AGC: coverage of my talk on “The Age of the Dinosaurs”
No slides yet, but there’s F13.net ‘s extensive liveblogged notes which are pretty accurate.
There’s also Gamespot’s coverage which is much less detailed, and which has a comments thread.
And Next Gen has the least detailed take but has lots of individual quotes.
I thikn it’s really interesting to compare the liveblogged version to the two press versions… to my mind, the liveblog is a much better representation of what I said, even though it has the fewest actual quotes.
Interestingly, Wonderland and Kotaku picked up on just the “TV is stealing tricks from games” bit, probably because they only saw the Gamespot version.
Another blog had this reaction.
I probably will not get around to posting the slides until this weekend. It is 3am here, so I should really go to bed now.
35 Responses to “AGC: coverage of my talk on “The Age of the Dinosaurs””
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show (surprised it was that high) and (b) I wanted to attend Raph’s talk! I lucked out Friday at the end of day when David Edery and I met up with Raph and he gave us an up-close-and-personal version of the pitch. Pretty interesting talk, which as Raph points out was taken vastly out of context by the press, but liveblogged pretty well elsewhere. The Digital Distribution panel that David & Warren Spector were on was entertaining, but I’m not sure anything remarkable was said. The only interesting snippet from
Where’s the video? 🙂
I was watching the Churchill Club video when you were just leaving for Austin. I think you had more screen time than the other panelists…
While it’s a colorfull and entertaining talk, I still disagree quite much. I’ve seen companies taking quite similar aproaches in the past already. That ended in what is known today as the “crash of the dotcom economy”.
We are all waiting for evolution in the MMO market for many years now. I’ve seen many people talking about an ending, if MMOs don’t change. Yet MMOs haven’t changed and still they go stronger than ever.
Personaly I think we will see slow evolution over many years to come. That is mainly because MMOs drive slowly. They take very long to develop and lots of money is at stake. But I would compare MMOs closest to the movie business.
– Hollywood is producing the same sex&crime movies for decades now, they still bring in money, if done right.
– The big blockbusters are not always what I would call the best movies.
– A lot is about marketing.
– Sequels are doing good, but rarely better than the original.
– Every once in a while there is a niche movie with tremondous success. But you can’t realy plan that.
– And every once in a while there is something with great success that will open up a trend for followers. Which again aren’t always the best kind of movies.
Love it or hate it, but that’s exectly the route I see for the MMO industy.
Why are you hatein on artists?
Why are developers moving away from hand made art? to more procedural?
Maybe im biased (Graphic artist here), but i feel it cheapens the product.
Not to mention puts me out of a job.
Oh designers and developers, why have you forsaken us?
Movie costs are not on the same sort of cray technological exponential cost curve. Their biggest rising costs have been the salaries for stars (and the recent stuff like dropping Tom Cruise’s contract is being seen as a method of curbing that sort of thing).
In the talk, I show slides of budgets, team sizes, and data sizes over the last couple of decades. The curves are all exponential. That’s what triggers this line of thinking.
I don’t hate artists personally! 🙂 But here’s the reasons why they get picked on.
– they’re a commodity. A LOT of people are capable artists.
– the work can be done as piecework to a standard.
– it’s the part of a game most affected by rising tech, and therefore it has become the single most expensive part of development
– most dynamic effects can only be done procedurally
Put those things together, and it’s the part you tackle first to reduce, via outsourcing first and then via procedural work.
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Niche, progress, dinosaurs, adaptation… it’s so Ian Malcolm:
http://raccaldin36.livejournal.com/655614.html
The amusing parallel between Malcolm’s and Raph’s speeches is that Malcolm implies there might have been no meteor; the dinosaurs just simply died without any help from a spaceborn death rock.
No, I don’t actually have anything to contribute.
I would have chose programming, Talk about dime a dozen…
Does every game really need to have a chat system written each time?
Do we need to rewrite a inventory or log in system each time?.
There are so many things in programming that are redundant. Game to game.
