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Gamasutra's Best Of 2008: Top 5 Disappointments
by Leigh Alexander
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December 9, 2008
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Throughout December, Gamasutra will be presenting a year-end retrospective, discussing notable games, events, developers, and industry figures of 2008, from the perspective of our position covering the art, science, and business of games.
We first took a look at the top five downloadable games released in 2008. Next, we go in-depth on 2008's top five biggest disappointments, from rampant piracy to the oft-downplayed impact of the economic downturn on the games industry.
5. Wii Software Is Still Weak
Sure, it's a tough sell to assert that the Wii is a disappointment of any stripe. It outsells its fellow consoles handily, has brought gaming into the mainstream family living room, and has done a goodly heap of shiny white image control for an industry that many still want to relegate to the domain of the basement nerd.
But the Wii's banner success seems to do little good overall for anyone other than Nintendo -- its lineup of successful third party titles is still too thin as the console comes up on its third Christmas, while the company's own Wii Fit and Wii Sports remain top sellers.
And while Nintendo has long promised "something for the hardcore," few rejoiced to know that Animal Crossing: City Folk was that something, and barely iterative on its predecessors to boot.
Nintendo can easily keep in riches through the whims of the faddish mainstream trendline -- and that's only sensible, the well-earned fruits of brilliant business savvy and an admirable marketing campaign. But it's disappointing to see that arguably the most successful console of all time has so little to do with the rest of the video game industry.
4. Rampant, Unrepentant Piracy
Piracy has always been a problem for the game industry, and one could even argue that an increase in the variety of copy protection mechanisms and the success of distribution services like Steam has actually lessened the issue in recent years.
But unfortunately, we've got few reliable ways to measure it concretely, so all we know is that whether it's a high-budget, long-lead title like Spore or a wildly innovative indie success story like World of Goo, alarming numbers in the audience still think it's fair to steal en masse.
Some digital rights management methods are controversial, as are the publishers that continue to employ them despite widespread protest, and the industry has yet to offer compelling data that demonstrates the extent to which piracy hurts the business.
But turning a profit on a game is a high-risk proposition already, and any activity that shaves those profits harms innovation and the medium's future health -- and it's disappointing to see continuing volumes of people who believe there's any rationale for that.
3. The Holiday Glut
Last year, we were promised that 2008 would be a breakout year for a maturing medium, and this holiday saw one of the most impressive release slates across the board in terms of quality and differentiation than we have perhaps ever seen.
But did anyone, whether critic, reviewer or consumer, really have time to give any of these titles more than a cursory fifteen minutes of fame? The year-end crunch meant hype-driven flashbangs that dissipated far too fast before cultural pressure demanded attentions turn to the Next Big Thing -- which is a shame, when what we've asked for all along is titles with enough depth for us to savor at length.
And the holiday glut tactic actually turned out to create additional challenges for the industry as the floor fell out from under the economy -- better sales from better titles earlier in the summer might have boosted investor confidence ahead of tough times. Let's hope that next year publishers space their crown jewels out a bit better, for everyone's sake.
2. Lack Of Critical Vocabulary
The critical reception for many of the year's interesting titles often seemed inconsistent and stilted throughout the year. It seemed like many reviewers (among whom this editor includes herself) struggled to find a new language through which to evaluate the offerings of a medium whose complexity -- both technically and creatively -- ramped to new heights in 2008.
Reviewers even argued amongst themselves the merit of the assertion that they might be missing the forest for the trees, as the old "product guide" methodology continues to translate ever more poorly to the modern era.
Discussion and media coverage of games -- which is capable of creating ambassadorship between the culture of games and the culture of more established mainstream media -- would do well in 2009 to embrace the distinction between "review" and "criticism," and to better incorporate the idea that games are now a much more subjective, experiential medium than they were in the days of pixels and bloops.
1. We Are Not Recession-Proof
Former U.S. Presidential candidate John McCain received a widespread backlash when he faced the darkening economic horizon and claimed, "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." He later clarified that, in making this assertion, he was referring to the spirit of the American worker, but general consensus held it was still something of a naive statement.
