It’s much easier for journalists to write stories about doom and gloom – you get the emotional outbursts from stressed people, you get stories (of rags to riches to rags; of loss and pathos; of fear and uncertainty; above all: of the contrast between “playing games” and “making them”).
But…
Oh dear, Sheridan’s. Money talks? After winning so much (accidental?) respect in the games industry, for defending against The Wicked Edge of The West, you then had to go and sue developers for using the word “Stick” in the names of their games.
Reaction? Well … severe enough that this lawfirm just put out a press-release to defend itself.
IMHO, this one is a little shakey, but I’m no lawyer and TM law is notoriously strong … so it’s unlikely any of the current crop of defendants can afford the legal fees. If I had the spare cash and I were in their situation, I’d defend it vigourously – but only if I could afford to lose the money; chances of success wouldn’t be great. Maybe Stick Golf has enough cash from their Apple featured status (but doesn’t the fact they’ve been ignored for a year, despite being top of the App Store, rather weaken the TM attack a little?) The trademark certainly exists – but I can think of a lot of minor (and some not-so-minor) unlicensed uses of it over the past 10 years (yes, 10 – i.e. 5 more years than the trademark’s been around – so the TM isn’t perfect), and I bet a good enough law firm could make quite a fuss with it.
Hmm. It’s obvious this was going to cause a big reputational hit, and perhaps someone at Sheridan’s deserves a firecracker lit under them for making the call on this. At what point should a lawfirm decide to reject a client? IMHO, and IME, in any service industry you’re as defined by the engagements you refuse as by the ones you accept. “Ignorance” seems an unlikely defence here, given they’ve got Alex Chapman, who I’m sure had a good idea what might happen if they did this.
How bad? Well, Sheridan’s is big enough they probably don’t care about the indie-dollar; so, maybe it really won’t affect them. Except that a lot of us sooner or later hold senior corporate positions, and we don’t tend to forget companies that go around shafting our fellows. Althouh Sheridans already does badly on Google thanks to pure bad luck – Tommy Sheridan – once you filter out the story of the swinger getting sued, indie-rage starts to make big inroads into the other links. Oops.
Another interesting post from Dan Lee Rogers on whether the money paid for ngmoco last year was reasonable.
(hint: Dan is clearly rather doubtful, IMHO with good reason) E.g. …
Further, Ms. Namba stated that DeNA’s purchase decision was based ngmoco’s ability to create hit iPhone games, which begs the question: what hit games? The ones they were giving away for free or the ones they lost money selling?
…
Perhaps ngmoco showed DeNA some sort of new-fangled accounting scheme to justify their purchase price? Unfortunately, whatever it was is a mystery to all of us simple cotton pickers.
Harsh but probably fair. I’m settled in with the popcorn, and eager to see where this goes next.
I just got two more emails about GDC attendance, and had to apologise that I won’t be there. Hopefully, this post will head off some of the rest.
Disclaimer: for the past 4 or 5 years, I’ve run one of the main calendars of unofficial GDC events. Every night of the conference, I’ve had invites to at least 3 parties, usually 5 or 6. This year, I’m not going, so I’m not bothering with the calendar – sorry, it’s a lot of time and effort (I used to personally check every single event + time + location), and if I’m not at the conference, there’s no point in me doing it.
Instead, I’ll be running my company. I wish I could justify going to San Francisco for GDC, but I need to focus my efforts on making sure we don’t slip up…
Generally, I don’t go to games-industry conferences unless I’m speaking (I used to go to many of them as a delegate). At my level of experience (technical director / studio head) it isn’t worth it. It may be worth going for the non-conference parts, but it’s not worth paying for the show itself. In the last 4 years, I can only remember learning one significant thing by attending a conference session – courtesy of David Edery (who was a fellow panellist at LOGIN/ION – so, incidentally, I was speaking on that occasion too).
I made the decision about a year ago that I wouldn’t go back to GDC until/unless I was invited to speak. I love GDC. I love being there, and I love meeting all the wondeful people there (and catching up with old friends). But … I decided I would no longer put effort into pitching a proposal to them – if they didn’t ask me in, either my work was no longer interesting enough to the community OR it was interesting but not relevant enough / not proven enough to justify me pontificating at my peers.
