What cau$ed the decline?

[:Flash:]

stuff

Excellent post, would read again. Since I can't brofist (yet?), I hope it's ok to show my appreciation this way.
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rezaf

Huh, I didn't even realize you were new until this post. This name sound so familiar. Were you on HotU, perchance?

 

[Mustawd]

And who caters to the mases more than those who value profits over all else?

Fair enough.

 

[rezaf]

Huh, I didn't even realize you were new until this post. This name sound so familiar. Were you on HotU, perchance?

I was indeed. But you realize this was ten years ago, don't you?

I admire your memory. I have to apologize, but Flash isn't a user name that's unique enough for me to associate someone with ten years afte the fact.
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rezaf

 

[Bester]

People talking about the rise of gamdev costs.... I don't get you, do you have some secret info I don't?

You have to make meshes with more tris, ok, but at the same time you're now free to outsource to poor countries.
Coding-wise, you now have frameworks like Unity and UE4, which frees up a lot of your programmers' time.
You have the possibility to self-publish with Steam.
You have software like Quixel's megascans for a million realistic textures and normals, you don't have to make them yourself now.
For indie gamedevs, we're now even entering the times where there are professional assets with CC0 and CC-BY licenses, and there's going to be more and more of those. For instance, very detailed meshes of hands, skulls, bodies, zbrush brushes, etc. Sites like blendswap are only the beginning of those times.

So where are you seeing gamedev costs rises exactly? And don't cite Skyrim's budget, you can spend 60 million on a car, doesn't mean that cars now cost more, it just means you spend money in a certain way.

 

[Mustawd]

To understand the decline you have to back to another time. When PC games were sold by mail order and 256 colors on screen was the height of technology.....

I was going to keep writing to get to present day, but I'm already tired of writing this and it seems tl;dr territory already. You can probably fill in the rest yourself.

I say keep going. actually, would love to see a series of in depth articles about the decline, subsequent recent incline, and what we think is in store for the future (another decline?).

 

[:Flash:]

Huh, I didn't even realize you were new until this post. This name sound so familiar. Were you on HotU, perchance?

I was indeed. But you realize this was ten years ago, don't you?

I admire your memory. I have to apologize, but Flash isn't a user name that's unique enough for me to associate someone with ten years afte the fact.
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rezaf

Flash is not a very distinguishing name, indeed. Unkillable Cat only recognized me when I incidentally linked to my old avatar.

I think I still remember your avatar, I think. A small guy/dog(?) with glasses?

 

[tindrli]

the new generations came up retarded in a way that no one expected master level .. so the market changed and we know the rest

 

[PhantasmaNL]

3D. Probably thought of as more engaging and simpler at the same time, all it did was reduce the player's level of imagination involved. "Show" isnt always better then "tell" (or maybe better "suggest") in entertainment. Apart from games, think movies, the Alien series for example.

Another problem was that every game had to be 3d from that moment on, or it was regarded shit (apart from grognard games such as TB wargames), while not every genre can profit from it in equal measure. "Showing" wasnt easy though and had to be limited since crappy computers and -at first- crappy engines. So in your 3d rpg you could actually do less then in 2d (in which of course you can do less then in pnp). Dumbification set in right there.

And consoles.

 

[mondblut]

So where are you seeing gamedev costs rises exactly?

Headcount. 10-20 people plus an immeasurable number of outsource contractors is what passes for "small studio" now. Even a shovelware-tier release costs several hundred thousands of dollar to produce. You may outsource graphics to starving chinese kids all you want; the sheer amount of it still makes it many times as expensive as your early 90s guy drawing a bunch of sprites with 4 animation frames.

Also, LOL @ people blaming playstation and xbox and pretending nintendo and sega were not retard-friendly devices carrying retard entertainment.

 

[Mustawd]

3D. Probably thought of as more engaging and simpler at the same time, all it did was reduce the player's level of imagination involved. "Show" isnt always better then "tell" (or maybe better "suggest") in entertainment. Apart from games, think movies, the Alien series for example.

