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TIGSource ForumsPlayerGeneralWhy so much hatred against gaming industry
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Bebop
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« on: February 28, 2007, 12:02:01 PM »

The title says it all. I do not have any particualr opinion  only want to know the reason you are for or against. It's a DEBATE!!! Smiley
Please explain yourself with intelligent argument.
« Last Edit: February 28, 2007, 12:08:58 PM by Bebop » Logged
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« Reply #1 on: February 28, 2007, 12:06:57 PM »

They're doing it wrong! Sad
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« Reply #2 on: February 28, 2007, 12:48:30 PM »

They ruined Deus Ex: IW. Sad
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« Reply #3 on: February 28, 2007, 12:56:20 PM »

They're doing it wrong! Sad

Sounds about right. Not to mention they're getting away with murder because of their size. How many "MLB 200X" titles are going to keep getting bought up again and again? Then don't forget employee abuse, horrible marketing (I'm looking at you Sony), among other atrocities Geneva should make rulings on.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes awesome things can happen (like Spore, B+W, Sims, Half Life, and others I can't seem to remember) but for the most part I just see the same shit getting pumped out again and again and again.

To be fair, the 'indie' scene fucks up a lot too. Anyone care to sing the "I'm sick of match 3 / mosaic / find the clues clones" song with me?
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« Reply #4 on: February 28, 2007, 05:25:29 PM »

Oh, for sure I think the business model is a bit screwy right now. But still, almost all of my favourite games came out of the "mainstream", and there are still great games coming out fairly regularly. Almost all of them are made in Japan, though, which is possibly significant.
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« Reply #5 on: February 28, 2007, 05:30:31 PM »

In the last 5 years there has been less than 5 games I considered buying in the retail space.
All of it is rehash of tired formulas, ww2,terrorists, etc,etc...
Oh and it's the same with console games.
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« Reply #6 on: February 28, 2007, 06:45:05 PM »

Let's see, where to begin. They refuse to try anything new. CRPGs are becoming a joke. I mean, I don't want to start a huge war here, but Oblivion was not good, innovative, pretty, or fun. Sure the models had high poly counts, and the forests had alot of leaves, but I really did not see a single good animation, or model in the game. Maybe I've just gotten picky about artwork; leaving out the artwork though, the game was more repetitive than rat killing in MMOs.
Then there are the MMOs, they could be fucking amazing, if the industry would put some thought into reward vs. risk, how to move away from grinds, and making worlds believable (lore/interesting quests/events). There are so many things that could be done with the "genre", and yet they've done nothing but go backwards from EQ. Eve has some decent ideas, A Tail in the Desert does too. Ryzom might even have a hint of an idea. The mainstream stuff though: Vanguard, WoW, shit do people even play any others? I'm so tired of treadmills I could shoot someone. I mean, time is definitely an intrinsic value to MMOs, but deciding who leads the game world based on how much endurance their ass has for the computer chair is not viable, fun, or whatever you want to call it, in my opinion.
Then there are FPSs, uhm do I even need to talk about those? They involve shooting people, and they're getting less and less creative as time goes on. Half-life 2 is a major step up in graphics and interaction (physics), but where the hell are the variety of models, landscapes, worlds? Sadly, it offers probably the best "story" out of the current gen shooters, though correct me if you feel I'm wrong, b/c I don't have much patience for most of 'em anymore.
RTSs, well they were cool when they came out because strategy can be really fun, and they've been refined, but do we really need to have the same essential mechanics for the whole genre. I know there are more ways to control a war or society than the same tired mechanic we've all known since Dune, (or before?). Look at DF (http://www.bay12games.com/), he's got something going with that AI run world. Of course DF is all in ASCII, but I think it's definitely its own brand of strategy.
Platformers don't really exist anymore; uhm, ok wait the DS isn't all that bad. I enjoy it once every blue moon, and there's alot of potential to it. I'm sure there are many more arguments about why the mainstream sucks, but suffice to say they basically arn't creative anymore.
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« Reply #7 on: February 28, 2007, 07:21:29 PM »

My thoughts are pretty much Gargantuas with more curse words.
Although I do think Half-Life 2 was really good and there are actually pretty varied enviroments. I detest Steam, though, so that kind of ruins it for me, a little.
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« Reply #8 on: February 28, 2007, 08:09:03 PM »

If we are going to be talking about mainstream - it's obvious that as computing power and memory increases, gamers are going to be demanding that both are put to good use - meaning more time and more employees working are models, programming, and so on. This means more money spent, yada yada yada, and now we have an industry where businesses could seriously hurt themselves if they invest time into a stinker of a game, so they prefer to play it safe and stick with the formulas that work. More power to them.

