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EA's Hilleman: Biz Shift Means No New Consoles For A While
by Leigh Alexander [PC, Console/PC]
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August 28, 2009
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The explosion of casual platforms and digital distribution has ushered in new design paradigms, and core console makers have exhausted themselves launching the current generation -- so a new console generation isn't coming anytime soon, says Electronic Arts chief creative officer Rich Hilleman.
"I expected we’ll see a PlayStation 3.5 before we see a PlayStation 4 and an Xbox 560 before we see an Xbox 720,” said Hilleman at Stanford's Hot Chips conference, according to Venturebeat.
"The biggest shift is how fast packaged goods games are changing and going away," he said. The barrier to entry for digitally-distributed portable games on iPhone, Nintendo DSi and PSP is getting lower and lower, and spells a two-to-one dominance for such platforms over traditional consoles.
That means lower development costs and smaller team sizes, Hilleman said, calling it the "democratization of game development." While it creates a more competitive environment for traditional developers, it also creates an entry point for talent that will serve games in the end.
Another factor affecting the timing and nature of future console generations is on-demand and streaming services, concepts beginning to crop up with cloud-based set-top box services like OnLive.
Hilleman is looking forward to these technologies, and says he knows of seven startups globally working on "remote desktop for gaming" services.
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While I am all for innovation, the "old crap" sells. It sustains companies. Hopefully giving them the time and money to innovate once in a while.
Innovation is not the same as invention.
Each iterative title builds upon its predecessor, adding new features, refining old ones, and delivering a better experience.
Obviously fresh ideas are good for the industry. But Creatively Bankrupt? please, the industry is saturated with talent. Unfortunately the economy has made everyone hedge their bets.
Maybe I've just been jaded since Spore disappointed so utterly, but video games these days aren't worth the power they draw from the grid.
Sounds a bit cynical to me. I think you could take that stance and say nothing has been innovative since the 90s, but perhaps it's more accurate to say that the innovations haven't been as obvious as they were in the 90s, such as going from 16bit sprites to polygon graphics. Which I might agree with, but I wouldn't say that means innovation is dead necessarily.
You say Braid is innovative, and it is imo, but it also relies heavily on previous established gameplay. It just happens to include a time manipulation element, that can also be seen in games predating Braid. But the way it uses these elements is quite innovative.
I disagree with the notion that the industry as a whole is creatively bankrupt. It just depends on where you're looking. In the movie industry, if I'm looking for creativity or risk taking I'm probably not going to find it in the summer blockbuster action films. If you're pointing to the Halos, Call of Duties, Final Fantasies and Maddens of the world and declaring the industry bankrupt then I think you're just looking in the wrong direction.
Another thing to think about is romanticism of the previous age versus the present. The NES and SNES have tons of great games that were innovative for their times and that are still fun to play. But you can't ignore the hundreds upon hundreds of utter crap titles that were released as well. Same with PSOne. We remember the great ones and the truly horrible ones.
The term "industry" is defined as "the people or companies engaged in a particular kind of commercial enterprise" and refers to a great many more categories of people and companies than merely first- or third-party developers of video games for console platforms. Within the industry supply chain, there is innovation at every point, from investment (games-focused venture capital) to distribution/consumption (Steam).
With regard to products, the types of games, in addition to the most popular sort, is growing, including: newsgames (Food Import Folly), cause games (Darfur is Dying), brain/puzzle games (Brain Age), serious games (Tactical Language & Culture Training System), medical games (treatments at Virtual Reality Medical Center), advergames (King Games series), Christian games (The Bible Game), educational games (Sim City), exergames (Dance Dance Revolution), casual games (Bejeweled), and big-screen games (an emerging category pioneered by Big Screen Gaming). The online games/virtual worlds space is expanding, too, with examples including adult-themed social worlds (Red Light Center), user-driven worlds (Second Life), massively multiplayer games (World of Warcraft), and web-based online game/virtual world platforms (Metaplace).
This trend toward more variation is not a symptom of a "creatively bankrupt" industry.
I personally feel that innovation isn't something you try to accomplish, it just comes as a result of your work. The best thing that game developers can do is to use the current known game design ideals to create the best experience possible then when you have something great, build upon that, and innovation just might shine through. I see all these people trying to create innovation, but as a result they forget the fundamentals and end up just reinventing the wheel or just a very bad game.