I'd also throw in the success of Half Life with this. From then on everything had to be "cinematic" Although the story wasn't great, its presentation was key. From then on, that type of presentation was the gold standard.

Which lead to games trying to become interactive movies...

 

[rezaf]

You have to make meshes with more tris, ok, but at the same time you're now free to outsource to poor countries.

This approach will either have you end with a variety of models of inconsistent quality or require you to do a LOT of management and QA. And since the market is global now, chances are even a modeler from Backwateristan knows what he can charge for his work from a contractor in a western country. In earlier games, you could very often get away with stuff that's at least partially "programmer art" - drawn up by moderately skilled programmers that happened to be available and possessed some minor skill in working Deluxe Paint or whatever. You can basically tell games that use this approach nowadays at first glance...

Coding-wise, you now have frameworks like Unity and UE4, which frees up a lot of your programmers' time.

As a (non games) programmer, I can tell you that getting an engine somebody else wrote to do just the stuff you want it to do, not more or less or slightly different stuff, can require as much or even more time than coding it all yourself from scratch. I imagine Unity can be a big help depending on what you want to do, but it isn't a magic solution.

You have the possibility to self-publish with Steam.

That's a pretty big thing, provided you manage to actually get onto the platform. The days where this was a magic bullet are long gone due to the platforms oversaturation with "indie games", but I imagine it's still hugely useful for payment processing, hosting, patching etc.

So where are you seeing gamedev costs rises exactly? And don't cite Skyrim's budget, you can spend 60 million on a car, doesn't mean that cars now cost more, it just means you spend money in a certain way.

Cars are actually a fairly good equivalent since they've also grown more and more expensive.
In cars, you have efficiency enhancements, safety systems and convenience electronics driving the costs. You can't sell a new car you could have sold in the 70s, because people expect (and sometimes the law requires) all that crap these days.
In gaming, you have graphics and UI. Since there are no laws in play, you CAN still ship that game with retro graphics and an archaic UI, but chances are it won't be a big hit. If you want to be REALLY competitive, you have to spend some serious amount of cash - much more than used to be neccessary.

Flash is not a very distinguishing name, indeed. Unkillable Cat only recognized me when I incidentally linked to my old avatar.

I think I still remember your avatar, I think. A small guy/dog(?) with glasses?

Heh, yes, I recognize the avatar. Well met, I guess.

IIRC I had Penfold (from the Danger Mouse cartoon) as an avatar for a while so I think that's the little guy with the glasses you remember. I think in the later days, I had the weightlifting guy from Epyx' "World Games", though.

Edit: Wrongly spelled out Stephen King's clown instead of the DM secretary ...
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rezaf

 

[Bester]

You have to make meshes with more tris, ok, but at the same time you're now free to outsource to poor countries.

This approach will either have you end with a variety of models of inconsistent quality or require you to do a LOT of management and QA. And since the market is global now, chances are even a modeler from Backwateristan knows what he can charge for his work from a contractor in a western country. In earlier games, you could very often get away with stuff that's at least partially "programmer art" - drawn up by moderately skilled programmers that happened to be available and possessed some minor skill in working Deluxe Paint or whatever. You can basically tell games that use this approach nowadays at first glance...

Coding-wise, you now have frameworks like Unity and UE4, which frees up a lot of your programmers' time.

As a (non games) programmer, I can tell you that getting an engine somebody else wrote to do just the stuff you want it to do, not more or less or slightly different stuff, can require as much or even more time than coding it all yourself from scratch. I imagine Unity can be a big help depending on what you want to do, but it isn't a magic solution.

You have the possibility to self-publish with Steam.

That's a pretty big thing, provided you manage to actually get onto the platform. The days where this was a magic bullet are long gone due to the platforms oversaturation with "indie games", but I imagine it's still hugely useful for payment processing, hosting, patching etc.

