The Return of Apogee
Old-timers like myself who remember the heyday of "shareware" back in the early-to-mid 90's probably remember Apogee Software. Yes, in the short-lived games biz, being able to remember 15 years of history makes you something of an old-timer. Scary, isn't it?

Apogee was made famous by the publication - via the shareware model - of games by newcomer id Software, which went on to create that one game with the title that that rhymes with "Boom" - which completely adopted the "Apogee" release model. Apogee established marketing via episodes - the first episode of a game was free, and they hoped you'd get hooked and pay for the other two (or more) games. Their most famous games included Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem, Raptor, and Rise of the Triad. In 1994, they formed a DBA ("doing business as") label called 3D Realms to emphasize the new, "hot" genre of first-person shooters. Starting with Duke Nukem 3D. Since then, 3D Realms has pretty much taken over the focus, working on titles like Duke Nukem Forever (perhaps the most famous vaporware game in history), Prey, and Max Paine. Officially, it's still Apogee, but they weren't using that name anymore.

Apparently, with the rise of indie gaming, things have gone full circle. Apogee is back, starting with a publishing partnership with developer Deep Silver to produce Duke Nukem games for the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. But they are also looking to publish indie games again. The new Apogee is Apogee Software, LLC (as opposed to Apogee Software, Ltd., just so there's no confusion or anything).

Apogee's Website states, "After more than a decade out of the limelight, Apogee Software is back in action! Apogee, which, pioneered digital distribution back in the 1980’s will continue its proud tradition of bringing top quality PC games direct to the consumer via digital distribution while at the same time expanding its publication muscle into next generation consoles."

As a publisher of indie games (boy, that sounds like an oxymoron to me), they claim that they will "take care of the heavy lifting of publishing a game, including marketing & promotion, distribution, and fullfillment. Apogee offloads these critical tasks, allowing you to focus on developing the next award-winning title."

From what I can see, it still looks a little rough and preliminary. While the legacy of Apogee Software is certainly cool and everything, it will take a little more than a name and pedigree to kick butt and chew gum in a field where we've already got guys like Steam, Stardock, Manifesto Games, GameTap, WildTangent, Greenhouse Games, Reflexive, and that's not to mention the casual game portals or the niche indie publishers like Matrix Games and Shrapnel. But I'm not positive what Apogee will be bringing to the table. Experience and an established presence? Back in 1994, maybe. Today? I don't really know.

What is becoming abundantly clear, however, is that the business of video games in general - and computer games in particular - is changing. The genie isn't going back inside the bottle.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:48 AM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
Go Big, Go Small, or Go Home?
According to an interview on GamesIndustry.biz with Christopher Kline, a technical director at 2K Boston, the market has pretty much split with big-name blockbusters or small, budget, casual games. There is no longer a market for "mid-budget" developers.

Now, this doesn't involve the "indies" so much, as we're dealing with shoestring budgets in the casual game range anyway, and he's talking specifically about games in the range of "3-4 million."

This saddens me, because historically, those have been the games I have enjoyed the most. The big, massive blockbusters have often been fun - but too often they gleam and glisten on the outside but are pablum on the inside. It's those middle-of-the-road games that make me all warm and fuzzy about video games.

Including Irrational Games' (2K Boston's previous incarnation) own Freedom Force games, which kicked all kinds of butt. But apparently, they didn't sell well. But looking back, a good deal of my favorite games were not the big-budget, massively-marketed blockbusters of the day. If he's right, and if that's the prevailing attitude of the industry, then ... well, from my perspective at least, we're pretty much screwed.

But I'm not sure about that.

By the sounds of it, some middle-budget games have been doing quite well. Like Galactic Civilizations II, Sins of a Solar Empire, Sam & Max, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, the "X" series of open-ended Elite-style games. These games had a budget that I suspect was significantly above that of the average casual game, though I guess I could be wrong. And it certainly sounds as if they have been plenty profitable - though again, I could be wrong. And I expect there are others... After all, Guitar Hero started out, according to the post-mortem, as a cheap-and-dirty low-to-mid-budget game.

But the gutters of the games business is littered with the bodies of dead who tried to buck these odds and failed. Troika Games seemed like it would be the savior of hardcore and avant-garde RPGs, but couldn't sustain its business. I doubt we'll find another company from the mainstream industry trying to make "mid-budget" RPGs in the future. If it does happen, they'll be coming up from the ranks of the indies.

So is Kline right? Are we left with nothing but low-budget indie games and top-shelf, glitzy blockbusters? Or is there still a market for mid-budget games if the companies can figure out how to tap into the market, as apparently certain "big indies" have done?

Discussion on the Forum!

Labels: Biz, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:11 AM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
Tale of Despereaux Game Announced
Kotaku and Leigh Alexander have the news:

Brash Handling Tale of Despereaux Movie Extension

Er... yeah. Here's the trailer to the movie if you haven't seen it yet:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809420569/video/8528812/standardformat/

Why am I posting this here? Well, if you were wondering why updates on Frayed Knights have been a little slow the last couple of months... you can blame this game.

Labels: Biz, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:39 AM (Permalink) 1 comments links to this post

 
Beer and Ice Cream
No, I don't mean making a float out of it. That's just what they tend to serve us here at work, late at night, when we've already put in a 12-hour day and have several hours to go before we can go home. For those of us who don't drink (we're in Utah, remember), they also provide sodas. So I guess I could make a pretty yummy float out of it. Maybe tonight, since it's looking likely that we'll have another week of 14 to 16 hour days this week.

This is just a brief comment on the state of my life right now. Back in the front lines of the mainstream game development business.

I vaguely remember being a little jealous and nostalgic about the video games biz when I had gotten out, but my buddy John was still in the thick of it. Now that circumstances are reversed, I doubt John feels the same.

Once upon a time, a little over a decade ago, it was a little different. A lot of people in the games biz had a stake in their companies. Stock options, or were actually founders / co-owners / whatever. It's a lot easier to pull out all the stops and work the crazy hours when you have a stake in the final results.

Not that those were ever worth much to ME (I think my options from the SingleTrac days netted me a whole $3500 when all was said and done and converted to Infogrammes stock). The beer and ice cream might be a better deal, truth be told.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:33 AM (Permalink) 7 comments links to this post

 
RPGs: Too Much Like Math?
I ran across John Scalzi's blog a few months ago, when I was researching (on a whim) the difficulty of marketing science fiction today. Fantasy, once buried in the science fiction section at the bookstore in the early 80's (when I started looking for it), is now the dominant sub-genre. In particular, the sub-sub-genre of Urban (or "modern") Fantasy - my favorite - seems to be ruling the charts these days. Blame Harry Potter if it makes you feel better.

