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LeoNatan
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Posts: 73196
Location: Ramat Gan, Israel 🇮🇱
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 Posted: Tue, 25th Mar 2014 22:56 Post subject: How F2P crap soured Apple’s iOS gaming revolution |
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The article is not about PC gaming. But I agree with it. And I think the mobile world is a microcosmos of the entire gaming industry. The title should be "How clones, fear, sanitisation and free-to-play soured the gaming industry".
http://www.edge-online.com/features/how-clones-fear-sanitisation-and-free-to-play-soured-the-ios-gaming-revolution/
| Quote: | Much has changed in the two years since we called Apple “the hottest property in handheld gaming” and said that the company had “changed the videogame industry irrevocably”. Between E236 and today, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has passed away, iPhone 5 has launched and bifurcated, Game Center’s poker-table felt has been torn off in favour of a spartan interface, and a wave of licensed iOS controllers has reached the market, drawing iPhones and iPads closer to the traditional world of videogame hardware. In other respects, though, nothing is different – Apple seems no closer to infiltrating the home console business through its set-top box, for example.
But crucially – at least for the people who have seen iOS platforms become integral parts of their gaming lives – it feels like the potential we saw in Apple’s devices to become a disruptive force has dissipated. Where we once saw a promising new marketplace of fresh ideas, unrestricted creativity, and daring new ways to play, the App Store of 2014 is swamped with cash-guzzling junk, shameless knockoffs and predictable sequels. Games worth discovering still exist, but they mostly dwell on the fringes and in the shadows, while endless horror stories suggest that paid-for games are simply no longer profitable and are dying out. What happened to the iOS gaming revolution?
The App Store is still turning over an extraordinary amount of money – the marketplace attracted spending in the region of $1bn in December 2013 alone – but the lion’s share of the profits is going to an elite cabal of developers making free-to-play games. The App Store’s Top Grossing chart, which remains the most prominent method of getting games in front of players, has effectively frozen. “All of the top-ten-grossing apps in 2013 were over a year old,” says free-to-play design consultant Nicholas Lovell. “There is no other entertainment industry where month on month it’s the same things at the top of the charts – not for books, not for DVDs, not for movies.”
This chart has become a self-sustaining cycle, acting as a billboard for games such as King’s Candy Crush Saga the whole year round, which in turn keeps them at the top. And while the most egregious ways to game the rankings have been stamped out by Apple, “people are definitely buying their way to chart positions”, according to Lovell. “There’s no doubt about that.”
“I think the Top Grossing charts should be removed from the stores,” says Barry Meade of The Room developer Fireproof Games. “It’s entirely unreflective of what is actually for sale and teaches users nothing about the exciting new stuff that’s out there on their devices.”
But no matter how much the stagnant chart positions have played a role in free-to-play’s uprising, it’s not surprising that the model would become dominant on iOS and Android. These platforms have always been skewed towards those looking to fill snatched moments here and there, and they’re markets where straightforward, inexpensive games such as Angry Birds have long ruled the roost. But dropping up-front pricetags has smashed even the perceived barrier to entry, massively broadening the player pool.
In itself, free-to-play isn’t an evil phrase or business model. Even self-identifying ‘hardcore’ gamers have flocked to free PC games such as Dota 2 and PlanetSide 2, after all. And there are certainly cases on iOS where the model supports, rather than undermines, an enjoyable game design, most notably in GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragons. But there’s still a problem. “With seemingly everybody in mobile development hearing the call of the cash, free-to-play mechanics are skewing investment into an ever-narrowing field of game types,” Meade warns.
Successful free-to-play games tend to be endless runners, match-three puzzlers, lightweight city builders and strategy games, with few exceptions. Attempts to adopt the model beyond this narrow band have not been positively received: hyped FPS The Drowning was critically panned, while even a big-name, well-promoted title such as PopCap’s Plants Vs Zombies 2 dropped out of the top 100 in many countries’ Top Grossing charts in a matter of months.
