Industry: on "developers getting lazy"

[portuga-man]

imo developers this days just pray for a miracle (their game being a success among the crapload of remakes/sequels in the market), and then moving on to launch sequels and, in time, remakes.

Most gamers only buy games that they know are worth buying. If you have to choose between a sequel of a game that rocked, or a game that just came out, of which you know nothing about, I'm sure most of you would go for the first option. at the price games are, people just want to be sure they spent their money well. Thing is, the people behind this games, in time, become lazy and just redo the game, put some new levels and maybe a new enemy, stamp the game with a well-known title and it will sell like hot pancakes.

Conclusion: the people behind a game hope their game sells well and becomes a well-known title in the industry and, when it happens, they live in the shadow of the game's success.

 

[Arbre]

As a fan of shmups and shorter arcade games, I am not bothered at all by games being below the average lenght in their respective genre.
I tend to find many games to be filled up with nonsense and irrelevant subquests just to add stuff to do and add many more game hours.
I liked picked up all the hearst in a Zelda, and sometimes, it feels OK, but at the same time, I really moved away from the Zelda franchise cause as a whole, it annoys me, and I only picked one Zelda among the last five or six which have been released. It was Minish Cap, and that was enough for me. I couldn't be bothered with the countless 64 and Cube iterations.
Or take Halo CE. Shorten it by 50% and you've got a very fine game. Right now, it's a big smelly pile of boredom that owes a lot to its SF setting.

 

[savagegoose]

i recall old cames having a lot of replayability, like m1 tank platoon silent service, even the glorious elite.

the games didnt reeally have an end game, you bought them, then played and played and played, now games are a like amovie, you get to play out the puzzles and action sequence, then toss it on " seen it " pile of dvd's. only to be played again when nostalgia kicks in.

remeber doom, the replay value of that was the fact that there where so many levels, but all my mates stopped playing until some smart modder got off his ass and made a mod called randoom that made random maps. i think the gta3 series are geting the idea with so much to do in a gme that isnt misison related. what was in gta: sa? car races, house breakins, taking over hoods, the police fire ambulance sub games, piza delivery, taxi driver.

I think developers need to make games end quick because theres resale vale in a game people play for a year. you want em to buy it, play it and go buy the next one, not sit around for a year having a ball.
alsao i think there is a lot of work to be done just making al the modles and textures, fitting everything together. got help of they actually wanna throw in some innovation.
i think its a special kind of team where there are even people on i tthat have new ideas, and even more rare to actually listen to them and develop them. maN I ONLY BOUGHT HALF LIFE TO GET ACCESS TO THE MODS. thats where the real innovations are comming from

 

[bobvodka]

I do wish people would stop referring to 'developers' as though they have some control over their destiny. The problem if it comes from anywhere is the publishers; they control the money and they control the direction of the game.

Graphics sells; fact of the industry right now. This means that the publishers want a game which looks good, beyond that the story line just has 'todo'.

So yes, many copies of games get put out, and as a programmer and someone who is going to be taking up a position in a game company in the new year this does annoy me slightly; but the reality is for big games you need a budget, budgets come from publishers so they say what goes. As for the rest of us, well we like to eat you know, so getting paid is important; to you it's a form of entertainment, to us it's a job, a form of income, and we have to do what we do to get paid and the only reason we accept the lower pay and horrible hours is because we want to make these games.

End of the day, it comes down to money and only a few companies (iD, Valve and 3D Realms for example) have the money to go it alone; everyone else prays for that big hit which will set them up and allow them to go it alone.... most don't make it, many fold and die...

 

[Pixelantes Anonymous]

This is one of my pet peeves, developer (as in the company, not the code-monkeys) laziness. It seems as if developers lately are increasingly trying only to reach the lowest common denominator rather than trying to take games further. The games where you can see that the developer actually tried to do something, rather than just schlepping a sequel with updated textures, are far and few in between.