We went to collage just like you, we studied and honed our skills.
I think, by skimping on the artwork, you will cheapen the produce.
Even spore has a very Generic and “plastic” feel to its graphics.
That’s like saying lets just use B-movie actors for the next Blockbuster film, They may not be as good looking, or as good of actors, but they are cheap.
I would really consider looking at other ways to cut bloat, rather than removing the art form the art form.
In an age where everything is mass-produced, one area that has all ways held talented people in high regard is now tossing them out and ordering from the “Generic elf” factory. And players and people will know the difference, even throe wal-mart gets everything from china, the quality is cheep and generic, and people still hold Hand crafted things as coveted, and that will only increase as we mass-produce more and more.
I do not like this route. It will cheapen the art form, and the industry.
And if this were true for programmers, would they also be replaced?
What about quest writers? Scripter’s? you could have a computer spit those out… Don’t even need people for that.
oh yeah, as my friend likes to say “Outsource middle management!”.
By the logic of the removal of true artists for some texture and animation created by a computer, why not cheapen the quality of those areas also, and i even think it would be easer to do so…
And to be honest…. Just make a bank of MMO templates and remove designers also… We have the data, just some random numbers and BAM, Feature list.
=p
I don’t think it’s a matter of skimping on anything, but using the assets you have more efficiently.
3D World and character modeling has come a long, long way since the days when SOE was first working on EQ1.
The problem here is the limits of the technology. You have to do a lot more to make a game look “good” on today’s computers relative to other games than you did 5 years ago. All that extra work going into detail and background aspects like lighting, shadowing, etc. takes time and bodies – and that translates into $$$.
The only way that a game is really going to be able to look great and cut that cost is for new tools to become available that make it easier for the artists to do their thing. So instead of three artists, now you just need two for the same amount of time. It’ll be an evolutionary trend.
You’ve got a good point about UI elements – there’s a lot of things there that could be modularized and reused from game to game. However, the technology isn’t quite to that point yet.
The big area where most MMO developers can cut costs? Process and efficiency. There’s good teams and bad teams, but it seems to me that the most successful games are also the ones where the teams are well-organized and well-managed. People are dedicated to certain aspects of the game and know their piece of it inside and out. Less successful teams often seem to have a pool of designers and programmers who switch from system to system and feature to feature randomly. The theory goes that with a pool method you need fewer people, but the truth (at least from my observation) is that you end up spending so much time on redo work and general confusion that you end up losing whatever benefit you might have gained).
Class-based systems. The real world should implement a skill-based system instead.
And yes, the job market for programmers isn’t exactly strong at the moment.
Don’t hate the future just because you’re not in it. Put yourself in it.
As a biz school professor, I can tell you that it’s been happening elsewhere for quite a while, I’m surprised it hasn’t hit gaming firms.
As a management professor in a biz school this is nice to hear 😉 I’d say the ivory tower research on team design and management is mixed but I certainly wouldn’t disagree with your observation about the downside of ‘pooled’ approaches.
As always I half disagree.
I don’t think we’re in for the meteor-strike although I do think that the market is changing and there will be adaptation. And there will be some churn among the big players in the market.
But I think that more will stay the same than will change.
I don’t think that players will stop valuing glitzy graphics. I don’t think that players will suddenly stop valuing things like voice acting and motion capture. Or that this will all magically get standardized and cease to be a significant game development chore. And because of this I think that games will continue to climb ladders of production quality and higher budgets (although budgets tend to cap and stop growing once you reach the genre-killer).
Even if the market shifts to online distribution I think that we will see hype and screenshots dictating sales and increasing budgets. We are already seeing that in the casual space with more and more games that have $100,000-500,000 budgets.
