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[aeiowu]

I got up in the middle of the night to write this article on an idea I've had for awhile now. It might be nothing new to a lot of you, but I think it lends our indie cause a bit more credence, and maybe give us a bit of perspective.

http://mile222.com/2009/04/what-the-history-of-the-print-industry-can-teach-us-about-the-future-of-the-game-industry/

I guess I have a specific question for the community in addition to any discussion from the article. Do you aspire to make a big, 40-man multi-million $$ game one day? Or does that seem abhorrent to you? How come?

[Sk8rCai]

Alas, your article isn't opening for me.  It's quite possible that it's my stupid mobile broadband connection....

I think the idea of aspiring to make a 40 man, multi million dollar project isn't the way I look upon my game making endeavors.  I would offer that I have games that I would like to make in the future that are technically and logistically out of my reach and might require a higher amount of funding that I can afford now.

Controversially, I would offer that you don't really need tens of million dollars to make a big game, in terms of technical scope or quality, but then I have no real hard experience in those sorts of areas.  Just my own meandering experience in application development for various scabby enterprises!
 

Edit: Spelling! Ick!

[Saint]

An interesting observation, to be sure.

I do not think it is quite as simple as with the history of print seeing as our end product is a lot more extendable. While print essentially ends with putting things on paper, there is a difference between World of Goo and GTAIV that is much bigger than the difference in printing quality of a 1000-man company and a single individual. Two guys may well do something different, but I think that there will be demand for both their product and the AAA games, and seeing as they can co-exist I don't see a reason as to why either would perish. Kind of like with movies.

I agree that it's the age of the little man, though. We are already seeing a decrease in the amount of really large projects that are greenlit, and I don't think the trend is about to turn.

[genericuser]

There's one big difference between the print and gaming industry, though:

Most book publishers don't sell their books padlocked 


Nice article, though; it was interesting to see the similarities of those industries.

[Fuzz]

Very interesting. I'm wondering how cave painting could be considered graphic design by any stretch of the imagination, though.

[Farbs]

Thanks for writing this up aeiowu, it's an interesting article.

I think your argument falters when you consider that most of the print jobs lost were easy to automate, whereas most gamedev jobs involve a large amount of subjective decision making. Gamedevs are a tech savvy bunch, so where they see an opportunity to cut costs through automation they leap on it. Eskil has shown us with Love that user content and procedural content can handle a lot of the subjective work, but then Love isn't really the same as Halo.

Hrm.

[Zaphos]

Creating a high-detail artificial world is a pretty hard problem in itself ... automating that process is even harder.  It's really interesting, but really hard.  Maybe some day.

And yeah, Eskil's solution is to basically just not do realism, which is great! ... unless you want realism.

[Craig Stern]

Interesting article. I think the analogy breaks down a bit when you consider that all those people whose jobs were eventually made superfluous in the newspaper industry (etchers et al) were performing tasks made genuinely redundant by new technology. By contrast, I don't think you can really argue that the kind of intense art assets, detailed 3D engines, etc. that most AAA titles sport today are something that small teams of indies could produce just as easily themselves. Technology has not made dedicated teams of modelers, texture artists and animators redundant, in other words.

[aeiowu]

I see what you guys mean but I think you're all not taking enough of a step back to see the big picture here. Right now, in the trenches, it's easy to look at just how hard it is to make a game from scratch. But is that any surprise? Even a 2D platformer is hard to make from scratch! Of course, get gamemaker out and the task gets much easier. The same is happening in the "AAA" market. Look at how the endorphin engine is essentially replacing character animation, not with something similar (motion capture) but with something _actually_ better because it's dynamic. Someone will open source that tech, drastically reducing the barrier-to-entry on that kind of awesome animation power. Furthermore, what about a generative algo to _create_ 3D models and then another one so they can _learn_ how to animate most efficiently (Spore).



To create the software to blank-slate design a newspaper (InDesign) from scratch would be quite an undertaking. But nobody would do that, they already have a blank-slate tool that does _everything_ necessary to pull off the production of a publication of any scope desired. Today, there's no real blank-slate tool for game development. But there will be.

Eskil is on the bleeding edge of this. Maybe LOVE is it, maybe it isn't. Regardless, it will happen... It won't be until much further down the road that _anyone_ can create a game from _anything_ they imagine, but certainly able-bodied game developers today can use the plethora of tools at their disposal to sidestep a lot of the technical barriers to focus on the creative elements of game development.

