 |
|
|
| |
Opinion: The News Of Console Gaming's Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
by Leigh Alexander [PC, Console/PC]
|
|
| |
|
March 26, 2010
|
| |
[Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander says that "rich gaming experiences" on console won't go out of style, despite a burgeoning social game sector that often views the triple-A space as a lumbering dinosaur.]
When a large and nuanced issue is interpreted by hundreds of thousands of people at once, the result is that the nuance is often lost in favor of the simplest takeaway. Such was the case at the 2010 Game Developers' Conference, an event reports would suggest played host to the death of traditional gaming and design.
The giant-slayer, of course, was ostensibly the general concept of "Social Gaming", a phrase that encompasses a deceptively narrow vertex of products -- not just that which is literally "social", because Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft (those relics!) are indeed that.
When people say "Social Gaming", they mean a few things: Games played on social networks (i.e. Facebook, because who really is psyched about the viability of MySpace and Friendster anymore?).
But beyond that, the vaguely sinister phrase refers to a certain school of game design most traditionalists find depressing: One where the goal is to create not fun or meaningful engagement, but metrics; one which aims to create of its players a legion of turnkey drones.
It's one which sets its userbase to work recruiting other players, an opportunist approach that exploits natural human tendencies of cooperation and competition to make players feel obligated to engage in repetitious tasks.
This recent column from former Civilization IV project lead and Spore designer/programmer Soren Johnson does a handy job of covering key talks and events in the social gaming space during GDC 2010. The pervasiveness of the controversy is evident.
Peak revenue for AAA gaming has passed, argue venture capitalists, and developers still toiling stubbornly away on million-dollar console games are in denial. The king is dead, they toll! The common argument points to the fact development budgets rise at a rate with which returns cannot possibly keep pace, and financiers draw tidy maps to illustrate the inevitability.
Of course, most of these prognostications are being made by investors who've taken million-dollar bets on asynchronous social play and have their fingers crossed that the Facebook gaming bubble will turn out to be more resilient than the virtual world bubble most of them were quite excited to fund just two or three years ago.
It's dangerous to presume that quality is not an issue. Without truly compelling design, will your average Farmville user be interested in the same grind a year from now?
How long will they take to figure out that throwing incremental change into a Facebook game provides them no tangible reward? The theory that many in the much-touted multi-million user figures just mess around with the game for a few weeks and grow bored has yet to be disproven.
But one doesn't need to tarnish the gloss of excitement all over the Facebook gaming boom in order to see the case for the enduring viability of AAA. The secret weapons are tools that are getting more powerful and less expensive, plus teams that are getting smaller and more agile.
Perhaps "traditional" development -- 200-man teams spending millions of dollars over years to create a first-person shooter, working as segregated departments toward fixed milestones -- is indeed less relevant in today's climate.
New ways of viewing development are surfacing, as successes like ThatGameCompany and Naughty Dog are producing work that stands in support of the concept that treating teams as flexible and human (rather than cogs in an elaborate machine solely in service to a publisher) produces profitable games. Explosive successes from the indie scene are showing the merit of rapid prototyping for the discovery of new concepts.
This year at GDC, plenty of people came to talk about the death of traditional development and the rise of Facebook, but less discussed were the wide variety of development practices in play. For the first time, every developer to whom you spoke had a different and personalized internal collaboration process, rather than a prior era that only saw one way to do things.
And new tools (Unreal Engine 3's procedural city-builder comes to mind) are making development more efficient and less expensive. AAA developers aren't dinosaurs on the way to extinction, but beings capable of evolution.
Certainly, the cream of the social gaming crop will rise to the surface and gain permanence; there's not only room for light web-based experiences alongside full-scale living room gaming experiences, there's a need for them. But rich gaming experiences -- not shallow reward structures designed to drive numbers -- will continue to get smarter, cheaper and faster. News of AAA gaming's death has been greatly exaggerated.
|
| |
|
|
Console gaming isn't going away. Simply put, there are enough people who enjoy a more engaging and profound experience than what Facebook has, and most likely will ever, have to offer.
That said, I think we can do alot better in social gaming than Farmville. Putting a decent game in there would be a start. Then breaking down boudaries between devices, individual games and activities will be the next big leap.
Both types of gaming are valid and have a future I think.