Now, "true" science fiction isn't normally the first on my list of desired reading. I mean, sure, I was a big Babylon 5 and Firefly fan. I've read several books by Heinlein. And William Gibson - in fact, I was pretty much a Cyberpunk fan throughout the early 90's, devouring what I could of Bruce Sterling, Walter John Williams, even a couple by Pat Cadigan. And Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash was bizarre yet awesome. And I recently came to discover Lois McMaster Bujold's novels - and I suspect The Warrior's Apprentice may be my favorite space opera story of all time (if not my favorite science fiction novel, period).

So I'm at least a remotely interested spectator to the sport. The tie-in with video games is, naturally, another aspect that leaves me curious. I can't see a very noticeable decline in science-fiction themes in video games, as we are still up to our neck in badass Space Marines these days.

Why has science fiction lost it's appeal and popularity? Scalzi, author of Old Man's War, blames accessibility. Today's SF is often written for existing (and jaded) fans of the genre, and is none-too-friendly for newbies. "It comes down to marketing and writing problems that science fiction literature has that fantasy does not; namely, that math is hard, and science fiction looks rather suspiciously like math," he writes.

That analogy could also be applied to computer role-playing games pretty easily, couldn't it? In fact, the more I read the article, the more applicable I thought the advice might be towards making RPGs more accessible. In particular, the "dying" single-player RPG. For the uninformed, the single-player computer role-playing game has been dying, on and off, since the mid-90's, stubbornly coming back into bloom with renewed vigor every time someone feels comfortable calling its effective demise. Granted, cRPGs are nowhere near their peak in the late 80's and early 90's, unless you count the MMO's, where World of Warcraft is practically a genre unto itself.

RPGs can be pretty intimidating. They do tend to carry the math-geek, chess-club stigma about them. They conjure up images of arcane formulae carried over from the early Dungeons & Dragons days - 1d8+2 Damage, THAC0 of 16, etc. I mean, D&D even had magical items described by their math. A +2 sword, for example. Yeesh! Naturally, being a geek myself, and a programmer to boot, I can get into this stuff without too much encouragement. But even I find myself a little intimidated when finding myself trying to understand what's going on when creating or leveling up a character in a new RPG.

Even those RPGs that don't wear their mechanics on their sleeves have that simulation / wargame stigma that I think might frighten off potential newcomers. Even the subject matter can get a little arcane. I mean, how many non-RPG players know what chain mail or plate mail is? There's a lot of lore there with which many RPGs assume the player has some passing familiarity. To top it all off, RPGs are notorious for being dense on exposition. As much as I love fantasy RPGs, I have come to dread the amount of backstory I'm forced to devour to figure out who I am, why I'm here, and what I'm supposed to be doing... only because it has been done so poorly in too many games.

Scalzi comments in his article on making SF more accessible, the solution is NOT to dumb it down. Likewise, I don't feel that the modern trend to dumb games down, hide the RPG-ness. and make the bad stats go away is the answer, either. For counterpoints, I look at World of Warcraft and Diablo - both extremely successful games, which wear their numbers proudly. But somehow, the numbers seem to be provided more for guidance than as something that players feel must be mastered. Once players get to a certain point, they enjoy manipulating those numbers. The trick is not to bewilder the player with all that mana, hit points, armor selection, strength-versus-dexterity crap right from the get-go.

Scalzi writes, "Make it fun, make it exciting, make it about people as much as ideas and give them a fulfilling reading experience that makes them realize that hey, this science fiction stuff really isn't so bad after all. And then beg beg beg your publisher to give it a cover that a normal 30-something human wouldn't die of embarrassment to be seen with in public. If we can do all that, then maybe, just maybe, science fiction as a literary genre would be back on its way to cultural relevance." He also cautions that not every SF author should do this - they need their hardcore SF as much as ever - but they do need to form more of an outreach to bring new fans into the fold.

This makes me pause and think for a bit.

Can we draw some parallels between bitter hardcore SF fans, annoyed to see Harry Potter taking the honors and making uncountable amounts of money, and hardcore old-school RPG fans who see their category dominated by action games "with RPG elements?"

Can we use more of our own outreach program?

Frankly, I don't see the big publishers doing it. They have no choice but to follow the money. Which means this is a job for the indies.

And they already are, to an extent. I look at Aveyond, Aveyond II: Ean's Quest, and Cute Knight as possible examples here. These titles have managed to rope in a non-traditional audience for RPGs (and Cute Knight has more numbers and math floating around than many mainstream RPGs!) In these games, which have most of the traditional trappings of a hardcore RPG, also have accessibility in spades, from the subject matter through the marketing and the actual mechanics. Players are attracted not by the "crunch" promised by these games, but by the promise of story and interesting characters. A simple story, one that doesn't overtly invoke a lot of overwrought fantasy tropes or demand too much familiarity with the genre.

Am I talking "casual RPGs?" Well, yeah. Maybe I am. Maybe not casual as in the currently defined "casual game market" (which emphasizes adult women), but casual as in not "hardcore gamers" (let the mainstream publishers worry about that group) and "not familiar with RPGs." Maybe getting away from the Tolkien-esque medieval fantasy settings a little bit and starting closer to home. Think of marketing an experience - the fun and excitement - rather than the category - for people who wouldn't know what an RPG is if it bit them on the mithril-armored keister.

I think there's opportunity here.

Labels: Biz, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:25 AM (Permalink) 12 comments links to this post

 
Game Industry Skill Crisis Its Own Fault
GamesIndustry.biz has posted an article about how the majority of "game development" programs offered by schools are leaving students ill-equipped to deal with the actual requirements of a game development career.

Industry Skills Message Hits Mainstream News

According to Matthew Jeffries, Head of European recruiting for EA, "If you look at the gaming degrees, a lot of them have been put together quite hastily and don't prepare graduates for a career in the industry... So the problem is that game degrees are almost like the latest fashion accessory - all the universities are running to set them up, but the students aren't being prepared in terms of the skill sets they have."

David "Elite" Braben complains that there is a lack of candidates with degrees in math, physics, and computer science.

Putting on my crusty ol' semi-disgruntled veteran cap, I've got my own comments to add about this "crisis" of skills in incoming recruits.

First of all, the games business isn't competitive in the job market. I don't know about science and math, but computer science graduates can easily make 15% more working outside of the games business. So you can work in a boring 9-5ish job (with some crunch, acknowledged) cranking out C# code for ASP.NET pages with plenty of time to play games and raise a family, or you can be paid $10,000 a year LESS to work in an industry with quality-of-life issues that make it sound like a sweatshop. But you get to make games.

That's a choice that is only interesting to real die-hard gamers for whom the coolness factor (and the lack of a dress code or early-morning hours) outweighs the hard hours and poor compensation. On the other hand, a "game design" degree is hard to leverage into anything outside of this industry.

Secondly - I'm not sure that technical degrees are great indicators of success in the game development field. Yes, I think programmers need to have a solid grasp of trigonometry and basic physics as well as programming concepts. But is having someone with a PhD in Physics on the team going to make or break a game? Unlikely.