And the fundamentals of the game industry may indeed still be strong -- monthly NPD is still growing, with declines largely due to mitigating factors in year-over-year comparisons. Hardware is still selling, and a raft of analyst opinions and retailer surveys show that even the cash-strapped consumer is still buying video games.
But even the stalwarts among the industry's major publishers feel the pinch when investors -- themselves cash-strapped consumers -- get skittish. And lowered share values, sales declines or profit gaps that might be statistically insignificant to them can be outright punishing to smaller or more challenged companies.
In the end, nobody likes reporting on layoffs, but we did quite a lot of that as the whispered word "recession" grew into a roar, and the industry indeed felt the impact from the bottom to the top. Companies like Electronic Arts, THQ and NCsoft tightened their belts and terminated projects and staff.
Midway now threatens to buckle under the weight of its backers' credit crunch, and many smaller studios were jettisoned, acquired or shuttered. Those that remain face major challenges -- a credit crisis can spell the end for promising venture-backed startup studios who may now never see their projects get off the ground.
So it'll likely be another successful holiday for the video game industry, even more impressive and positively portentous considering what it's up against. But even when products sell, when people are hurt, "recession-proof" is the wrong word.
Rather than parrot the gratifying refrain, it may be wise to prepare to consider how the displacement of talent and the climate of increasing risk aversion will affect the creative direction of the industry in the coming years.
[Do you agree or disagree with these picks? Feel free to comment below. We'll pick the best reader comments on each list for our final retrospective, to debut on Gamasutra close to the holidays.]
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While sales numbers would probably continue to grow, the industry's morphing may actually make it healthier than ever within less than two years.
As for the critical vocabulary, with the likes of Megaman 9 and games like Ico for example, there may be needs to make people realize it may become harder to judge games just by sound, graphics, replayability, etc., when standards of judgement are becoming very contrasted. That said, I don't think emotions have become a greater element in the appreciation of games today, than they were during the ages of Pong and PacMan, and good reviews already include those aspects; you just have to look for them.
It's just that we are realizing it a bit more nowadays, and possibly trying to put the emphasis on it to some greater extent, but if anything, David Sudnow's experience on Breakout pretty much proves this is nothing new. It's a question that critics and designers could tackle together, along the topic of scores and the impact of metacritic systems.
Clearly, I was wrong, because Wii is far from being forgotten, but I don't see anyone coming up with a good idea of how to turn it into something more than just a gadget. I'm not sure whether it's caused by developers not understanding the interface, or maybe by the interface having too many technical limitations. In any case, I think this is something Nintendo should have done more about.
As for piracy, I've been disappointed by my fellow gamers for many years now. I remember when an AAA game would cost 160 PLN - three times the pocket money my parents were giving me each month at that time. My highschool friends were all saying they would start buying games if the price dropped by half. More than ten years later, a typical retail price of a PC game is 100 PLN, or $30. That's less than half the old price due to steady GDP growth and inflation. But all my colleagues keep saying the same: when games are half as expensive as they are now, they will start buying them.
It's not that people are too poor to buy games, nor is it true that PC gaming is "dead". CD Projekt managed to sell some 200 thousand copies of "Witcher" to the local market. Usually, the most popular games struggle to sell a fifth of that. "Witcher" did very well, locally, because it was a decent game by a local developer, based on a novel by famous local author. People bought the game because it was the patriotic thing to do. In other words, they were given an extra psychological incentive to buy the game. My major disappointment is that the game being a result of someone's hard work is not a good enough reason by itself.
I think the industry should stop hunting pirates, because it's futile and only seems to antagonize gamers. We should focus on education instead. For instance, my mother works for a state-funded education program for the unemployed. Most of her students are adults who are not computer-literate. She teaches them basic skills, such as how to use a word processor, a Web browser, an e-mail client, and so on. She also often confronts them about software piracy, which to them feels like a very natural and obvious thing to do. A simple observation: most people don't realise it may take fifty people to develop a computer game. When my mother tells them "my son makes computer games", they usually think I develop them all by myself. Some of them think I'm doing this as a hobby. Surely, I have some other, real job.