That’s just what happens. The environment shifts. There are new fitness functions. The landscape of players changes a bit. But then new dominant archetypes form and raise to the top again. As new niches form they t0o will lead to their genre-killers. And the genre killers will be polished games with very high production values. What we see now with games like Runescape is what happens when the environment is in transition. It’s not what we’ll see once the transition has been finished. Runescape will be history, replaced by a glitzier, better-marketed, better-hyped, better-polished, higher-budget game that is appropriate to the new market but fitter and sleeker and capable of swallowing an entire audience whole. Maybe that game will be Runescape 2, developed on the profits of the transitional title, but it will still be more like what we have now than like what we see in transition.
Also, one has to consider spending habits. If 5% of the population is willing to spend $1,000 a year on games and 25% of the population is willing to spend $100 a year on games then the 5% market is actually twice as big. WoW is presumably generating $1 billion in revenue right now and the entire US casual market is estimated at between $200-400 million.
I don’t think we’re even close to losing artists.
I ascribe to the philosophy that one should forget the difficulties of creating ‘procedural content’. Instead, perhaps focus on the design of the game. The design itself needs to drive the requirement for the procedural. Trouble is, few designs are calling for it. And if they do, they’re trying to generate the entire universe. 🙂
Spore is a good example of asking first, then solving. It took them a long time, but they did it (albeit piecemeal, over six years or so?). In my opinion, it’s the hopeful beginnings of a greater trend. 🙂
Glad to see your talk got broad interest, if only because it means I can justify going to another talk because yours was s well covered. 🙂
I’m also glad to see you got evolution and extinction right, although I don’t agree that a metoer has hit, although rising costs are a limiting factor. But a limiting factor just means that the dinosaurs stop getting bigger, not that they go extinct. That only happens when something happens to destroy the part of the environment that they depend on.
Habbo Hotel’s success does not imply WoW’s failure. The two are feeding on different parts of the landscape. What would cause death for the dinosaur is something that served that market at a lower cost. That would literally be eating WoW’s lunch.
To use a different metaphor, I’d say that you can look at the current state of ‘hardcore’ gaming as being like the joke I hear among antique collector’s about how three collectors could be on a desert island with one antique, and the’d all make a living off it.
Which doesn’t change the valid point that the future almost certainly lies in some other direction.
Players are not going to stop valuing glitzy graphics, I agree. I would note, however, that ONLY the current hardcore segment values the really high end glitzy graphics. This is not the largest segment, by far; it’s only the segment we are used to selling to.
Budgets in games do NOT cap and stop growing when you reach the genre killer, when we are talking AAA games. Check out the FPS market, or the RTS market.
And really, there is not much room to grow the budgets, honest.
Keep in mind we are talking $10-20m budgets here, and needing to fill 9.7GB to 25GB of data. It’s a completely different scale. Of course we’ll see a similar arms race happen all over again, but resetting the scale has a tremendous effect on the overall market.
None of the articles really talked about this because I only glancingly covered it in the talk, but one of the effects of this new model is that revenues fall. A lot. There’s a lot more free content. Consumers in this model tend to believe content should be free.
Such as:
– the disappearance of retail as a significant distribution channel
– the migration of consumers to other providers of entertainment (which is happening, as gamers migrate to free games too)
– the predation of other companies on the gamer market, which is also happening in a variety of ways
It’s not just rising costs.
Yep. I am asserting that this is only a matter of time. And there’s plenty of other ventures saying the same thing. Runescape is one example of that. You do realize that Runescape is not only bigger than WoW worldwide, but that Runescape is only a Western game, and therefore outclasses WoW by more than double in the territories they share? A perfect example of a different approach coming in and getting less revenue but a lot more eyeballs. It’s a far more repeatable effort than Wow itself is.
Casual gamers value graphics just as much as hardcore gamers, they just value a different type of graphics. Hardcore gamers tend to value gritty, realistic 3D graphics. Casual gamers prefer 2D graphics. Either way you need something appealing and detailed.
In terms of quality I think its getting to a point where you need very high quality artists to even consider selling a casual game, and you won’t be able to get away with simple graphics. The major difference is casual games require much less content than hardcore games, so you just need one good artist to make a game as opposed to 100.. Well, 10 good ones and 90 “grunt” artist.
