"Death to the Games Industry"

[StGabe]

Has this made the rounds here already?  I found it off of PA today.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/8/3
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/9/4
http://www.the-underdogs.org/scratch.php

I find I agree with almost all of it.  A lot of the thoughts he puts down are thoughts I've had myself but described more completely.  Basically we a very good, well-marketed, indie-friendly iGames to start kicking some butt and getting some dollars in the gaming market.  Cut out retailers and provide a channel for well-marketed low-budget games.  The only thing I'd add to what he has to say is that I think he needs to go a bit further with how to develop a taste for indie among gamers.  Not that I think there are any easy answers there, I just think it is more important than the space he gives it and a problem that needs to be solved for his ideas to really work.  The dollars all start in consumer's hands and the market won't shift until consumers indicate a willingness to spend differently.

And as mentioned on PA, he's actually investing his own money and time in to trying to make this stuff happen.  Bravo I say.  It's one thing to post this stuff on the internet and flame people who disagree with you.  It's quite another to quit a comfortable job and actually try to make the thing happen. I'm not sure he'll succeed but I think at least he's trying the right sorts of things.

Gabe.

[Llava]

I went into it thinking "Sure, no shit, but what's gonna stop it?"

Now... well, the guy has conviction.  Would be nice.

[Fabricated]

Pie-in-the-sky bullshit. All of it.

Customers are whores. The vast majority of them want the shiny. Delivering the now epic amount of shiny they want requires more than 1 douche in his basement with a VIC-20 and a good idea.

"WAH WHY CANT WE GO BACK TO THE DAYS WHER INNOVATARS COULD MAKE A HOJILLION SELLING TITLE ON A $5 BUDGET??/?/???"

Well, look at the hardware, you idiots. being innovative now is harder than ever not because people have been brainwashed by the industry, it's just that the medium is no longer as new. At the dawn of games, fucking everything you could make was innovative and hadn't been done before and could be done on a shoestring budget since you needed only programmers and zero art staff.

"Hey, what if you could make this white square bounce off of other white squares? Like a ball? And maybe use a paddle type thing to bounce it into them?"

"My god, you just invented a genre!"

Kill the game industry? We fucking made it that way. Either we tear the industry down and rebuild it, or the vast majority of us consumers dramatically alter our expectations and taste in games.

And that's not happening any time soon.

[StGabe]

I think the article makes a very good point about how movies and books, very similar media, still manage to sell small budget items to Indie-conscious and niche consumers.  Comics went through a period where they were in a very similar place to where games are now -- but there is a lot of innovative and inventive indie and non-indie working going on in the comics industry these days.  Internet distribution through programs like iTunes is doing a great job of driving up sales and visibility of indie bands.

The technology point is largely moot.  If you think that the only way to sell a game is to match the rate of progress of the hardware then you are just saying that you too are in the "me-me-shiny-shiny" camp.  I do think there are plenty of us who are not.  Enough to at least allow small budget, but well-marketed games to sell a couple tens of thousand copies and generate meaningful profit for small-time developers.  Or even more.  Look at games like Lumines which had a relatively quite small budget and yet has superb production quality and gameplay.  This is what I think we need more of and I think could be start impacting the market more and more with robust enough internet marketing/distribution system.

That it will be hard to do is a given.  Yes, the of majority consumers are idiots.  Yes the industry is entrenched.  But it doesn't mean we can't still try and come up with solutions to move on from where we're at.

Even worse than the "want-the-shiny" attitude I see in consumers is this hardcore, angst-ridden, "developers-just-want-to-circle-jerk" atittude.  That really just justifies complacency about the market and indulgence in self-fulfilling prophecy.  There is this knee-jerk reaction to scream at any developer-type indicates who indicates any innovative tendencies at all and makes no sense.  Just look at reactions to the DS or to the new Revolution controller (and mind you I'm not a Nintendo fanboi -- my DS was my first Nintendo system in 15 years).  Whether Nintendo or Mr. Costikyan's innovations work or not I can't see how anyone who wants fun games can rationally oppose or spew such hatred towards developers who want to try and find new gaming goodness to the gaming market. It may not be exactly the games you asked for but given time you may be surprised to find that it becomes part of your gaming habits anyway.  And if it fails, it fails, and you lose nothing.

Gabe.

[Glazius]

I think the mentality that's doing the most harm is "working 16-hour days to finish a game is expected and meritorious" when in actuality "working 16-hour days to finish a game is worse than working 8-hour days because you make more bugs in the last 8 hours than you fix in the first 8".