Historically, the above statement is often proven false: games industry conferences treat most of the speakers so poorly that rarely do they attract (or retain) the best speakers – it’s “buy em cheap, pile em high”. They tend (NB: this is not exclusive – they do lots of good too!) to attract the famous speakers (by showering them with accolades and free publicity), and retain the speakers who are about to launch a new game, and who need the free press. The truly important people? The influencers? Meh. Sometimes, but often not. Often, the really useful stuff at GDC is stated only when drunk, and at parties. Which are free to attend…
However, I felt it was a good metric: the few who *do* get chased-down by organizers to speak always (IME) “ought” to be speaking – the organizers know lots of the right people, and chase them assiduously. Although … sadly, the chase-ees often give mediocre talks, probably because they didn’t care enough … because they were cajoled into speaking, rather than choosing to.
(In my experience, volunteers who are doing something because you tricked them into it generally give little; those who do it out of personal interest / engagement tend to blow the roof off.)
Ironic and tragic.
But, yet – a great way to test (effortlessly) if your areas of interest are of great importance, or if you’re imperceptibly turning into Chris Crawford (founder of the original CGDC, which became GDC), and have gone off on a tangent THAT NO-ONE CARES ABOUT.
This year, thanks to the urging of two people on the advisory board(s), I put in some proposals anyway. In all honesty, I was too busy with work, and servicing clients, to notice the deadlines coming and going, so it was all done last-minute. My proposals sucked. The main one, though, was (IMHO) clearly important and worthwhile – rough around the edges, but I cited *3 years* of R&D behind it (even if I didn’t have time to write it all out in detail).
(NB: c.f. my previous statement about Crawford-ism: I can only tell you what *I* believe, I can’t fairly judge how important / irrelevant this stuff is to the rest of the industry)
The main one (on entity systems) was rejected silently, the second one (on mobile / iPhone) I didn’t get time to finish. Laughably, it was judged anyway – I heard on the grapevine that the judges thought it was a crap proposal. Well, duh – I only filled in the the title and a few aides-memoire on the rest of it – I ran out of time before I’d even decided what I wanted to say. But the process (apparently) auto-submitted my empty proposal anyway. Sigh. That implies to me that a lot of games-industry speakers only put a half-arsed effort into their talks – otherwise, the system would just auto-ignore the incomplete entries.
Anyway … if you do go to GDC, please have a great time. And if you’re not sure what to do, short-cut the few years it took me to work it out – go read Darius’s blogposts on newbies and games-industry conferences … I wish I’d known his tips before I first went to GDC!
Oh dear..
This is something I desperately hope comes into practice (apparently it’s just an “aim” right now, no telling if it’ll actually happen).
It’s especially interesting given the rich and powerful games-companies that keep banging the drum of “There’s not enough qualified IT professionals in the UK” (which, IMHO, is bullshit: they know there’s plenty, but the companies in question have a poor reputation and not enough people *want* to work for them). So far as their claims are genuine, a large contributory factor is students taking “the wrong” A-levels, and then failing to get into “the right” degree course.
For instance, when recruiting graduates for development jobs, we’d often see people with the “IT” (Information Technology) A-level, or some variant of it. Most professional programmers know that that A-level is worthless – it teaches next to nothing, and demands next to nothing. If someone included it on their list of A-levels, they were immediately downgraded in the CV/Resume pile – it begs the question “were you too lazy to do a real A-level? Why should we even consider you when there’s 2 other candidates who did a “full” 3 (or 4) A-levels – are you going to have the same attitude (work-shy) if we employ you?”.
This is not fair: many people chose that subject without realising what it signifies. I suspect the root problem is that teenagers aren’t encouraged to read the curriculum of their chosen subject BEFORE starting the A-level, and judge it for themselves. Analysis, suspicion, and appraisal (in the UK) is now banned until the age of 17: the GCSE syallabus for most subjects in the UK punishes any kind of critical thinking. Shocking, tragic, sad, but with enormous momentum of its own. In reality, changing that would be massively difficult – and anyway, there *should* be other checks and balances.
…One of which is the universities, who look at those A-levels in detail each year, and “judge” them carefully. Unlike critical appraisal of A-levels, sixth-formers considering university tend to look in great detail at anything the university has to say about entrance requirements – no cultural or educational shift is required to get their attention at this point. So, if more universities publish this info, I’m sure it’ll be seen by a great many more of the people who need it.