I don't feel the holiday glut is much of a problem to me as a consumer. I'm just going to buy and play two games a month, as usual, which means some holiday releases will have to wait for six months or more. Maybe they'll get cheaper in the meantime. I don't understand why everybody seems to feel they have to play everything as soon as possible. Most readers don't care when book translations delay local publications by a year or two, or ten. Why should gamers be more impatient? Is the newest game going to be less enjoyable in a year's time? Let's face it - you're playing them for the bragging rights, aren't you? ;-)
The lack of critical vocabulary is a very old problem. Back around 2000, it was a major topic for flames on the local Usenet. I think it's one of main reasons why many people have turned away from paper magazines. Why pay for a review, if an opinion of some random user on a Web forum seems just as informed? Mind you, there's no local equivalent for sites like Gamasutra or The Escapist to this day.
As for recession, it may actually be a good thing. It will encourage - or maybe even enforce - a change of development philosophy. I remember a project I took part in, in which some half a million dollars and six months were wasted because of incorrect high-level decisions that could be easily avoided. Judging from what other developers report occasionally, I suspect the "waste factor" of a typical AAA project is in the order of fifty per cent. It's high time to drop some bad habits, but it seems we as industry are unable to do so unless something forces us to. The recession will surely force everybody to become more frugal.
1. Piracy: While we can all agree that game piracy should not be encouraged, and is detrimental to the industry. I cannot see how this is a "disappointment." When a rational actor is offer two (nearly) identical products, one which has a cost associated to it, and the other with no apparent cost, the rational action is to opt for the free one. This should come as no surprise. As such, the disappointment should be that the industry has largely not followed the lead taken by Stardock and Valve, who offer a different experience to the paying customer.
2. Nintendo: While again we can all agree that we would like to have seen a wider variety of titles on the Wii, the question remains: What does Nintendo owe the rest of the gaming industry? The answer: Absolutely Nothing. Sure, if you're a developer it would be great to have access to the platform with the largest install base in the world, but what makes that deal good for Nintendo? They have seemingly stumbled onto a gold mine, and people are - generally speaking - reluctant to share their gold.
3. Recessions: Nothing is recession proof. The concept of an industry being "recession proof" is somewhat ludicrous. If you have to finance things (as all companies must) you need to go to access some manner of capital market. These markets are where recession occur (again generally speaking). I think, by looking a tad too often at the sales charts, we tend to over estimate the relevance of consumers to the overall viability of an industry.
and finally on of my own - Standards:
What this industry needs, in my opinion, is better standards. This includes better employment standards e.g. a common understanding of what a "game developer" is exactly. Doing this would greatly increase the ability of designers to move from one firm to another without having to re-prove themselves in every new job. This might also include standards as to the evaluation of games, the creation of meaningful genres, and other points. The idea here is that if the games industry is to stand as a proper industry, and be respected as such, it will need to start acting the part.
Isn't it more disappointing to see that 'the rest of the video game industry' wants so little to do with arguably the most successful games console?
A company striving for new and fresh experiences is being left out in the cold by an industry regularly complaining of sequel-itis and formulaic game releases. It's a shame.
3rd parties have delivered some great games as well - World of Goo (I prefer the Wii version with multiplayer), Lost Winds, Tetris Party (which reintroduced Co-op for the first time since Tengen), Bomb Blox, No More Heroes and Shaun White (a lot of fun on the Balance Board) are all top tier games, and there were plenty of other interesting and 'original' (when compared to the 'industry) games like Blast Works and de Blob.
I'm glad the Wii is going down a different path than the rest of the industry. There have been bad games, but there have been some amazing sparks of goodness that seem to be forgotten before they are known.
John McCain's statement was entirely true. The fundamentals of our economy are strong. This economic recession was caused by one specific failure in our gigantic economic structure - the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, which incidentally was an artificial construct of the Democrats.
Furthermore, Barack Obama himself said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong, in one of his many pandering stump speeches. This wasn't widely reported because the media was too busy falling all over themselves to lick his bootheels.
Even if you can make the extremely dubious claim that your comment on McCain has any relevance, it would be the opposite of what you claim, since as you point out the fundamentals of the game industry are quite strong - stronger than at any time in history - but the outside market is pulling down sales.