“Some types of game, particularly those with skill-based mechanics, really don’t suit free-to-play at all,” says Paul Taylor of Frozen Synapse creator Mode 7. “I don’t think developers should feel pressure to take them in that direction.”
Indie developers are having an especially troubled time in this environment. For every story about a venture-capital-backed superfirm pulling in daily revenues of $2m, there’s another tragic tale of some tiny studio trying to find success in the F2P market and getting crushed. Mikengreg’s Gasketball gave too much away for free and flopped. Earnings from Rubicon’s Combat Monsters have been “tragically disappointing”, according to the studio’s Paul Johnson. When Radiangames launched F2P puzzler Bombcats, “people just never felt the need to pay for stuff”, explains creator Luke Schneider.
Punch Quest was “way too generous” at launch, says Rocketcat Games’ Kepa Auwae. Just 0.1 per cent of the game’s players spend money on the game. “We raised the prices of everything by around six times [to make it successful],” Auwae explains. “With this style of game, where people buy progress, you really want to intentionally hobble the balance of your game so it preys on people’s impatience.”
Namco Bandai’s recently released iOS version of Tales Of Phantasia demonstrates how F2P cash grabs can destroy a game, though. In this incarnation – available only as a free title – the game’s difficulty has been cranked up and key save points have been removed in a bid to get players to buy resurrection orbs at $2 a pop.
Lovell notes that “free-to-play games are a different skill [for developers], and you’ve got to make games that you expect to maintain and support for a long time, which is something that not all developers want to do”.
So long as the same clutch of top free-to-play games are turning over the same incredible amounts of money, however, we’ll continue to see titles that fit neatly into the same narrow but proven categories. And the influx of publishers to the market isn’t helping. “It’s great that some are making loads of money from free-to-play,” says Meade, “but the inability of publishers to see what else mobile gaming can be leads them to be profit-chasing and risk-averse to a ridiculous degree. The sheer ubiquity of free-to-play is freezing mobile gaming at a very shallow and immature state of its development, when it should be at its most exciting, dynamic and diverse.”
The issues facing the iOS gaming landscape because of free-to-play also spill out in the form of hundreds of games content to chase the tails of ideas that have worked in the past. It’s impossible to miss, for example, the explosion of games that copy the core gameplay template of Supercell’s evergreen Clash Of Clans almost to the letter, including Gree’s Call To Arms, Gameloft’s Total Conquest, and Space Ape’s Samurai Siege. EA’s reboot of Dungeon Keeper – a series born at UK studio Bullfrog in the ’90s, which helped it forge a reputation for thinking up and executing original concepts – also leans on the same gameplay loops. It’s perhaps most telling of all that Supercell’s next game, Boom Beach, which is currently undergoing beta testing in Canada, is also a twist on Clash Of Clans, with Vikings and dragons replaced by soldiers and landing craft.
Lovell puts this kind of risk aversion down to “creative fear”. “A lot of my clients are starting with an endless runner simply because they want to learn the free-to-play business in a known genre,” he says. “Think of it like a journeyman wood maker who had to do some basic pieces in order to understand his craft.”
This all makes free-to-play sound like a toxic substance that’s killing off innovative games single-handedly. But a number of free-to-play iOS games have proven themselves as worthwhile pieces of entertainment, and there are further culprits to consider when looking for reasons behind the App Store’s troubling stagnation.
Visibility, and therefore discoverability, continues to be an issue, but a more offensive trend is the proliferation of cheap clones of indie games on iOS, brought about by the App Store’s low barrier to entry. Vlambeer almost didn’t make Apple’s iPhone Game Of The Year for 2013, compulsive angling sim Ridiculous Fishing, because a clone named Ninja Fishing beat it to market and sucked away the team’s motivation – not to mention potential customers and profits – like a spacecraft’s airlock.
Such blatant copycatting doesn’t affect only indies, either. Homemade Games’ recently released Front Wars, for example, is a ruthlessly executed clone of Intelligent Systems’ legendary strategy game Advance Wars, going so far as to riff on the original’s cover art with its App icon. That it is a well-made rip-off – bringing to Apple’s platforms what Nintendo will not – does little to make up for its shamelessness. It feels like it would never reach the market as a PC title, but in the wild west of the iOS market, there it is.
