Yet, somehow, it's believed that games are completely different and everyone who wants to make games is good enough to be able make living off it.
Most people realize they suck and don't try to make a career out of it.
If you look at the truly dedicated actors, musicians, or whatever, out there... the ones who practiced during High School and/or pursued Drama degrees in college... they're for the most part, as high quality as any other Hollywood actor.
You can pretty much go into any off-Broadway or even local Theater and find excellent singing, dancing, and/or acting technique.
That is to say: "Good Actors" truly exist, and most people that I've personally met in the field seem to be of "good" quality or better.
Unfortunately, life sucks for them. Just being 'good' isn't enough, you basically need to reach "Star" status to get anywhere these days.
"Stars" are often worse actors than these dedicated unknown folk actually. The thing about "Stars" is that they've built up brand recognition and have learned to generate free press through (often contrived) magazine drama.
Long story short: being a successful actor is COMPLETELY different from being a "good" actor. A good actor can take on a variety of storyline roles, memorizing lines, creating characters, holding a stage presence, etc. etc. Stuff that takes lots of practice, but there really are a LOT of people out there who are really, really, really good at this.
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To put it into technical / programming terms: no one really cares if a game programmer has excellent architecture and bug-free code. Hell, the Speedrunning community seems to prefer bug-ridden code for the credit-warp glitch, sequence-breaks, or whatnot.
It's difficult to reduce the dimensionality of people down to one continuous variable, let alone one binary variable; though some actors, I will concede, could almost manage this.
There's few objective criteria we can actually define a good/suck scale on. Acting quality is very subjective. I tend to find unknown European actors far more convincing than many big name US actors who are chosen to play basically the same character over and over again and perform the same limited two-or-three facial expressions from the set of {happy, sad, angry, confused}. As we've come to learn recently through scandal, performance on screen may not always be the first consideration of some studio execs.
If you're talking financially, that's great: we have an objective measure. If the whole point of being an actor is to make money for themselves, then I can tell you who the great ones are. To the studios though, perhaps it's the actors that will pull in the crowds but not cost too much that are the best. In other words, the amount of money they are expected to make for the studio.
Let's look at the games industry. To be a successful games developer we think we can probably agree on what is good. But to a manager I should imagine a good games developer is someone who helps ship on time and doesn't come to their door telling them what nobody else dares tell them that the bugs that QA found are deep, hard to fix and morale is low. Again, if we define by earnings tor the individual I'm not even sure where pays well.
If we define developers by money they are expected to make for the studio, I'd imagine EA and King employees must be pretty high up.
> If we define developers by money they are expected to make for the studio, I'd imagine EA and King employees must be pretty high up.
It depends on employees, both EA and King own multiple studios and have thousands of people working on projects, which don't make a dime of profit. However, on a studio scale you will notice that studios making successful games repeatedly do not have many horror stories about them and if you look into credits for those games you will see the same individuals working on such games for many years.
The majority of Hollywood actors are good at being Hollywood actors. Much of that seems to be more about maintaining an off-screen presence. For some reason many are celebrated. My point is that they may have fantastic careers and be household names, but that does not seem to correlate to acting ability.
> Of course somebody could be an amazing actor playing Santa at the mall from the point of view of children sitting on his lap.
I was not talking about actors playing Santa at the mall. I was talking about professional actors that are relatively unknown because they act in non-Hollywood productions. Few of these actors would be of interest to Hollywood.
If you look at European actors careers, they make a fraction of the money of their Hollywood counterparts but seem to have a multiple of the ability. I have watched some play different characters, all very different, to the point where you wouldn't recognise them by the character they play. They are believable as that character and bring the character to life. I struggle to say this about even the more respected Hollywood actors, because they are often cast to be very similar to the character they were in something else. There are actors that do buck this trend to avoid becoming typecast.
To me, acting is a skill where you try to bring a character to life. It involves understanding that character, feeling what they feel, portraying that feeling on camera. This is something that is lacking in Hollywood productions.
> It depends on employees, both EA and King own multiple studios and have thousands of people working on projects, which don't make a dime of profit.
Indeed. But this is true of Hollywood. There are films with big name stars in it that have been complete flops. Blade Runner 2049 had Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford in it, both successful actors, but made a loss. Alcon entertainment, the main production company, certainly has overall commercial success.
> However, on a studio scale you will notice that studios making successful games repeatedly do not have many horror stories about them and if you look into credits for those games you will see the same individuals working on such games for many years.
The phenomenon you describe to me would in fact suggest that it is less down to individuals than the studio attracting the right people or at least not rejecting them. Perhaps people who are more passionate about making good games can't suffer being in a team that is churning out bad games. I'm not sure this is simply down to the one-dimensional projection of the people being bad developers. You can be passionate about development and have limited development skill. I'm not sure it's necessarily better to have the technical skills and be dispassionate.
Sure. And people who come to LA want to become one too. I am sorry if I've made you think I am talking about European actors when I replied to a comment mentioning Hollywood, Los Angeles and people coming there.
>The phenomenon you describe to me would in fact suggest that it is less down to individuals than the studio attracting the right people or at least not rejecting them.
Studios are not intelligent entities, they don't hire people by themselves. Hiring people is a job for individuals and one can suck at it just like at any other job. If you look at the events where a studio had been disbanded/went bankrupt but the significant number of staff banded together and formed a new one or it had been saved by an investor, you will notice that the new studio with the same people performs the same or worse than the original. It's up to you to decide if it's because of skills, passion or anything else. I just pointed out the phenomenon of being unable to make living from selling games one's made and its prevalence.
This is an important point, most of the people who have the talent have spent their lives in their fields of talent and have little idea how to make money off of it and neither have the contacts to such people who can help them do it.