SNCommand said:
The argument is more complex than just "companies exist to make money"
It also means that companies need to make money, if a practice is deemed unprofitable they will of course try to steer away from it, they might not be correct in their assessment, but then it's up to the consumer to buy the product or not
The argument isn't about someone having to like or even accept why a company does what it do, but it is to make someone understand why they do it
Hmmm, I wrote a lengthy response to this video but apparently it didn't save properly, nothing I hadn't said before so here it is (in a more condensed form) in response to your post where it seems fairly relevent:
I think a lot of the issue comes from what people refer to as "the corperate mentality" more than a problem with businesses needing, or wanting to, make a profit. That is to say when it goes from producing a good, solid, product for a fair profit, and turning it into a situation where they expect to consistantly produce the least possible, for the highest possible returns. A mentality which has lead to a view where to succeed a company needs to constantly grow, instead of simply making money. Failing to make continually huger ratios of profit are considered the same as a
failure. Likewise if you say make 45 million dollars less this year than last year, that's considered catastrophic,
even if you might have still made hundreds of millions of dollars in excess of what you spent.
As I've said before as well, the problem isn't entirely the fault of publishers like EA, Activision, and their ilk. We as gamers like to lionize the developers, the ones who actually make the games, but they are part of what contributes to the problem. The actual cost to make a game is largely a matter of human resources, the cost of office space, materials, etc... are minimal compared to these game budgets. Publishers talk about how increasingly expensive it is to make games, and point to rising costs, it's important to understand that that rising cost pretty much amounts to some line coder or graphics artist demanding more and more money each year. By definition a professional keeps up with the latest technology and such as part of their profession and what they do, it's what makes them a professional. At the end of
the day the reason why one shooter winds up costing more money than a very similar one released the year before is because some guy is demanding more money to draw pictures and such with his computer. Success of course contributes to this as well, after all if a Publisher is making millions upon millions of dollars on someone's work, it only makes sense for the guys actually producing it to want to see more of that actual profit, of course this causes a cycle where as the successful developer asks for more, the publisher in response gouges more to cover it, especially as their demands for profit consistantly increase.
While it was years ago "Maxim" (I think it was) did an article called "Why Game Developers Drive Ferraris" or something like that. I believe The Escapist covered it at the time. The source was not one known for utter reliability, but it's own sources were supposed to be tax filings and earnings claims by individual people that wound up on public record if I remember, so that made it rather hard to dispute. The bottom line is that while we like to support the view of game developers as ordinary folks, who just happen to love games and make them, that's not entirely the truth, these are guys demanding top dollar for skills that they as ruthlessly promote as other professionals like Lawyers. A developer is going to demand as much money as it can possibly get, especially if it's working on a product like a sequel a Publisher specifically wants, which all filters down to the employees of that developer who tend to do quite well for themselves. To date I've never seen another breakdown quite like the one Maxim did, so I pretty much take that as a general indication of how much your line coders, graphics artists, etc... are making.
To be entirely fair also if you've seen studio tours and such put out by some development companies, it also doesn't paint a flattering picture from the perspective of cost, and what our money pays for. Rarely does such a video show anything like professional cube farms, with people hunched over computers working non-stop under the gaze of a relentless boss. Instead you see a bunch of people lounging around, relaxed, tons of clutter around their work space, and other things. Companies like Valve have even done things like show off their corperate snack bars and such in the past. An enviroment that makes me sort of "get" why you have complaints by groups like "Rockstar Wives" when there is actually a crunch, requiring people to work 12-16 hour days or whatever, since no game studio I've seen covered has exactly seemed all that productive to me, and it makes me wonder if that contributes to how long it takes for some
games to get made, and how sloppy and bug filled a lot are. In short, you see millions of dollars being throw into groups of people that are high paid, but seem to also be sloppy, unprofessional, and inefficient.
None of this would be a big deal of course, I mean I have no problem with low-stress work places that are high on comfort and low on productivity, or people enjoying the fruits of their work by having nice cars, houses, etc. The problem mostly occurs in a big picture sense when you consider that at the bottom line you, the customer, are paying for all of this, the cost for all of this goes into the development cost for the game, which then the Publisher has to make up with it's own inflated needs, and that all falls to you, with things like all that gouging taking place to support all of this along with the demands for ever increasing profits.