Some are attempting to bring law to the App Store, if not justice. The most recently documented case is King’s trademarking of the word ‘Candy’ and its application for ‘Saga’. It says this helps it to combat the clones, such as Candy Blast Mania. Less easily understandable, however, despite statements to clarify its position, is its decision to oppose Stoic’s trademark for PC strategy game The Banner Saga. While the nuances of trademark law are complex, one thing is clear: it will be a bad day if original games suffer because of ripoffs on other platforms.
Then there’s Apple’s stringent rules on what content is acceptable in the iOS games department. These rules forced the removal of Sweatshop HD – a satirical game about a production line manned by children – which crippled UK developer Littleloud. Games that have anything to say about the conditions at the factories where iPhones are assembled have been banned. A game about the Syrian civil war was forced to change setting to a fictional country, while a game about smuggling illegal immigrants over the Mexican border was turned into a game about carting cuddly animals to the zoo, metamorphosing from Smuggle Truck into the more wholesome-sounding Snuggle Truck.
Development guidelines urge game creators to distance themselves from touchy subjects and controversial topics: “If you want to criticise a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a song, or create a medical app”. Would Lucas Pope have made the confronting Papers, Please for iOS with the threat of an instant App Store rejection hanging over his head like the big red stamp in his game? Developers with controversial themes to explore are increasingly gravitating towards Android and PC, where content isn’t as sanitised as it is on iOS.
Despite all these hurdles, though, the doom of paid games on iOS has been exaggerated. “Paid games are more than viable for Fireproof. They are a lifesaver and fortune changer,” says Meade, whose box-opening puzzler The Room has sold 2.5 million copies to date. Swedish indie studio Simogo has also enjoyed success by swimming against the iOS tide. Last year, it released Year Walk, which sold 200,000 copies, and Device 6, which sold 100,000. Co-founder Simon Flesser believes developers can remain profitable so long as they don’t bet the farm on one enormous project. “I think it’s important to have modest expectations,” he says, “and have good backup [options], and try to build up a good portfolio over a longer period.”
Even games that hew closer to console titles have found success on iOS. Like most paid-for titles, Kickstarted stealth game République quickly dropped off the Top Grossing charts, but designer Ryan Payton says he’s very pleased, telling us that it’s “actually exceeded our internal goals in early adoption of the Season Pass and international sales”. Payton also believes that “console-quality games definitely have a place on the App Store. This is just the beginning”.
Assassin’s Creed IV spinoff Assassin’s Creed: Pirates also enjoyed “significant sales”, according to Etienne Tardieu, senior sales manager at Ubisoft. “The premium market still exists,” he says, “especially on iOS, and Apple has been supportive of our effort on this segment.” Games such as Infinity Blade, Joe Danger and Oceanhorn have also proved successful, despite their higher prices and more traditional audiences.
Games in niche genres do well, too, providing they suit the device. UK studio Slitherine says that its £14/$20 Battle Academy has outsold the PC version by a ratio of ten to one, while Tin Man Games has put out enough mobile remakes of classic choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks to open a small library.
Ports are also sources of profit, and not just for nostalgic classics such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Sonic The Hedgehog, or high-profile console games such as XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Independent creators are extending the profitability of their PC and console games with App Store releases. “Although Frozen Synapse iPad has contributed only a small fraction of [the game’s] total revenue, we were still able to make a reasonable profit on it,” says Mode 7’s Taylor. Developers also expand their reach on the App Store. “Most iPad customers are buying the game on that platform first. Early on in its life, I think quite a few of our PC players picked up the game, but for the most part we seem to be reaching a new audience.”
