Zynga (farmville) worth more then EA

[Awor Szurkrarz]

So, what innovation do you, guys expect? Give some examples.

 

[Lyric Suite]

How can one game rack more then an entire publisher?

BTW, interesting to see that the single most popular game out there happens to be isometric.

 

[madbringer]

Oh because it's either sitting on your ass, adding tiny, tiny bits over the span of several decades, at most, or innovating for the sake of innovating because innovation is innovation and innovation is good because it's an innovation.

Guys, here are some words for you to examine and process:

Moderation.
Compromise.
Common sense.

cRPG's were deprived of what should have been a natural progression from what evolved of the genre in the mid-to-late 90's and early 2k, and instead were simplified to cater to a wider, less demanding public. It is "a" innovation, but obviously not "the" innovation (more like reinvention, though), it did make cRPG games stay above the water line, however. Stagnation would be actually even worse, because then the whole genre would go the way of platformers and puzzle/adventure games.

So pick your poison, you're fucked either way, boo fucking hoo, meanwhile the rest of us will sit back and weather the storm of popping moles and enjoy the occasional game worth the tag until the whole genre will undergo a renaissance.

 

[FeelTheRads]

How can one game rack more then an entire publisher?

It's that goddamn slumping economy. It's not EA's fault.

 

[DraQ]

So, what innovation do you, guys expect? Give some examples.

Ever been to Codex Workshop? Awesome place.

How can one game rack more then an entire publisher?

BTW, interesting to see that single most popular game out there happens to be isometric.

And a decline incarnate.

 

[commie]

Good. The less overlap between actual games and casual games, the better. Drawing greedy lowest common denominator panderers away from proper gaming just makes more breathing room for the indies and small companies that aren't so encased in their own lard to prevent the from trying anything remotely risky. It's not that smart people wanting smart games will suddenly disappear just because retards fap their lives away on fakebook.

The only bad thing is that this may delay the moment when the giants splatter all over the photorealism barrier, which would bring much more effective and thorough cleansing of the industry.

This. If EA decides to go that way and takes Activshit and the rest with them and all they ever release are Sims meet Farmville type of crap on Fecesbook then the entire PC market will be left open for smaller groups that would have been muscled out by those fuckers anyway.
I had originally hoped that EA and the rest would start making games exclusively for consoles and just leave us the fuck alone, but any direction they fuck off to is good enough for me.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

So, what innovation do you, guys expect? Give some examples.

Ever been to Codex Workshop? Awesome place.

Been there. If I'm not mistaken most of that was already done either in cRPGs or PnP RPGs.

 

[Excommunicator]

Why the hell would I want "innovation" when there's barely anything done in the genre I like?

You just answered your own question.


And to quote your signature:

It's all fucking shit.

Sums up the industry and your thought processes.

 

[Hobo Elf]

How can one game rack more then an entire publisher?

BTW, interesting to see that the single most popular game out there happens to be isometric.

Easy. It costs nothing to play, but you can pay if you want to. You don't even need to download or install it to play it. You just click on it and that's about it. It's easy to get into since there are no prior investments required to try it out.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Why the hell would I want "innovation" when there's barely anything done in the genre I like?

You just answered your own question.

Herp what?

So it's bad to want "clones" of Arcanum and Fallout but it is innovation if somebody does them? Maybe try and decide which one?

 

[zeitgeist]

What confuses me about farmville is that the only people who play it are the exclusively, passionately anti-game people. You know, the ones who, if you asked them if they liked video games, would go NO NO THOSE ARE FOR GEEKS I AM A COOL TEEN GIRL/CONTENT MIDDLE-AGED HOUSEWIFE WHO ONLY WATCHES COOKERY PROGRAMS FICTION IS FOR KIDS (EXCEPT TWILIGHT). Even after sinking hundreds of hours into farmville, they would probably still say this. I don't get it. I hate people.

Good. The less overlap between actual games and casual games, the better. Drawing greedy lowest common denominator panderers away from proper gaming just makes more breathing room for the indies and small companies that aren't so encased in their own lard to prevent the from trying anything remotely risky. It's not that smart people wanting smart games will suddenly disappear just because retards fap their lives away on fakebook.

Yeah, but the bigger this casual market gets, the more "actual" games will pander to the casual players, trying to attract at least a part of the demographics. It's highly unlikely publishers will ever say "ok, we'll ignore those millions of people, and just make a game for these five thousand people instead" again. At least not most of them. It's similar to the post-WoW state of the MMO industry.

You can already see this in many PC-exclusive genres, take the point and click adventure for example. There's a somewhat recent casual subtype of the point&clicker called the "hidden object" game, and it has almost completely ruined the genre, directly and indirectly. All the small companies who would otherwise make decent point&clickers are making those, and even when someone makes an actual classic point&clicker, it's almost always tailored to appeal to the huge casual hidden object gamer crowd, and you can probably guess that this doesn't make the game any more complex...

In essence, what the esteemed POOPOO MCBUMFACE said is very insightful - more and more, everyone is trying to change established game genre conventions to appeal to people who don't even like games.

 

[Excommunicator]

Why the hell would I want "innovation" when there's barely anything done in the genre I like?

You just answered your own question.

Herp what?

So it's bad to want "clones" of Arcanum and Fallout but it is innovation if somebody does them? Maybe try and decide which one?

When you are unhappy with the way things are, you try to improve them.

