Even if you’re not following the LOTRO series, you might want to take a gander at page one of this week’s installment for my comments on Lord of the Rings Online going free-to-play this fall. And if you do follow this series, then I guess you were going to read page one anyway. But I’ll give you your own special link so you don’t have to share one with all the Lulzy haters.
I’m sure I’m not the only person to have noticed this.
Like I said in the linked text, this trope isn’t anywhere on TV Tropes*. Elements I consider crucial to this Trope:
1) It takes place at the start of the game.
2) You awaken in an unfamiliar place.
3) You are in your underwear or otherwise deprived of basic stuff you’ll be collecting during the tutorial.
4) A local calamity is going on. (“Darth Malak threatens the galaxy” doesn’t count. “The Endar Spire is under attack” does. Ideally, this calamity should be resolved within the tutorial.)
5) Bonus points if you’re alone and someone has to guide you from a remote location.
6) Bonus points if you’re in some sort of medical facility.
Someone suggested that this Trope should be called “Good Morning, Disaster”. It fits. Now someone who knows what they’re doing at TV Tropes* needs to add this.
And yes, this is the comic I was trying to make when all of this happened.
* Warning: The link labeled “TV Tropes” links to TV Tropes*.
Number of vaults ruined by Dad thus far: 2
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This article by Themis CEO Alexander Macris (publisher of the Escapist) encapsulates almost everything I’ve been trying to say about this industry for the last six years. The reality of development costs is painful and I don’t see any way around it.
The numbers in the article are ballpark figures, but they jive with assumptions I’ve been working with:
All game developers, and even most gamers, are aware that it costs more to create a videogame for the latest generation of consoles than it took for prior generations. But how much more? While hard data is hard to come by, a variety of estimates are available on the web that support the following approximations:
* 1994: 4th generation premium videogames cost $200,000 to develop and retailed for $60-$80
* 1999: 5th generation premium videogames cost $1,000,000 to develop and retailed for $40-$60
* 2004: 6th generation premium videogames cost $5,000,000 to develop and retailed for $40-$60
* 2009: 7th generation premium videogames cost $25,000,000 to develop and retailed for $60-$80
And then later he breaks those numbers down for us:
* 1994: 4th gen videogames had to sell to 16,000 customers to break even
* 1999: 5th gen videogames had to sell to 80,000 customers to break even
* 2004: 6th gen videogames had to sell to 400,000 customers to break even
* 2009: 7th gen videogames had to sell to 2,000,000 customers to break even
Do read the whole thing for the full context.
Usually when we talk about how games are getting bigger and dumber (don’t even get me started on this year’s E3) we comfort ourselves with talk about how indie games will save us. But even if an indie is willing to step back to 1994 level technology* we’re still looking at games that take $200,000 to produce, and that kind of scratch is hard to come by and easy to lose. If you handed me $200k right now I sure as heck wouldn’t risk it all on game development.
* You wouldn’t actually want to go back to 1994 tech, or the game would actually be harder to develop and would have trouble running on current-gen computers. But you would need to go back to 1994 presentation styles of 2D or isometric views. As soon as you move to 3D you’re animating polygons and dealing with lighting and camera movements and you’ve basically jumped up to the $1 million price point.
$200k might sound like a lot, but when you think about having just three people spend two years on a game, that works out to each person grossing just $33,000 yearly. Once you pay taxes and buy health insurance, you’re not doing much better than minimum wage. And minimum wage people at least have a guarantee that they’ll get paid for their work. In game development there’s always the chance that the thing won’t sell and you’ll have wasted your time and treasure. Oh, and the minimum wage worker is a lot less likely to be hauling around an albatross of student debt.
So even if you did have $200k (which again, is a crapload of money in my book) the best you could do is pay a small team very poorly in order to have a chance at making a game that will be ignored by the press and could end up making almost nothing.
So we can get fun puzzle games like World of Goo. And we can get $50 million popcorn games like God of War. But there isn’t really a viable path for the stuff in between. Which is why we’re not seeing deep, niche games like the original X-Com, Starflight, or Elite. (Yes, we have Dwarf Fortress, but that’s a rare exception and I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of indies going down that road.)
From Fenix:
Are you planning on doing anymore Reset Button episodes?
Just watched the Fuel tech one and felt like a show not focusing on game quality and more on the tech within the game could be a cult hit (which is a contradiction I believe).
For the curious, here’s the video in question:
Link (YouTube) |
Here’s the thing about Reset Button:
It’s crazy time consuming. Of course, that’s true of pretty much all video content. In the time it takes to produce a ten-minute video, I could probably hammer out 5,000 words. (One episode of Shamus Plays is ~2,000 words, and my weekly column probably averages just over 1,000.) I’d rather produce video if I could. Video is way more viral and my video work always has a longer reach than my written stuff. But the time just isn’t there. (Josh handles all the editing for Spoiler Warning, which is what makes that series possible.)
This is actually a really interesting time for me. In the past, I’d pick up a project and fiddle with it until I was bored with it or people lost interest. But at some point this site became popular enough that projects would no longer fizzle out, and instead they would grow in scope and in audience. So instead of dropping the project I’d add it to my list of weekly duties. Then when I’d get another itch I’d add yet another new project. We now have this blog, Stolen Pixels, Experienced Points, Shamus Plays, and Spoiler Warning. I’m getting restless because I’m at capacity and I can’t add anything new without dropping an existing project. And I can’t bear to let any of them go.
Our only hope now is for me to lose my day job.
I just installed KOTOR. I just need ONE screenshot for a comic I’m trying to do. But the program just refused to run. It would put up a splash screen and then silently exit. Eventually I got it to give me an error message:
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Of course, I have no such stuff on my machine. But here we are. Seven years after the game came out, and idiot SecuROM is fumbling around in my future operating system trying to protect this ages-old game from “teh haxorz”.
I had better things to do with the last two hours than install a program that wasn’t going to work because the no-talent hacks at SecuROM would rather pretend they can do the impossible than simply quit their jobs and find honest employment elsewhere. Even when new, this system never protected anyone from anything. But honest customers will bear the cost of this wasteful idiocy, forever.
And no, I’m not going to go screw around for six hours on the torrents trying to pirate a game I already own. I’ve wasted enough time on this already.
What a stupid mess.
EDIT: Also, I’m now too grouchy to come up with a new joke. I blame SecuROM for this as well. So now when Tuesday’s joke sucks, you’ll have to complain to them.
EDIT II: It’s a twofer! The very next game I fired up:
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Commence with Operation Infinite Facepalm
The Saturday morning movie post begins with a coy introduction designed to make you curious about the video in the hopes of enticing you to watch it. Then it’s followed by a YouTube embed of the video in question:
Link (YouTube) |
After the video I’ll refer to the content more explicitly, and I’ll try to mention what parts I thought were interesting or perhaps what it is about the subject matter that caused me to link it in the first place.
And finally I’ll have the wrap-up paragraph, where I’ll say something in hopes of inciting a response or starting a conversation.
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
T w e n t y S i d e d