Silhouette platformer Limbo, underworld RTS Skulls Of The Shogun, scientific brainteaser SpaceChem and sneaky puzzler Stealth Bastard all broadened their lifespans on iOS (albeit with the latter renamed as the more Apple-friendly Stealth, Inc). Then, of course, there is Minecraft, whose Pocket Edition has sold more copies than the PC original. It’s also the only paid game to consistently join the free-to-play titans on the Top Grossing chart, but it’s hard to argue with Lovell when he calls it “an outlier by any definition”.
Looking at the games that have done well for their creators, it becomes obvious that the key to iOS success is little different to any other platform. Not only must a game be of high quality and sufficiently polished, but it needs hype, anticipation and the ear of the press. The one differentiator unique to iOS is promotion from Apple itself via placement in one of its coveted, massively influential ‘Featured’ slots.
So while free-to-play continues to dominate the charts, and limit the sort of experiences that the App Store has to offer, there is still a place for paid games for discerning players. And looking to the rest of 2014, there seems to be a fresh wave of the sort of daring and innovative ideas that led us to call the App Store the hottest property in handheld gaming in E236. For proof, consider Ustwo’s Escher-inspired Monument Valley, Steph Thirion’s long-awaited otherworldly epic Faraway, the popup papercraft Tengami from the ex-Rare developers at Nyamyam, the Japanese superhero management sim Chroma Squad, and an inventive game about shuffling comic book panels called Framed.
Joshua Boggs, director at Loveshack, defends his decision to launch Framed as a paid game exclusively on iOS amid horror stories about the death of premium games by pointing at the numbers. “Apple said this time last year the App Store had 500 million active users,” he says. “What excites us about that number, though, isn’t an infinite number of dollar signs. It’s the potential for what an audience that large means. It means a diverse audience, niche audiences – many people from many different backgrounds, many people looking for different experiences. By making the games that we want to play, we’re technically hitting a potentially large demographic that we’re a part of.”
But he’s quick to add that “Framed will be heading to other platforms, too, eventually”. And that’s something you’ll hear from a lot of developers who are now making their games for PC as well. It makes good financial sense, but it could have a knock-on effect on the quality of iOS titles. If game creators choose Steam first and iOS later, or make their games with multiple platforms in mind, we may start to miss out on the kind of ideas that really take advantage of a touchscreen. Take, for example, Simogo’s Device 6, which has you turning your phone on its side and upside down to follow the winding corridors of words, or Crabitron, which lets you use four fingers to pantomime the pincers of a ramping space crustacean. Then there’s the gyroscope-reliant Ridiculous Fishing or the tactile The Room. “We have to give tablet owners a reason to look at the paid charts, and that means making ever more interesting and different titles that really exploit the tablet experience over anything that’s happened on other platforms,” Meade says.
So what’s ahead for mobile? Will the introduction of better hardware, like the 64bit chip in your iPad Air, or Nvidia’s Unreal Engine 4-capable Tegra K1 unit, change anything?
“We long for the day when the A7 chipset is our minimum spec,” says République creator Payton. “That day can’t come soon enough.” Fireproof’s Meade has a similar view: “I think The Room was helped by being unabashedly a game for high-end devices.” But Lovell warns that the industry’s obsession with faster chips and fancier graphics could be disastrous. “Traditional publishers think it’s all about graphical fidelity, which means they will continue to push up the cost of making this stuff without increasing the revenue opportunity.”
The recent spate of Apple-approved controllers from gadget makers like MOGA, SteelSeries and Logitech are less interesting to the developers we ask. “As long as they are optional thirdparty peripherals, I don’t think controllers will have any major effect on the way we play games on iOS,” says Simogo’s Flesser.
République is controlled through a one-tap system because “until a large percentage of consumers play iOS games with a gamepad, we’re going to continue focusing on developing better ways for players to control touchscreen games”, Payton says. “That’s how the vast majority of the hundreds of millions of iOS users are interacting with their devices.”
The controllers could be part of that ever-present threat that Apple might infiltrate your TV, and take on consoles, but nothing has changed – at least publicly – in that regard since our previous look at Apple’s ambitions for the living room back in E236.