The approach from the publishers and upper management these days is to make game development an assembly line widget factory anyway. Meanwhile, middle-management tends to rely upon heroics by team members, which is probably where the desire for more heroicly-inclined workers comes from. There's a fundamental disconnect in how the process is supposed to work, and more skilled workers aren't going to make that big of a difference cranking out the latest Third-Person Shooter Clone With a Movie License.

Finally - and most importantly - the "churn rate" in game studios and big publishers is a far, far bigger problem than finding better fresh-faced, eager-beaver recruits who have huge technical skills and a love of games that surpasses their instinct for survival and propagation. These companies are complaining about having to provide additional trading to new employees, but then they burn these guys out within 2-5 years and discard them with all the emotional attachment associated with tossing a used Kleenex.

The retention rates in the games industry are improving, I think, but they still suck. And a part of me wonders if the improved retention rate isn't coming from these game degrees that leave graduates trapped in the games biz.

Labels: Biz, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:44 AM (Permalink) 14 comments links to this post

 
Meet the New Game, Same as the Old Game
We won't get fooled again!

So Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition was released last week. I'm hearing a lot of reports of how it's the Best RPG Evar!!1!1, and how it doesn't resemble previous versions of D&D very much. And I know that there are many people out there who feel the latter statement is a prerequisite for the former. I still haven't checked out the rules myself - we were having too much fun playing 3.5 last weekend with some home-brewed naval combat rules. So I guess you can accurately say I don't know what I'm missing.

Now, I'm apparently not alone in this, based on some extremely informal polls - which are likely to be as inaccurate as they are informal. This happens every time there's an "upgrade," of course (hey, I'm still running Windows XP and Office 2000).

"Jedi Wiker" at Declassified suggests one explanation as to why there appears to be a rift in the community - that the marketing campaign surrounding the new edition was pretty divisive, implying the abandonment of the current customer base in the pursuit of the new generation raised on MMO's. His contention - though he prefers 3.5 himself - is that players should ignore the marketing and give the new edition a chance - but not to invest too much into doing so, as he feels many gamers will still prefer their older edition.

As I mentioned above, I think it is far too early to tell whether or not this is a mistake on WotC's part. The "rift" might likely blow over in a couple of years, as these things usually do. And it is not too clear whether the "Your D&D Sucks, You Must Be Stupid To Like It!" message was really implied by their marketing, or if that message was simply attributed to them by both their fans and detractors.

But their message was - as it had to be - "out with the old, and in with the new." When you are selling something durable, there's really no other way to go. At least, I don't think there is. You have to convince your customers that their old but still functional possessions should be replaced.

Which is exactly the problem with the video game business, just as all media industries (that I can think of).

It's not that we haven't hit some new highs with modern games. I'll happily pit modern racing games against Pole Position any day. In many cases, the newer truly is superior.

But there's a landmine in sending this message that "newer is always better, and anything too old is crap and not worth keeping," as Wiker illustrates. Oversell that message, and you may find a couple of corollaries popping up in the minds of your audience:

#1 - Since everything you've done so far has apparently been crap, there's no reason to believe your newest production is anything different.

#2 - If I love something that you think is crap, then our tastes may be so divergant that I should not expect to love what you have created.

Sound familiar at all? Maybe it's just me. Well, Wiker and me.

Fortunately, as a medium matures, respect for and interest in its past also increases. At least, it does for the more mature (read: jaded) audiences who have been through the "new and improved!" cycle a few times.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:58 AM (Permalink) 7 comments links to this post

 
Requiem for the Arcades
Earlier this week, GBGames posted a link and commentary on an article in the Chicago Tribune entitled, "Video Arcades' Last Gasp." I was kind of surprised to feel as much nostalgia and sadness reading the article as I did.

I guess there's a thing about the "formative years." You assume life will always be the same as it was when you were thirteen - except the things you personally want to change, of course. For me, Gary Gygax was immortal (as was everyone else around me), Vinyl LPs were THE medium for music, Van Halen was going to rock forever, Harrison Ford was perpetually 40, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were always going to make great movies, and video arcades and coin-operated video games were going to be permanent fixtures of American culture - though they'd just keep getting better and better.

In 1981, the video game craze was just starting to hit full force. Expert pundits were daily proclaiming that video games were only a passing fad, soon to be as forgotten as hula hoops and pet rocks. "Pac Man Fever" began sweeping the nation, even garnering nods from Time Magazine. Coin-op arcade machines were found almost everywhere - from the neighborhood 7-Eleven to the corner nooks of any casual restaurant. Handheld gaming hadn't come of age - rather than bringing a DS around with us, we kept quarters in our pocket. Video gaming was rarely more than a couple of blocks away.

But the real action was in the arcades. While not ubiquitous, by 1983 they were fixtures of almost any shopping center. You'd see a supermarket, a Radio Shack, maybe a record store or Chinese restaurant, a video store, and - hey, there'd be the arcade. They were usually dark (the better so see the screen, and the better to scare the parents, making them doubly attractive to us), noisy, poorly decorated, and a garden of geekly delights. There's be the strains of music from a radio (or even a juke box) pouring out - some classic rock or 80's pop, usual. Something by The Fixx or Foreigner or Van Halen or even... Men At Work. Or Journey. If not from the radio, then from a pretty awful video game bearing their name, digitized faces, and the synthetic beeping of their top tunes.

Illumination often came from colored neon lights, theoretically there to make the environment more like a science-fiction setting, but often more closely resembling that of a bar. The neon could have just as easily spelled out "Budweiser." Either way worked for most gamers. You'd hunt down a particular noise first, the unusual clanky-clanky sound of a change machine. And you'd find out if the arcade took quarters or tokens just by the noise the machine made when the currency of the realm hit the metal cup. Tokens sucked unless you came to that particular arcade all the time (the use of tokens is, naturally, designed to encourage that).

In the back of the room, you'd find the old standbys - the "classics" that had stood the test of time (time being measured in months - a two-year-old game that still attracted quarters was by definition a classic. That's where you'd find Defender, Asteroids, Pac Man, Galaxian, Space Invaders, Tempest, Centipede, Joust, Robotron, Dig-Dug, and several others. You'd also find some overlooked oldies that just had no resell value, or the owner picked up for a song. Or something. Sometimes the back of the arcade felt like digging for buried treasure. You'd occasionally stumble across some "antique" that was all of two years old that you'd never heard of before. And once in a while, you'd find that it didn't suck, and you'd find yourself blowing a couple of bucks on some quirky old game that you'd never really played before.

Pinball machines stood side-by-side with the video games at the time, borrowing from the technology of their younger siblings to include more advanced sounds and behaviors, little marquee mini-games and visual effects, and advanced game logic and stages.