The consumers, on the other hand, demand more creativity and freshness in the genre, while helpfully having no idea what this means in terms of gameplay, leading developers to scratch their heads and throw their hands in the air. (This isn't to say there hasn't been good mainstream games, though.)

I like how this post was basically a rehashing of something everyone already knows. 
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« Reply #9 on: February 28, 2007, 08:10:15 PM »

I kind of enjoyed Gears of War. *runs away*
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« Reply #10 on: February 28, 2007, 08:18:08 PM »

Well, I don't tend to play retail PC games, MMORPGS, RTSes or FPSes. Or American-made games in general. So it all seems okay to me. Certainly there is not a huge volume of great games being made, but was there ever? I liked Shadow of the Colossus; that was interesting. I liked Outrun 2006. I liked Gradius V. I liked Rhythm Tengoku. I liked God Hand. I liked a whole buncha games.  They still get made.
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« Reply #11 on: February 28, 2007, 09:09:05 PM »

In Japan. Cool
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« Reply #12 on: February 28, 2007, 09:49:13 PM »

They're doing it wrong! Sad

That sounds so simple, but it's so right.  I'm not going to pretend things aren't changing or that people haven't noticed.  XBox Live and the other ESD systems are exactly what we've been asking for.  Now we just need to use them, instead of crying about them in forums. Tongue
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« Reply #13 on: February 28, 2007, 10:14:19 PM »

Oblivion was not good, innovative, pretty, or fun.

The character faces were so scary.
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Alex May
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« Reply #14 on: March 01, 2007, 03:27:35 AM »

Let's see, where to begin. They refuse to try anything new. CRPGs are becoming a joke. I mean, I don't want to start a huge war here, but Oblivion was not good, innovative, pretty, or fun. Sure the models had high poly counts, and the forests had alot of leaves, but I really did not see a single good animation, or model in the game. Maybe I've just gotten picky about artwork; leaving out the artwork though, the game was more repetitive than rat killing in MMOs.
Then there are the MMOs, they could be fucking amazing, if the industry would put some thought into reward vs. risk, how to move away from grinds, and making worlds believable (lore/interesting quests/events). There are so many things that could be done with the "genre", and yet they've done nothing but go backwards from EQ. Eve has some decent ideas, A Tail in the Desert does too. Ryzom might even have a hint of an idea. The mainstream stuff though: Vanguard, WoW, shit do people even play any others? I'm so tired of treadmills I could shoot someone. I mean, time is definitely an intrinsic value to MMOs, but deciding who leads the game world based on how much endurance their ass has for the computer chair is not viable, fun, or whatever you want to call it, in my opinion.
Then there are FPSs, uhm do I even need to talk about those? They involve shooting people, and they're getting less and less creative as time goes on. Half-life 2 is a major step up in graphics and interaction (physics), but where the hell are the variety of models, landscapes, worlds? Sadly, it offers probably the best "story" out of the current gen shooters, though correct me if you feel I'm wrong, b/c I don't have much patience for most of 'em anymore.
RTSs, well they were cool when they came out because strategy can be really fun, and they've been refined, but do we really need to have the same essential mechanics for the whole genre. I know there are more ways to control a war or society than the same tired mechanic we've all known since Dune, (or before?). Look at DF (http://www.bay12games.com/), he's got something going with that AI run world. Of course DF is all in ASCII, but I think it's definitely its own brand of strategy.
Platformers don't really exist anymore; uhm, ok wait the DS isn't all that bad. I enjoy it once every blue moon, and there's alot of potential to it. I'm sure there are many more arguments about why the mainstream sucks, but suffice to say they basically arn't creative anymore.

I don't agree with a lot of this. New things are tried all the time, yes there is a hesitancy from some publishers about new IP, and sometimes new game ideas, but there are still some crazy mad games that get released. Naturally they don't make a profit so a publisher is less likely to try that again.

Platformers don't exist - well that's hardly true, but the bottom dropped out of that market supposedly, when excellent games like Jak and Daxter and so forth start not selling so well then what's the point in making more of them? They had to innovate (by, heh, by adding weapons) to make sales, and it worked.

