Games that no longer support their creators | Hacker News Reader

Games that no longer support their creators

machinestudios.co.uk

47 pointsjayeshsalvi40 comments

This is a poor article since few readers will have any idea what point he is making. No references are provided nor insights into what exactly is meant by saying they don't support their creators.

Is it a comment about the studios having gone out of business because subsequent titles were not as popular?

Is it an acknowledgment of the fact most game developers work long hours for below market rate pay, and receive no royalties for their creations?

Is it a comment that distributors like Steam, or corporate fat cats take all the money?

No idea.

I think it's supposed to be a list of games where it's 'fair game' to pirate them because the creators no longer directly receive income from sales.

Which is short-sighted and, in at least one case, completely wrong. LA Noire was a long, expensive project headed up by Team Bondi. TB has since folded, mainly due to mismanagement and going crazily over-budget, but they weren't the only people working on it. The project was bought and published by Rockstar/Take Two, who also drafted in their own creators to help finish the game, who didn't get laid off, and sales of LA Noire help to pay for their salaries.

Thanks! If that is really his point he should state it because I agree with you, and if this is his point, I would like to argue against the claim. But since he doesn't say what it is he is asserting, one can't even argue against it very well because the obvious rebuttal would of course be "Well I never said that." Such a passive aggressive article really has no place here if that's the case!

> This is a poor article since few readers will have any idea what point he is making.

The author explicitly states that the text should be taken as an aseptic catalogue of facts:

> Below I present an incomplete list of PC games where the developers no longer receive payment for their creations. I wont offer an editorial, think of it what you will.

(emphasis mine)

Claiming lack of opinion in performing an action is nothing but a cop-out.

So what do you make of Wikipedia's NPOV policy? Surely there must be people out there providing information just for the sake of information.

Wikipedia has an opinion, which it clearly states. It wants to be a free encyclopedia, which it can only do if the information is nominally unbiased.

I agree, especially as a blog post with such a list.

This seems dangerously close to a case where someone is listing the home addresses of animal lab researchers and whether they have been assassinated yet or not, then puts "this page for informational purposes only". It seems like the person might be advocating criminal activity, but then has some wishy washy words to cop out on taking responsibility for it. Stating what his purpose is in posting such a list would clear up a lot of questions.

Maybe he is calling for more companies to establish royalty payments for artists and developers on the project, much as hollywood does for their projects. If that's the case it's a great idea! But who knows, it's just a list, being passed around the internet. It's certainly true that some are claiming it's an invitation for them to take the games without paying. That may even be the most common interpretation. If he didn't intend that, he should clear up the misunderstanding. Along with explain his sources other than to say they are secret.

He just says, here is a list, think about it. Which we did, so, mission accomplished IMO ;)

All I can think is, if I had the rights to, and assets form a great old game that many loved, I'd be working my butt off right now to rescript it for release on mobile app stores. It would be like a second wind of revenue.

Why the Sierra adventure games like kings quest, space quest, and police quest never came out on wii ware is beyond me. Not to mention iOS. Just look at the success of grisly manor.

While that might work with adventure games, a lot of games are simply impossible to do well on a tiny screen, with an inaccurate finger-on-touch-screen interface (imagine playing starcraft on an iphone).

Might be doable on an iPad, though. I'd play Theme Hospital on one.

Right, that one doesn't require precision or tight-timing.

Basically anything turn based or slow is doable.

You make great points. Many games like Myst are doing well as mobile apps. Somebody has to own the rights to these old titles, right? If a company folds up and doesn't sell it, who owns the IP? I don't know the answer to that. Without a solid answer, perhaps even original creators can't do anything with it.

If the point is that there are no residual payments[1] for individual game creators, this list is ridiculously short. Practically all games ever on a shelf are in that category, where the individuals worked for hire with only the hope of short-term bonuses or profit-sharing for successful games.

Instead, this list seems to say that sometimes the corporate entities who developed the game, and their shareholders, sometimes aren't getting money anymore for whatever possible success the games get. This doesn't seem to be riddled with moral complexities as much as business complexity. But I know this is an "abandonware" [2] apologia and so I'm not expecting this to be totally serious.

I think individual residual payments are a much more provocative idea. I've programmed on games on and off this list, and when I was younger I acted in a few TV shows. I've gotten a couple dollars (literally[3]) in residuals from the Screen Actors Guild, which is 100% more than for my work on games after leaving the developer. So hmm, what can I say about this?