It's like spam. Not only is it noise, not only does nobody fall for it in sufficient numbers to be profitable, but THERE ARE PEOPLE SPAMMING WHO CAN'T EVEN WORK A SPAMBOT AND THEY THINK IT'LL HELP. Sweet moogledy fuck, if I get another message informing me that I, $SUBSCRIBER_NAME, am so very fortunate because mortgage rates in $SUBSCRIBER_CITY are as low as $LOW_PERCENT, I'm going to open up an SSL socket, and by SSL I mean 'Shotgun ShelL' and by 'socket' I mean 'missing head'.

The only people who make money from spam are the people SELLING the spambots and addresses. I have to wonder if there's some industry of psychologists treating chronic burnout whispering things into the game industry's ear...

--GF

[Pococurante]

Pie-in-the-sky bullshit. All of it.

I don't know about inventing genres but I do think we're going to see an explosion in indies.  The tools to create niche products that can support sub-50k players are already dirt cheap and actually quite good.  And a lot of those "turn-key" tools are actually quite scalable if it turns out the indie has released something compelling.  Hell the open source UO emulator RunUO already supports up to 10k players on (serious) "hobbyist" equipment.

Take a look at Torque for example - for $100 US you too can create a living breathing proof of concept that's already bulding market interest before you shop the idea to investors.  We're already seeing a vibrant after-market opening up to sell character models and textures as well as custom services to Torque indies.

This is a huge trend - the sort of thing commercial server emulator builders like myself have been predicting since the first UO emulator.  I do think this is a threat the Massive CMOGS who will eventually see market share ceded to smaller decentralized products which are defined as massive by the interconnections to other worlds rather than by the maximum number that can be crammed onto a single "shard".

[Evangolis]

I hardly started to read the Scratchware Manifesto when I started sputtering.  My local bookstore and my local recordstore are closed, replaced by megachains and Amazon. Small press is a tiny puddle of a few dedicated publishers, each nursing a series of barely known publications that cost more per word than mainstream books, but pay authors half the pittance that the mainstream doles out.  Books and records are all in the chokehold of major companies as much as games, but the creators of books and records  really can do sometihng novel and innovative on their own.

Games require teams because they are a multidisciplinary medium.  Without coders, musicians, actors, writers, artists, designers, and managers, yes, managers, you are going to get a second rate product, because it will be amateur night for part of your game.  You may not need much of all of those specialties, but without a little of all of them, you will have a game that is clunky, no matter what nifty notion it was based on.

People do not love Teh Shiny because it is shiny.  The love it because it is well done.  Why should players be expected to embrace games that are twenty years behind the state of the art?

All this is not to say that the industry does not need drastic reform and rebirth.  But that change will not come because we revert to older standards.

I'll read the Escapist stuff now, but I've got a lot of problems with the assumptions the Scratchware Manifesto is based on.

[Evangolis]

Ok, I'm happier with the Escapist piece.

Mind, I think the way the author waved off DRM issues was weak.  If you are going to get away from brick and mortar, DRM is a key issue.

And I strongly disagree with the dis of glitz.  Like any major paper magazine, The Escapist has lots of shiny pictures backing the articles.  It would be faster to download white pages, but the extra bits are there because they expand the audience from people who read white papers to a larger, less hardcore group.  Games need the same broadening of appeal, even if they are niche products.  Particularly if they are niche products.  How else will the niche grow?

There is a real problem with the existing distribution path, and it really is stranglling creativity.  One of the good sides of Amazon is that it allows for the Long Tail.  There is the best hope for niche product, IMO.  And it is the best hope for good gameplay to become a market force.  Ditto for creativity.  And if the originals are still in the active distribution channels, the clones are going to need to be better than the originals to match the originals' success.

So here is a question.  Why don't sites like this one have clear paths to the existing indie channels?  Perhaps a box of links on this page.  Yeah, free advertising for aggregation sites and indie game makers.  It's not like these people have the ability to pay to advertise on specialty boards like this (unless maybe the specialty board drew a lot of that sort of traffic), so there is no real ad revenue to be lost, and there is a service to provide both the players and the developers that might earn some good will.

And what about the rest of us?  If I mention a book in a post, I try to link to the Amazon page for it, so that interested parties can look at it, maybe even buy it.  Why don't I do the same for games?

I don't know if we can blow up the publisher/retail monlith, but can we chip at the foundations a little?

[AOFanboi]

VIC-20

Common misconception: The machine's name was VC-20 - for "Video Computer". There is no I in between, though people add one when pronouncing it.

Back to subject: Indie games exist and, as far as I can tell, thrive with online sales (and distribution); stars include the makers of Uplink (in a genre by itself) and Darwinia, not to mention small game distribution channels like PopCap and GarageGames (if I understand their business model right) or download.com and the likes. Kinda what Magnatune is for music - you can make decent gameplay without having to spend millions on 3D models, textures and shit that your users need to upgrade their computers to experience.

So screw the mass industry; henceforth I will prefer cheap indie games and only buy "industry" games at discounted prices or budget label editions. Why pay $50-$60 for a game that will cost half that in a few months' time?