The real action was in the front - the new games. As time went on, these became depressingly predictable, with the new "hit" games appearing in every single arcade. But like the search for buried treasure in the back, the new games putting in their rotation. Usually they were dominated by one to five older kids who had "mastered" the game in the last week, hogging up the machine for a half-hour on a single coin. But it was almost as entertaining to watch these strangers who has mastered a game as it was to play it yourself. And these kids usually drank up the attention. It was community at an infant level, but it was something. Regular arcade-goers got to recognize each other by face and by game, even if they didn't always know each other's names. It was enough to greet each other with a "hey."

The arcades also exposed players to a wide variety of games, all at once. Rather than choosing to play what was being hyped the hardest in magazines, websites, or on TV like we do today, players chose their games based on browsing the actual selection and seeing the game in action. Granted, there was a layer of insulation there between the producers and the players (arcade operators tended to choose games based on the hype at the industry level and at trade shows), but it did allow more dark-horse winners to emerge. Like Pac-Man and Defender versus the AMOA favorite Rally-X. There was also a fairly immediate Darwinism that took place. They were designed to kick your butt within two minutes. They had to hook you, thrill you, and then beat you within that time. Games that could do all three would fill their tills quickly. Those that did not were replaced.

But it was awesome to be confronted with a real, playable GAME that you had never tried before in the back of an arcade, or in a convenience stoor, or nestled in an alcove of a pizza parlor. I remember discovering Qix and Mappy at a local Pizza Hut one afternoon. I would have forgotten to eat, had I not run out of quarters. I had no idea a sequel to Asteroids existed, but I found Asteroids Deluxe in a grocery store on a road trip with my family. My brothers and I spent half the trip talking about what the rest of the game MIGHT be like, had we had enough time to play more than a two games.

The arcade games were the big brothers to the consoles in that era. The "console wars" were Intellivision versus Atari versus Colecovision versus some various other platforms that could only offer a crude approximation of the arcade experience. So crude, in fact, that the skills and techniques did not transfer from platform to platform. We were invariably disappointed with the home versions of games, but we bought them anyway. Because a crappy Pac-Man was better than no Pac-Man at all. But that was the relationship - the coin-op titles were always superior.


As game developers in the mid-90's, we all hoped to work on coin-op games. A coin-op title was prestigious. The feeling still lingered that the coin-op titles were superior to what was on coin-op. But with the advent of the 32-bit machines, it was evident that this relationship might not be sustainable. Even with the 16-bit games on the SNES and Sega, nearly arcade perfect home versions were no longer a rare exception. The superiority of the arcade games over the home consoles was based on the pace of video game technology dwarfing all that had come six months earlier. No more.

For the new generation of game developers, arcades have lost their glamor. They may have fond memories of the last of the glory days, when Street Fighter II and its peers ruled the less-common-but-still-surviving coin-op world. But the developers coming out of school today were still young when the X-Box and Playstation 2 were released, and it has always been renting the newest games from Blockbuster for their consoles, or contributing to the endless churn of used games at GameStop in much the same way.

I still can't walk into a mall without expecting to see an arcade or game room somewhere on the bottom floor, though it has been almost two decades since they were common. Only a few years ago, I heard some rumblings about what it would take to bring back the arcades. None of the strategies made much sense to me, but I still rooted for them. I would love to see the return of arcades.

But would I go any more frequently than I do now, when there are about three coin-op game rooms within a reasonable driving distance? Probably not. The home gaming systems and computer, with Internet capability and affordable peripherals, have managed to absorb almost all of the benefits of the arcade experience. Game developers can no longer crank out a new game every six to nine months (well, except for certain driven indies) as required by that business to keep things current.

The arcades were largely an artifact of the technology of the era, like record studios, videocassette recorders, and pay phones. Technology moves on. As much as I miss the experience, I really can't see how they can make a comeback, or find a reason why they should other than, "it would be cool."

And they really were.

Labels: Biz, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:45 PM (Permalink) 6 comments links to this post

 
Indie Adventure Game Rips Off Oblivion?
Important tip for aspiring indie and small game developers:

Want to make sure that you are never, ever able to get a publishing deal again? You want to ruin your career and business? Then just blatantly rip off content from a major mainstream game, call it your own, and let your publisher take the heat for it when a gaming website posts screenshots showing what would be pixel-perfect comparisons if only your rendering was better.

Bad, bad, bad idea.

Now, we don't know that Majestic Studios actually ripped off content from Oblivion and other games for their adventure game, Limbo of the Lost. There are allegations that content has also been ripped off from Thief: Deadly Shadows, Morrowind, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Unreal Tournament, and even - Diablo II? That may be a bit of a stretch, but once that particular can of worms gets opened, things get crazy.

But we do know that publisher Tri Synergy, has offered the following press release:

Sharon, MA, May 11th, 2008

Tri Synergy, Inc. (www.trisynergy.com) would like to publish an official comment regarding recent comparisons of level design and artwork between Majestic Studios' *Limbo of the Lost* and Bethesda's *The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion*/Eidos Interactive's *Thief: Deadly Shadows*.

Tri Synergy is just as shocked as everyone else is by the recent screenshot comparisons. At no point during our dealings with Majestic Studios up until the point that the comparison was first publicly made by a third party did we have any knowledge of these similarities. Additionally, Tri Synergy will discontinue distribution of *Limbo of the Lost* in both retail and online outlets.

We have contacted the developer, Majestic, and are anxiously awaiting their response. As soon as we know more on this matter we will issue another statement.

More information about Tri Synergy is available from www.trisynergy.com.

Curious? GamePlasma.com was the first (as far as I know) to break the news, complete with screenshots:

GamePlasma's Screen-By-Screen Comparison of Limbo of the Lost and Oblivion

While nothing has yet been proven or admitted yet, the comparisons are... ummm.... Well, unless those screenshots are a hoax by GamePlasma , it's pretty freaking obvious that content was ripped off from Oblivion. I don't know about Thief and the other games. But except for low-quality rendering, they are identical. An artist or level designer would have a very, very rough time TRYING to duplicate these areas that precisely.

So there's no kidding around here: It's the same content. So unless Majestic Studios legally licensed the content, there's some epic copyright / IP violation going on here.

And here's the extra sucky part: These guys, Majestic Studios, are / were - as far as I can tell - basically indies. I don't know how much (if at all) that Tri Synergy funded the game's development, but these guys have been working on this adventure game since the Amiga days, according to this JustAdventure Preview.

So who's to blame? Did Majestic Studios even know about the problem? Or did they get screwed over by a contractor? If the latter, I really, really hope they got a legal document from said contractor stating that it was his original work. Not that it will prevent Majestic from ceasing to exist, and possibly dragging Tri Synergy with it, but at least it might reduce the owners' liability should Eidos, Bethesda, and Tri Synergy get litigious. Which they might.