The really high end glitzy graphics I am referring to are the ones that involve 3d engines, shaders, etc. No matter how fancy and high-end the 2d graphics get they are nowhere near as expensive. 🙂
There’s a fatal flaw in your metaphor to dinosaurs.
The meteor has hit, the world has changed and its time for new species to adapt to a new environment. The first few new species forays enter the scene … and wham, you think the game is over. You think those first few species are IT. They are the new wave. Nothing further will happen.
But that’s not how it works.
Runescape is NOT the mammal of the metaphor. It is the first fish to walk out of the sea. It’s ungainly, suboptimal and ugly. But it doesn’t have any competition and so it flourishes anyway. But there is no reason to think that things will stay that way. In fact the whole market would have to be stupid to let things stay that way. If this niche which Runescape has found is as lucrative as you claim then, in a few years, it will have several entrants. And they will compete for the market. And what are they going to compete on? Quality. And eventually this is going to mean bigger budgets and higher production quality until this niche has finally developed its WoW/genre-killer.
I mentioned the $100,000-500,000 budgets on casual games not to indicate that they were competing with hardcore games NOW but to show how fast budgets are increasing in that field. 2 years ago, $50,000 might have been a big budget. That’s an order of magnitude. Give them a few years and they could very well be at $5,000,000 budgets.
It took hardcore games decades to get there but it probably won’t take the next generation nearly as long. It’s natural. Western consumers have plenty of disposable income. They want quality. You are wrong to imply that non-hardcore players don’t want glitz. They do. They like spending money on perceived quality, whether that be an expensive purse, an expensive stereo system or an expensive game. And as the markets develop they will chase this. If it is possible to make $1,000,000 off of a $50,000 product then someone will make the same product for $100,000 and assume that market. Until someone makes that product for $200,000, etc.
And the thing is, it won’t matter if it is glitzy graphics that becomes equated with quality. If it isn’t glitzy graphics then it will be celebrity characters. Or other sorts of branding. Or SOMETHING else which will allow games to spend more in order to differentiate themselves from the crowd and capture the market.
I *hope* it remains glitzy graphics because at least then I can still play a part. If its branding and celebrities then I’m out of the loop entirely.
That’s not a flaw in the metaphor. I didn’t say that this was IT, that then change stopped. I said this is just the next transition, IN fact, I was also saying (though not in this talk, but at the panel I did the day before) that these transitions happen periodically.
I disagree that huge budgets will be an inevitable consequence of time’ passage in this case, though, not unless the revenue streams become much more significant.
I can tell you that there are LOTS of players to whom graphics are secondary. My kids are avid gamers, and move freely between lots of platforms. And they actually voluntarily play Pong on the Atari 2600 emulator. They are not alone; there are many segments of the market for whom gameplay is more important than graphics. Do graphics matter? Hugely, hugely. Don’t get me wrong. But the current market is hyperadapted to graphics, and the big new platforms are not ones that lend themselves to graphics — such as cell phones.
Of course there will be an arms race. It’s just that the terms of the race are somewhat different. With the emphasis on digital distribution, giant installs are a problem.
How long will that last? Until the next innovation in home networking at best. Or until a games service starts doing background downloads of the sorts of products you want. When distibutors get to where they want to push this stuff they’ll find a way to get it to consumers easily.
I wouldn’t call cell phones the next big games market. Cell phones will have to see significant technological improvement first (at which point these graphics will be doable).
The point is that the next market is just on its way to its own “hyperadaptation”. And if it’s not graphics it will be actors. Diner Dash, except that Flo is played by Natlie Portman (on a budget of $10 million). Or something else. Because it is in the interest of the distributors not to have a small barrier to entry into the market and because consumers of all sorts will go for it.
The terms of the arms race may be different. But most of the realities of who is in the market will be more or less the same. The market will still depend on publishers. After a while the indy influence will diminish. There will be a bit more “long tail” but that will be a small corner of the market. I’m very hopeful for this segment of the market. I’m just not trying to convince myself that it will be the primary market.