But the real factors in the future of the iOS gaming landscape will not be chips and controllers, but business models and software. Will we really see the last of the premium games slowly squeezed out in favour of a glut of brainless free-to-play repetition, or will the paid, adventurous and refreshing apps that made us excited about the App Store in the first place hold their niche, or even make a triumphant comeback, in the next few years?
“We’re spinning on a super-conservative dime, showing very little vision and no feel for what’s possible,” says Fireproof’s Meade when we ask him to sum up the state of the App Store. “Mobile games in general are designed by committee, in awe of their successful peers, answerable only to player usage data, and tactically designed to give users nothing but what they already know. We think ignoring all of that is our way to sanity and success.”
Whether more developers share that way of thinking will determine whether the iOS gaming revolution is truly cancelled, or merely on hold. |
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| Posted: Tue, 25th Mar 2014 23:01 Post subject: |
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Pretty much satisfied phone gaming didn't get a bigger foothold than it did. Would be worse for proper gamers.
I bet this is all about the flappy bird game though. Searched for it on the store and there was like a billion knockoffs.
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LeoNatan
☢ NFOHump Despot ☢
Posts: 73196
Location: Ramat Gan, Israel 🇮🇱
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| Posted: Tue, 25th Mar 2014 23:06 Post subject: |
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Not just. Every f2p shit gets multiplied by the dozens to try and fool people to spend their cash with their app instead of another. It's terrible.
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Werelds
Special Little Man
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Location: 0100111001001100
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 01:08 Post subject: |
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I don't think it has stopped any revolution though. That revolution happened, handheld gaming made a huge shift towards smart phones and tablets. Not only did they become a serious target, they became a target that is extremely lucrative to smaller developers due to the low overhead and gigantic (potential) user base.
So I think the title (and thus the point the article tries to make) is flawed. What these F2P games have done is halt progress, not stop a revolution. Rather than remaining an industry (I consider mobile gaming a different industry than PC/consoles, for the record) where innovation is key and pushing the boundaries the norm, it has fallen to what the other side (PC/console) is now slowly crawling out of: the pit of mediocrity and cash flow above all. And the reason. For that is the same reason that makes it so attractive: low overhead on a huge user base.
Not that I personally give much of a shit, since I don't do mobile gaming much, it's still a shame 
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LeoNatan
☢ NFOHump Despot ☢
Posts: 73196
Location: Ramat Gan, Israel 🇮🇱
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 09:12 Post subject: |
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Slowly crawling out of?  next gen gaeming? Or you mean the cheap 2D "indie" crap that is more often than not mobile ports? The difference between mobile and PC/console is that on mobile, small time players can more easily create a cash grab, while on consoles usually only late pubs can, and small devs are reduced to 2D "indie" shit.
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 09:48 Post subject: |
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You can't have serious gaming without physical buttons anyway, so who cares....
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 13:54 Post subject: |
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Platform is a joke for most kinds of serious games anyway. I'm pleased they've fucked themselves through greed.
That said, eventually a decent exclusive will come out and inspire yet another greed-wave. It's inevitable.
But crowd funding gives me hope for the future - and something like Star Citizen has the potential to change everything for the passionate developer and the hardcore gamer.
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 13:59 Post subject: |
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until google buys star citizen that is.
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 14:02 Post subject: |
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That would be disappointing.
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Werelds
Special Little Man
Posts: 15098
Location: 0100111001001100
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 14:21 Post subject: |
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| LeoNatan wrote: | | Slowly crawling out of? next gen gaeming? Or you mean the cheap 2D "indie" crap that is more often than not mobile ports? The difference between mobile and PC/console is that on mobile, small time players can more easily create a cash grab, while on consoles usually only late pubs can, and small devs are reduced to 2D "indie" shit. |
No, not next-gen gaming, at least not that I have seen (yet) 
But at least on the PC in particular you now see a shift back towards innovation. The Oculus Rift for example. Kickstarter allowing some developers to develop the things they want to develop resulting in pretty amazing support from their target audience. There's still sellouts among those, as well as just plain dickheads, but that's always been there and always will be. There's a few developers out there who are really listening to their audience, focusing on getting all the details right. Most of those games we won't even see this year, but they do exist.
