Interview "I'm going to reinvent roleplaying games again": Richard Garriott Interview at Gather Your Party

[Infinitron]

PS1 and PS2 especially were sold by bazillions and brought huge profits to the publishers

This is true, yet I assume that developing games multiplatform for both PC and PS1 (and to a lesser extent PS2) was difficult, because it seems to have been fairly uncommon.

 

[Jarpie]

PS1 and PS2 especially were sold by bazillions and brought huge profits to the publishers

This is true, yet I assume that developing games multiplatform for both PC and PS1 (and to a lesser extent PS2) was difficult, because it seems to have been fairly uncommon.

I see the dominance of the PS1 and PS2 as a natural extension of the earlier dominance of the NES/SNES. Sony simply stole the market from Nintendo.

I think there's one major difference with Sony and Nintendo at that time - SNes and NES were still mostly thought as basicly "The kids toys" or "Something what kids play" even though they were very popular but PS1 and PS2 were really the first consoles which managed to push through that barrier and made it feasible for the masses to play - PS2 especially with it's DVD playback made it perfect bridge for the masses who didn't play before to get introduced to games and perfect breeding ground for more casual games.

In the 90s PS1 and later PS2 also had the advantage of the name "Sony", the masses were much more willing to give them a shot because Sony was household name in doing high-quality entertainment systems (such as tvs, videosystems, audiosystems etc), and people were willing to think that "Well, if company such as Sony is doing gaming console then there might be something to it..."

 

[Infinitron]

You're right, edited my post

 

[Mortmal]

You are right i cant tell for the usa, but the european market should have been sufficient by itself to fund those studios, instead we have let a whole industry died.I dont have the numbers of c64 and amiga sold in USA although, i remember very good USA studios like cinemaware some of the best games on the amiga. I think you may underestimate the importance those machines had .I quote you "the NES/SNES was a part of every middle class American kid's life in the late 80's and early 90's " , seems like gaming was already a big deal then.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I don't think Vault Dweller played and like one real RPG before Fallout, and that's true of half the people back then.

I got hooked on RPGs in late 80s (I'm 41). Dungeon Master, Bard's Tales, Wasteland, Ultima 5, Pool of Radiance, Wiz 5-6, followed by Darklands, Realms of Arkania, Ultima Underworld, Dungeon Master 2, Arena, etc in early 90s.

I like all sub-genres, from roguelikes and isometric dungeon crawlers to first-person sandbox games and story-driven games like PST, but I like Fallout-like games the most.

Problem?

 

[Telengard]

Temple of Apshai was a "best seller" and a trendsetter at 40,000 copies during the 4-year span of its heyday. Ultima was a huge success at 50,000.

Pool of Radiance, 10 years later, was a huge success at 250,000. Soon, the benchmark for success became 100,000.

Just 10 years after that, Diablo is a huge success at 2 and a half million. Only a few years later, 1 million copies becomes the new benchmark for success. Meeting cost is driven up into the hundreds of thousands.

Now, 10 years after Diablo, one million isn't enough to have profit anymore, and 10 million is a huge success.

40,000 -> 10,000,000 in 30 years. Needing 2+million in sales to show profit.

Piracy has nothing to do with any of that. (Although insanity might.)

 

[Vault Dweller]

The cost keeps going up. Do you remember Stonekeep ads? 4 years in development, 5 million dollar budget! It was big enough to be used as a selling feature. Today 5 mil is nothing. The budgets are 50-100 mil plus TV ads, so selling a million copies at 50 bucks isn't that much these days, after the stores take their cut.

I assume that's why South Park needs to sell 2 mil just to break even.

 

[FrancoTAU]

The cost keeps going up. Do you remember Stonekeep ads? 4 years in development, 5 million dollar budget! It was big enough to be used as a selling feature. Today 5 mil is nothing. The budgets are 50-100 mil plus TV ads, so selling a million copies at 50 bucks isn't that much these days, after the stores take their cut.

I assume that's why South Park needs to sell 2 mil just to break even.

I'm sure a good chunk of that is tied up in licensing fees too, but your point is still valid.