Gamasutra, please stop allowing these idealogues to use their pseudo-subjects to give naive and ignorant political lectures.
Heh...I already have...for years.
I wouldn't be throwing around the phrase "naive and ignorant" too much since your comments are exactly that. Saying the fundamentals of this economy are strong is like saying the response to Hurricane Katrina was exemplary.
The fundamentals of the economy are not strong when there are record unemployment rates, an astronomical deficit, massive debt, a major industry (U.S. auto industry) is on the brink of bankruptcy, states are faced with major budget issues, government programs are being slashed and we're still pissing away $10-$12 billion a month on an unnecessary war. Yes, the subprime mortgage mess is a major contributor but there are plenty of other ways the Bush administration has driven this country into a wall.
Try reading a bit more before getting on your shaky soapbox.
The point was that even if those fundamentals are strong, the crisis is still a real thing that hurts. American economy will certainly recover with time, but lots of people will have lost their jobs and savings by then.
Same with game development: it may seem healthy, because sales are rising etc., but there are already first victims of recession, so it's not "recession-proof".
It seems there is more of a lack of a tradition of criticism than a lack of a vocabulary as such. There is definitely an audience eager for it, if not an audience accustomed to it. Editors are obviously aware of the inadequacy of the product review model, but they don't feel at home in the criticism model. There is a lot of lamentation about how game criticism doesn't seem to exist, a lot of wandering through the desert, a lot of concern for how best to approach this paradigm shift, etc.... It is a skill like any other--you jump, flail your limbs, try not to drown and eventually you'll get the hang of it.
As for #1 - who's to say that those companies weren't going to do that anyway? Do some companies lay people off every December? Would they have still been considered underperformers if 2008 was a healthy year? (No opinion there myself.)
"If anything, the recession may be the push the industry needed to lay off the old ways, and move towards the flexibility granted by intelligent outsourcing, orbiting core studios."
I'm sorry, but I take a credible amount of offense to this statement. Forgive me if I'm reading this the wrong way.
It sounds like you are advocating what is one of the root causes of our financial problems of today. Outsourcing leads to a loss in local talent pools, and proves that making money is more important than the community's quality of life. What you are suggestion is that we have a few highly paid execs making office decisions and then shipping off the work-load to the cheapest bidder.
We don't have to wonder what killed the US auto industry. We know what killed it. Outsourcing is the death knell of an industry. The call that the love has fled from the grasping hands of profit. As soon as big companies start cutting corners by outsourcing it almost forces the little guys to follow suit just to keep a positive PnL. Interested investors want to now if your company is also being competitive through aggressive outsourcing. It is a bad way to take.
While I don't think core design studios are a bad thing, I think that culling the industry down to small development groups buttressed by heavy outsourcing is.
As for the "waste factor" mentioned by Jacek, I think that this is something of a case by case problem. Large companies with deep pockets are always going to be wasteful, because ultimately people are lazy. Those that don't have to struggle are lazier. To say that the industry needs to solve it's wasteful tendencies is to ignore human foibles. Certain people need to be more diligent with their capital, the industry isn't those people, it just happens to have a bunch of them running around.
This may not necessarily be bad for the overall industry: likely there will be less AAA projects with big budgets but more creative and small teams will find space working on innovative ideas and games focusing on platforms like XBLA, PSN and Wiiware.
Do try not to use the terms "out-sourcing" and "off-shoring" (which is what you're talking about) interchangably - they're not the same thing.
As someone who's preparing to enter the industry this news has been a major concern of mine; with a lot of talented people, who already have industry experience, being dropped from the many companies who are forced to cut back staff it does not bode well for new talent coming into the industry at junior level.
However, while you can't work any harder sometimes, you can always work smarter. That's what I call "development philosophy". There are many ways in which you can make your project cheaper and more likely to succeed, without adding yourself work (in fact, most of these reduce the amount of work needed):
1. Asset reuse. It allows you to save on asset creation, which is a major factor in every AAA budget. Many assets are unique to a given game, but many others, like furniture, small architecture, and foliage, are more or less generic. You can use them over and over again, and nobody's going to mind. Except we often don't do that, because either nobody cares, or no one knows where the previous project backup was stored, or the polycount doesn't seem high enough etc.
