Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Name one original screenplay writer (who isn't also a mainstream author or the director; ie, Stephen King and M. Night don't count). Nobody knows who writes the movies they love.

Great writing makes or breaks the movies that have the best ROI. If you spend $50 million on actors and $50 million on effects, yeah... you can probably bring in $200 million at the box. But little movies like "Clerks" and "Spinal Tap" and "Amelie" make many more times what they cost because the writing is great.

But great writing (especially as judged by receipts), like great game creation, is very, very hard to predict (John Romero).

I ain't saying it's fair or couldn't be replaced by better systems. I'm just saying that if somebody knew how to predict which games (or scripts) would do well, they'd be rollin' in the green.

I find this incredibly disheartening. I'd recently been considering starting up a casual games company. I remember Eric and Gamelab from the blix days, and if he can't make it, what hope do I have?

Andyhavens, I have to disagree with the appropriateness of your analogy - whilst a writer's efforts can sometimes be the saving grace of a film, they are still only one small cog in the machine; movies can still be financially successful (and in some peoples' opinions even worth watching!) despite a lack of good writing.

Compare that with the situation in the game industry, where ALL the creativity is the result of the developer's efforts. In fact, everything a consumer buys except for the distribution and the desire to buy (read: marketing, a dirty word I'd rather not use) are the developer's work. And it is the entire developer being strangled, not just the lead designer...

So my gripe is that your analogy does insufficient justice to the extent of the problem!

Greg, if you held all the cards as a publisher, would you give a developer room to maneouvre and risk them breaking free from your chains, able to negotiate better deals - or to not need you at all - in the future?

Oh, you would? Well, you're only human. ;)

We´re all moving toward a post-industrial society in the strong sense due to the failures of centralized finance, scarcity of non-renewable energy and the inequity of our centralized food production system. This is a shift happening due to systemic factors beyond our control and will result in a much more decentralized society, if society is to survive at all. Those who position themselves for this shift sooner rather than later will benefit in terms of tangible and aesthetic wealth. To that effect, I think the future of this high will be more along the lines of people working 20 hours a week to manage their own farmlet and then another 20 hours a week to produce freeware, possibly subsidized by a micronage model.

I met some guys from Big Huge Games at the paper prototyping tutorial at GDC and they seemed like good folks, plus they were the only studio in Baltimore as far as I can tell, that city has such a good music scene it deserves more game developers. On the other hand, like all the other systemically marginalized professionals, this is an opportunity to make a choice between sucking at the government/corporate teat or taking charge of your life, growing your own food, and doing a bootstrap business. If this all seems unrealistic, you should do a bit of research on permaculture techniques and you´ll see the time/efficiency ratios can be designed radically in one´s benefit.

Firaxis and Breakaway are also near Baltimore. There's actually a fairly sizable development community in the region, the legacy ultimately of Microprose.

@andyhavens: William Goldman had it nailed nigh on thirty years ago.
"Nobody Knows Anything".

He was talking about movies, but it applies across the board. (e.g. Dan Brown was a relatively mid-league writer with three or four quite acceptable and fun titles under his belt. But not even he thought The DaVinci Code was going to take off like it did. And nor did anyone else.)

The big commodity producers don't really care* what they are selling - they are about making money for their shareholders. That's very different to the hobbyist arena, where the designers are doing it for love. (Not that they aren't doing it for the money too, but it's not the same priority.) The problem is that those two universes really don't coexist all that well - "success" and "failure" have totally different meanings in those two universes; if I sell 10000 copies of my boardgame, that's a pretty decent success - unless you compare it to sales of Monopoly, which isn't strictly a boardgame, it's a commodity.

(*OK that's unfair. But I imagine that the guys with the ideals who came from the hobbyist universe into the commodity universe hoping to change it and discovered that they couldn't either got out or were changed themselves instead.)

Scurra:

Here's the issue. In the game industry, quite often the games that succeed best are games that come out of left field, and do something interesting and novel. As Dan Scherlis says, "genre is the name we give to one hit game and its imitators" -- or to put it less cynically, an innovative game that demonstrates that a novel play pattern can be commercially successful spawns a whole genre. And not incidentally, creates a perennial, IP that can then be exploited till the cows come home.

From a publisher's perspective, therefore, you'd think that a program of planned innovation would make a great deal of sense. Not so; at the prototype stage, it takes real understanding of games and judgment to be able to see whether a proposed game might actually be a hit or not. Innovation is risky, and when you're throwing around tens of millions of dollars, you want to minimize risk as much as you can. Hence the attachment to existing IP, whether deriving originally from games or other media. At the marketing stage, as well, novel product is hard for the marketing weasels to figure out how to sell, because it doesn't slot into an existing genre category. They might actually have to think and work, instead of relying on tried and true formulae.

Developers want to make money; publishers want to make money. Both sides are in accord here. The problem is that publishers are crass, ignorant, and lazy.

"All the creativity is the result of the developer's efforts."

Really? Nothing is owed to the graphic artists, the writers (if there's any story, doc, dialogue), the sound guys, the bug testers, etc.? I'd argue that some of those jobs (and even the marketing) involves some creativity.

And creativity also isn't the only thing that makes a game (or a movie) great, is it? I mean, you can have a really great, creative idea for a film, great writing, great direction... and then lousy editing can spoil it. Good editing is, in fact, highly creative.

In terms of games, what about a great game where the learning curve is too steep? And somebody from the testing group suggests a couple levels between the tutorial and the "meat" of the game to help people ramp up a bit more smoothly? That's creative... or, at least, helpful to the creative process.

I'm not arguing that the devs shouldn't have more autonomy and room to do creative, interesting things. But what I've seen in many industries (including my own) is that when devs (writers, artists, designers) don't have a good idea of the business end of the process, it can be just as damaging as when the suits don't know squat about games. If, that is, you're interested in making at least enough money to keep the lights on.

Andy:

As used in the game industry, the term "game developer" can mean one of two things:

1. The studio that develops the game, which typically employs game and level designers, programmers, graphic artists, Q/A people, and sometimes sound artists as well.

2. Individuals who contribute to the development of a game, including programmers, game and level designers, graphic artists, Q/A people, etc., etc.

In other software industries, "developer" usually means coders alone. In the game industry, it does not, but incorporates all creative talents.

Thus, your comment is not germane; everything in the game -is- due to the game developers. Except perhaps voice talent.

As Greg said (except germane, as I don't know what that means...); I had intended to refer to the studio rather than any individual.

I am trying to recall the closest corresponding term in the film industry, but am drawing a blank... I think because, as I understand it, the big "studios" (companies like Universal, to pick a purely random example) get more invovled with the actual production of a film. They don't just stump up the money and handle the marketing.

A similar thing actually occurs in film, where a production company makes the movie, then sells it to a distributor. Nobody wants to make a movie for any significant amount of money unless it has a guaranteed audience. So the major studios' production wings chuck big stars and directors at projects, and starve the rest. Independent productions have to sell to distributors on their own, and nobody wants to take much risk unless it fits their pre-existing audience. Independent film has actually been starving to death for several years now.