 

[Dexter]

Again, before the Xbawks there were different audiences for every consoles/game system, there's been a lot of decline there too, but most of them are too blinded by the flashing shooty images to notice. Look at the state of the Japanese games industry, it's fucking sad.
Aside from Nintendo it's all but dead and those fucktards are always trying to "appeal to the Western audience" without realizing that the success they've had over here is BECAUSE they were different: http://www.vg247.com/2012/06/06/hayashi-ninja-gaiden-iii-was-a-japanese-hamburger-for-the-west/

Btw. the talks about Nintendo reminded me of this, lol xD

 

[Davaris]

I'm sure a good chunk of that is tied up in licensing fees too, but your point is still valid.

Didn't Chris Avellone say recently, marketing costs several multiples of dev costs?

It would be interesting to see a graph of AAA development costs over the last 20 years, I wonder if it is going exponential.

 

[Telengard]

Lots of game companies don't release costs, only sales figures, so data is iffy, but...

Your top end games were at a development cost of
2000 - 5 million
2005 - 20 million
2010 - 50 to 100 million

(with something like Rock Band maybe being 200 million)

In 2000 marketing budgets would be equal to 1/3-ish of development costs.
In 2010 that has gone to 3x the development cost.
Or 1.5 million to 150 million respectively.

 

[Tramboi]

Why do you all care about the hugest AAA games?
They're really not representative of the whole industry.

 

[Telengard]

Why do you all care about the hugest AAA games?
They're really not representative of the whole industry.

I dunno.

Maybe because for years some of us have watched AAA companies gobble up any small studio with an ounce of creativity and start shatting out mediocrity after mediocrity under the old titles?

Or maybe it's the distortive effect that companies spending 50 million on development has on the entire industry? Such as a "small" development game is now considered to be 5 million.

Or maybe it was watching the AAA companies and the chain stores crowd out small and medium developers from store shelves for a decade?

Or maybe it was seeing the store I used to go to, which once organized games by genre, like a bookstore does, abandon that policy because the shelf imbalance and number of dead genres was starting to make it look laughable?

Or maybe it's like a train wreck, and people just can't look away from the impending destruction?

Or maybe some of us can't help being like the blind seer in a Greek tragedy, forever calling out warnings that no one will heed?

Or, you know, maybe some of us like to laugh at the sheer absurdity?

 

[Tramboi]

All this surely didn't prevent the cinematographic industry to provide good low-budget and middle-budget products that are not blockbusters, in the long run.
Let EA and Activision be the Warner and Universal of gaming. And let's ignore them.

 

[Telengard]

The big companies all use tactics to control the marketplace. Through such means you can have an inferior product purchased. Means such as:

Buying out your competition
Raiding your competition of its talent
Crowding your competition off store shelves
Forcing your competition out of business by increasing the cost of doing business out of their ability to manage
Controlling the media message

All of the big companies use those tactics, and more.

On top of that, unsupported spiralling costs at the top is a bubble. And we all now know what happens with bubbles.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

The big companies all use tactics to control the marketplace. Through such means you can have an inferior product purchased. Means such as:

Buying out your competition
Raiding your competition of its talent
Crowding your competition off store shelves
Forcing your competition out of business by increasing the cost of doing business out of their ability to manage
Controlling the media message

All of the big companies use those tactics, and more.

On top of that, unsupported spiralling costs at the top is a bubble. And we all now know what happens with bubbles.

I hate this world.

 

[Davaris]

Buying out your competition
Raiding your competition of its talent
Crowding your competition off store shelves
Forcing your competition out of business by increasing the cost of doing business out of their ability to manage
Controlling the media message

+

Give your product away free of charge to a casual user base, to make it impossible for competition to sell their product at any price. Then charge heavily the few that are hooked on your product, to subsidize your monopolistic behavior.

On top of that, unsupported spiralling costs at the top is a bubble. And we all now know what happens with bubbles.

If you see an exponential curve, you have found a bubble.

 

[Tramboi]

Aye, they do all these things.
That doesn't prevent the adventure and strategy markets to be quite sane, with moderate budgets and sometimes good games.
Why couldn't "hardcore" RPGs be a sane niche too?
I don't think EA cares about Age of decadence as long as they can sell truckloads of Mass Effects...

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Aye, they do all these things.
That doesn't prevent the adventure and strategy markets to be quite sane, with moderate budgets and sometimes good games.
Why couldn't "hardcore" RPGs be a sane niche too?