The laziness exhibits itself in different ways. Shorter gameplay doesn't really upset me that much, because I play a lot of online games and buy a lot of games, so I'm always moving onto the next best thing already. But that does seem like a trend to me just like many of you have noticed.

But what REALLY bothers me are cutting features that existed either on the earlier version of the game or on a version on another platform. EA is a master of this. FIFA 08 on XBox 360 was a wonderful product...$10 more than Fifa 07 on XBox, but with much less content. And was I then supposed to pay even more for the DLC? Laziness or just pure greed? Maybe a little bit of both.

The most troubling form of laziness to me is the "our product is good enough, so why bother going the extra mile" kind. This is the sort of stuff that means your hockey game STILL doesn't have online coop after everyone and their dog has been begging for it for years. Or how all shooters but the one from Bungie have no meaningful stat tracking. Or how it is still impossible have a lap-by-lap stats on any racing game out there. Or why every online multiplay game under the sun ALWAYS has the same network code issues than the previous version did. Or how every single racing game with online leaderboards still can't deal with leaderboard corruption in any other manner than a complete wipe.

It's as if most developers are completely satisfied at doing "10 SHIP GAME; 20 GOTO 10;" all over and over and over again without ever really thinking wtf could we do to REALLY advance our video game franchise. I know the 20 GOTO 10 approach is probably more profitable, at least in the short run, but come'on! Is it really that important to invest all your R&D on how to squeeze 120K polygons into a game that used to have 110K polygons or should at least some of that R&D budget be reallocated to other things?

 

[rawlight]

I don't think that devs are getting lazy. There is no reason to believe that, unless you also have a poor understanding about how games actually get made. The publishers are the ones who rush the games out the door and refuse to bankroll games that break the mold in any way.

 

[cnlfailure]

The main problem with this argument is that gamers as a whole place too much importance on their own opinion in the cycle of games development and publishing. Our of every year's top ten best sellers how many of them do you feel are "worthy" of their position? The hardcore gamer is no longer the mainstay consumer of video games, that role has fallen to the mass market.

The pay-off that means you can buy games from multiple stores on any street is that much like mainstream movies games have developed a commercial, less artistic cause for being. The biggest titles every year are not necessarily instigated by some creative developers with a passion for their art, moreover it was a publisher who recognised a demand existed.

That's not to say that this is a bad thing. I for one, like being able to walk down the high street and find a dozen different stores that sell games - albeit mainstream titles.

Those who describe themselves as gamers need to look at movies to understand their role - the analogy here would be that gamers have become art-house movie fans; while still enjoying the occasional blockbuster, they relish picking holes in every title that comes out despite the fact that some games aren't designed for gamers, they're designed for a mass audience. For every groundbreaking and awesome title that achieves success of any kind there will be a hundred polished but mediocre games which grab more attention.

As a second point, developers aren't getting lazy in the slightest. Far from it. Rather, any experienced gamer is getting to be harder to please. Every person who has played games for years will have high points in their gaming career, ranging from their first multiplayer experience, first time they were scared, first time they laughed and so on. Because it was the first experience it is remembered fondly, and despite new games being better designed, better presented and more than equally playable, they're given more credit in terms of merit.

Every gamer seeks that next rush of... something, but the fact is that gamers as a whole are becoming desensitised to greatness in games. Was the first hour you player Guitar Hero 2 as much fun as the first hour of GH1? It might not be an appropriate example for you, but you get my point. Innovation is best left to the art house developers, as trying to foist a new concept on a mass audience is far less likely to succeed.

Finally I'd offer a cautionary note to anyone who wants to point the finger at publishers as being the root of all evil for perpetrating mediocre and derivative games in the name of making a profit. Remind yourself regularly that publishers are focused more highly on being profitable than innovation for the sake of innovation, so if they're making games you don't like it must mean that someone does, and that it sells well off the back of that - especially if a sequel is in the pipeline.

If you want to see innovation more frequently look away from the big boys and investigate shareware, or self publishers as they're the ones with the lowest overheads, and most likely to have an artistic need to create their game rather than a financial one.

