Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

As negative as the modern state of gaming development is now, makes me wonder if learning from past renaissance times (e.g. the '90s, particularly 1998) will bring any wisdom.

For instance, it's a truism that AAA studios that are dominating the market, like big Hollywood studios, must trend towards increasingly reliably safe blockbuster titles to make back their immense budgets. And yet there are still plenty of indie studios today. Indie gaming is stronger than ever. And yet why the consolidation into fewer and less innovative/interesting forms?

Maybe it's because the death of AA studios means that there are fewer sub-blockbuster entities to create influence? Because there are way more games today so interest is diffused and gravitate naturally towards AAA attention sinks? Because on a technical level, gaming is so advanced that there is a push towards photorealistic simulation rather than the innovative abstraction that earlier period of gaming had? One's creativity is capped by the amount of effort and resources needs to go towards making sights and sounds of greater quality than Hollywood movies. Either way, maybe the medium and the industry is just at a stage where conventions calcify and it's harder to turn the ship.

>For instance, it's a truism that AAA studios that are dominating the market, like big Hollywood studios, must trend towards increasingly reliably safe blockbuster titles to make back their immense budgets. And yet there are still plenty of indie studios today. Indie gaming is stronger than ever. And yet why the consolidation into fewer and less innovative/interesting forms?

I think the problem is the minimum cost of making games is too high. It's very difficult for a single person to make a movie, but there is a low cost alternative - writing books (and scripts). A book can translate pretty well into a movie, but there is no proper alternative for games. Maybe custom games in map editors of established games is the closest we can get, but even that tends to require a lot of skill using that specific map editor.

In Japan there are people who start out writing web novels. These are usually not the greatest quality (compared to published novels), but because anybody can just sit down and start writing there's a lot of them. Once in a while some of them become popular and end up getting adapted into manga, anime, even movies. This is (somewhat) happening or going to happen in the western world too. I don't think there's an equivalent path for that in games though.

The other problem is with players. Players expect most games to do too much. It's not like novels where you pick a novel read it once (for some hours) and never read it again. Players play some games for thousands and thousands of hours.

Making games has a very low cost. In fact, a lot of successes in the beginning of the game industry were people coding up things in basic on an 8-bit micro in their bedroom. As someone who started hobbyist gamedev in the DOS era, I can assure you that games are easier to make, and with much higher level of sophistication, than they ever have been.

Even today we have notable 1-person successes: Undertale was basically all Toby Fox, Stardew Valley was entirely Concerned Ape. Both games are on Playstation 4, Switch, and Xbox One, which is just completely wild from the perspective of someone who grew up making hobbyist games in the 80s and 90s. When was the last time you saw a movie made by someone with a cell phone and adobe premier playing in a major theater?

I think Bo Burnham's Inside would make an interesting comparison

>Making games has a very low cost.

Think about the skills required to create a presentable product, then think about the time you have to sink into it with no idea if you'll have any success at all. Just look at how ConcernedApe is described on Wikipedia:

>is an American video game developer, video game designer, artist, composer, and musician.

Imagine how difficult it would be to hire somebody who would be able to fulfill all of these roles at the same time and how much you would have to pay them. The 1-person successes are people who are on top of their game.

>Even today we have notable 1-person successes

And how many failures? How many people gave it everything they had and it went nowhere? Those failures have a cost too.

>When was the last time you saw a movie made by someone with a cell phone and adobe premier playing in a major theater?

But that's not where it starts. You can tell a story in a book that can be made into a movie, because they can overlap. Movies get a constant stream of new ideas from books that are written. Most of those books are failures too, but the barrier to entry there is much lower than making a game. You can't write a book and then turn it into a game, because the most important aspect of a game - gameplay - isn't something that a book can handle in any way.

> Think about the skills required to create a presentable product, then think about the time you have to sink into it with no idea if you'll have any success at all.

You say these things like it isn't true of literally every creative endeavor including writing.

> But that's not where it starts. You can tell a story in a book that can be made into a movie, because they can overlap.

Many game developers of yesteryear took their inspiration from tabletop RPGs, board games, sports, and just regular real world activities that looked interesting. There are places to start other than diving in a making a game... and yet lots of people do, because it has a low barrier to entry.

> You can't write a book and then turn it into a game, because the most important aspect of a game - gameplay - isn't something that a book can handle in any way.

A strange thing to say considering how many games are incredibly linear stories with almost no gameplay whatsoever. Also strange considering how many books simply don't translate to film very well. Go on, write a screenplay for Gravity's Rainbow, I dare you.

But seriously, there are lots of ways to learn game design without ever touching electronics. Human beings have been designing all sorts of games since they've had enough free time to play games. A lot of those ideas can become video games.

> I think the problem is the minimum cost of making games is too high.

In 2021, 11.7k games were released on steam. That's 30 games per day[1]. Cost of making games is too low.

[1] https://vginsights.com/insights/article/video-game-insights-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com