2. Non-realistic art direction. What's the most expensive thing in the world? A realistic 3D model of a human that moves realistically. We don't always need those. "Portal" didn't. Indie games make do with cartoon-style 2D, and nobody blames them.
3. Rigorous software engineering practice. Most frequent conclusions in postmortems are things like "yeah, we should have made a prototype before we started doing levels", or "our dialogue list was a mess", or "we had to throw everything away two years into production, because we came to realise the game sucked", or "the game is a third of what we wanted it to be, we were just too ambitious". These are all things that should be obvious to every single computer science undergrad. Apparently, either everybody gets carried away as soon as they start development, or nobody listens to software engineers.
4. Formalised software lifecycle models. Game development is a risky business, but there are many risk management practices. They don't require you to do more work, they just require you to do it in a specific order. Things like the spiral model, for example: it's like greenligting to n-th power. You start with a single guy working on a concept. If it gets a green light, you set up a small team to create requirement analysis. If it gets a green light, you set up a slightly bigger team to do the essential prototypes. If those get their green lights, you can increase the head count again and start detailed design. As soon as design starts to look solid, you hire all the asset artists, and construction begins. If the project doesn't get the green light at any point, you don't cry, because you've saved like 95% of the budget, and most of the work you've done so far (concepts, prototypes, designs) can be reused.
5. Brave designs. A genuinely innovative, original, or artistic game doesn't need to look great, it's as simple as that. Copycats do, because better execution is their only advantage. "Execution", or content creation, is the most expensive part. If you want to save on it, then the game needs to offer something unique. Neat ideas tend to turn players' attention away from neat visuals.
6. Distributed project structure. Large projects have a high organisational overhead. So make them smaller. Split your team of one hundred into interdisciplinary feature teams, and have each of them take care of some aspect of the game. Give them clear goals and requirements (e.g. "this level needs to have an overall mood of scariness, we introduce the main NPC at the end of it, and it needs to present the following key events to the player"). Then give them a budget (e.g. "your asset allowance for this level is fifty man-days"). And then give them autonomy. The benefits: a) your project leader can focus on the vision rather than particulars, b) obscure details and parameters are given proper attention by the feature team, c) essentially every team member contributes their ideas to the design in an organised fashion (it's not design by committee, because each feature team is given clear goals, and each team member has authority over different aspect of the feature), d) every feature in the game is worked on by a team of two to five people most of the time.
These are all things a lot of people have been talking about, and they all have already been done. They're just not being done on a regular basis. Those who adapt them will survive. The rest will go bankrupt, because development costs are already astronomical, and our sales projections will soon go down in flames.
... all of which happened after McCain's statement.
And those still aren't 'fundamentals of the American economy'. They are facets of our economy.
And furthermore, the fundamentals are still sound. The very concept of a society based in capitalism is that there will be boom and bust. This is why we still have a >90% employment rate, even during one of the worst recessions we've had. This is why the vast majority of businesses are still functional.
McCain's comment, which has been widely mocked by naive people, was intended to offset two things: panic and an emotional swing to socialism. McCain was trying to remind us that there are bad times in any system, but that does not mean the system is fundamentally flawed or unsound. And he was correct. If politicians would stop meddling for political points, the system would right itself: the companies that have practiced poor business would fail and other companies would rise to take their place. This doesn't mock anyone's pain or suffering. It's the 'hope' and 'optimism' everyone claims to want, until they hear it from the guy they've been told not to like. And as I've pointed out, it was echoed by Obama in his stump speeches - on the days he wasn't mocking the comment.
But as others have pointed out, this is neither here nor there. Which is why it SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN PART OF THE ARTICLE. It doesn't even really set up the point she pretends to have set up. It's an irrelevant name check, like Ernest Adams' odious Obama love letter. Personal politics have no place in these articles.
I also take issue with the apparent inability of some game writers to make a distinction between an innovative game (The Force Unleashed, Spore, Mirror's Edge) and a game made for the purposes of improving upon past ideas (Deadspace).