But it it might not stop there. Tri Synergy is not a major publisher. They are a second- or third-string publisher that gets tiny games like this to market, both at retail and online. This is potentially a pretty monstrous disaster from their perspective. Every publisher's nightmare, I expect. Or one of their nightmares. Hopefully not enough of one to sink the company, but definitely a bad, bad situation.

What sort of ripple effect might this cause among the small publishers and developers? The indies of the world looking for a publishing deal to take their game to retail? I'm foreseeing a lot more paperwork (and expense) going into due diligence, and publishers being a lot more gun-shy about signing on new studios that haven't been around long enough to establish a track record.

So to whomever is responsible: Gee, thanks for making the lives of all the tiny little game producers in the world a little bit harder. We really had it too easy trying to survive and put food on the table with our little niche titles.

Labels: Adventure Games, Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:05 AM (Permalink) 8 comments links to this post

 
Working For Big Publishers
Jeff Tunnell, newly resigned from GarageGames and now doing his own game-making thing to be unveiled at a future date, has an outstanding article at Make It Big In Games about working for big publishers - titled, coincidentally:

Working For Big Publishers

Now, my experience working for big publishers has been kinda limited. I have worked for three - kinda. I worked for Infogrammes U.S.A. (shortly thereafter redubbed "Atari" - so I can kinda fool people into thinking I'm much more long-in-the-tooth than I really am by saying, "I worked for Atari.") after they bought GT Interactive after GT bought my studio, and I worked (briefly) for Acclaim, leaving when I saw the proverbial writing on the equally proverbial wall.

Neither experience was particularly endearing, though Acclaim was by far the most disastrous.

I can attest to the role of politics. We had a mid-level manager sabotage a project to help HIS boss save face. We had some blatant dishonesty, a lack of anything resembling "job security," gross mismanagement (usually due to poor communication or infighting happening in the upper ranks), and psychotic work hours - which are not unique to working for big publishers at all.

But we also had really cool company picnics, and I got a one-time bonus after our acquisition that was the biggest I have YET to receive. So it wasn't all Teh Suck.

And, now that I've done some time in the software industry outside of games, I will have to say that the crimes committed in the games biz are hardly unique. Just - so far (knock on wood) - the most egregious. But my experiences working for big publishers is coming up on a decade old, so my information may be obsolete. I'd hope some things have changed since then.

But anybody looking at working for a Big Publisher on a Hit Series Title would be well advised to read Jeff's article. Not that it should dissuade you - there is a lot to be learned for putting in a couple of years in the trenches of gaming's front line, should you (and your love of video games) survive the experience. But career-wise, you may be advised not to consider it the be-all, end-all.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:08 PM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Captain Crunch ... And Not The Good Kind
I'm back to the 12-hour day crunch at Ye Olde Day Job.

If it seems like its hard to see when one crunch ends and the other begins, you may join the club. It is beginning to feel like it's just one long crunch with some breaks in between. I guess I'm breaking my rule about not complaining here. I apologize. And things could be worse, I suppose. I mean, the guys in the military serving in Iraq definitely have a tougher job. For less pay. So I'm whining a little here. Sorry 'bout that.

It's not like its unfamiliar territory. My first year at SingleTrac, I pretty much missed an entire summer. I slept on the bus on the way to work, missing all but a little bit of the dawn, and worked until after dark every day. And many weekends. While I have some great memories of that time, it's no way to live life. I don't know how much the video games business has changed elsewhere as far as "Quality of Life" issues, but it seems to me that the business, as a whole, is still implementing a management strategy of "heroic effort."

And it is heroic effort. The demands of customers are for greater production quality, ever increasing detail and realism, and ever increasing game scope. The industry is dealing with this by shrinking game play-time and raising game budgets - but I don't think the industry can keep up the pace.

So what gives next?

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:56 AM (Permalink) 8 comments links to this post

 
DRM With a Reset Button
You know, I never looked too close at Apple's DRM for iTunes. Apparently, according to my brother, they reset the hardware "locks" every year. So you have a limit of a certain number of machines you can play your media on THIS year, but next year you can start all over. This works nicely with upgrades to hardware and so forth.

Now, I haven't double-checked this to verify that this is how iTunes works or not. But it struck me as a clever idea that would work much better with computer games. Game publishers are really worried about the sales in the first QUARTER - and to a lesser degree, sales the first year. For online / casual sales, maybe the first two years. So would it really matter all that much if players could do the "casual piracy" thing in a year or two by installing the game on extra machines belonging to friends?

While I like the idea, it doesn't resolve my number-one problem with "phone home" DRM... that the company responsible might drop support / drop off the face of the planet. I play games that are YEARS old. I love DOSBOX. Have I mentioned this before? I'm not one of these fifteen-year-olds who subscribes to the industry's marketing dogma that anything more than a year old is garbage.

But as a step to wean themselves off of DRM, I'd love to see the game industry adopt this stance. Financially, it's almost no risk to a mainstream publisher. It wouldn't make everyone happy (not me, and not Shamus Young), but it'd be a step in the right direction.

Oh, and final request: No CD-based protection anymore, please? Especially not with DRM. One alone is bad enough. Both are ... ridiculous, redundant, and only pushing your paying customers to hunt down pirate sites.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:08 AM (Permalink) 7 comments links to this post

 
Examining ITT's Game Design Program
Yesterday I was invited to be on the program advisory committee for ITT Technical Institute's game design program here in Salt Lake. The goal was for us to evaluate their game design program's curriculum, and offer suggestions and feedback as professionals in the field that they are training their students to enter. Greg Squire (who runs the Utah Indie Game Night meetings), Lane Kiriyama of Wahoo / NinjaBee, and I represented something of the "indie contingent" of people on the committee. They didn't swear me to secrecy or anything, so I figured I'd share.

They fed us lunch, which consisted of sandwiches bigger than my head (plus salads, chips, drinks, and a dessert that almost nobody touched). Greg and I split a sandwich, and neither of us could finish our halves. I think those sandwiches were really for feeding a family of four. As we tried to work our way around the gravitational pull exerted by the significant mass of these things, they gave us a Power Point presentation of the curriculum, with a week-by-week breakdown of everything taught for each course, and asked for feedback for each class.

Game development degrees have been described by Chris Crawford as producing "foot soldiers for the video game industry." I've had something of that attitude for game development schools, too. And - to be fair - the curriculum at ITT is definitely geared more towards getting students jobs at mainstream studios. I don't really have a problem with that. I think "doing some time" at a professional, mainstream game studio is an invaluable experience for a serious would-be indie.

(Yes, I do note here that being an indie is often considered a possible milestone on the path to becoming a professional in the mainstream game business. Naturally, I look at it the other way around).