[Glazius]

I hardly started to read the Scratchware Manifesto when I started sputtering.  My local bookstore and my local recordstore are closed, replaced by megachains and Amazon.

To be fair, there may be other reasons why your local media supplier got co-opted by The Chain.

--GF

[schild]

You know why people do stuff like this?

Masturbation is fun. Suriously.

Edit: Actually, Gabe, people quit their jobs to do something more promising every day. It's merely one aspect of the idealist mind. Megalomania is also. And after playing God of War, Resident Evil 4, Indigo Prophecy, and a handful of other games this year, I think his measures are extreme. I'm lucky to see 3-5 good movies a year. I shouldn't expect more from the gaming industry. I WANT more, but I'm not going to expect it. Most developers create trash that I simply won't spend money on. Low Budget Games without boxes are something I typically don't spend money on either, if only because $10-$20 is still a lot of money for something that isn't half as fun as a perfectly crafted big budget game like the ones listed above. That said, I support indie developers doing their things and planting seeds in the minds of the people who create big budget games. Without Gish, we'd have no Loco Roco. Without Every Extend, we wouldn't have Every Extend Extra. Without Counterstrike, we wouldn't have....counterstrike? Point being, it takes money and lots of it to compete in this industry, Indie developers are instigators of the collective money-grubbing hivemind. It's a shame, but it's just how it is.

Edit: Also, in response to the part about the retail monolith, as much as I hate shopping at Walmart and love shopping at Fry's, the prices there are often cheaper than EB and GS after 2 months. Also, once EB and Gamestop merge and collectively have +-33% of the gaming market retail space, they will not be dropping their prices. According to them, Fry's takes a huge loss on games which is a problem for them because it's all they sell. Though, I reckon fry's doesn't take such a huge loss given the sheer number of games they buy. At the end of the day the publisher is the evil here. He sets MSRP. Nintendo fucked us with a high standard in the 80s and that carried on to the cheaper DVD format (I reckon a dvd based game costs less than $3 lock stock and barrel for the printed artwork, manual, disc, packaging and shipping. That's problematic.

[Margalis]

The book industry is a terrible comparison. 5% of books do 95% of sales in the US, and getting published for the first time is extremely difficult.

I've read all of this stuff before. At first it was just "damn this sucks." Then it became something more coherent like "the developer/publisher relationship sucks." Fine, we know that. It does suck.

Also, I see some blinders on the author. What about a game like Rez? What about all the music-based games? (I mean, how expensive is the art in Donkey Konga? Ten bucks?) What about your Paper Mario, your Katamari, etc. It IS quite possible to create games that don't have the latest and greatest glitz - as long as those games aren't competing against similar games that do. Monkey Ball? How much did that cost to develop? It couldn't have been a lot, it's all repetitive textures and geometric shapes.

I think that is one of the real problems here: I don't think most DEVELOPERS want to create games with indie aesthetics. They want to be able to create the next Doom 3, just on the cheap somehow. If you go to a web discussion forum focused on novice game makers half of them want to create a MMORPG!

I see pieces like this as long on problems and short on solutions. "We must tear down the distribution model blah blah.." Ok, stop talking and rip off a chunk already! Waiting for someone else to do it isn't going to work. How about, you go collect a bunch of great games and set up a website that sells them, then scrounge up some money for some ads? Sounds like a plan.

[Kail]

As someone who doesn't produce games, my only really relevant response to this is going to be to wait and see if anything happens.  And, I doubt it will; it's been said before.  Repeatedly.  To say that someone can sit in their basement and put out an "indy" game that will rival something done by id is a nice sentiment, but even the biggest corp isn't just hosing green around at random.  They actually pay people to make (or try to make) good games.  If you think that a team of five people who get a kick out of making games on their laptops are going to be able to rival that, you're going to have to give me some evidence.

People do not love Teh Shiny because it is shiny. The love it because it is well done. Why should players be expected to embrace games that are twenty years behind the state of the art?

Exactly.  I mean, if you're going to do things to a reasonable level of competence, there is a HUGE amount of volume that simply needs to get done.  I don't care how talented a 3D modeller you are, it takes time (and a lot of it) to put together a decent 3D world.  Being skilled or not can only speed this up so much.  If you want to stick to doing flash puzzle games or whatever, fine.  Yes, you can make a profit with that kind of thing.  But if you're running around shouting shit like "We will turn this industry on its head.  Tremble, Redwood City! The forces of revolution are on the march." then I hope to God you've got something you can point to that's better than fucking Tetris.

I have no qualms with the stated goals of this kind of thing... but I'll believe it when I see it.