The reason I started off by saying there is a cut off point for innovation is because there is only so many ways that you can control a character or situation (gameplay) just like there are only so many ways that you can point a camera lens at a character or situation. Innovation just might be a dead end road, so how about we just visit some nice locations along the way before driving off the cliff.
Computers are simulation devices, they don't just play back authored content, they interpret and create. There are myriad different worlds/distinct sets of inter-reacting rules which have not yet been conceived.
Look back to the 80s and 90s where very often each new game was a genre unto itself. Look at the demoscene where the number of different stylish and distinct aesthetics puts modern games to shame.
Maybe part of the problem these days is that the technology is geared towards large static data-sets with heavy pre-computation. There are probably also business/production factors which lead to a preference for the known over the unknown.
If you want a humbling experience, consider Skool Daze ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skool_Daze ), an adventure/action game embedded within a quite impressive and immersing simulation, running on an 8bit 3MHz CPU with 48k RAM. Even a single Cell SPU is orders of magnitude more capable, but the code currently running on them is usually orders of magnitude less imaginative.
With all the digital distribution models, I think creativity is not as risky. At least on the small scale. Look at games like Flow, PixelJunk Eden, etc. These are good games, creative and well received. When a game costs $50M+ a publisher wants a reasonable expectation of success. We can only hope that a publisher would allow a developer to take risks for every two (or some number of) successful titles.
a few posts here surfaced the fact that context is often missed or overlooked. looking in the wrong place and at the wrong time is usually going to net out subjective or arbitrary findings.
"democratization of game development" is a great way to highlight some good out of bad. quicker to market, cheaper to make, smaller overhead, etc. is going to help re-balance some of the biz, hopefully. but, there's always going to be gatekeepers, so for now: "what is your favorite color?"
A gulf no longer exists between the current generation of consoles (Wii, PS3, 360) and a high end PC (like a PC running 4890/275/285 or even a 4870/260). There was an enormous gulf that grew ever wider between the consoles around the year 2002 and the time of the rollout of the 360 in 2005.
Consoles, as we all kno don't change incrimentally in terms of performance and graphics like PC's do with their CPUS and graphics cards, rather consoles change in leaps and bounds. Right now there isn't a leap or a bound for the consoles to make that would fundamentally change the user experience in terms of 3D graphics and performance.
I really don't think that consumers are clamoring to have a high end PC Crysis experience. In fact, I think that consumers are already thinking they are getting just (even though they aren't) that through games like Call of Duty 4/WoW, Mass Effect, Batman, Gears of War 1 and 2, Uncharted 1 and soon 2, and so on.
Instead, the console makers as focusing on changing the way we interact with our devices through peripherals like motion controls and censors.
As Hilleman points out, there isn't a financial base from which the console makers to justify another generation of consoles now. They shot their wad, so to speak, on the PS3 and the 360, and they know that rolling out a console that would give the same experience as a PC with an i7 and a 295 just wouldn't pay off. Consumers just wouldn't see any reason to buy them.
Right now the PS3 and 360 is taking great advantage of the HD capable panels growing ever larger in our living rooms, and proliferating into out dens, bedrooms and college dorms. Offering another more capable console isn't going to improve that much on what they are getting now. In fact, the console as competing if not outright beating the high end PC for the video game market--no matter what kind of power can be gotten from a PC even at the jaw droppingly low high end PC prices.
Which brings to the last of this long winded, and perhaps master of the obvious post, I think the only console maker that could roll out another high end console and win is, of course, Nintendo. The Wii is so underpowered that another generation of the Wii could capture the market. Imagine the Wii that plays DVDs, has a big hard drive, pushes 1080p and has spot on motion control and capture, provides a browser, is backwards compatible, is wireless of course, and talks to my DS version X.....
In every industry there are people who believe the path to riches is ...
1. Create a simplistic, low-value solution (in the games industry this is "shovelware")
2. Copy a currently successful idea. (This might even work for the first couple of people to do so!)
Just because the people exist it does not mean creativity is absent.
The game industry is ultimately about entertainment. While we can applaud artistic merit and creativity, in the end if a game entertains, even if it is derivative, it is a success.
Many "artistic" movies fail to entertain the majority of the audience. Many creative games fail to be "fun".
Creativity != fun != commercial success != commercial distribution (or visibility).
I believe there is plenty of creativity. Some may be lurking in basements and never make it to your console but it there nonetheless.
Besides, usually innovative products are not really good. It's the followup product, which uses the previously innovative part, which might be good.
Also, just because something isn't innovative doesn't mean it's the result of a cookie cutter.