If your solution to the state of games today - and this is certainly how it sounds - is to completely erase/ignore everything that everyone has done or has been trying to do after that game, then you are ignorant to the limits of your own enjoyment.
That would be the end result of reverting all attempts at innovation in games, and that is what you are suggesting whether you mean to or not.

Your Golden idols of Fallout and Arcanum and the like were and are wrought with problems. Even you will admit this I am sure. Every game in existence has a certain amount of conceptual flaws, and yet your response would be to make no attempts at improving anything?

You don't respond to such a situation with "Oh but they are fun so let us just remake them exactly the way they are, and forget about any attempt to improve their flaws".

How do you expect to get past these problems?

Innovation can be big or small; it can use a lot of existing architecture, or it can try to take most of that away and replace it with something entirely new. The point is not what is changed in the process. The point is how the concept or product has improved as a result of the changes. You may want some things in your experiences to stay the same - and that is fair enough - but that does not mean everything related is completely immune to any form of improvement.

Taking ALL of the practical results away for a moment: if for absolutely nothing else then innovation is there to stimulate improvement in the way we think, whether through successful or unsuccessful attempts.

The value of innovation in a creative industry like this is not limited to the amount of immediate success in each attempt.


You and others seem to have a very twisted view of what innovation is.

Read some more about it before you bother to reply.

 

[DraQ]

Additionally the difference between innovation and innovashun is that the latter usually involves trying too hard without having any meaningful or creative idea. This way we end up with stuff like ME's 'OMGTOTALLYAWSUMANDINNOVATIVEDIALOG!!!!1' that actually changes 'I dunno' in game.

Or FableIII's inventory.

The actual innovations would be HP-less combat (Dwarf Fortress seems to have implemented it), integrating this combat with actual engine, integrating presentation with mechanics, allowing for emergent environmental puzzles and so on.

 

[madbringer]

HP-less combat

How would that work?

 

[Hobo Elf]

HP-less combat

How would that work?

Injury?

 

[DraQ]

HP-less combat

How would that work?

Injury?

Codex Workshop?

 

[FeelTheRads]

You don't respond to such a situation with "Oh but they are fun so let us just remake them exactly the way they are, and forget about any attempt to improve their flaws".

Is that what I said?

Here's what I said:

Yes, because it would be totally bad. There were hundreds of them already and they improved on the formula until there was nothing else to do.

Hint: It was sarcastic. Because the formula wasn't perfected, or at least improved.

Also, improving and fixing flaws =/= innovation. At least not what Awor Szurkrarz meant when he mentioned Spore or The Sims. I don't think anyone was talking about copying Fallout and Arcanum 1:1

In short: first try to fix what's already there, instead of starting something else that would likely remain in an unfinished state too. Get it?

 

[Alex]

Games need innovation to grow. You can't just, "clone" Arcanum, just changing the setting and a few rules. For the game to be any good, you would have to tie the elements of the new story and setting to the rules. This would need you to understand this new setting and rules enough to come up with good ways to link these elements together. And this is innovation.

I think the reason innovation got a bad name is because a lot of people used the word to mean a change in priorities, in principles, in game design, like the transition from turn based combat to real time, which was heralded as innovation long after it became the norm.

The key problem here is not innovation, though, but a change in priorities and principles. Real time combat, for example, appeared because visceral and fast gameplay became more important, at least in the eyes of the publishers and developers, than tactical challenge.

 

[MetalCraze]

Fuck innovation. No dev today is capable of it. Give me a good game. Or improved old shit like ArmA2

 

[fizzelopeguss]

My mum loves this shit. From what little i've seen of it though it definately takes more grey matter to play than a modern warfare.

 

[Luzur]

wait, Farmville? that game where you sow corn and milk cows?

 

[Alex]

@FeelTheRads:

Sorry, didn't see your post. I think I understand what you mean, but I think you and Awor Szurkrarz are playing down how important and useful experimentation is in this field. Spore itself might have been an interesting games (at least from what I gathered of it) if it had a more open gameplay.

For example, let's take Morrowind and Oblivion. I am not a big fan of Morrowind, but a lot of people here seem to appreciate it for its graphical design, its rich lore and the way these elements related to each other. Then comes Oblivion and does away with all these things. This helps us understand a few things, such as how people who liked the first were immersed because of the lore, while the second's strong point seems to be its graphics. Another interesting fact is that the people who got most immersed in Oblivion seemed to do so by ignoring what was going on in the game, instead creating their own stories. This shows two, very distinct kinds of immersion.

So, my point isn't that we should emulate either, but learn from them, and thus, experimentation is important. Morrowind shows that you can increase a lot the player's attachment to the game by making the setting and the art design cohesive, while Oblivion shows that if you want to have a game that is dynamic, a focus on graphics like that of Oblivion is probably out of place.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Neither providing lots of lore (done by BG series and probably lots of others) nor improving graphics is anything new.

 

[Alex]

No, but I understand (and I may well be wrong here, feel free to correct me) that the particular combination of detailed 3D graphics, lore and open world working together to create an explorable environment. Even if that is not so, however, the point still stay. By creating one different game that takes a bolder step, that departs from tradition, even if the game itself isn't a success, it can help us make better games by seeing what worked in it and what didn't.

 

[Derper]

Games need innovation to grow. You can't just, "clone" Arcanum, just changing the setting and a few rules.

I would take a clone over the current kind of innovation any day. Why not correct the flaws of Arcanum and write a new story/setting? Wouldn't that be a perfect slam dunk?

 

[The_Pope]

This is about share price, and has more to do with bandwagon jumping in the stock market than zynga or EA.