[Pococurante]

Again, these things are all true. But... people are putting together graphics and even rule bases now for resale.  There was once a time when folks were paid seven and eight figures to put together the kind of presentation high school kids now do solo in Powerpoint in just a few hours.  We're smack in the middle of the same trend for games.  Don't let what "everybody knows" from three years ago blind you to what some folks know now.

[HaemishM]

http://www.the-underdogs.org/scratch.php

I refuse to have my retina assualted by the Escapist again. Fuck them.

Also, I couldn't finish this article. I kept seeing myself at 16, railing against TEH MAN. I got about halfway down and just said fuck it.

Everything he claims will kill the games industry and recreate it as some new phoenix rising from the ashes CAN ALREADY BE DONE SUCCESSFULLY. It just takes doing it by someone willing to do it. Most people like regular paychecks as opposed to starving for an ideal. Psychochild has been doing it for years, and more power to him.

But don't try to claim that you're some kind of fucking Unabomber that's going to bring down the great Satans of the game industry. Let them have their Madden 2030's and their Ultima Onlines and do your own goddamn thing. You're not trying to achieve any more noble goal than make money, the only difference is you are doing it at something you love. It's harder and less profitable. Boo-fucking-hoo. The people interested in indy games find them, the people who never will be never will find them, nor will they play them when they do. El Mariachi was a great movie, made on a shoelace fiber budget, but just because it was well-done does not mean the mass market would like it. It just doesn't. It made a profit and the director went on to get other films made with bigger budgets. Hooray for him.

But he didn't destroy the movie industry, he actually helped grow it. 

[WindupAtheist]

Walk into your local bookstore; you'll find tens of thousands of titles. Walk into your local record store; you'll find thousands of albums. Walk into your local software store; you'll find perhaps 40 games.

Not long ago, I finished reading a book written in 1945.  It was pretty good.  Since it all took place in the 17th century anyway, it could have been written last week and it wouldn't have made one goddamn bit of difference.  Until the English language changes so much that the dialect of a good slang-free writer of 1945 sounds like Ye Olde English to modern ears, it will never really become dated.  Games hold up, shall we say, not quite so well.

[Arnold]

Let them have their Madden 2030's and their Ultima Onlines and do your own goddamn thing.

Ehm, UO was developed as a niche product, but it turned out to be very profitable, and EA started taking those profits for granted.


I agreed with a lot of what he said and liked seeing him knock Jessica Mulligan on the first page.  I disagree with about 99% of the stuff I've seen her spew.

[StGabe]

The "manifesto" is rather sensationlist.  I added there only for flavor really -- the Escapist piece is the real meat of it.

And I strongly disagree with the dis of glitz.  Like any major paper magazine, The Escapist has lots of shiny pictures backing the articles.  It would be faster to download white pages, but the extra bits are there because they expand the audience from people who read white papers to a larger, less hardcore group.  Games need the same broadening of appeal, even if they are niche products.  Particularly if they are niche products.  How else will the niche grow?

As far as glitz, the problem is that glitz is replacing substance these days.  And the essay correctly pin-points why this is: because glitz and not gameplay sells to execs and retail chains.  That's really why we need to get past the big publishing houses and Walmart, EB, Gamestop, et al.  By the way, were you trying to say that EB and Gamestop are better than Fry's and Walmart, schild?  Because they're not.  In a number of ways (like how they pander to the hype machine), they are worse.  Personally I buy almost everything either on EBay or Amazon.  I get the best price, it's always in stock, and I'm not supporting the worst of the retail outlets -- three wins.  The only loss is that I may get it a few days later and that is mitigated by not having to walk through a mall to get it.

It's not like the author of the essay or I are asking for permission to publish games that are ugly.  Instead we are trying to find ways to market games based on "fun" and not on the ability to sell it to a marketing exec at EA or at Walmart (or Gamestop).  And to keep creative ownership of the game while doing so.  It is possible to have good graphics and good gameplay.

Masturbation is fun. Suriously.

Masturbation has nothing to do with it.  And in topics like this you always bring it up without any justification.  How about you actually tell me where he is wrong.  Do you know a lot about actually selling a game?  Because I actually do.  And the author is absolutely correct that selling most games (to a publisher, venture capitalist, retailer, etc.) requires pandering to marketing execs and retail execs and has very little to do with whether the actual game is fun.  A marketing exec can show a pretty picture on a slide and he can talk about how many polygons are being rendered.  But he has no way of selling fun gameplay through a slide-show (nor would any relevant exec understand him if he did).  This mentality of divvying development out based on graphics and render-counts is driving most of the decisions that result in the games we see on the market.  And it sucks and I can't see why we would want to continue it, as developers or gamers.  Neither of us are in a good position here.

Also, I see some blinders on the author. What about a game like Rez?