What was really cool is that - at least in Greg's case and my case - they were specifically seeking out indies. The local ITT here has been very good about offering its facilities and support for the indie game night, and told us that they have a few students who really want to go that route. That impressed me. I mean, the indies (except for NinjaBee) in the local area aren't prestigious, and aren't in a strong position to hire students coming out of the program (what I am sure was an additional motive behind having these review committees - to keep local companies informed of the quality of ITT's training and the strengths of their graduating students as potential job candidates).

Another thing I've noted - both in ITT's curriculum and from graduates of game development programs at other schools - is that they do tend to concentrate on completed game projects from their students. This is a huge deal. One of the hardest things in indie-dom is to finish a game. That last 20% of the game tends to take 80% of the time, and that's usually when inexperienced hobbyists quit. Hey, I have my share of incomplete projects, too. The experience of seeing a game to completion - of learning what that takes - is outstanding.

Finally, I noted with glee that an entire course on game design mechanics emphasizes RPGs. Is there any other college course out there that has students perform a comparative analysis between three major pen & paper RPGs? And the class project is to create a class project using RPG Maker. I gotta say, that made me an automatic fan of the program, right there!

The concerns I voiced involved addressing the evolving needs of the industry... including expansion of the audience beyond males ages 14-24, and the much broader range of methods of delivery of games to their audiences today. Too many game designers have trouble understanding the needs of an audience that does not include them. And, in an era of downloadable content, constantly updated massively muliplayer online games, and alternative means of distribution that bypass traditional publishers completely, it is no longer just about giant, departmentalized teams delivering a gold master to the folks who commissioned their work.

Another thing that came to mind was how much there is to learn about the games business for a young 17 or 18 year-old today. I mean, it is scary to imagine that these people entering the program today are too young to remember the release of Twisted Metal and Warhawk, the first games I worked on when I entered the business in '94. I grew up with video games - becoming truly aware of them just as the industry was beginning to explode (and before its first implosion). So I've had nearly three decades to learn something of the "history" of video games, and to learn what works and what doesn't through years of watching them appear, playing them, talking to people about them, and reading about them. I had a ringside seat in the early console wars (Atari vs. Intellivision vs. Coleco vs. lots of others...) and the home computer wars. I remember when arcades - now almost extinct - were everywhere, and you could keep abreast of the industry for a pocketful of quarters. I was a participant in the 32-bit and 64-bit console wars. There was too much happening for me to see more than a fraction of it, but as much as possible I got to live it.

These new students don't have that history, and have to pack that information in during a very short time. It's mind-boggling. And from the sounds of it, the ITT program teaches a few things that I could stand to learn more about. I have to admit, it sounded pretty comprehensive.

And that sandwich might keep me fed for two more days.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:05 AM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
Monkey Island and DRM
That one dude, Shamus Young, just can't leave DRM issues alone. Thankfully. His latest analogy:

In the original Monkey Island, at one point you are captured by natives who lock you in a simple bamboo hut. There is a trap door in the floor through which you may escape. If you’re dumb you can walk over to the natives once you’re out, and they will grab you and throw you back into the hut. The second time they throw you in, they add chains to the door. The next time the door is made of metal. This keeps going until eventually (if you keep going back) they have a bamboo shack with a massive steel vault door on the front, a timed lock with an alarm system on it. It looks like the front of Fort Knox.

“How he keeps getting out is almost as mysterious as why he keeps coming back.“

In a lot of ways these DRM schemes are a bamboo hut with a vault door on the front. The keep using a bigger and bigger lock and a more complex system of authentication, but it still has to run on a machine where you can edit the executable, and all the hacker has to do is go in and disable the part that says, “Do the security check.” It doesn’t matter how secure or complex or devious the security check is, if the machine’s not doing it, it’s not doing it.

Microsoft was going to "correct" this "problem" at the Operating System level with Vista, or so I had heard. I guess that got pushed back until the next version of Windows, or dropped when cooler heads realized that deliberately crippling your customer's systems might not be a wonderful business strategy.

But I really liked Shamus's analogy here. Okay, sure, ANY analogy involving Monkey Island is likely to gain my approval! But this was a well-known problem when I was working on the security side of the software fence. As a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, copy protection and DRM is only as effective as the easiest work-around... and for as long as it takes until the very first pirate releases a crack.

To make matters worse - GBGames has an article discussing what happens to customers - or "victims" - when the reputable company they go through for DRM decides to drop the expense of supporting old DRM solutions. Basically, the customer gets screwed. The implication with DRM is that it will be supported forever, but its clear that this is not even the case with stable, long-lived companies.

This bugs me a lot. My family jumped on the BetaMax train back in the early days of videocassettes. When Sony finally bowed under pressure and Beta went away, it didn't make our library of Beta-format tapes disappear. We could still play them, so long as our old BetaMax player stayed in working condition. But that's not the case with this kind of DRM. what's the poor customer to do who bought music from Sony or Microsoft in good faith, and then finds that their purchases have been sabotaged by remote control like this?

I'm sure the companies in question would hope that said customer would throw good money after bad, and re-purchase their old product.

I think most consumers, faced with this lose-lose scenario shoved onto them by the company for which they were a formerly loyal customer, would feel perfectly justified in acquiring an unprotected version of their product from a less-than-reputable source. Oh, and as long as they are there, why not enjoy one of millions of other easy downloads, some of which might not have been legally obtain by other means on a previous occasion?

Especially when they are getting a superior product than the crap the legitimate customers are paying good money for? And how much worse is it going to get?

So I postulate the following:

#1 - Yes, piracy is killing (non-online) PC gaming. Not shooting-it-in-the-head, going-the-way-of-the-8-Track-Tape dead, and it's not solely responsible, but it's definitely a major contributor to PC gaming's marginalization over the last several years.

#2 - DRM / Copy Protection is only a short-term solution that will ultimately fail in the long term

#3 - Onerous and untrustworthy DRM solutions, like the one proposed for Spore and Mass Effect (and lest we forget, Bioshock), may actually do a lot more long-term harm and encourage piracy.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:05 AM (Permalink) 7 comments links to this post

 
This Is Not A Complaint
I went to a seminar a few weeks ago where they encouraged everyone - as a homework exercise - to not complain. At all. For a week. I guess it worked, because I've noticed I've had a much better attitude and things have been going better for me since then. Maybe it's all in my head, but it's worked so far.

So let me just say that getting back into crunch for a few days of 12+ hour days is not a complaint. It's - a particular challenge that leaves me with little time to do much else. I'm not too pleased about missing my daughter's band concert tonight, which is definitely losing me some daddy points. But - I'm in the critical path right now on a key deadline, I have to be all professional and stuff. That's important too. I'd say it's just the life of a game programmer, but I've worked non-game programming jobs that required the ol' crunch time slog, too.

Just not as much.

However, on the benefit side, they replaced the controls on our arcade console in the break room, so I can no longer blame the buttons for my dismal performance in Street Fighter II. Oh, wait, is that an upside?

