Original Comment by: Mihnea Balta
I still don't see what's there to talk about, let alone write an article on. So there are 2 game companies in Bucharest (well, 3 if you count Gameloft separately from Ubisoft). So they have made a grand total of 3 successful non-handheld games so far (I'm not counting Chess Master until a Romanian programmer puts a line of code into the actual chess engine; if that's happened already, please correct me). There are also a bunch of startups (3? 5?) that are trying to get things going, but haven't produced anything so far. How can this make you say that game development is taking off in Romania? I say there's no need to get overly excited about something that hasn't happened yet. Take a look a bit North, in Kiev, or a bit to the West, in Budapest. That's what you usually call small, but promising.
Two companies with three games is a start, but nothing to write home about. I guess you can write about it in this... erm... thing, The Escapist, which sounds a bit like high level wank: everybody's giving their expert opinion on the art and craft of making games, crying that development costs skyrocket, frowning on publishers for milking licenses to hell and back... you know, "FOTM" for MMORPG players, "trendy stuff" for people with social skills. Too bad games are supposed to be fun first, and art maybe afterwards, and that the opinions expressed in here (mine included, I guess) have about 0 practical impact.
What really upsets me about the article is the gratuitous way in which some grand statements are made. "But what the Eastern Europeans lack in numbers is compensated with quality, passion and unity." What the hell? What's this based on? What quality are you referring to exactly? If you're talking about the quality of the produced games, I'd say that first, your sample population is kind of irrelevant (3, if I may remind you) and second that (8.9 + 6.7 + 6.9) / 3 = 7.5. It can look like passion to outsiders, but I'm pretty sure nobody's seen the Quality yet (note the capital Q).
I don't know if you can quantize the quality of somebody's gameplay. I play games to have fun. I think it's pointless to compare people's results in games as long as they're having fun. You know, games being about entertainment and all that. I've also got some gripes with people that play current-day MMORPGs at all, but that's a different discussion and we can save it for another time, which will never come.
Another example is "advantage" 4: money. Hello? Romanian gamers have the financial advantage over American gamers because the average salary is now 250 USD? I can't wrap my mind around that one, sorry.
And then, there's the grand finale of all gratuitous finales. Can't we not make big patriotic statements in inappropriate places? Or maybe I just have some sort of hypersensibility to this kind of article endings mostly seen in 4th grade homework or communist odes (or interviews with redneck mobile home owners, but those have a slightly different flavour).
To wrap things up: 300 preorders for Guildwars in a country with 5.5 million PC users is not an achievement. Having an Ubisoft branch is something, but I fail to see it as a big thing. The fact that the only other game developer in town is a company that's whipped into making budget games by Activison Value (I see that people keep forgetting the second part of the name of the company that Funlabs does business with, I wonder why?) is by no means anything to get excited over. So, what's with the patriotic outburst? Don't get me wrong, I don't like it when the international press talks about kids with AIDS, gipsies that kidnap Spanish babies and run big ATM fraud networks in the UK and all that, but it doesn't mean that we have to try to balance this by falling into the other, positivistic extreme.
I don't mean to ruin anybody's business, and I wish to see retailers selling games at lower prices in Romania, because of it being a poorer market. On the other hand, I'd like to see localized games pretty much as much as I'd like to see dubbed movies in theatres, i.e. not at all. For my little moment of nationalistic pride, I can say that we can appreciate a work in its original form, without the need to have some semi-talented translator screwing up the meaning of the text, or some semi-talented actor sounding really, really stupid when I'm trying to enjoy the game.
PS: Mr. Boitor, I've already listed your game as a success and acknowledged it for being developed entirely in Ubisoft Bucharest. In fact, the little reference part of my previous post shows that it has seen the warmest critical reception out of the 3 titles that I listed as worthy of being called games. As for the part about being relaxed and confident after taking part in its development, you will surely understand if I don't wholeheartedly agree with you. Also, when you so elegantly start a statement with "the skeptics on this board could this and that", it's not nice to change your mind about being impersonal halfway through, going like "if he was that or the other"...