Incidentally, this is one of the few areas where a move to a USA-style “commercial” university system may be a big improvement over the traditional UK system. Because students would have to pay vast sums of their own money to go to uni, they’re “likely” to be a lot more critical and a lot more demanding up-front, before they spend their cash. Maybe.
Yet my own small experiences of USA undergrads suggest the opposite. There are a couple of “universities” (and I use the term very loosely) in the USA that specialise in “Computer Games Design” courses, or similar, where the students learn … nothing. They just spend the time playing games, making shitty models in Max/Maya (donated to the “university” by Autodesk’s aggressive marketing/sales team, keen to do a loss-leader and capture future users), and having the sunshine blown up their ass by “professors” with little or no qualification in the subjects at hand.
We know this for two reasons: firstly, we see the CVs/Resumes that come out of them, and they’re so bad it makes you want to cry. “Portfolios” that look like the scribbles of a 4-year-old child; self-important monologues on game-design that would make even Molyneux blush and declare “oh, how pompous!”; “code samples” of students *failing* to implement space-invaders, or tetris.
Secondly, there’s the increasing bitterness and anger of the students that have been through that system, come out the far end, and realised how much they’d been ripped-off. I won’t name names – no need: if you’re considering a college, just google it with the word “sucks” or “waste of money”, and see what happens. The guilty colleges have websites dedicated – probably even whole youtube channels – to bitching about how bad they are, from current and former students.
In those cases, even the prospect of going 10s of thousands of dollars into debt wasn’t enough to spur the students into critical appraisal before heading to uni. Which leaves me unconvinced that “paying for your degree” will solve such problems – although it will excuse the responsble authorities from taking responsibility in the future. For good reasons and bad, universities, lecturers, schools, and government are all keen to pass the buck here – and the pay-as-you-go education seems a neat way out.
So … yes; bring-on the blacklists! Share this info, info which the (arguably) morally bankrupt Examination companies would like kept buried forever (because it directly reduces their profitability). Info which successive governments had no interest in revealing (because it would draw too much attention to the severely ****ed teaching of some subjects – and lead to public demand for the government to fix something enormous it had neither the money nor the will to achieve).
Even if you own a Nintendo DS or a Sony PlayStationPortable, there’s a high chance you’re playing games on your phone instead:
“27.2% of consumers who indicate that they play games on their phones only (and not on the DS/PSP) actually own a DS or PSP, but do not actively use the device(s).”
Admittedly, it’s a terrible, amateurish statistic – it’s missing the REAL stats that we need to corroborate the concept – but the report is pay-for, so I can’t look that up.
Still, assuming the report isn’t woelfully misrepresented, it’s a seriously big proportion who own yet have given up on their Nintendos and Sonys. Now compare that with all the people who haven’t forked out the hundreds-of-dollars to buy one yet: how much harder is it going to be to grab them?
Are there enough consumers purchasing games on iPhone to make it worth it?
(NB: this is an ultra-quick analysis, based on the various stats and info I’ve read recently – if you want references you’ll have to pay someone, or google it all yourself)
As of Dec 2010, approx:
Given that iPhone has two of the top 5 slots on children’s Xmas wishlists (once as iPhone, once as iPod Touch), I’d feel confident in saying that iPhone has already overtaken PSP’s installed userbase.
Of course, iPhone app price is approx 10 times less than PSP/DS game price. But … family spending tends to be fairly constant, developers get much higher revenue share on iPhone, and cross-promotion of your own games is spectacularly successful on iPhone.
So, assuming you develop more than one game, you should be getting the same or higher revenues on iPhone games. And yet the development costs are significantly lower than on DS/PSP.
Today, I *almost* bought Civilization 5. The temptation was strong…
…but they still won’t allow me to buy it. You go into a shop, and spend money, and they tell you you’re a pirate, that you’re a thief, and that unless you create a Steam account and connect the internet to your PC, you “won’t be allowed” to play the game you’ve just paid for.
Over Xmas, I think I’ll pirate it instead. Since they won’t let me buy it legitimately.
(for the record, *if* I pirate it, I will also go into a shop and buy the useless £50 box of plastic and DVD. I’ll do the morally right thing, despite their attempts to stop me)
I’ve often spoken in public about anti-piracy measures for games. My conclusion was to include online-only content that you needed to be authenticated for.