And this should hopefully be a pretty short crunch, lasting less than a week. The Rampant Coyote's Rule of Crunch sez: The longer the crunch goes, the longer it's GONNA go, because performance drops SIGNIFICANTLY after a few days of serious overtime to the point where you might as well be working 40 hour weeks, and the more time people end up putting in just to break even.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:41 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Steamworks SDK Now Available
Released yesterday... the Steamworks SDK.

While it's absolutely free for developers, I suspect that in the long run it's going to make Valve a hell of a lot of money. The whole "Windows Live" gaming thing ... the Windows equivalent of XBox Live... is pretty much stillborn. It looks like Steam is going to be the XBox Live for the PC. I give it less than five years before Valve becomes the "evil overlord" people complain about.

Anyway, the API includes calls to handle Stats & Achievements, Multiplayer authentication, matchmaking, anti-cheat, networking, community calls (to pull up things like the other player's clan, avatar, and so forth), integrated in-game voice communication, and everybody's favorite... DRM.

Steamworks SDK

Labels: Biz, programming

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:08 AM (Permalink) 8 comments links to this post

 
Bruce Everiss On Piracy
I rant about software piracy (and it's equally evil opposite, DRM) a bit. But Bruce Everiss is even more passionate about the subject, having seen a company go from highly successful to failure all attributed to the rise of piracy.

Bruce On Piracy

According to him, the fading of non-MMO PC games in favor of consoles can be directly attributed to the ease of piracy in recent years. And his conclusion is even more grim, from my perspective: In the future, all PC games will be MMOs. Although he also note EA's foray into purely ad-based revenue.

Me? I personally hate these alternatives. I mean, yeah, I like some MMOs, and I play some Flash games that are subsidized by advertising. But if that's all there's going to be, in the future, I'm gonna hang up my mouse. Which is going to really suck, because a lot of my favorite genres are ones that only work well on the PC. And I still greatly prefer FPS titles on the PC over their console counterparts.

Now, I'm the kind of guy who doesn't watch a TV series until it's been out a year so I can watch it on DVD sans commercial interruptions. It saves me 20 minutes per hour-long episode (which is really only 40 minutes), and I'm happy to pay for that privilege of NOT dealing with commercials. I'm also the kind of guy who likes watching old movies and shows (including old black & white films), and enjoys playing older games. I don't want to be stuck playing nothing but the current dreck because the great games of yesteryear are no longer supported by their respective companies and don't have an MMO-style server up and running.

There has got to be a better solution than this!


(Vaguely) related dreck of my own manufacture:
* A Pirate Story
* The Real Cost of Piracy
* PC Game Publishers: Please Hurt Me Some More!
.

Labels: Biz, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:27 AM (Permalink) 6 comments links to this post

 
D&D 4th Edition "Open" - But Only If You Close 3.5E
Apparently, Wizards of the Coast has come to a conclusion regarding whether or not there will be anything resembling the much-celebrated "Open Gaming License" for 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons.

The response is still a little hazy, as nobody commenting on it has seen the actual contracts, but the key aspect that has a lot of nerd rage going on at the ENWorld forums is a requirement for anyone to use the new license that they forever forswear creating any content for the previous system (or any other "open gaming" system). In other words, you marry yourself to 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, or you aren't invited to the party at all.

I guess that's one way of putting the genie back in the bottle. As reported by Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games (one of the attendees of the conference call), "I was told that specifically by Wizards of the Coast. In direct response to that direct question. The answer was, 'we dont want fence sitters. Companies have to choose.'" So unless there's a change at the last minute, there will be no dual-statted modules for both Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. As restrictive as it sounds, for a few weeks third parties were worried that Wizards was going to revoke any sort of "open" third-party support, returning to the ol' 2nd edition days where third parties were cut off completely (AFAIK).

It's a pretty bold move, one that could only be made by Wizards throwing its considerable weight and best-known brand around within the admittedly small "industry." Wizards of the Coast is committed to doing away with the legacy game system (and competitive products that piggybacked on the OGL, like Castles & Crusades and Pathfinder). But I also see signs that they are not just trying to put a bullet in the head of an older system - they are actually trying to reinvent the entire industry.

Face it - the pen & paper roleplaying game industry is almost identical to its 1974 roots. Books are durable goods, and players only need so many books to play the game. Seriously - I have much-beloved copies of the 1st edition Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, and Dungeon Master's Guide, and I could very easily continue to play the game for years with nothing more than that. There are, in fact, a bunch of holdouts who are doing exactly that right now. Every book makes the players more and more independent of the company.

So as bookshelves get filled, purchases drop off. Players have more game books than they know what to do with, and aren't really interested in more. Wizards of the Coast has already solved - to a point - this problem for their collectible games, like Magic: The Gathering and D&D Miniatures. It sounds like they are applying a similar approach to D&D, making it a constantly-evolving game... and a game players must keep paying for, as new "core" books become an annual expense. And that's not even including their online initiative, which I expect to be a key element of their marketing and sales strategy.

Will it work? Does Wizards have the clout to hit the reset button this time? Does this strategy provide enough benefit to customers that they'll put up with greater dependence on the company under the new plan (assuming there is a new plan and I'm not just tilting at windmills)? And will third parties hitch their wagons to 4E, or will they throw their collective weight behind competing products, fracturing the small industry even further?


(Vaguely) related musings
* Pathfinder: The New Dungeons & Dragons 3.5?
* Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Announced
* Disappointment In the Demonweb Pits
* Original Dungeons & Dragons Trivia
* Spring and... D&D?
.

Labels: Biz, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 AM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
RIP CGW Part Deux: RIP GFW
I have already said my goodbyes to Computer Gaming World when they switched over to Games For Windows magazine. And now GFW is shutting down their print magazine, to go purely to online content.

That didn't last long, did it?

Games For Windows, Signifying Nothing
I guess it was too much to expect that somehow Microsoft would really support their "official" magazine. I guess it's pretty clear by now that Gabe Newell was right - the "Games For Windows" initiative was nothing more than a marketing campaign to try and convince gamers to downgrade to Vista.

Microsoft wants to sell more XBoxes - that's where they are getting their gaming money. So far, they haven't figured out a way to force game publishers to pay them $7 - $10 per copy sold on Windows, like they can on XBox (I don't know the actual number, I'm guessing), so I guess their priorities are at least understandable.

And quite frankly, what I used to be able to read in Computer Gaming World back in its early 90's heyday I can now find (and better!) at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Scorpia's Gaming Lair, Sexy Videogameland (even if she does favor those console games), Play This Thing!, The Escapist Magazine, and... yes, even 1Up. And other review sites.

Doom and Gloom?
So is this a harbinger of the doom of PC gaming, the doom of print gaming mags, both, or neither?

Honestly, I think it's "a little of both," if you append the phrases with the words, "as we knew it."