I did say slowly, we're a long way from where we were 10-15 years ago, when every year (or other year at most) we'd see major advancements in all kinds of areas. But things are slowly improving
I believe the same will happen on mobile. I already see lots of people around me getting bored of all the crap they're playing. Candy Derp and those things (I'd love a game called Derp Crush though  ). |
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 14:33 Post subject: |
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Depends on what you mean by advancements. I hardly dared dream of a game like Skyrim or Battlefield 4 10-15 years ago.
Doesn't mean I wouldn't have preferred game design or gameplay evolution - but those advances are very real to me.
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Werelds
Special Little Man
Posts: 15098
Location: 0100111001001100
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 15:04 Post subject: |
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BF1942 came out 12 years ago; BF4 is a much prettier game, I'll give you that, but other than that not that much has changed at its core. DICE have just struck a decent balance between infantry and vehicles now, rather than BF1942 being the vehicular combat game that it was
Skyrim I won't comment on, as I haven't played and most likely won't anymore. For some reason I have no interest in it, despite the fact that it should be right up my alley. I can't explain it
But if we go back to the late 90's, we saw massive jumps in visuals thanks to 3D accelerators. Those jumps are much smaller and much less frequent now. AI also improved a lot back then, whereas nowadays we mostly get worse AI than what we got then. It's also in that period that most developers tried to make their own game; even on the same engines, you got unique games. Again, much less of those nowadays.
That last part is what we're finally slowly getting back; some developers just do their own thing, rather than blindly copying for the money. AI doesn't seem to be changing much unfortunately and I know that visuals won't change a great deal despite the new consoles; they'll just finally get to where they could've been 5 years ago.
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 15:19 Post subject: |
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You can't expect technology to keep the pace in terms of evolution - as much more will happen during the early days, when nothing has been invented yet.
This is true for everything, including movies, cars, refrigerators and so on.
In my opinion, Skyrim is an amazing achievement if you compare it (in technological terms) to, say, Arena from 1994.
Moving from Wolfenstein to 3D accelerated graphics in Quake didn't happen over night - it took years.
What I think has stagnated is game design and how games have become so expensive to make that almost no chances are taken with AAA budgets in terms of design and challenging our notions of what games can be.
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Werelds
Special Little Man
Posts: 15098
Location: 0100111001001100
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 15:46 Post subject: |
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| Casus wrote: | You can't expect technology to keep the pace in terms of evolution - as much more will happen during the early days, when nothing has been invented yet.
This is true for everything, including movies, cars, refrigerators and so on. |
Except that the technology HAS evolved at a high pace on the hardware side. It's on the software side where it's been held back by the lowest common denominator as well as the target audience. To put that in hump terms: consoles and derps
Starting with the 6th generation of consoles (Xbox, DC, GC, PS2), MS tapped into a bigger mainstream audience than Nintendo, Sega and Sony had done before then. Sony didn't really go along with that yet, because MS didn't get it quite right and Sony had their existing fanbase. The 7th generation (PS3, 360, Wii) however was a massive turnaround, as MS figured out their mistakes and fixed them. The end result is that that generation is by far the most popular ever and one that went very, very mainstream. Particularly the 360 in the US did extremely well (Nintendo still outsold both of them combined, but in the US the 360 sold like 60-70% more units than the PS3; in EU the two are about equal...behind Nintendo ).
It's that mainstream audience that'll suck up the same shit over and over; the same audience that gets addicted to Candy Crush and all that other crap. They're either people who never owned a gaming platform of any shape or form before then, or they're people who grew up with that generation (you know, those little foul-mouthed bastards that yell FAG DICK CHEATER I WILL FUCK UR MOTHER in MP games). It's also that audience that was content with the stagnated industry and allowed the PS360 to live on till long after they should've been hung out to dry.
| Quote: | | In my opinion, Skyrim is an amazing achievement if you compare it (in technological terms) to, say, Arena from 1994. |
Sure. But now compare it to Oblivion? 