Sure there are quite a number of good games.  But it shouldn't require sweat and tears to actually make a few bucks on a fun, off-beat title.  That a few decent ideas make it through the system doesn't mean that the system still isn't quite piss-poor.  I'm not saying that everyone who thinks they have a good idea needs to be handed thousands of dollars to make a game either.  Rather something in between.  The market right now sucks for promoting ideas.  Ideas, gameplay and "fun" have very little to do with 98% of the important decisions that lead to the games we get to play every year.

By the way, notice how many of the "innovative" titles these days come out for portables and not consoles.  The reason for this is of course that they market is a bit wider there and the budgets are a little lower.  Of course with the PSP that is not unlikely to start changing.  Not that I don't like the PSP, it's a great device.  I just see it as part of a natural progression to bring portable gaming into the same echelon as console gaming and that will have lots of different effects.


Gabe.

[StGabe]

Also if you want to dismiss the article because the book and music industries also suck then I think you are missing the point.  Yes, they suck.  Publishers suck all around.  They stifle new ideas and make it very hard for a creator to maintain ownership of their ideas.

The point is that these are still far better off than the gaming market.  You can still easily find lots of off-beat, creative works, even in Barnes & Noble.  And these are both benefitting from online distribution.  I know a few people who have their books on Amazon and even make a few sales there -- and could never get their books on a shelf in a bookstore (outside of perhaps a university bookstore when used as textbooks).  iTunes and the internet music industry is doing good things for music.  Etc.

Even if we can't immediately step to a perfect solution we need to find ways to at least start heading in the right direction.  If we were at least as good as books or music then that would still be better than we are today.

Gabe.

[Pococurante]

/homecoming queen clap

[Margalis]

I don't think you understand. Most people here agree with what he said - we've heard it before. What's the next step? Complaining is not a next step.

Five years ago this may have been very novel, now it is not. That's why people called it masturbation - these complaints are old hat now.

[StGabe]

The article in question says exactly how it thinks we should move on from here and the author has quit his job to try to implement it.  That's not idle masturbation.  I'm saying I think he's nailed what most of the problems in the industry and I just hope he manages to get a following and at the very least you could say how you think he's doing things wrong.

Or maybe actually support this sort of thing.  Because you know, for any change like this to actually dent the market the following is going to have to happen:
Consumers, like you guys, have to stop complaining yourselves, stop masturbating over every new tidbit of hype that Sony/MS/EA/et al sends you and put your money where your mouth is.  And actually support a developer that tries to do things differently instead of bringing out The Hate at any idea that deviates slightly from the norm and is expressed in a slightly different manner than you might like.

Gabe.

[schild]

I don't bring out the hate. I bring out the reality. The reality of it is that he/they don't have enough money to do it. The reality of it is that it's all pretty knee-jerk. The reality of it is that people have failed in the past and I don't see what makes this attempt any different. The reality of it is that outside of these types of communities, no one knows who these people are. The reality of it is that it's still masturbation.

That said, I'd like him to succeed. I'd like to read more about it. But I'm not getting my hopes up.

[Margalis]

Consumers, like you guys, have to stop complaining yourselves, stop masturbating over every new tidbit of hype that Sony/MS/EA/et al sends you and put your money where your mouth is.  And actually support a developer that tries to do things differently instead of bringing out The Hate at any idea that deviates slightly from the norm and is expressed in a slightly different manner than you might like.

If he releases something I want I'll buy it. I'm hardly a raving fanboy, and unlike many people on this board, I won't complain about a game and still pay for it. I'm not playing any MMORPGs right now because none appeal to me. I'm not buying a next gen system until I have good reason to. I bought a GarageGames development license.

I don't see how GarageGames isn't already doing what he is talking about to some extent anyway. I guess GG looks like it sells only Torque games but I think they are open to other things.

[Merusk]

What Marg said. When I get bored I stop playing. If it's a good game and I hear about it I'll play it, regardless of production values or glitz. Something devs need to realize, however, is

As to the first article, welcome to creative endeavours meet business reality.  You don't like it, you can go and do your own thing and hope you sell enough via whatever distribution you find to pay your bills.  It happens in Art, Architecture, Design, Music, Photography and other 'true' arts every day. People make a meager living doing it because they love it while people like myself say it's stupid to do so and continue to shit-out subdivisions that look like every other or those by-the-dozen paintings you can buy at Target.  Very few people ever achieve the success to be able to do both A and B in any of these fields.

Railing against the machine is futile. It's there and it's not going away because it provides a product people want at a price they'll accept. You can only do the best you're able to do by working within it or hope you can survive by working outside of it.

All I see in the article is a guy saying 'this sucks, wah' over and over. The second article he's at least trying.  He's still wrong, because people are going to prefer brick & mortar sales for a long time.  Look at the warm reception Steam got among the gaming crowd.   Oh wait, it didn't, it was Lukewarm at best.  A few folks love the idea a few folks hate it and the majority couldn't care less, except for the fucking authenitcation that keeps going down.