Oblivion gets by with its large world and bags of (albeit very repetitive, similar) content. Yes, it's not an anal D&D CRPG but then that probably wouldn't sell as well. It's all about markets.

What do you want from an FPS anyway? It's first-person, and you shoot people. You're seeing more stuff now in FPS than you ever did before: wall-walking, portals and and gravity manipulation in Prey; bullet-time and horror in FEAR; behaving like a fricking animal in Far Cry; the list goes on. Yes, the old problems are still there, and those need working on, but you can't really argue that the FPS genre has no new stuff going on in it. I could agree that it's saturated with a lot of other crap (WW2 shooters raise your hands please).

I kind of agree with you about RTS, though the Total War series is a good example of breaking the mould slightly and Supreme Commander deals with a lot of the standard RTS problems quite artfully, but your point about Dwarf Fortress is a good one, and shows up how tired RTS really is.

Of course, I personally hate the industry for other reasons - the way its employees are treated and paid, and the developer-publisher relationship.
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« Reply #15 on: March 01, 2007, 04:02:55 AM »

I think they're doing a good job releasing pretty ok games for their target demographic. They are meeting the demands of their target demographic rather well.

They're doing an awful job releasing games that I like, because releasing games targeted at a (maybe just percieved from their part) minority is not (seen as) economically viable.


Basically, my generation, 25-35, grew up with slooow computers that took time to load games. We put up with disk swapping. If the game took a bit of time to get into, it was okay. It was exciting to just see figures move on the screen even if we didn't know what the heck was going on for day or even weeks. A lot of us didn't have any game manuals too...  Embarrassed

The game designers back then knew that people wouldn't be put off by having some complexity and depth thrown at them. That has changed I say. Now everything has to be so intuitive and easy to pick up that they (think they) have to make gameplay mechanic sacrifices to achieve that.
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Anthony Flack
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« Reply #16 on: March 01, 2007, 04:51:30 AM »

I think the industry in general is generally too focused on big-money, big-hype blockbusters. But there is also the chance that people commenting on the game business also end up being blinded by all that hype and so conclude that that is all the game industry is.

But then you've got companies like Treasure, who have quietly managed to stay in business for the last 15 years or so by making fairly niche titles with smaller budgets, staying agile and working with several different publishers across lots of different platforms.
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Alex May
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« Reply #17 on: March 01, 2007, 04:54:29 AM »

I spent a year an a half making Plug'n'play TV Games, recently - the most money I have ever been paid, working on piss easy projects of short duration with achievable goals. It was bliss. I wish all game development was like that.
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Bezzy
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« Reply #18 on: March 01, 2007, 05:02:12 AM »

The game designers back then knew that people wouldn't be put off by having some complexity and depth thrown at them. That has changed I say. Now everything has to be so intuitive and easy to pick up that they (think they) have to make gameplay mechanic sacrifices to achieve that.
Emphasised for agreement.

Complexity (i.e. depth, emergence etc.) and intuition are not at odds.

Overcomplexity (i.e. inelegance) is something I'm glad we see less of. Complexity in the form of bad interfaces is also something I'm glad we see less of (you shouldn't have to have OCD to get into a game).

The interesting side effect of streamlining all these things is that it tends to simply expose how shallow a lot of games already are without their complex clothing to hide it. The extra hurdle of putting up with a complex interface is often the only thing that makes us percieve them as deep or complex. Ultimate Spiderman for example, has basically the same game structure as Spiderman 2 but with simplified controls. The controls are fine (and needed simplification), but now that you're not worrying about holding circle + R2 to wall run, or remembering stupid button combinations for combos, suddenly you realize you don't actually have many options for fun.

So, that means that some games' interface IS the core fun of the game. While DOA4 (or many fighting games) has some strategy to it, it's mainly about learning a character's moves more intuitively than the next guy (though there are other skills to learn - recognizing the timing of enemy attacks from their animations etc).

A more transparent interface means more face time with the core game, and more effort must be put into a deeper possibility space.

The Wii's first few games have been mainly novelties, giving all players a chance to get used to the controls in rather shallow game spaces (there are exceptions, ofcourse, but Raving Rabbits, Wario Ware, Wii Sports - minigame packs). As developers learn what sort of actions suit the controller best (because it has a lot of annoying little limitations) the games will suit the interface better, the interface will become more transparent to the player, and the games will have to become deeper to keep returning players interested.
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« Reply #19 on: March 01, 2007, 05:45:15 AM »

Some points about why we are justified in hating the games industry.