Nowhere near as nice of a jump as we saw from Q1 to Q2. Or what we saw with the original Unreal.
| Quote: | | Moving from Wolfenstein to 3D accelerated graphics in Quake didn't happen over night - it took years. |
Actually...from Doom 2 to Quake 1 was less than 2 years. The entire engine and all artwork (which was a gigantic shift on all fronts) were done within that period.
| Quote: | | What I think has stagnated is game design and how games have become so expensive to make that almost no chances are taken with AAA budgets in terms of design and challenging our notions of what games can be. |
Games have not become as insanely expensive as some lead us to believe. 75% of any AAA game's reported "budget" is marketing costs.
What that generation of consoles did for games is what smartphones becoming common good did for the mobile space. People are now starting to get annoyed by ads, getting concerned about their privacy, etc., so they are now willing to pay for their things. That's what'll slowly bring the free knock offs down. |
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 15:59 Post subject: |
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| Werelds wrote: | | Except that the technology HAS evolved at a high pace on the hardware side. It's on the software side where it's been held back by the lowest common denominator as well as the target audience. To put that in hump terms: consoles and derps |
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I'm not seeing huge jumps in technology - I see almost identical technology being pushed further and further, but not exactly in huge jumps.
| Quote: | | It's that mainstream audience that'll suck up the same shit over and over; the same audience that gets addicted to Candy Crush and all that other crap. They're either people who never owned a gaming platform of any shape or form before then, or they're people who grew up with that generation (you know, those little foul-mouthed bastards that yell FAG DICK CHEATER I WILL FUCK UR MOTHER in MP games). It's also that audience that was content with the stagnated industry and allowed the PS360 to live on till long after they should've been hung out to dry. |
There's a ton of people in this world for which gaming is a casual interest - much like you have casual interests. It doesn't make you a foul-mouthed bastard or a completely ignorant person. It just means you don't really care about gaming that much - and you can have fun playing the same stuff over and over.
In fact, such people represent the majority - so it's easy to understand publishers caring more about them than the core gamers.
| Quote: | | Sure. But now compare it to Oblivion? |
You mean compared to Fallout 3 - which would be the appropriate comparison. Actually, I think Skyrim is a much more impressive game, visually, than Fallout 3 - mostly because of the animations and character models. Also, the in-game conversations was a big jump in terms of immersion.
| Quote: | | Nowhere near as nice of a jump as we saw from Q1 to Q2. Or what we saw with the original Unreal. |
Well, you're talking about games based on engines the developers themselves were creating from scratch. Bethesda is using an engine that's based on that ancient Gamebryo stuff - and they're being held back by console hardware limitations.
I'm hoping the next TES or Fallout will be based on another engine.
| Quote: | | Actually...from Doom 2 to Quake 1 was less than 2 years. The entire engine and all artwork (which was a gigantic shift on all fronts) were done within that period. |
Sure, but Doom 2 was identical to Doom in terms of the engine. Carmack was basically the number one guy in the world when it came to engines - and he was obviously developing it on the side.
If you look at Doom 3 - that was also a very big jump in visual quality. I was certainly extremely impressed.
Much more impressed than I was with Quake 1 > Quake 2 > Quake 3.
| Quote: | | Games have not become as insanely expensive as some lead us to believe. 75% of any AAA game's reported "budget" is marketing costs. |
Marketing is a huge part of modern gaming budgets - and I call bullshit on 75% being the norm. But, yeah, marketing is a big part of it - and I'm not sure why you'd say it's not part of it? You have to sell your game.