PC gaming has changed. This struck home to me as I was looking at the March issue of Games For Windows, and saw their "Ultimate Gaming Rig" feature. For PCs that cost more than I paid for my car. And it occurred to me that it didn't matter that you could set up a PC that is four times as powerful as the XBox 360 anymore. The kind of player who used to care about those things is... uh... off playing games on his XBox 360. Seriously. Sure, there are some hardcore gamers still doing the LAN deathmatch thing on their hotrod computers, but that's becoming a niche as surely as those of us who love flight simulators and adventure games and RPGs with lovely stats.

But the difference between a "bleeding edge" PC and a plain ol' vanilla PC with a decent video card is nothing like the difference we had 15 years ago. I suspect that part of the push to go to High Definition on the newer consoles was simply because it is too hard to tell the difference in graphics quality on older TV systems. We've started running into the law of diminishing returns on graphics and the need for raw processing power for the kinds of games we're doing. Not that we wouldn't love more of both... but each successive year is not giving us nearly the bang for the buck it used to, when a 2-year-old game looked embarrassingly obsolete.

But PC gaming is still the place to be. I mean, yeah, I love my XBox 360, and my PS2, and I even love my aging Dreamcast. And my day job depends upon console sales, so yeah - I want them to do well. :) But I'm a PC gamer at heart, and there's some great stuff happening here, and the consoles are still playing catch-up.

And as far as print magazines - I gotta admit I have paid less and less attention to the magazines now that so much is available online. When I'm reading for pleasure, I prefer pages. When I'm reading for information, I find online (with nifty links 'n stuff!) to be at least equal, if not preferable. And I have to admit, the magazines have a tough time competing with online when their focus is on news and reviews. I believe print magazines need to rely upon more time-independent information, but in the rapidly changing world of videogames that's a tall order.

Anyway, here's Jeff Green's breaking of the news to the public:

Jeff Green Talks about shutting down Games For Windows Magazine (Formerly Computer Gaming World)

(The news has been everywhere, but Scorpia tipped me off... Hmm... CGW's slide into suck-dom and subsequent rise to mediocrity began right about the time they gave her the boot. Coincidence...?)

Labels: Biz, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 3:25 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Why Game Developers Are Screwed
Hey, I've got a really awesome deal I'd like to offer to anybody who'll take it: If you will give me $20, I will happily pay you $12 in return.

Sound like a great deal? No? It occurred to me this weekend that it's the kind of deal most independent video game developers keep making with publishers, again and again.

Part of this was brought about by a post Scorpia made this weekend about a number of studios closing up shop. I've begun taking a little bit more of an interest in investing lately, and I realized that based on very fundamental criteria, I'd never invest in a traditional independent game development studio. Because - the way royalties and advances are being handled nowadays, from the development studio's perspective at least - they are spending more to make a game than it has a reasonable chance of breaking even on. So they may spend $8 million on a game that will likely only make them $5 million.

But that's all to recoup the publisher's advance - which the publisher treats as "funding" the game with a zillion strings attached all the way up until the point where the game begins to sell. At that point it reverts to its legal status as an "advance towards royalties" at the developers pathetic royalty rate.

Meanwhile, that $5 million really becomes $0, because it's an advance on royalties and - as it turns out - was the developer's money the whole time. And the publisher - who is raking in much more money on the game, is making a modest profit. Except in the rare instances where the game far outperforms expectations, in which case the publisher makes enough money to cover a ton of losses (which they also take, admittedly - particularly when they cancel contracts), and the developer actually sees back-end royalties for a change.

Is that good business? I admit, I've not an experienced business-person or anything, but that sounds to me like a stupid proposition. Maybe that's just the nature of hit-driven businesses. But aside from practically winning the lottery with a game that greatly outperforms the publisher's expectations, the best a studio can hope for is to pad their advance (since that's really their only source of revenue) long enough to make a small, self-funded ("indie") game, or to stick around long enough to get bought out by a publisher. Or to make tiny games in such quantities that a developer literally has dozens of "clients" (publishers) pipelining money in.

Being a true "indie" may be a really tough row to hoe. But the alternative sure doesn't seem to be a winning proposition in the long run. Though I do wonder how long it'll take before making games for portals (who are slowly evolving into the new "publishers" of the online age) falls into the same trap.


(Vaguely) related weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth:
* Dependent, Independent, and Indie
* Explaining Indie Games, Illustrated!
* The Casual Game Industry Sucks, Too
* I'm A Gamer?

Update: Discussion rages on the forum!

Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 AM (Permalink) 16 comments links to this post

 
Greenhouse: Penny Arcade's New Indie Portal
There's another non-casual indie game portal in town, this one from the Penny Arcade crew. Considering how these guys managed to turn PAX into a major event that threatens to rival E3 in its salad days, I'd say they've got the potential to pull it off, where Manifesto (whom I still root for!) has had trouble gaining traction.

According to Mike "Gabe" Krahulik: "We developed Greenhouse along with Hothead originally because we needed a way to deliver our game to you guys. what we needed was a platform agnostic digital distibution portal. Once it was done we realised that it could actually be super useful to other independent developers. At first Greenhouse will be the place to get our game but eventually we'd like to use it as a way of promoting great independent games that might otherwise slide under the radar. Like PAX and Child's Play and all the other stuff we do we're starting out simple. We've got big ideas though and I'm excited about building Greenhouse into something really special."

We'll see how things turn out. They won't be selling any other games besides their own at launch, but they are already talking about the kinds of titles they'd like to put up... things like Kloonigames' Crayon Physics Deluxe. They've got a million readers, so I'd have to say this sort of thing has potential out the wazoo.

Here's an interview at Wired:
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/04/exclusive-inter.html

Here's an excerpt from the interview that really steams me up a bit, and demonstrates just how screwed up the entrenched brick-and-mortar biz really is:

We had a meeting with GameStop to talk about selling a boxed version of the game. Once we had a bunch of episodes together, we would collect them and put them in a box, you know? And GameStop said, oh, that's fantastic. We'd love to do it, we'd love to carry the game... but it's not going to be available anywhere else, is it?

And Robert said, well, we're going to digitally distribute it first.

They got really upset. And they said, no, you can't do that. We can't have it in our store if it's coming out digitally first. And he said, well, I'm sorry, that's the way it works. We're publishing our game and we can say where it goes. And so the deal that they tried to strike with Robert was okay, well, listen: If you cut us in on the profits from online distribution, and XBLA, and everything it comes out on, then we'll think about carrying it in the store. Just, what assholes.

I guess if you are new to the indie games scene, or to the games business in general, you might find this shocking. Me? I really can't claim to be surprised. The guys along the distribution channel really do think this way. It pisses me off, but it doesn't surprise me anymore.

For your amusement (since it's not live yet), here's the beta Greenhouse site:
http://www.playgreenhouse.com/

Have Fun!

Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:01 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post