This is a single-player, offline game. There is literally no reason to make it “Steam required” – every offline player will get no benefit, and will be better off pirating it. This is (yet again) mindless stupidity from a games company (probably the publisher).
How long do you want to be an Assistant Product Manager?
Assistant Product Manager 4 Life
Job Summary
Reference IS0012
Location Horseferry Road
Hours 37 per week
Closing Date 03 December 2010 at MidnightDEPARTMENT DESCRIPTION
* Channel 4 Online is responsible for creating and managing Channel 4 multiplatform experiences on the Web, Mobile and next-generation connected-devices such as YouView.
* The department comprises three main functional teams: Production, Product Management, and Multiplatform Commissioning.
(there’s also a new Commissioning Editor role up for grabs at Channel 4, which is perhaps more appealing to readers here ;))
I’m an idiot. It only just occured to me today to wonder how common a name “Markus Persson” actually is.
My first reaction on playing with Minecraft was: “Ah, this (much success, this quickly, with this style of game) is what the WurmOnline guys would have loved to achieve, I think”. Oh, the irony. Not that I expect the WO guys are unhappy with what they’ve achieved – WO is an achievement in and of itself, and continues to evolve in beauty and depth – but it’s too slow / too little to become a mainstream success. It’s a technical and personal success, not a business success. Unlike MC.
Now that I know it’s the *same* Markus – Wurm’s Markus_Persson from JavaGaming.org, and the author of Minecraft – I’m revisiting that first impression. Incidentally, in checking out this authorship, I saw I still have the 2nd highest post count on JGO (!), despite almost 5 years of personal absence. Wow. I really did talk a *lot* of crap, I guess ;)…
There are two things in MC that jumped out at me early on. The first one was pure simplicity. This game/world is bursting with a sense that someone has ended up with nothing left to take away.
The art has a nice style in and of itself. This is something I’ve often talked about with other veterans of making cheap games … mostly, that means indie developers (many of the folks from JGO, for instance – especially look at the 4k Java games contest, and look at the frequent winners such as Kev), but it also includes folks from the big-budget games industry, like Thomas Bidaux and Ken Malcolm. And, of course, Matt Mihaly, whose Earth Eternal started out explicitly using an art-style to keep production costs low.
It’s a trick. It’s the avoidance of the uncanny-valley. Make your art look deliberately cheap, instead of accidentally, and you can achieve the same level of pleasure in your audience as if you’d built photo-realistic graphics. As far as I recall, it’s even been tested (in movies and visual art) and found to be literally true.
Here’s one key point where Wurm fell down … there was a vast amount to do, but it was damned hard to know WTF you could do, how, when, why, where.
And at this point, I’m going to pull out and dust off Runescape, circa 2001. Back when it was a few thousand players, and was already taking off, but long before it became famous. RS has changed plenty over the years, and has finessed their interface, but it started off with Andrew’s unrelenting insistence that the UI must have “no menus”. Everything had to be achievable with the LMB or the RMB. There were already examples of places where the interface was crippled and made complex because 3 (or 4) buttons were needed … and eventually Andrew relented and allowed for RMB to be a menu, with LMB being the “most likely option from that menu”.
The point being that if he’d not clung so hard to that desire for ultra simplicity in the GUI, then he’d probably have ended up with a series of rich menus – or more likely a many-button interface. Sure, it had to be modified as the game grew, but IMHO it was one of the greatest attractions to RS, and helped enormously with RS’s growth and success among the school-age market (where RS thrived).
Now back to MC. In MC, your actions are very narrowly limited. Indeed, they reminded me a lot of early RS. Everything relies upon context. In MC’s case, the compromise with game-richness comes in the form of the crafting interface. Here you have to step beyond the LMB/RMB setup, the “purely contextual” actionset, and move to a new UI element. It’s new, it’s extra UI, but … it’s still brutally simple, and yet (so far) proving more than adequate to the enormous demands of variety in MC.
This is the second one that struck me, and it took a bit longer, a bit more playing around (and watching other players in their more advanced worlds), for me to spot.
Wurm Online was always one of the richest “physical universe simulators”: there was a huge amount of physical laws implemented and underlying everything you saw on-screen. This is not a good path for a developer to take: it’s a steep slope into exponentially large CPU and content-production costs … and even worse in terms of balancing and game-design.