And hardcore gamers are not going anywhere and will continue to be a huge market. If 5-10% of the population is willing to spend 10 times what others will on games then they are as powerful dollarwise as any market consisting of 50-100% of the population. Prizes or budgets aren’t going to drop. And neither Runescape nor Casual games are good example that they will because hardcore gamers aren’t buying these. There is no indication that this market wants to stop buying Madden or Halo or WoW and if anything they are clamoring for graphics more than ever before. As new markets develop they are still dwarfed by the old ($1 billion WoW revenue dwarfing the entire casual industry).
In other words, it’s very convenient for your argument but not justified to sweep this disparity in spending habits under the rug. The reason why people are spending less on casual games isn’t just because of distribution and low barrier to entry in that field. It’s largely because that market isn’t willing to budget nearly as much on their gaming and because of this, even if the market has 5 times as many consumers, it will still likely be smaller than the hardcore market.
How long will that last?
Wasn’t that his point? That would be the next stage, and when that gives out, there will be another meteor or whatever and the industry will have to pivot again.
Cell phones already ARE the next big games market. There are probably more people playing on their phones than in the entire retail box industry. The idea that they need technological improvement is exactly the sort of thinking that I am warning about. Stop thinking that the platforms need to adapt to the content. It’s the other way around.
Only if it can be monetized. Otherwise it will not make sense to spend the money on Natalie Portman.
Hardcore gamers are not going anywhere, definitely. And they will get dinged more and more by payments, because that’s how you mine a niche. I would expect the hobby to get more and more expensive, actually.
And if you can afford to make content for that hardcore market, great for you. But I am saying that almost nobody can afford it now, and next gen it’s gonna be much worse.
I agree that spending in the hardcore market is unfortunately large. I just don’t see it going anywhere else. It makes too much fiscal for it to stay where it is. And that’s a major objecting to your metaphor. Because the dinosaurs are still running around, alive and well.
I work on cell phone games and I feel I know our markets pretty well. My company made what is perhaps the most popular game in US mobile history (Jamdat Bowling). And generally I think cell phone games still have a relatively small share of our cultures overall attention and nowhere near the sales of traditional games. It’s a growing market but it’s a frustrating market for consumers. Most of the games are crap because the devices suck (and have little standardization) and the distribution sucks. I think we are a generation or two out from really being able to focus on quality (actually the highest end phones right now have some pretty good capabilities).
One of the big issues with mobile gaming is that the lack of reviews, screenshots, etc., makes branding SO important. If you slap a good brand on your game you are going to instantly multiply your sales dramatically no matter how bad your game. Because you have to have SOMETHING which catches the eye of your consumer and causes them to buy your game instead of the other ones and because mobile games don’t offer demos. Relationships with carriers is also very, very important as product placement on their carrier decks is crucial (it’s a very close analogue to the relationship between hardcore games and retailers).
And these are just the same sorts of money-controlled barriers that graphics are. A small indie is not going to have branding or a relationship with the carrier. So they’re going to get shafted in the back corner of a catalog or on an aggregator. And their market share is going to suck. Add all the costs to port your game to 50+ phones and a budget for the equivalent of a AAA cell phone game is going to hundreds of thousands of dollars with revenue shares going out to your brand partners. And as devices and the market grow that’s only going to increase.
I agree all those barriers are there in the mobile biz. I’ve described the mobile games industry as being like all the problems with the publisher model in console games, only worse because they’re distilled into a two inch screen.
However, the cell phone is now the dominant computing platform on the planet, touching far more people than consoles do. Worldwide, carriers have loosened up significantly — it’s mostly only here in the US that the barriers are still as high as they are.
The capabilities of mid range phones aren’t the issue — even a midrange phone outclasses the platforms of the late 70s and early 80s. You can make great games in that capacity. The issue is, again, the definition of AAA and the insistence on it.
Having spent time talking to execs from some of the big publishers and developers that are facing the next gen, I can tell you that they are freaking out. They are alive, but they also can see the dust cloud rising, because the future doesn’t make fiscal sense to them anymore.