*All round lack of experience
*Inexperienced Management
**Undercutting Budgets and Schedules to please publishers, pushing workers into crunch
**With so many eager fools just out of university, you can buy and burn out two noobs for the price of one precocious veteran (and it does not take long to be considered a vet, especially with the industry burn rate: 90% chance that you leave the industry by year 5).
*Leads to Inexperienced Developers
**Cheap
**Eager
**Ambitions beyond ability
**Acceptance of crunch-culture ("We're living the dream and contracting diabetes!")
*This proliferates the cycle of burnout
*Working Conditions
**Developers in a crunch-happy environment do not have lives outside work.
*Pay
**People willing to be paid less because it's considered a "luxury job". You could earn much more doing software engineering, but that's "boring". Games are fun! Riight.
*Fear of Risk
**Typically (though not always) as budget increases, less risks(read: major innovations) can be taken. You get incremental innovation, or as I like to call it "Minnovation". *chuckle*. What a wit.)
**Inexperienced staff don't know how to successfully innovate
***Lack of experience in development, or lack of knowledge of similar games - end up reinventing the wheel.
*Treating Gamers like the enemy
**Typical inexperienced devs/mngmnt/marketing blame their audience for "not understanding our genius" or say of the 'Hardcore' "They're raving fanboys, and don't represent the silent majority, and there is no way I prove this but I hold it to be true anyway", and say of the 'casual' "Idiot Joe Sixpack won't understand this interesting new game mechanic. Ditch it" or "You can make it idiot proof, but you can't make it cunt proof", when infact, the 'hardcore' and 'casual' demographics are atleast partially fictional - the 'hardcore' are not averse to playing old-ideas-done-well. The casual are not simpering idiots who can't understand which way up to hold a controller. There's a lot of fear of the audience, and that turns to hate. And it's fucking childish.
**Results in conservative Games.
*Design by committee
**Everyone can design, and everyone should have a say.
***Too many cunts cooks?
*Design by bullet point/market watching/Marketing
**"I don't care if feature X doesn't fit elegantly into this game. Game Y has it, and it sold millions!" - y'know, even if it sold millions despite shitty feature X.
*Marketing in General
**Design By Marketing (see above)
**Every developer who talks through a marketing agency has their voice turned into some kind of robotic, inoffensive beige advertisment, like some kind of propaganda vocoder.
**Marketing decides if there's an audience for a game or not, despite the fact that a surprising amount of people in marketing don't even play games of their own volition. Thus, they refer to figures for previous games, or review scores, as a kind of artificial replacement for their own taste (since they haven't established any).
**If there's not an established way to sell a game, they won't touch it. Another strike against innovation. ("This game doesn't fit into a genre easily. My brain hurts!").
**If they DO pick up an innovative game, the marketing budget on it is based upon the percieved risk, which comes from the previous sales figures. Previous innovative games have done badly, so less marketing budget is spent on them. However, it's entirely possible that these innovative games a) are marketed badly (because it's diffcult to market something new - you don't know who it's for) b) aren't given the marketing budget they'd need to be truely successful.
**Coming up with shit on the spot, or "The Molyneux Effect", or "The Sony Target Gameplay Video Effect", or "Lying", or "Lying, and expecting the developers to deliver the lie, which they cannot do, because you're lying" AKA "Rainmaking" - tell someone it'll rain. If it does, take credit. If it doesn't, it's beyond your control.


Counter points:
*Good and/or innovative games do get made despite all this shite.
*We will always crave more innovation than there currently is. That is an unshifting truth, no matter how varied games become.
*Are we any different to other entertainment industries? How many movies are really worth watching in a year?

More Negative points (because they're easier than counter points)
*The Ogopoly on platforms.
**Indie-ing on PC is one of the only real choices, but PC games have the worst sales due not least to rampant piracy.
**XBLA/Sony's Equivalent/Wii's Equivalent are less averse to innovative games (because they're smaller, cheaper, and thus inherently less risk), but still put games through the rigeurs of a full title, which creates a massive hurdle for small indies (though it is for the betterment of the game, on the whole).


I dunno. I could go on all day. I should work, though.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2007, 05:52:12 AM by Bezzy » Logged

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