Oh, you think that a world with “full physics” has no content production cost? Ha! How much time do you think it takes to implement each of the laws of physics? Even with a rigid-body physics engine to start from? May seem like there’s not many of them around, but just try coding it…
But many of WO’s laws were barely noticed by the majority of the players, while others were smack in their faces a large amount of the time. MC very nearly appeared to cherry-pick only the “frequently significant” laws, and focus on those. MC’s world is breaktaking in it’s depth, and yet if you analyse it closely, you quickly notice it’s lacking some very basic essentials of a world-simulator.
And, back to the irony, I felt that last point made MC feel very much like a direct sequel (in spirit) to Wurm Online: a “lessons learned … and acted upon” when it came down to the most addictive and engaging (and unique) part of WO. And yet I was still too dumb to connect the names together. Doh!
Ubisoft just bought Qazal – one of the last providers of networking tech for games. Congrats to the Qazal folks; although the price isn’t mentioned, I’d imagine a lot of them have picked up a nice windfall from this.
Two problems: one immediate, anti-competitive, affecting games using this tech; the other long-term, and damaging for the *entire* games industry.
Simple. Ubisoft is a large publisher, big enough that whoever is publishing *your* game probably competes directly with them.
Even if you don’t use Qazal yet, if you’re a developer you now have the problem that Ubisoft has an extra stick to beat you into submission when you’re looking for a publisher for your next game:
“Yes, this publishing deal screws you over, and you get 50% less royalty than with our competitors. But you want to use Qazal, don’t you? Well, unless you accept this 1-sided deal, we’ll make sure you either can’t use Qazal, or we’ll quietly – unofficially – make sure you get terrible support, screwed over, etc”
NB: Qazal guys have made it clear they won’t stand for this. Unfortunately, Criterion guys said much the same thing when EA bought them. Turns out that guys with sticks can protest all they want, but the guys with machine guns tend to win the argument.
Remember when the Swine Flu started, govts panicked that this virulent disease – started no-one quite knew where – might become a pandemic? Maybe just one chance interaction between pig and man that would bring down mankind. Maybe …
Over the past few years, there’s been a series of aggressive, destructive, anti-competitive acquisitions of games-middleware companies.
It seems *likely* that the Ubisoft/Qazal purchase will be more of the same – no matter what they say. It may prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Already, development teams – or, more accurately, the people that run them – are actively avoiding using middleware. The common refrain is “we’ve been so badly burned by Renderware/Demonware/[insert here] that we now have an exec-level policy that we must not use middleware unless it’s from a company that has practically zero chance of being purchased by our major competitor”.
In the short term, EA and Activision got to laugh at everyone else and dance and sing and claim their brilliance.
But already there are lots of smart industry people who have avoided founding new middleware companies (and I suspect there are plenty that started but died) because of this: too many of their desired customers are refusing to buy, on principle.
It may take 5+ years for the full impact to be felt, but I’m confident it will be felt.
To be clear: we’re not talking about things like Unreal3 here, we’re talking about focussed technology solutions to game-development problems. The dominant players of the industry bemoan the escalating costs of production, but the great innovations in cost – cheap, effective, nimble tech – have traditionally come from small middleware startups. Not from monolithic tech spinouts like U3.
No matter the protestations of innocence, AFAICS there’s a problem of mis-aligned interests.
Ubi will materially suffer *not at all* if Qazal is no longer licensed – the revenue (so far as I can see) is relatively tiny, and it’s non-core to their business. Unless they want to become a “tech selling company”, they will never care much about it. They won’t even care that much about the lost “shared R&D costs” they’ll just be happy to have the smart people in-house.
However, Ubi now has an enormous sword of damocles they can use both to bully and to materially harm their competitors: at any moment, they can turn off the tap.
You can write the cleverest contract in the world, to protect your project, and yet STILL Ubi may screw you over. The team leads may not notice – protected by said contract – but the TDs will (wasted investment of time and research/training with Q).
And the CTO will be livid (because the lead time to build up an internal expertise is measured in years – and they’ll have to start from scratch just to persuade the Finance division to let them have the money, which could take a year or more on its own).
