Comment by quadcore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadcore | Hacker News Reader

Most people in the game industry dont get this: games are, economically, startups (innovative high-growth product), they are not content - like movies. So you have a few killer games and armies of clones which often make their author poor or barely even.

In other words, if you are a game developper, you need to figure out why your product will be a high growth product. You should not treat it as an art exercise (if you wanna succeed economically).

For example, the art style of world of warcraft is not like it is because that was the art style of the art director (well it is but) they did it like this because they knew this was the kind of art that is needed for a high growth product. Everything in world of warcraft (its just an example) has been done to reach high growth, they werent doing an art exercise that happen to be successful. Its a mindset most game developers wont ever get.

Of course you can do art exercises and be lucky. Just be conscious youre playing at the lotery though.

Aren't (commercial) movies the same though? The decisions are made by producers, and their main task is to figure out how to make the movie appealing to the largest possible audience, so that investors will get maximum RoI.

I know this is difficult to get but people watch a movie and then watch another one. They dont do that with games (not in an economically significant way). People spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on one game. They spend their life on 2-3 games. Its a product, not content.

Do you think Jenova Chen was just lucky with Journey's success?

Disclaimer Ive seen a little bit the game, I dont know the extent of its success.

1) most likely, just look at his success rate in terms of how many of his games did succeed.

2) now the definition of success. if he took 5 years to develop the game, he has to net a very (very) minimum of 20 millions to start becoming successful. Remember, you can't just pay one salary developing software, you have to cover: salaries (top engineers and top artists) + (the most important) investment for the next games + bad years + grow you company (that's the point of a company) + hardware + R&D to stay at the top of your game + retirement money because you cant do this after 38. 20 millions net is a very optimistic number, I wouldn't be happy with that, I would be happy with netting 50.

Did he net 50 millions? If yes, then yes he was starting to become successful. If he did this 3 games in a row, now he wasnt lucky.

Now dont get me wrong, this game is a wondeful piece of art, but it's likely not a succesful company.

> most likely, just look at his success rate in terms of how many of his games did succeed.

I don't think you ca boil it to some formula like success rate. Journey got funding partly from the big critical success of some of those earlier ones.

I'm sorry but this is just insanity.

30 years of evidences - the game companies who don't see things like that all disapear, and the graveyard has an impressive size

> grow you company (that's the point of a company)

OMG... No. The point of the company is to provide satisfactory profits to the owners. In case of many smaller companies, the point is not even that, but instead "to provide a place of work for owners where they can work on their own stuff and on their own terms".

Plenty of people don't care about infinite growth. People are not bacteria.

This is not true for me. I think I buy more games than I watch movies at this point. Movies of the games are under ten dollars because I pick them up on sale, then I spend a couple hours on them and feel fine with it, because it wasn't very expensive. Based on the front page of Steam, I don't think I'm the only one. I have a couple I keep going back to, but probably on average, I spend about ten hours on each game I purchase, and I would guess I'm not the I only one.

I think you’re probably an outlier here though. I’m the same, I buy and play a game for an evening, but I don’t know anyone else personally that also does that.

I would definitely not expect a game designer to target for this type of audience.

What is your source for that? Games are different, f2p mobile games are an equivalent of slot machines working on pure addiction, for some indie games you pay for a short unique experience, there high budget single player games where they have a campaign you play and that's it.

I really don't think so. It might be true for sandboxes which draw players in by letting them create new objectives for themselves, or competitive games with high time investment requirements, but it's definitely not true for linear singleplayer games, and in my experience most games are like that.

Did they or were they just copying Warcraft 3 art style with higher poly count? Or were they continuing the old pre-Warcraft 3 prototype and expanding it into something else?

The thing about cartooney art style vs a realistic one is that it ages better, but they had no way of knowing it would reach globe-shattering popularity. The only thing they can know is that it's a bit less resource intensive (to make and to display). Keep in mind something 2D would be even less resource intensive.

I'm pretty sure, based on nothing at all but playing the game for a decade or so, that all character animation in world of warcraft is either motion capture, or extremely painstaking animation. Poly counts and cartoonish texturing had very little to do with why the game looked good and aged well. It was the animation that made the difference.

World of Warcraft at launch had relatively low polygon count models and worked flawlessly on low-spec graphics hardware, but the animation was spectacular and miles beyond what any of its competition was doing. The feet of a moving model actually touched the ground as if it were a solid object; literally every other MMO I played from that era had models where the run or walk animation was completely decoupled from movement speed, with feet sliding around disconnected from the ground.

In addition, WoW had coherent and consistent art direction with characters, enemies, and environments all feeling like part of a thematic whole.

Blizzard had clearly spent ridiculous amounts of time and money on the visuals of the game, the animation in particular. They just did it while targeting low-spec hardware to avoid limiting their audience.

There’s a very big difference between cheap for the game developer to make, and supporting cheap hardware.

> something 2D would be even less resource intensive

But then you lose the players that value immersion, who I suspect are also more likely to drive word-of-mouth promotion.

I would not have played WoW nearly as much as I did, or encouraged others to do so, without the option to go first person and turn off (almost) all UI elements-- being able to fully dive into the art design and feel like I was there was more than half the appeal to me. Other MMOs that went 2D/isometric never kept me engaged as long.

> But then you lose the players that value immersion

Depends on player, but to me all MMORPGs feel less like an environment and more off an Amusement parks.

Because events in them are designer driven and not player driven. Could players cause Cataclysm or liberate a city for a day or a month? No. Because designers want to appease a mass of players, they make events repeatable, which cheapens the significance of event (you get an achievement, and you get an achievement).

Compare this to something 2D but more systemic like SS13, where unintentional actions of a single individual e.g. a clown puting a bag of holding in another bag of holding can completely change the round. I.e. spawn a life-threatening singularity that might destroy the station.

Or hell a sabotage by a spy might have side effects. Lets say a spy trying to cause a blackout to eliminate his target unintentionally unleashes a horde of monkeys, infected by the furry virus, from captivity. Monkeys in turn unleash a dangerous space kudzu which results in station being plagued by both a literal furry plague, a bunch of violent apes and a sentient and malevolent plant.

At first I had a longer comment how I think you're missing the point, but I think you are right - I just disagree with the startup part because they were actually polishing something for the mainstream (high growth) but it's like you take people who are good at... [proprietary market leader tech] and commoditizing it in a new company... which is well-funded and has worked together.

Oh, movies are startups too. Often you see a production company established to make a single movie. And they spawn clones -- Star Wars gave rise to perhaps hundreds of space movies -- many of them really bad.

It depends on the era. Lucasfilm was definitely a startup during its halcyon days(not just in film, but in FX (special and CGI), editing, and sound design). But most of the prolific movies of the era before Lucasfilm were products of the studio system (or what remained of it) whose operating principles mirrored that of IBM.

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