J_C said:
janjetina said:
His tastes influence the games he makes. If he likes ARPGs and AARPGs, there is a good chance that he will make similar games, and in fact, that is what he does.
I wish it would be the case. The thing is, the personal preference of one game designer has nothing to do, with the business decisions. If a publisher says to Obsidian to make a hardcore RPG, Obsidian will do it. If they say make a dumbed down action RPG, Obsidian will make that.
What you say is true to small indie developers.
This ++
You take whatever contracts the publisher gives you. End of story. You're making the games, not playing them - what matters is getting secure contracts and multiple projects with different publishers to try to hedge against the Troika downfall of no publisher willing to contract with them (again, Troika fell because they couldn't secure a publisher for their next project - the games themselves didn't take them under, but they didn't need to if the publishers are too stupid to understand the longer shelf-life of VtM:B and factor that into Troika's record).
Also, the comment about Obsidian having 'a great record', in context, had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of their crpgs. He was talking about whether Obsidian was finding it easy or hard to get publishers to contract with them, and how with Bioware now publisher-owned (hence out of the market for anyone but EA), Obsidian is doing well out of getting contracts that might have formerly gone to Bioware first. By the 'great record' he is talking about getting the publishers their sales - quite the reverse of saying that they have made monocle games. Remember, Obsidian works on a model where they get paid a flat fee to make a game for a publisher, to the publishers specs and mandates, and then the publisher gets the money from the sales. Even when they create a new IP, as in Alpha Protocol, Obsidian doesn't actually get to own the IP - the publisher takes full ownership of the IP and can give the sequels to whoever they want, because the publisher is in a strong enough position that they simply won't contract unless they get to own the IP.
Which, from a business perspective, means it is pretty silly to try to make an original IP. You're going to have to make it fit the publisher's requirements anyway, so it isn't as though you get any real artistic freedom from it. And you don't even get to own it - all your hard work in building the setting and lore becomes the publisher's property. Surely it makes more sense to try to get the publisher to give YOU an existing IP to work with - you're getting the same money for much less work, and you don't have the humiliation of the publisher walking off with the IP you spent the last few years inventing.
For a developer's taste in games to affect the type of games they make, they need the capacity to self-publish. Troika proved that even if your games are profitable, you can't survive making monocle crpgs if you have to rely on publishers to back you. Obsidian doesn't have that, and from his comments it seems that they're nowhere near achieving it - they're aiming to try to be able to digitally distribute some smaller (read: more interesting but less costly) titles some time in the future, at best (mind you, if you are planning to self-publish, you sure as fuck want to keep that secret, or at least play it down, until the last fucking minute or else you aren't going to get any publisher funding for your current projects, as they're going to see you as a competitor that needs killing before you get established).
In the very rare case that a (professional) developer's personal taste in games affects her/his choice of games to make, I'd actually go further and say the developer is LESS likely to make the kind of games that he likes to play himself. That's very common in film, animation and writing. It's why Tim Cain liked Oblivion. You need to remember, when someone from the tech end of entertainment sees these products, half the time they aren't really watching the movie or playing the game, they're thinking about how those sets were built, how the CGI was handled, what coding tricks were used to get around that engine restriction, and so on. It's much easier for a someone who works in entertainment to switch that off and relax (and be entertained) when the product is very different to what he/she works on. If you're spending your days mapping out C+C flow-charts on story-boarding software, or working on quest design, you're going to find it difficult to just turn off and play a game that has those items in it. That doesn't mean you don't play them - you do, and you're more likely to be impressed by the games that take a really different approach to your own (why would Tim be impressed by another Arcanum - he's already made that and knows how it works - Oblivion, on the other hand, is different to anything he's worked on, and as a coder it's probable that he'd run into things and think 'how the fuck did they manage to code that into this engine?"). But when you want to actually relax and play a game, rather than analyse a competitor's product, it's going to be something far removed from the stuff that makes up your 9-5.