To some extent your on-disc DLC, microtransactions, and other assorted things, come so some graphics designer can sit back with his feet on his desk 8 hours a day, talking comics with the guy in the next cubicle over. I mean sure, he DOES eventually get the work done, but probably not to the extent he would otherwise, and your dealing with what probably amount to dozens if not hundreds of wasted man-hours. If they halved or quartered what these guys make down to actual "normal people" earnings (you know, like most of us, who also probably have degrees and professional level skills) and then cracked the whip to get these guys to actually work every hour they are paid for, we'd probably see higher quality games released in less time, for less cost. Of course at the end of the day the corperate mentality of the publishers would still be a problem, representing another mentality that needs to be dealt with, with a lower expectation on what a reasonable profit is.
I know a lot of people don't like what I have to say on these things when I talk about the business aspects, but I call it as I see it. Over the years various websites and magazines and such have done industry exposes on how it all works. To be honest a lot of my criticism of the developers comes from what they show of themselves in studio walkthroughs, videos, etc... in addition to financial reports. In a lot of cases these walkthroughs of studios and "meet the team" videos are probably intended to show them as "hey we're gamers just like you, and this is a nerd's paradise!", and on some levels they succeed, but when looked at as a group of professionals producing a product it doesn't always leave me with a good impression. Of course then again my own former employment probably has a bit to do something with that. Someone who was acting anything like the guys in some of those videos would have wound up in an unofficial security "pool" about how long until we were sent to walk them out. Our occasional walkthroughs back of the house oftentimes being a sort of "look a blazer, this is your get back to work warning" even if we had no direct authority there, you know "dog and pony show, security exists to be seen" schtick.
From a productivity perspective, the nervous mole-like IT guy in the white shirt and black pants who is always hunched over his computer typing furiously is a good employee and the guy who is likely to actually make a solid product. The dude who sits around in jeans and a geeky T-shirt, action figures on his desk, and chatters all the time display occasional bounts of doing something might be a nicer guy, and more fun for making a show about computer nerds, but at the end of the day he's more likely to fail to get either a quantity or quality (or both) of work done and need to be badged and sent packing. I've seen it for years. Some of these studio walkthroughs make me think "you know, I can see exactly why their last game took 3 years and was glitched to death".
In short I agree with Jim, and I guess with you, though the gist of what I'm saying is that I think I have a pretty good idea of WHY they do things, and even HOW. From my perspective identifying the problems isn't the issue, it's actually getting people to change without some kind of cataclysmic crash. This goes from developers who are both paid more reasonable wages and salaries, lowering the costs of games... combined with a demeanor that comes accross like a group of people I might actually want to hire if I was looking to invest my money in publishing a game (from most of the behind the scenes studio stuff, I wouldn't hire 90%+ of these guys if I was spending my own money), combined with publishers contenting themselves with a reasonable profit.... not setting the standard based on what was made last year, projected growth, or what the most successful franchise of all time has managed to pull down. At the end of the day if a product makes more money than it cost to produce, that should be considered a "win". It actually makes me angry when someone wants me empathize with their position when their company has only made a few hundred million or whatever... I mean "QQ, we've only got more money this one year than a person could ever reasonably spend... pity us".
It's one of those things where I'm actually extremely capitalist, as an idea I love it. The problem is when you inevitably wind up with a few greedy arseholes that ruin it for everyone else. I don't nessicarly feel that's inherant to the system, though, more of a matter of nobody keeping an eye on it, and the gradual erosion of the safeguards that were supposed to prevent this. Half the problem being that it's pretty much impossible to call a big company on thins they should be called on due to the expenses involved in the legal system... more of a general commentary than one on the game industry in paticular. Right now being RIGHT doesn't matter so much as your abillity to represent yourself in court, and by spending a few million dollars on defense casually, and making a potential loss (forcing you to cover their expenses) catastrophic, it pretty much means that the only one who can challenge a big company is another big company, rendering any safeguards almost entirely irrelevent, as that tends to only leave the goverments, and since big business can donate to political campaigns we know how smashingly that tends to go.