[aschearer]

The cost of production for seemingly everything is going down, and with the internet the cost of distribution is close to zero. (Let me step back a moment and say that this obviously only applies to things such as IP.) In that light it's not surprising that the print industry is struggling to find an updated business model which sustains its current size and profit. Presumably as technology marches forward the same thing will happen to gaming. After all it's already happened to music and is beginning to happen to movies.

Personally, I'm not sure what the world will look like when we no longer treat digital goods like physical goods. That is, when we finally stop trying to treat digital goods as being excludable. While I think the stakeholders in the music, news, etc industries are exaggerating the impact this new order will have it's also clear that the amount and scope of content that is produced is going to change. Ad based business models simply do not replace the old business models.

In some industries, such as news and reporting, I imagine that society will deem the content important enough to support via taxes. Look to England's BBC and TV tax as an example of this model, which is arguably it is more effective than the current one we enjoy in the US. At the same time for the game industry I don't think that society will bear the burden of R&D. This may mean that the days of giant corporations such as EA are numbered and that the future will be populated by smaller, more agile companies vying for a piece of a smaller pie.

Either way it's certainly going to be a wild ride! 

[Fuzz]

[off-topic rant]
The one thing I know about the music industry is that I will never stop buying CDs/other physical music storage with album art, packaging, etc. until physical music media is completely dead (hopefully that will never happen). Example: a couple months ago I bought Nine Inch Nails's The Slip on CD. You can download it free on the NIN website. It comes with a bonus DVD, but that's not why I bought it. I bought it because I wanted it on CD.
[/off-topic rant]

[Movius]

I got up in the middle of the night to write this article on an idea I've had for awhile now. It might be nothing new to a lot of you, but I think it lends our indie cause a bit more credence, and maybe give us a bit of perspective.

http://mile222.com/2009/04/what-the-history-of-the-print-industry-can-teach-us-about-the-future-of-the-game-industry/

I guess I have a specific question for the community in addition to any discussion from the article. Do you aspire to make a big, 40-man multi-million $$ game one day? Or does that seem abhorrent to you? How come?

Your article is good and I mostly agree with the sentiment, however it makes the same mistake a lot of writing on this subject does and portrays 'indies' as some sort of homogenous collection of game-making automatons with the same intentions and the same motivations. For example: In one sentence you stress that these indies are not a 'movement', yet one paragraph later you are assigning them all the traits of members of an idealistic movement or cause and are making bold statements about intrinsic indie characteristics.

A couple of the things that I endlessly harp on about here are:

A) people that treat the 'indie scene' like it is some sort of homogenous amorphous blob that you can carve a chunk out of and thats how indie-game developers made.

B) people that use 'we' and 'our' incorrectly. Generally this an extension of fallacy a; Where hypothetical person 'Faklfjl' considers himself an 'indie-gamer.'

Faklfjl enjoys eating fried-chicken. because he believes he is an indie-gamer and also believes in fallacy in A, he therefore concludes that all indie-gamers also enjoy eating fried chicken. He has no problem making claims like "We need fried-chicken to satisfy our ravenous hunger."

Unfortunately this article, despite otherwise making a good point, has both these annoying qualities. It generally fails to acknowledge the indie-game stereotype is largely false and that any cursory scan of the internet will find many that don't match the small-agile developer described in the article. (quick example: go count the number of names in the credits for Nethack... or while you're at it consider the time since the last released version of a game thats supposedly in 'constant' development.)

final note: Everything in my post and more is probably said better in the answer to the question regarding the indie 'market' in this interview with haowan.

[Zaratustra]

I guess I have a specific question for the community in addition to any discussion from the article. Do you aspire to make a big, 40-man multi-million $$ game one day?

Yes. It will be Spore done right, or Dwarf Fortress done expensive. It will be beautiful.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I guess I have a specific question for the community in addition to any discussion from the article. Do you aspire to make a big, 40-man multi-million $$ game one day? Or does that seem abhorrent to you? How come?

Actually, from what I gather, an interesting thing is that *most* of the money that goes into the development of a mainstream game goes into its marketing campaign. For instance what is called a 40 million dollar game is often 10 million spent for production and 30 million spent on marketing. That's the biggest cost right now.

But to answer the question, I'd like to be able to pay people to make games with me, but I don't imagine it'd be very expensive. I can see myself making a game with a $500,000 budget or something, but not $40m. I'd have no idea what to do with that much money, and the stress of having to make a game that would make at least that much money back would be pretty negative, like an albatross around your neck.

The more money you spend on a game, the harder it is to break even -- past a certain point, anyway.

[agj]

Of course. No amount of money can fix a bad idea. Not that the general mainstream audience is quite aware of that, considering the shlock that is often bought.