   Digitial distribution is in it's infancy and it won't catch on in large part for another 10-15 years, as the youngin's now adopt it and accept it.. like every other technological breakthrough.  Don't fall into the trap of your own techiness saying "no way, they'll accept it before that" just because you do and you wish everyone else would.  HDTV hasn't even penetrated the market in large part yet, and home computers only achieved widespread penetration in 99, so there's no way you're going to get DD penetration in just a few years.

So instead of the corporate whoring he advocates.. an indie publisher one-stop.  Which, of course, will just become another EA the way he's selling it.  Indie music & films became 'trendy' because a few of them made big bucks, so larger companies bought them out and are playing corporate shell games while promoing them.  True indy music isn't heard on the radio, and it isn't advertised in the way he seems to think it is.  I imagine the same is true for films.

  Selling counterculture is just corporate whoring in a different package.  Do real 'goths' shop at Hot Topic?  Would real 'hardcore indy gamers' shop at a site with such lame marketing as "Tired of sloppy x-box seconds?".  I sure wouldn't, I think it's insulting.  But kids are dumber so perhaps they would, and they're the ones you're going to have to change, not me.

I still say it's pie-in-the-sky. The biggest stumbling block is people want and expect something physical.  Christmas, birthdays, anniversarys, or 'good job' presents are expected to be physical objects.  How lame is it to get gift certificates instead of the actual object?  It's be doubly lame to get a printed cert or e-mail with a download code.  So until that aspect of consumer culture changes, the B&M stores are still what you need to work through.  And for that, if you want to sell, you'll have to go through the publishers.

[Pococurante]

(...) and put your money where your mouth is.

If there's an example community anywhere that does this it would be this one.  I'm nowhere near as aggressive an early adopter as most here but I invest in stocks and I invest in myself/family.  I don't invest in games but simply consume the service when something comes along that's interesting.  Considering my disposable time decreases as I get older such products pretty much have to be complete the day they open their doors.  Viewing the wreckage of flawed MOG launches over the last few years it appears I'm among the majority.

I think Teh Hate has finally died out here except with a few folks whose opinions are pretty flaky anyway.  To my relief - it always grated on my nerves.

It's in the indies' aggregate interest to pool into co-ops or even cartels.  Strength in numbers matters.

Digitial distribution is in it's infancy and it won't catch on in large part for another 10-15 years, as the youngin's now adopt it and accept it.. like every other technological breakthrough.

And yet iTunes now sells more music digitally than is sold in packaged form.  Every console maker also accepts that their future revenue comes from software/content electronic distribution and are aggressively tryng to lock in those channels hence why I think Nintendo in the next decade will be remembered much how we view Atari and Magnavox from the 80s (and for the same reasons).

Your numbers should be in months not years.

[Merusk]

Who's using iTunes?  Nobody I know except the one guy who owned an iPod.  That's who iTunes is selling to, iPod owners, so I view them as separate in the discussion of digital distribution.  People who buy iPods see iTunes as part of the bundle.   Unless you're suggesting that every computer is going to come with digital download software and an integrated service with the sale.  Then you're once again outside of the arena of small time publishers and you're poking into MS and yet another monopoly lawsuit.

iPods might be big among geeks and early adopters, but in big terms I'd hardly say they have enough market penetration to say digital distribution is a rousing success.  There's fewer iPods out there after 4 years than PS2s in the first 5 years I'd hardly call the iPod a well-penetrated product since gamers are a much smaller niche than music listeners.  But their sales are picking-up, as Apple pushes the price down so who knows, perhaps people WILL become more accustomed to it sooner than I think.  However, adaptation of other tech used by a broader base hasn't been any faster, so I'm pretty comfortable with my estimate.

[HaemishM]

I find it funny that I wrote an article saying pretty much exactly what St. Gabe said in this thread many months ago, and Gabe shouted me down for it, boiling my article down to me calling devs stupid.

[Pococurante]

Who's using iTunes?  Nobody I know except the one guy who owned an iPod.  That's who iTunes is selling to, iPod owners, so I view them as separate in the discussion of digital distribution.

Even using the inflated numbers from RIAA iTunes moves more music than the illegal p2ps.

Over a year ago they sold over 3 million individual songs (not including albums) in a single week.

The trend is well established and the record companies know they're losing ground.

You may not like iPod but they are basically the same business model as a game console.  Not surprisingly there is huge overlap between console players and mobile music listeners.  And overlap with people who use mobile phones as more than just a mobile phone, which is why Apple's collaboration with Motorola is just huge and took away the one last ace recording companies had up their sleeve.

Microsoft has made it very clear they see future revenue growth in selling content over their platform products.  Starting with the 360.