I didn’t say “every big publisher will fold.” I said that circumstances are changing, and the question is who adapts and how. Some developers are extremely adapted only to this environment — makers of giant single-player RPGs come to mind — and will have real issues with the new climate.
I don’t think the end consummer looks at it that way. He has a small portable cell phone which can also play Mp3s and games. He doesn’t expect it to play MP3s as easily as a dedicated device. He doesn’t expect the graphics of the games to look like his friend’s Xbox. He just wants something new to play on the bus ride. I think the poor graphics is a plus becuase it forces game designers on fun and away from lush enviroments.
In regards to mobile gaming, note that it’s not just cellphone. It’s all about wireless gaming. Networked P2Ps, Gameboys, cellphones, etc.
Also, if you watch TV game shows like Wheel of Fortune and such, the integration with mobile phone is much smoother than logging online.
One shift in the ecology is that products are views across multi-platforms. While there is currently little re-use in the game franchises, there is a trend toward finding innovative ways to increase re-use. Therefore, companies will have to adopt to this multi-platform and channels for better survivial.
Frank
I obviously agree that mobile gaming is a strong growing market. Enough to make a career in it. However I think you are glorifying it (as you glorify other markets) to fit your argument. It would be just as easy, and just as nonsensical, to say that the microchips in microwaves or VCR’s are the “dominant computing platforms on the planet”. Most people in the US still only use their mobiles as phones. Some are starting to text message and a few game. But there is still a decided lack of quality in gaming that is apparent even to casuals and I think that you would just need to download a few puzzle-style games for your midrange mobile phone to recognize this.
What was one of the big stunts at E3? A Paris Hilton mobile game hyped with a Paris Hilton visit to E3. And no, I don’t agree that carriers in other markets have opened up. We are doing almost all our business in Europe right now and carrier relationships are very important as is branding. Why should they open up? By wielding power over the market they guarantee their share of the pie.
Mobile gaming has already been transitioning through the phases that traditional gaming went through. It has gone from a wide open market with few rules to one with lots of protocols and a lot of power in the hands of the “retailer” (in this case the carrier). Publishers have sprung up who yield power in part simply because of their relationships to carriers, etc., and their ability to “skip the line”. Budgets are rising and the market is starting to require more and more investments to enter.
I just think we need to be realistic and understand that old patterns will repeat because they have more to do with market forces than the specific medium we are talking about.
StGabe wrote:
Oh, I thought the stunt was Paris Hilton’s on-the-fly renaming of the game…
Quality is an interesting animal. Quality is not a direct differentiator, and usually quality is not a competitive advantage. There are few businesses that can actually compete (i.e., survive) on quality. Those that do compete (i.e., attempt to survive) on quality eventually slam into a brick wall. Best-of-breed marketing requires other modes of thought. I’ll write an article on quality as strategy because the subject is widely misunderstood and yet the subject is extremely important and relevant.
By quality I meant consumer-perceived quality. For example, I don’t agree that expensive graphics is a measure of quality for traditional video games. However, generally the market does. And so it is on that metric that companies compete.
StGabe wrote:
—> Insert previous response.
I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t, for example, talking about quality as a Shakespeare versus trashy romance sort of thing.
Well when you write your article make sure you account for why so many consumers buy Tide instead of generic, just as an example. Or why so many consumers desire clothing from shops like Saks, Nordstrom’s, etc.
Markets are good at creating perceptions of quality tied to costs for the producer. Without some measurement there is no way for products to compete and for there to be better and worse products. And consumers want the “better” product. It doesn’t matter what they are buying. Anything that doesn’t cost the producer isn’t considered quality (as everyone offers it). This is why so much of traditional gaming revolves around such high-budget items and I see no reason to see why gaming with slightly different audiences and media will be any different. Casual gamers will be even less sophisticated about their tastes and more likely to swallow whatever measures of “quality” they are handed.
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