His recent post about the top ten “doomed” games-industry projects/companies/things attracted a lot of attention … and some snide commentary. It was “traffic-chasing”, “doom-mongering”, “gutter-press”, “tabloid journalism”.
Even if all the above were true and fair, it would still be wrong to focus on it.
The games industry has real problems right now.
I can think of 100,000,000 of them off the top of my head, floating in the air above Dundee. For instance, the industry at large had plenty of opportunities to see that RTW was in big trouble. But no-one said a word. Without naming names, go and ask a few publishers how many of them were approached by an increasingly desperate RTW over the last few years, and what terms were on offer; research some rumours.
But, overall, get a sense of perspective: you should be celebrating Nicholas’s call-out, and begging him to write more. Because otherwise there’ll be another 50,000,000 of them, quite possibly starting in Southam and rapidly spreading to Guildford, before leaping across the Atlantic, swinging down the east coast, doing a little tour of Texas (via Austin), and then finishing up with a round of bankruptcy parties in San Francisco.
I thought about commenting, but decided against it. IMHO the post was fine. It wasn’t exactly “detailed researched professional journalism”, but it wasn’t presented that way – and it was perfectly reasonable throughout.
Any intelligent reader would quickly see that he backed-up his opinions and clearly had thought about the topic – it wasn’t simply tossed-off in a spare few minutes.
I suspected (because I’m a cynical game developer) that most of the complainers were either looking at a slow news day and needed something to comment on … or were feeling bitter that they’d (implicitly) been denigrated by their OWN failure to speak up about these failures.
At the same time … IMHO, Nicholas knows exactly what he’s doing – I’ve been following his blog and tweets for a year or so, and I’ve seen his tone gradually change to become more and more provocative.
So I was pleased to see Nicholas’s followup today, in which he states of *some* aspects of the post:
“That was traffic chasing. But I wanted people to read my blog post. And it worked.”
Excellent. I’d said it privately to one or two people who asked – and not in a derogatory sense – but I wasn’t expecting such a frank admission. Most smart people tend to back down when told-off for being negative.
My own blog (t-machine) is regularly (albeit infrequently) denounced for being argumentative, blunt, and full of outrageous provocations. It got that way because I learned (on the MUD-DEV mailing list back in the 1990’s) that reasonable, qualified, objective statements *do not trigger debate*. Great times, great people – but if you wanted a decent discussion, and insights from smart people, you had to include just enough bite to your words to get them to hit the Reply button…
And debate is something this industry is sorely lacking in when it comes to introspection and “what went wrong”.
Frabjous:
An EA spokesperson told us the company is “pleased with the opinion issued by the court. We hope that this case serves as a milestone in protecting independent developers from nuisance litigation.”
Although I’m not keen on schadenfreude, I’m genuinely pleased to see the US PTO finally smack him down, after years of being caught napping. Tim always seemed a nice enough guy in person, but I found his (publically reported) trademark actions simply vile. His extensive lies and disingenuous claims of being a game developer just added insult to injury.
In other news … with this, EA may finally have recovered brand normality from the long after-effects of EA-Spouse.
This year, numerous retailers (GameStop (GamesIndustry.biz sucks) , HMV (GamesIndustry.biz sucks) ) have been whinging and crying that they can no longer make huge profits out of selling computer games. Publishers have often jumped on the same bandwagon, but tended to blame retailers for selling 2nd-hand games (oh my! shock! horror!).
You might think that developers would agree, would sympathise – after all, they’re losing money too.
Not really. Here’s the historical perspective:
“Industry: Hey, Retail. Take your dick out of my arse!
Retail: You love it you little bitch.
Industry: Grr!
<Time passes>
Retail: OMG THERE’S A DICK IN MY ARSE! I DON’T LIKE IT! HALP! HALP!
Industry: You cheeky fecker.”
— ForkBoy
…at the end of the day, there’s no drop in demand for computer games; there’s only drop in demand for the weak ways that those games were traditionally *sold* to the consumer. Developers (and publishers) aren’t facing doom. And after many years of having to “bribe” retailers to even be “allowed” to send their products for sale, no-one’s feeling much sympathy for the retail sector…
Anyone saying “redundancies are inevitable for games industry companies” should never be allowed to run a studio. Ditto for the raving loons who think everyone should be hired as contractors instead.