This trend is moving much faster than you give it credit - perhaps because you're confusing a global business trend with your life experience of a single iPod-owning friend.

[Margalis]

I see tons of people around with iPods. I think digital distribution is not that bad. We already have the fileplanet Direct2Drive stuff, Steam, etc. The problem people have with Steam is that it is flaky and the DRM stuff kind of gets in the way.

I don't think a game with solely digitial distribution is going to sell as many copies as GTA, but it doesn't have to. Some of the things from PopCapGames do well enough, and those are digital only.

I think the idea that we need to replace the publisher model is separate from having a place where indie games can be sold online. The second is very doable. The first will take a much longer length of time.

[StGabe]

I find it funny that I wrote an article saying pretty much exactly what St. Gabe said in this thread many months ago, and Gabe shouted me down for it, boiling my article down to me calling devs stupid.

Uhh, because you did. :)  You only wanted to talk about developers furiously masturbating as though it was all their fault that the market is as fucked up as it is.

Your article was about how indie developers just need to band together and share source code and art and stuff as though it would magically solve all their problems.  And the fact is that they already do all that.  But they still are awaiting (and trying to build) a market that will actually support products that don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars of marketing behind them.  A much more real problem for indies is the insane cost of entry that consumers have allowed publishers to put on the market.

Changing this is going to require two things:

1) Better distribution systems that avoid publishers and retailers who (mostly) only fuck up the games and take the profits.
2) Consumer adoption and support.  Nothing can happen without that.

And these are the points I was harping on months ago.  I was saying then that what we need is an iTunes for games and to get there we need consumer support.  Grass roots support for which is something which can best happen in fringe boards like this. 

Instead of furiously masturbating, indie developers like the author of this paper are furiously trying to make a market where fun games can be bought and sold.  Consumers just have to meet them halfway.  And somehow we need to get rid of the retail/publisher dependencies and the hype machine.  Buy from Amazon or Ebay, even that is better than buying from Gamestop or Best Buy (let alone Walmart).  Put up free ads for indie games on your websites.  Give news coverage of new attempts to create internet distribution mechanisms -- even if most of these attempts will likely fail.  Try to create some hype for stuff that doesn't come from EA, et al.  Stop reiterating existing bullshit hype like: OMG, the next consoles are going to be better than PC's.  Actually try out some of the innovative ideas that do make it to the surface of our industry before you rant about how bloody awful they are.

And get over this stupid, unfounded stereotype of "furiously masturbating game developers".  What basis does this prejudice have and what purpose does it serve?  All I see it doing is serving as a rallying point to piss on anyone who actually tries to innovate.  Are there assholes making games? Sure. Assholes exist.  Almost everywhere. But you act as though a few assholes define the entire industry.

Gabe.

[Kail]

Changing this is going to require two things:

1) Better distribution systems that avoid publishers and retailers who (mostly) only fuck up the games and take the profits.
2) Consumer adoption and support.  Nothing can happen without that.

It sounds like a bit of a chicken-and-egg argument from here.  You're saying companies need consumer support to produce good games, while some of us are saying companies need to produce good games to earn consumer support. 

I mean, there's that old expression:  Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.  With regards to this Indie Gaming thing, it sounds to me like we're sitting around debating proposed designs this path could take, and assuming that maybe someone will take care of the mousetrap aspect at some point.

As I see it, either you can make a good game or you can't.  If you can't, I won't buy it, regardless of how awesome your distribution scheme is.  It's great if you're being creative and doing what you love, but don't expect me to finance it.  On the other hand, if you can make a great game, I'd buy it off your notepad-spawned Geocities page if I had to.  No, you're not going to be the next John Romero, driving around in your gold plated elephant-drawn wheeled submarine, but you could make a living doing it.  Some people already do, and have for some time. 

It seems to me that this element (can I make a good, profitable game on a low budget) is more pivotal than revamping the whole publisher/retailer relationship.  If you can make good games without them, this issue will resolve itself rapidly.  If not, you're going to have serious problems getting it started.

About the most relevant example I can think of is webcomics.  A decade ago, they basically weren't viable.  Comic book (Marvel, DC, et al.)  publishers look at the internet and can't see a real, effective way of distributing their stuff online.  Scott McCloud publishes a book, "Reinventing Comics," and rifles off a few ideas on how you could make a profitable online comic business, which bears a number of superficial similarities to this conversation.  Fast forward a bit: a few comics become very popular, experiment with various payment schemes.  Now, there are a number of people making a living off of online comics, and a lot more who use them to suppliment their regular income.  But McCloud's ideas (at least with regards to business) are still not widely accepted; most comics do things very differently.  Almost all the real progress has come from people "on the ground" so to speak, who have a successful comic on their hands and are looking for ways to earn some money off it.  But the product came first, and they designed a solution around it.  They didn't look particularly hard at "Reinventing Comics," and why should they?  It was all just theoretical stuff, and they had a real property to sell to real people.