 

[shadow skill]

I don't think that devs are getting lazy. There is no reason to believe that, unless you also have a poor understanding about how games actually get made. The publishers are the ones who rush the games out the door and refuse to bankroll games that break the mold in any way.

I don't know when a game comes out on a console that has a bug where it will not let you finish the game because you did a sidequest before getting to the final area, or you have a game where changing the key mapping makes it possible to disable weapon switching entirely, or you keep seeing games that don't give the user full control of the mapping at all even though the hardest part of doing so is creating an interface for the user to use. I don't know what else to call it but lazy. Of course part of it is in fact contempt for the users themselves.

 

[stevesan]

I do wish people would stop referring to 'developers' as though they have some control over their destiny. The problem if it comes from anywhere is the publishers; they control the money and they control the direction of the game.

Graphics sells; fact of the industry right now. This means that the publishers want a game which looks good, beyond that the story line just has 'todo'.

So yes, many copies of games get put out, and as a programmer and someone who is going to be taking up a position in a game company in the new year this does annoy me slightly; but the reality is for big games you need a budget, budgets come from publishers so they say what goes. As for the rest of us, well we like to eat you know, so getting paid is important; to you it's a form of entertainment, to us it's a job, a form of income, and we have to do what we do to get paid and the only reason we accept the lower pay and horrible hours is because we want to make these games.

End of the day, it comes down to money and only a few companies (iD, Valve and 3D Realms for example) have the money to go it alone; everyone else prays for that big hit which will set them up and allow them to go it alone.... most don't make it, many fold and die...

Couldn't have said it better myself. I spent a year working at a studio myself (not gonna say what game I worked on for potential legal reasons, but it was a tie-in to a blockbuster movie), and that's pretty much how I feel about it all.

But I'm not convinced that graphics sell games.

And the developers have little say in those business/marketing issues. This is why I think we the consumers (I don't work in games anymore) ultimately have the power the change things (developers are at the mercy of the publishers, who are at the mercy of sales, which come from..us!). If we can convince publishers that gameplay sells over visual polish, maybe things will get better for everyone. And these days, with the Wii doing so well, maybe it's not so far off.

 

[stevesan]

I don't think that devs are getting lazy. There is no reason to believe that, unless you also have a poor understanding about how games actually get made. The publishers are the ones who rush the games out the door and refuse to bankroll games that break the mold in any way.

I don't know when a game comes out on a console that has a bug where it will not let you finish the game because you did a sidequest before getting to the final area, or you have a game where changing the key mapping makes it possible to disable weapon switching entirely, or you keep seeing games that don't give the user full control of the mapping at all even though the hardest part of doing so is creating an interface for the user to use. I don't know what else to call it but lazy. Of course part of it is in fact contempt for the users themselves.

Ya know, I don't blame ya for feeling that way. It certainly feels like developers are just letting these simple things slip these days. How about Lair as an example? You look at that game and think, "jeeesus if they just spent ONE DAY play-testing and tuning the flight control it woulda been infinitely better." And sadly, you would be right...but why didn't that happen?

It's mis-guided priorities. I bet with Lair, they wanted to playtest and tune, but didn't have any time left - they spent all the time getting it to look great! It's stupid management. So, maybe we should start calling developers and publishers stupid instead of lazy.

So some would argue, that those priorities aren't misplaced at all because graphics sells. If that were true, then OK, Lair was a smashing success. But hey, it wasn't. And judging from the success of the Wii, Blizzard's games, and even Halo (its graphics are pretty underwhelming compared to most FPS's these days), I'm not convinced.

I would love for someone to prove me wrong about this, cuz right now, it feels like the industry is ran by idiots. Hard-working idiots, but idiots nonetheless.