So where are you seeing gamedev costs rises exactly? And don't cite Skyrim's budget, you can spend 60 million on a car, doesn't mean that cars now cost more, it just means you spend money in a certain way.

Cars are actually a fairly good equivalent since they've also grown more and more expensive.
In cars, you have efficiency enhancements, safety systems and convenience electronics driving the costs. You can't sell a new car you could have sold in the 70s, because people expect (and sometimes the law requires) all that crap these days.
In gaming, you have graphics and UI. Since there are no laws in play, you CAN still ship that game with retro graphics and an archaic UI, but chances are it won't be a big hit. If you want to be REALLY competitive, you have to spend some serious amount of cash - much more than used to be neccessary.

Flash is not a very distinguishing name, indeed. Unkillable Cat only recognized me when I incidentally linked to my old avatar.

I think I still remember your avatar, I think. A small guy/dog(?) with glasses?

Heh, yes, I recognize the avatar. Well met, I guess.

IIRC I had Pennywise (from the Danger Mouse cartoon) as an avatar for a while so I think that's the little guy with the glasses you remember. I think in the later days, I had the weightlifting guy from Epyx' "World Games", though.
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rezaf

You're wrong or overly pessimistic in everything, don't want to go into details.

 

[rezaf]

You're wrong or overly pessimistic in everything, don't want to go into details.

My bad then. Care to provide a link to your AAA quality game made quickly on a modest budget to prove why you're right and I'm wrong?
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rezaf

 

[Shannow]

The problem is that I'm just not really sure if that narrative, which I've seen pop up time and again, is ultimately true and, if so, what fundamental shifts in the marketplace would have led them to being stuck for so long in exile.

There is no such thing as one "true narrative" in any contentious issue.

That said, I agree with most that has been said before.
Other aspects, IMO, would be:
In the beginning the manager types and creative types were partners. Often one and the same person People with a passion of making good games. Over time the manager types came to dominate the creatives. The managers themselves were over time exchanged with suits. Suits with a passion for money.
It's simply how our modern capitalism works. Those who control the (investment) money, control the product. Devs used to have the priority of making good games, and only then make money with them. The suits' sole focus is making money.
To be fair, many devs who did not focus on money-making went bankrupt/were forced into bankruptcy. Another issue with capitalism where the biggest EAts the smaller.
To make serious money you want games with mass-appeal. That means it has to be shiny (3d) and have easy gratification (you are speshul, here is your awesome button). These aspects were not stinted on, since they made the product sell. But other aspects relevant for RPGs were made cheaply. In extreme cases it means that games should be as short as possible and only have to be good in the beginning. Suits'd rather put millions in advertising than into actually improving the game. Since reviews could be bought, negative feedback had little/no impact on early sales. And as was mentioned, longterm is not particularly interesting to suits. Only if you've got a franchise. But they're even willing to sacrifice that, as can be seen with DA2.
Specifically for PC-RPGs I think Oblivion and WoW were the major negative impacts. For suits, "good" is never good enough. You always want more, higher, better. Given their success, these games became the watermark in the RPG-genre. That had to be surpassed, thus sucking publisher money away from anything that didn't look similar. For that suits would put serious investment money on the table. Just look at TOR and its rumored 100 million budget. I think it's also a psychological issue, with suits having really small dicks and trying to compensate. Far less rationality than one would normally attribute.

The recent incline shows the points quite well:
KS makes devs studios more independant from publisher money. The budgets are not huge but one can make decent/good games with them, if all the bling is left out. The widespread use of social media also massively helps. The advertisement budgets can shrink to tiny proportions. Word of mouth is enough to get people to know about your game. With digital distribution platforms you don't need to fight for shelf-space (only for page one ). On the other hand "journalists" are no longer the gatekeepers of information and the major source of reviews. Metacritic and prestigious magazines like the codex are easy sources of information and reviews. Ones presumably not tainted by dorito-gate. (Because of this I also expect an overall improvement of AAA games in the midterm. They won't be able to get away with anything anymore by simply buying reviews. And journalists might develop ethics before everybody stops reading them.)

