers know fuckall about making games, they only know about selling games. Selling games thrives on the simple, quick vocabulary of marketing, the three bullet-point list of competitive features and the tagline.

I don't see a lot of innovation possible with the mass market we have copped from the movie industry. There are very few innovative movies anymore, simply because the audience expects certain things that the studios want to give them, and the directors/creators have a vocabulary of techniques to fall back on when they need to. Neither money nor a lack of money will drive innovation, innovation is all about the developer.

[Hoax]

So to recap:
TV - Suddenly has a decent amount of really cool shows, despite all the reality crap.

Movies - Suck and are not making enough money as a result, eventually (in theory) they'll stop blaming "pirates!" and realize perhaps they should stop doing remakes and part 2-6 of everything.

Video Games - Snatched a bigger piece of the pie and are now quagmired in bullshit (thanks EA!) putting out unimaginative titles that add +1 feature, +1 shiney to whatever the current formula de jour is.

How accurate does that sound?

[HaemishM]

Don't believe the hype. Movies are still making phat cash, despite the pleathora of shite they churn out. Also, video games only made more money than BOX OFFICE movies, which is a really bad comparison in hindsight. Movies cost less per unit, are more widely acceptable, and require nothing but presence of the audience. Video games are more expensive per unit, only now being considered mainstream, require special hardware on the part of the user, as well as time and participation. A more apt comparison is video games to the DVD industry, for which I have no numbers.

TV only has cool shows now if you expand the spectrum to cable and pay outlets, mainly because of competition and the addition of a lot more content than before.

[Margalis]

Very few movies make money based on theater release. Where movies make money is on stuff like OnDeman, HBO/Showtime, DVD and finally standard TV, as well as toys and other merchandise. The theater release is just to make you interested in those things.