 

[Jacques 2]

Risk- the potential for failure and success is the reason why games are what they are today

What has worked: WWII
Sci-Fi
Fantasy RPGs
Japanese Imports
Big Titles: Halo, Final Fantasy, Call of Duty

Whenever you change anything about what has sold, you no longer know if it will sell, and the money it will bring in is what the Publisher cares about. So developers for project "A" come along and proposes a WWII shooter that meets the status quo and has some new gimmick while developers for project "B" propose something that deals more with modern day settings and the psychological world behind human interactions. "A" fits the formula and "B" gets dropped till either the devs get enough investors to publish it themselves or someone picks it up that isn't so afraid of change. Sometimes a developer's interesting idea will be taken in by a normally uninspired pusher of status quo games because they feel that their old titles have either over saturated the market or the last one has simply been a total fuck up that didn't sell. In this case, they'll have a tendency to mold the interesting idea into a half way between status quo and half way major risk, so it's a moderate risk after being dumbed down.

Blizzard's games have been simple mainstays that have been fun at the beginning and addictive enough for players to ignore flaws. Halo was THE first widely advertised FPS for the X-Box console that was at the same time somewhat compelling to many potential players and somewhat new for many people, who bought it, and bought the sequel, and bought the final installment. If "The Library" (why it's called a library is beyond me, all it contains is lots and lots of vents for The Flood to pour in from and conveniently placed slow to open doors that trap you with the never ending swarm) was earlier on in the game, I doubt the game would have sold nearly as many copies by word of mouth.

The developers are as in the command chair as you are when you drive a car, but at the same time, they are dependent on money just as you are fuel in a car, so without backing they're going to go as far as you will, in a car without gas or any other power source (in case a smartass argues an electric car can run without gas)

 

[NexusBlade]

THey aren't getting lazy. THey simply can't get enough time to do anything decent.

 

[Jacques 2]

Time does not equal quality, but it helps alot

 

[entaroadun]

It's not laziness; it's business. No decent business is going to invest capital into any feature that doesn't provide an adequate return on capital. And since potential features are unlimited, but capital and time are not, businesses will pick and choose the combination of features that generate the highest return for the capital and time invested.

As long as no one feature sucks to the point that the game is unplayable, any extra capital will be poured into the one feature that sells the best on the mass market: graphics.

The film and art world analogies are good ones. These are mainstream Hollywood blockbusters. If we want art house fare, we need the conditions conducive to art house productions. There are really two:

1. A small number of really rich art enthusiasts who sponsor Warhols and Mapplethorpes to produce great art.
2. Starry eyed dreamers with little money but lots of time who make independent films.

The first is a matter of time. Gamers are getting older and entering classical positions of power in society. In another 20 years, there will be some really wealthy angels willing to sponsor true artists. The rest of us will benefit from their work, though none of it will specifically be for us.

The second is also inevitable. We just need the equivalent of mass market toolmakers (think digital cameras and camcorders) for game programming and art production. Maybe open source 3D frameworks and physics engines. Any software that will allow amateurs the ability to manipulate 3D objects and define behaviors will allow this. It's probably 10 years away, and it probably won't be open source, but will sell on shelves for < $500 (with strong copyright protections), like camcorders, that will allow amateur artists who refuse to sell out to produce works. This will lead to a cascade of crap (like YouTube), but gems will rise out of that mayhem.

 

[NexusBlade]

Time does not equal quality, but it helps alot

But when you are expected to make a game live up to over-hype with only 9 months, what good will THAT do? Publishers nowadays expect a game every year.

 

[Jacques 2]

It's a matter dependent on the situation, ofcourse 9 months isn't enough time to come up with anything more than a mere "episode" of a franchise, if that even. But look for example at the Unreal Tournament Franchise, UT2K4 outdid it's predecessor from the previous year in just about every way, which isn't saying that much because 2k3 was horrible, but 2k4 was so much better in just a year. Unreal Tournament 3 however has spent years in development and has been pushed back in release repeatedly and now it's finally out and it's pretty much a shinier 2k4 with some good new concepts, but a whole lot of "dumbing down for consoles" in the menu system and not that much truly new content. At least most of what it has is somewhat polished, but it still has so much wasted potential for all the years it was in development.