 

[Bester]

You're wrong or overly pessimistic in everything, don't want to go into details.

My bad then. Care to provide a link to your AAA quality game made quickly on a modest budget to prove why you're right and I'm wrong?
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rezaf

You know what AAA means, right? It means high budget. You're asking me to give you a high bugdet game with low budget.

 

[Norfleet]

Nothing "caused" the decline. The decline is inevitable and inexorable. The entropy of a closed system always increases, therefore, things always get worse. Any appearance of incline is simply a local spike that will actually result in greater decline.

 

[Sranchammer]

These threads breed future GDs

 

[rezaf]

You know what AAA means, right? It means high budget. You're asking me to give you a high bugdet game with low budget.

Even though often perceived this way, AAA actually does not refer to a game's budget. Read the definition on wikipedia or something.

Anyway, that's splitting hairs. I'll just drop the term and go for my initial "competitive" again. Can you link to a competitive game you created?

Note that I'm not the person who came up with the notion that game budgets were on the rise. It's a pretty common conception, and I merely provided my reasoning on why I think you claiming otherwise can't be the universal truth.

You're that guy in the joke that hears the news about a wrong-way driver on the radio and goes like: "They gotta be kiddin' me, one ghost driver. There's hundreds of them!"...
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rezaf

 

[Apexeon]

The 3D engine and its unlimited thirst for content.
The 3D simulator is the bane of incline.

 

[Tehdagah]

(...) Increased advertising leading to games finding audiences instead of audiences finding games. (...)

You can't risk putting millions of dollars to develop a product and then rely on luck to sell it. Remember, millions of dollars.

"The audience will find your game..."

The 3D engine and its unlimited thirst for content.
The 3D simulator is the bane of incline.

3D improves gameplay.

 

[rezaf]

"The audience will find your game..."

Yeah, I still remember that superbowl ad for Minecraft back in the day...

Seriously though, I kinda agree with the point you make.
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rezaf

 

[FeelTheRads]

3D improves gameplay.

Does it? For any kind of game? How?

You can't risk putting millions of dollars to develop a product and then rely on luck to sell it. Remember, millions of dollars.

Maybe don't spend millions of dollars to then have to spend even more millions to advertise it and then cry about piracy when you can't sell 1 billion copies to make the money back.

 

[Infinitron]

If you can multiplatform why leave out PC at all? After all, one could argue that you're just leaving behind an untapped source of revenue if you do that. I mean, designing a console game to work on a PC is much easier than the other way around.

Here's the logic: You've got a marketplace where (just throwing out numbers here) PC gaming is about 10%, Playstation is about 45%, and XBox is about 45%. You need to develop mulitplatform games that work on both Playstation and XBox. So you already have multiplatform development processes in place. If that's the case, why not go the extra mile and develop a PC port as wel?

Now imagine a new scenario. XBox never existed. So you've got PC gaming still at 10%, and Playstation at 90%. See the difference? The logic of just going Playstation-exclusive is much stronger.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

rezaf! :D

IIRC you're from (or were in) Portugal, right?

Great to see you. There are a few HotU'ers around here, though it should be obvious by now that this place is nothing like it.

But back to the topic, it's been said before and I'll say it again: The single biggest harbinger of the decline was Microsoft deciding to enter the console market with the X-Box. But riding on its coattails were several other things, like pointless bottlenecks in game design (like the controller), a broader market with a wider reach and policies enforced by Microsoft to 'standardize' gaming (like making game boxes all have the same X x Y sizes).

 

[Mustawd]

This is all kind of vague. Someone needs to put together a proper decline timeline. For example, which game was "patient zero" in terms of decline?