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Werelds
Special Little Man
Posts: 15098
Location: 0100111001001100
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 17:13 Post subject: |
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| Casus wrote: | | I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I'm not seeing huge jumps in technology - I see almost identical technology being pushed further and further, but not exactly in huge jumps. |
Maybe they're not as obvious to you, but they are there, just rarely used because of the common denominator problem. Since the inception of programmable shaders (Unified Shaders, 2006), which was probably the biggest thing since the Voodoo 1, we've seen big improvements in a lot of areas. The true technical bits aside (transistor density and such), texture filtering has come a long way for example. We've got things such as tessellation, extremely smart schedulers, ridiculous amounts of memory bandwidth, very flexible pipelines. That's not even talking about some of the half-software/half-hardware things, such as Partial Resident Textures.
| Quote: | There's a ton of people in this world for which gaming is a casual interest - much like you have casual interests. It doesn't make you a foul-mouthed bastard or a completely ignorant person. It just means you don't really care about gaming that much - and you can have fun playing the same stuff over and over.
In fact, such people represent the majority - so it's easy to understand publishers caring more about them than the core gamers. |
Uh, that was exactly my point? As for foul mouthed: I guess you don't play multiplayer much. That remark was aimed at the generation that was under 12 when the PS360 came out; they're now in their mid-to-late teens and the vast majority of them are foul mouthed little shits that are very sore losers. Trust me, I have several cousins at that age and I've seen them play their games. I swear as any person does, but not like them. They insult people outright just because they lost their game.
It wasn't about the people that got into consoles casually around then. And those people have always been catered for, even before they were the only realistic target any publisher wanted to target.
| Quote: | | You mean compared to Fallout 3 - which would be the appropriate comparison. Actually, I think Skyrim is a much more impressive game, visually, than Fallout 3 - mostly because of the animations and character models. Also, the in-game conversations was a big jump in terms of immersion. |
No, I meant Oblivion, as FO3 is a vastly different setting.
| Quote: | | Well, you're talking about games based on engines the developers themselves were creating from scratch. Bethesda is using an engine that's based on that ancient Gamebryo stuff - and they're being held back by console hardware limitations. |
Again, you're reiterating the exact point I made. Even with developers licensing engines 15 years ago, there were major improvements to what some people did with them. Particularly id's Tech 2 and 3 have been used so much and in such wide varieties - some of those implementations are pretty mindblowing considering where it came from.
Back then, not even the cross platform games let themselves get held back. PC was the primary platform in those cases, they scaled down for other platforms. For the exclusives, games always sought to maximise the platform they were being built for.
| Quote: | | Marketing is a huge part of modern gaming budgets - and I call bullshit on 75% being the norm. But, yeah, marketing is a big part of it - and I'm not sure why you'd say it's not part of it? You have to sell your game. |
It wasn't such a huge chunk 15 years ago and it's wasted money now, because publishers allocate their resources wrongly. There's no need for elaborate TV ads for every game.
As for 75%: MW2 was reported to "cost" around $200m. Development for that one wouldn't even have been 25% for that. HL2 was around $40m and that was already pretty exceptional. Every AAA game nowadays you see figures of hundreds of millions reported for development and that is just absolute horseshit. Even if you pay all of your 300 staff $100k per year, pay $50k in rent and utilities per month and develop for 3 years straight that's (100 * 300 000) + (12 * 50000) = $30.6m per year for a grand total of $91.8m over 3 years.
No. I know how much marketing agencies ask for their services and it's absolutely disgusting to see the kind of money they make. |
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| Posted: Wed, 26th Mar 2014 17:35 Post subject: |
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Still not seeing the huge jumps. Technology has been steadily evolving over the years - but if you consider that "in jumps", that's fine I guess. To me, going from CPU based 3D rendering to 3D acceleration was a HUGE jump back in the day, and I haven't seen a single jump quite like that since.
Actually, you seem to be iterating MY point. I'm saying in the past - jumps were bigger, which is why game "steps" were more impressive. But I'm saying we're still seeing those steps, just not quite as big.
Where we seem to disagree is the reason we're not seeing the same kind of steps.
Again, the marketing budget being 75% as THE NORM is what I'm calling bullshit on. It doesn't mean it's not the case in certain games.
But I can't say this is a particularly important debate for me, so I'll just let it rest here.
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