As to the article, I would question whether quality is needed to hook people for life -- I have to wonder whether Leigh has ever visited a casino. People will sit in front of slot machines for hours, and that's terribly boring and rarely provides any payoff. Facebook games (and MMORPGs) operate similarly, adding a competitive element. I have little doubt that a literal casino model, with money involved, is in the future for many of these games.
To me, one of the great hopes is the indie game community. While I believe most developers undervalue their work, it's still a fact that many indie developers aren't primarily motivated by money. There's good reason to believe someone will develop a more compelling WoW or Farmville with a much less obscene pricing scheme -- a traditional business just can't compete with someone uninterested in maximizing his or her profit.
i just dont see much profit in getting into that space now. its too late. im sure a few will do alright, but it wont last. people want quality.
people should be looking at Naughty Dog on how to run a profitable and long term business. they are doing it right.
I think Kimberly is correct, eventually some (smart) developer is going to make some great games on Facebook that have actual gameplay and attract people who dislike the current FB game model. There's a lot of precedent in asynchronous gameplay that hasn't been tapped yet, and these, better games will attract core gamers to the platform to play when they are away from their consoles or don't have the time to boot up a full-fledged AAA game.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the success of SNGs, but a lot of people aren't seeing the forest for the trees.
Thanks for writing this Leigh.
These "Progress Quest you play with your friends" games don't really satisfy what gamers want, and there is an established industry based off of satisfying gamers. That industry won't go away, rather it will expand to accommodate these new players interested in Farmville and whatnot.
Of course, just like how you can write anything in Java and that's why all software is written in Java now.
Social network platforms are the true home of the “casual gamer.” And while some of these casual gamers may be lured into core gaming as Kimberly suggests, I think most will remain turned off by the perception of core games (and, perhaps, core gamers) as in-your-face competitive and destructive.
So not just any game will work on a social network. To the extent that the big AAA games continue to be mostly about the old ultraviolence, they’ll continue to need their own platform.
I agree that news of the death of AAA games has been exaggerated. But I don’t think a rush to *also* make light cooperative games for social networks constitutes a serious threat to AAA games (or consoles). If that’s enough to kill them, they had it coming.
I concur. :)
Learn from history. In the mid-80s people said gaming said gaming was dead and the fad had passed. It didn't. In the mid 90s people said that single-player was dead and everyone would be playing multi-player games. That never happened. In the late 90s people said that PC gaming was dead. PC gaming is still here.
And now people say consoles are dead and we're all going to be playing Facebook games. It will never happen. Ever. Its ridiculous.
Wow, if you can't break even with 1.5 million sales your business model is completely broken: http://www.edge-online.com/news/ninja-theory-didnt-%E2%80%9Cbreak-even%E2%80%9D-
with-heavenly-swordEdit
Ninja Theory Didn't “Break Even” With Heavenly Sword | Edge Online
Tom Long - Developing for 7th Gen Consoles is a nearly broken business model.12:26 pm
Patrick Dugan - Yeah if you're downloadable and/or multi-platform AND (big and) your game is stellar, you can do double digit returns, but the odds are cruel. I mean, I'm not pretending the odds aren't cruel in social games or with indie PC or whatever, power law distributions are everywhere, especially the entertainment industry. The big question is what you have to go through to roll those dice, and I prefer the short dev cycles and iterative post-launch.
Farmville might gateway a couple hundred thousand people into AAA games, but it won't be a meaningful number.
Games are not going to all go the way of Farmville, being mired in "the trap" as Adam Curtis put it.
Farmville players will grow into something more interesting and developers will have to use critical thinking and question the assumptions underlying their metrics, and what will result will be very interesting, possibly making the final leap to eclipse film and television in terms of mass cultural relevance.
But that is not the same as saying that AAA games are dead. It is arguing that a business model that requires a consumer to buy $500 of hardware and $50 a game to subsidise a box on the television that is off 90% of the time is dead.
The biggest threat is to Sony and Microsoft. There is still a place for expensive, high-fidelity gaming content. I just think it won't take place on dedicated boxes any more.
(http://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/12/the-death-of-the-console-a-book-proposal-part-
1-of-4/)
The part that likes to blame consumers for their games not selling , because they think that they are such great artist that only a fool would not buy their game. This is also the part that likes to blame used games, market conditions, and other publishers for their own weak business model.