I was pointed at this by Nicholas Lovell’s wholehearted supporting tweet, reminding me that Nicholas is a finance guy, not a game developer:
“If you’re a work-for-hire/self-funded studio working for little profit who employs 100% of your staff on a permanent basis then expect redundancies at the end of every project and or the business completely failing.”
No. If you’re in that situation *you don’t deserve to be in business*. Contractors are no solution here at all: your “solution” is to *raise income*. Making games is not a box-shifting industry, it’s a creative industry. The ONLY way this works is to charge high prices, because you can never directly control creative-cost.
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with “Cyclical business” and “Core teams” and “Contractor flexibility” – those are the terms of idiots who think it’s reasonable to run a business as if it were a hobby, always on the brink of bankruptcy. You’ll go the way of Woolworths et al – and you damn well deserve it.
A healthy, profitable, creative business not only ALWAYS runs at less than 100% staff efficiency, it positively THRIVES on it. The open secret of successful creative industries is that you pay someone’s salary just to get them in the door and to keep them content … so you can reap the rewards by being the one to exploit the new IP that – randomly, spontaneously – flows out of them.
18 months ago, Scott and I described our perspectives on the fall of Tabula Rasa. I said that if you’re going to spend $100m on an MMO, you’d better be aware of MMO history and not repeat those mistakes.
It would seem that Real Time Worlds wasn’t listening – coincidentally, $100m is how much *publically announced* money just went down the pan, now they’ve gone into administration.
No-one in this industry likes to talk openly about their enormous fuck-ups – and the few that do tend to become pariahs, sued by their employers or shunned by future investors. No major company openly documents – or “allows to be documented” – anything of import. It’s a system that punishes progress in the professional field.
There’s a single public analysis on RTW/APB right now. It’s an anonymous source (oh, for god’s sake! When will we stop shooting the messengers?), but some non-anonymous sources have backed it up. So, let’s take a look…
“lead you to think it’s going to come right by release … You end up in this situation where you’re heads down working your ass off”
Me, 18 months ago:
“The implication being that they didn’t do anything wrong, perhaps, but that they stood by and watched the train rolling slowly towards the brick wall and didn’t try (hard enough) to stop the collision.”
“APB … came together… relatively late in its development cycle … leaving too little time for content production and polish … lacking any real quality in some of its core mechanics”
Me, 18 months ago:
It wasn’t ready for beta. I said so. Many others said so.
“it was pretty clear to me that the game was going to get a kicking at review – the gap between expectation and the reality was huge.”
Me, 18 months ago:
A survey was taken, internally, asking what people thought. The results were never published – so no-one (apart from the survey takers) knows exactly what the results were, but we were told that the *company* knew.
Incidentally … I was afraid to come clean at the time (and upset individuals), but that survey of all staff was EXTREMELY negative about the project, and I have been told (but you’ll have to take this as unsubstantiated rumour) that the reaction of the top-level execs on seeing the results was simple:
“Bury it”
“I wasn’t on the APB team, so I played it infrequently, during internal test days etc. I was genuinely shocked when I played the release candidate – I couldn’t believe Dave J would be willing to release this.”
Me, 18 months ago:
[I wasn’t on the TR dev team, but] given my position I had the luxury of a lot of insights that other people wouldn’t have had.
…
I played TR in the alpha, and I actually enjoyed it
…
it was a good pre-production prototype [but – at best – YEARS away from being a finished project – and they went to beta only 6 months later]
“The real purpose of beta is publicity, not bug fixing. We never took that lesson on board.”
[I didn’t cover this, but Scott’s post did, IIRC]
“MyWorld is an innocent bystander caught up in the demise of APB. Which is a real shame, because it is genuinely ground breaking, though not aimed at the traditional gamer audience. ”
…which sounds an awful lot like Scott’s team and Steve Nichols team (the former very basic playable but unreleased, the latter Dungeon Runners)
EDIT: it’s 100k sales, not 10k.
APB:
“the real killer, IMO, is the business model. This was out of the team’s hands. The game has issues, but I think if you separate the business model from the game itself, it holds up at least a little better.”
I originally (mis-)understood
the figures that Nicholas Lovell has dug out, but apparently sales were over 100k (presumably that means practically zero sales in USA?).
By comparison, the previous big-failure MMO which went down because of the “bad business model” was Hellgate: London.