If we're going to see any real progress with the idea of "Indy" game shops, someone needs to come up with a great product first.  People will need to want to buy it.  Any significant reform we get is going to come after that.  Everything we do until then is just "Reinventing Games."

[Margalis]

And these are the points I was harping on months ago.  I was saying then that what we need is an iTunes for games and to get there we need consumer support.  Grass roots support for which is something which can best happen in fringe boards like this. 

It's called a "website." Welcome to 1997!

Seriously, what is hard about this? There are already websites that sell games. You can already buy full games online. The technology is there.

It's a matter of someone setting up a websites and finding some decent games to put on it. The second is the hard part. I still haven't heard how this is different than GarageGames.

[StGabe]

First of all, the web comic revolution never would have happened if people on the net didn't start getting excited about it.  If everyone had sat on their asses and said, "it's just masturbation it will never touch REAL comics" then web comics would still be a dead art.

It sounds like a bit of a chicken-and-egg argument from here.  You're saying companies need consumer support to produce good games, while some of us are saying companies need to produce good games to earn consumer support.

Yeah and no.  There are good indie games already.  More importantly there is a LOT of talent out there that really wants nothing more than to just make good, fun games and could care less about the hype, the franchises, the licensing, the marketing, and all the general crap in the market that tends to make games suck.  So it's not like the resources aren't there to make very good games.

It is not in the interest of a publisher to let this talent loose however.  They don't get anything from doing this.  Sure they might get a few titles out of it but by and large the more open the market is to talent and innovation the less their market share will become.  The market gets too chaotic and spreads out to lots of individuals instead of the one monolith.  It's simply good business for them to stifle innovation and keep putting out the same sort of crap -- as long as they can get away with it. Which brings us to this:

It seems to me that this element (can I make a good, profitable game on a low budget) is more pivotal than revamping the whole publisher/retailer relationship.  If you can make good games without them, this issue will resolve itself rapidly.  If not, you're going to have serious problems getting it started.

Money is an issue.  A developer can starve themselves or work after hours on a game, but their won't be an explosion of really good indie games until it becomes possible for indies to pay for their time with their work.  But that's not the biggest problem for indies.  The biggest problem is that the cost of entry into the legitimate market is too high.  You may be able to make a good game on a minimal budget but if you can't get it to the real markets where people are actually buying games then you won't make money anyway.

Publishers do everything they can to increase the cost of entry into the market.  I wouldn't say it's evil, it simply happens to be in their best interests.  The Hype machine is their best friend.  Because in a market where hype is necessary to sell a game and where hype costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to create, only the big guys can compete.  On top of this are the costs to get any title on a shelf in any store or other market where Joe Gamer is actually going to shop which are significant and out of reach of any true independent.

That market is a product of producers and consumers.  On the producer end, we have publishers doing everything they can to shift the market away from smaller, independent game developers.  And on the other side of things, unfortunately, we have consumers buying it up like crazy.

Just read around these boards and see how many times you can spot someone buying into big publisher hype or talking about going to Gamestop, Walmart, et al, to buy a game.  Schild in a thread recently, for example, was trumpeting the next batch of consoles as "ahead of the [PC] curve" even though that is nothing but MS/Sony marketing bullshit and any and all comments from actual developers working on these consoles indicate that the next gen of consoles is still far behind the curve, will only barely be able to do high-def TV and are only slightly better than the last gen.

Now, read around to see how often an indie game gets hyped.  I'm not saying it doesn't happen.  I'm just saying that it is a rare event.  What we need is more hype for indie games.  Who cares if not every indie game or new distribution scheme lives up to expectations?  It's not like every EA/Vivendi/Sony/MS game lives up to expectations -- far from it.  Most of the time when any company or individual tries to do some actual innovation, far from hype, we hear about what "masturbating" bastards they are and how they everything they touch is going to turn to shit.  And yet isn't this the direction we want gaming to go?

It's not about developers needing to make all the changes.  Because most of the developers who actually have money, etc., don't want change and are selling their model quite well to consumers.  And those who do want to create change are trying to offer their talents and products and simply can't capture enough of a market to grow.  It's probably unfair to say that consumers need to make all the changes too.  Yes, there needs to be some good offerings out there before you can buy too hard into any concept.  But that's not what I'm saying anyway.  I'm saying that indies (and any developers trying to innovate) and consumers need to meet in the middle.  Indies and innovators need to keep trying to create new products.  But consumers need to help get the buzz going when they see something that might actually work or is at least headed in the right direction. 

[Margalis]

Schild is a fanboy, we all know that. 

That said, I STILL haven't heard how this is different from GarageGames. I'm just going to keep saying that over and over again.