The main difference is that at their peak moment, RPGs were dependent on the big publishers for financing their development. Fallout, PST, Arcanum, etc. all happened because the publishers were willing to invest in them.
Wargame developers need publishers just to publish them.
Things have changed with the appearance of Kickstarter and Thursday drawing nearer.

 

[Telengard]

That's not really how EA does business.

EA acquires a company that has has some IPs (like Mass Effect or Medal of Honor, or well, anything in their catalog), and then proceeds to drain that company of any vitality it might have had, milking it of every bit of value it can, and then casts the broken husk aside when there's nothing left to feed on.

Age of Decadence isn't interesting to EA...for now. If Age of Decadence sells a lot of copies, that's when EA starts hovering around offering enticements. And then, if it can't get what it wants through enticements, it tries to take what it wants by force.

Take a quick look through EAs past acquisitions, because I really couldn't go through the list again. That's just ONE of the ways EA has had a major influence on the games industry as a whole.

 

[Tramboi]

The main difference is that at their peak moment, RPGs were dependent on the big publishers for financing their development. Fallout, PST, Arcanum, etc. all happened because the publishers were willing to invest in them.

Most adventure and strategy games are funded through publishers too.

If Kickstarter leads to some good finished games, it could really change the future of niche games. Let's pray whatever gods we have at hand we're not betrayed by these industry veterans.

 

[Mortmal]

IF those veteran, or new kickstarter devs were offered millions to work at zynga on a new farmville or social shit games, how long do you think it would take to "betray" ? You prefer to make games for hardcore gamers, working everyday 12H by day, with very little benifits, oh and most people bitching about your game on forum , or you prefer to have your villa near the lake and a new porsche ? Tough choice indeed...

 

[Gord]

IF those veteran, or new kickstarter devs were offered millions to work at zynga on a new farmville or social shit games, how long do you think it would take to "betray" ?

I wouldn't quite go as far as call it betrayal. No one would be preventing them from working on a project at Zynga for a year or two, only to return to something more afterwards. Except money, I guess. Or slave contracts. The worst they could do is selling the rights to their trademark to some big publisher.
I guess even the most hardcore rpg dev might get bored by not doing anything else but churning out oldskool TB-cRPGs. Why not take a well-paid position for some break?

The question is, would they return to what they did before?

 

[PorkaMorka]

Please remember all the people you knew back then. Could you tell me the piracy wasn't massive?

Most of the gamers I knew in 90s 'Kwa were like me, spoiled kids/teens with a lot of disposable income and gigantic bins full of poor purchasing decisions games.

I'm sure that piracy was easy for people who knew what they were doing back then, but it wasn't something that we did. Http warez wasn't considered safe and we were too newbish to have connections for good IRC/FTP warez or figure out usenet. It wasn't like today where you just have to google for 30 seconds to find a torrent that is almost certainly safe.

Of course, the other factor is that middle class 'Kwan teens in the 90s were so spoiled that there wasn't really a need to figure out piracy.

Also literally everyone I knew had 1-3 consoles and possibly a hand held, never saw any piracy on those either.

Just one man's experience.

I hardly pirated anything in the 90s though, I only started pirating later on, after games became shit and I learned the value of money. (And I mostly stopped playing the games that I pirated after a few hours, long enough to determine that they were bad.)

 

[octavius]

OTOH, some people wisen up with years. Take Mike Singleton, back in the day he was daydreaming about turning Lords of Midnight into a bunch of akshun minigames now that the advances in technology finally allow him to scrap that silly turn-based mode and numbers-driven gameplay (and to an extent, he did with the disastrous LOM3, which is still a pinnacle of strategy next to his dream of a LOM game he used to describe in interviews). Fast forward 20 years, and he is making a faithful TB remake of the original LOM (and then possible the "true" LOM3, the fabled Eye of the Moon originally envisioned in 1985) without any intent of making it play more like GTA.

Alas, he's dead now, and the ultimate fate of Eye of the Moon uncertain.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/16/farewell-to-british-gaming-design-legend-mike-singleton/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/16/farewell-to-british-gaming-design-legend-mike-singleton/http://www.icemark.com/blog/archives/2012/10/16/night-has-fallen/