So, not as strongly as I originally put it, but I’m still dubious about the business model being the cause. This stinks to me of a marketing/sales failure (unless those 100k sales are spread equally across territories)
APB:
“we should have kept our powder dry. Our PR felt tired and dragged on and on, rather than building a short, sharp crescendo of excitement pre-release.”
IMHO this is a really bad idea – unless you remove the entire “MMO” part of the game. Big Bang Marketing doesn’t work for MMOs; this is the old-school of game-marketing.
Although, given how ineffective RTW’s marketing seems to have been, I doubt a big-bank-marketing-campaign could have done any worse.
Two parts of this industry need to talk, one part doesn’t. As I said in 2009: “We need to talk [about failure]; when will we talk [about failure]?”
The professionals: you’re getting burned out, chewed up, and spat out. Your lives are being wasted.
The investors: you’re getting screwed. You write it off as random failure, and you can afford it, but you’re shying away from “games” as a result, leaving good profits behind on the table.
The inexperienced, the mediocre, and all those people who don’t actually MAKE the game, but do get to ruin the process (rockstar-designers, producers, marketers, directors, managers, etc) : you’re doing great. Your lack of skill hasn’t held you back, and the company will often go bankrupt before anyone gets around to firing you for incompetence.
When I left NCsoft, I was cold-contacted with some new job offers.
A typical example: “make a success of” a project that had already spent several years and many millions of dollars and was about to launch. But I wasn’t allowed to move said launch, and they had “infinite” funding (I kid you not).
There was a fat salary for anyone willing to shepherd that disaster (and, I suspect, become the public fall-guy). The game itself launched as they insisted, and was a laughable failure. I doubted it could have been fixed without another 12-18 months of development.
And me, personally? Nowadays, I run a freeform studio developing mobile apps and games for corporate clients. Each employee is responsible for themself and for their own decisions. If you need a project-manager to mollycoddle you every day, you can’t work here.
Personal responsibility, and personal authority; so far, it’s working pretty well…
Came up recently on TCE. I finally figured out a concise definition of the job role being filled by the “good/great” Tech Directors – someone who’s worth every penny of the $150k salaries they command:
“Figure out the worst things that go wrong which nobody is specifically to blame for, and make sure they don’t happen”
The point with TD is that 9 times in 10 you have a hierachical company structure:
Owners
…
Company Directors
…
Senior Management
…
Exec Producer
…
Project Management
…
Leads
…
Teams
…with the setup that responsibility flows DOWNWARDS (companies where responsibility flows UP are very rare in games industry, IME. Nice idea but very few companies have the culture to obey that ideal!).
So … e.g. … anything that the PM’s don’t think of, and don’t delegate to one or more leads … gets completely ignored/forgotten.
This is a gross generalization – in practice, people lower down tend to notice if something’s missing, and apply pressure up the chain until someone takes it on, or take it on themselves.
That works for small stuff. But the big stuff – especially something that needs two disciplines to fix, or that is too much workload for one person to “absorb”, you need someone with management power (i.e. the authority to take people away from pre-existing tasks).
That’s where the [X] Director comes in. (X = Technical, Art, Design, etc)
TD, AD, etc have the sweeping power to get different departments to collaborate, or to persuade a Producer to relinquish some of their team for a week to get a “more important but so subtle you didn’t see it yet” problem fixed.
Typical Escapist. The very first page of their article on “Videogame mths debunked” waxes eloquently (and contemptuously) about supposed “facts” without much apparent fact-checking.
And then the following pages go off on a personal journey of ignorance and attitude. Nuanced opinion, researched journalism, or even useful commentary … this is not.
(The only scientificly valid studies I’ve seen for the brain-training game showed that it DOES have a positive effect. They also suggested that people who otherwise claimed to play it every day were apparently lieing, or blurring their memories of how often they played … which might explain the failures of some of the other “studies”, including the pop-science one that The Escapist bothers to cite)
Apart from Zero Punctuation (a canny acquisition on the editors’ part), TheEscapist seems to continue to be happy as mostly a waste of (internet) space. Sigh. I think EDGE has a lot to answer for…
…and Amazon’s intelligent recommendation engine leaps into action:
(if you don’t know who Tim Langdell is, and you work in the games industry, just Google him.
Here we have Zynga recruiting for a CTO in SF:
(see also the last post, on UK online games jobs)