First, the economics don't make sense for it right now. Games are like movies in the pre-TV era, where they earn 90% of all the money they will ever earn in the 12 months after their release. But I recognize that with emulation that is becoming somewhat less true.

Second, the project structure doesn't support this. This was actually easier to do in the studio system when you had more free agency, movies banked heavily on their highly-visible actors and movies took a few months to film at most. Major game projects require more creators than ever and are now longer than ever, so only a few creators have individual influence over the finished product. So game developers are not in a strong position to get them.

Finally, you can make an argument that a game is an work that encapsulates a performance of its creators. This is a rational basis for residual payments, because it's very comparable to acting. This is a promising angle to argue, but still, this is a very unrealistic possibility. But it was interesting to think about, right?

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_(entertainment_industr...

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

[3] - http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/6620_10281393...

This can't possibly be about Abandonware, since software that's still being sold is not abandonware, and a lot of the games on that list can still be gotten through legal means, even if the corporations that originally made them no longer own them or no longer exist.

A lot of games that once used to be Abandonware are now... not. Thanks to digital distribution there is now zero cost to selling these titles on Steam, GOG, or elsewhere. The definition of abandonware has shrunk over time.

In any case, I'm a bit allergic to "abandonware" being sold on Steam. These titles are sold as if they've been tested and work on modern machines/OSes, but more often than not there are crippling issues. This is something that has actually tainted my opinion of Valve - that they would continue to list and sell these items without any disclaimer, warning, or anything.

I am absolutely not sure what to make of this. A lot of those companies have sad histories (Looking Glass especially) and went bankrupt or were closed, but rarely because of piracy. Some examples:

- Ion Storm built Daikatana (Romero, *, you know the history) and Deus Ex 2, 2 huge time- and moneysinks that are widely regarded as failures. Add Anachronox, which was mediocre at best.

- Ensemble Studios was closed by Microsoft with no specific reason, most likely due to a shift of focus, after multiple really successful releases, piracy or not. Also, Halo Wars didn't get a lot of praise.

- Core Design is praised for Tomb Raider I and hated for running the series into the ground release by release. This ended in Angel of Darkness, which was bundled with some ATI graphics boards (9800) on which it didn't run (!). I still have an unplayed but not untouched version of this.

- Kaos Studios made Frontline and Homefront which were... ehm... yes. Okayish at best.

I could go on. Games is a tough market. Production costs are high and failures are costly. Companies surviving more than 10 years in the gaming market are great. So whats the point of this post? Should we start paying rent to developers that worked on games for dying companies? Should sales of these games be stopped because the money goes to whatever publisher that still puts these games out on the shelves? And whats the thing with piracy again?

Add Anachronox, which was mediocre at best.

Anachronox was a damn good game. It used non-traditional narrative techniques and did a fine job of utilizing the diverse set of characters to help the storytelling. It had great writing and humor, as as well as an interesting universe with many diverse, interactive areas to explore. The locations were probably the best part. They were so dynamic. When you were on a space station there were places with displaced gravity to make you feel like you're really on a space station. When you went to a dock, you could see space ships coming and leaving. Even now there are very few games that go to that level of detail, especially on such large scale.

I knew this one was going to bite me :). I meant mediocre in a product-market-fit way. It definitely had its high-points (and not accidentally), but it also suffered from the fact that Ion Storm Dallas was already burning when it was released. The cult following definitely showed that a lot of things were right about the game.

This was strictly a personal note, I didn't enjoy the game as much as I could have and still consider it a wasted opportunity for greatness.

Ah, that I can agree with. The graphics in particular was quite outdated, even by the standards of those times.

Look, these studios/developers had the choice between retaining the copyrights themselves (thereby securing royalties for the life of sales of that particular product) leaving distribution and sales up to themselves, or selling the copyrights to a distributor for a fist full of cash...guess which option they chose! (protip: its the latter!)

Almost every developer I know who works for a large studio is paid by the hour for the work they do, not paid in stock, promises of shares of future royalties or in magic beans!

I'm not sure I want to live in a world where people help make one single (semi-popular) product and expect to live off it for the rest of their lives...

You might not like this story then. Guy who writes textbook that students continue to pay big bucks for has built a $30m house from the proceeds: http://www.thestar.com/news/article/933017--the-house-that-m... .. Gotta admit, I wouldn't mind being in his position :-)

School textbooks, probably the worst example you could have picked as a counter point.

You get paid a lot less per hour to write textbooks than games.

Not saying that's the only way, but there IS a difference.

But that world you describe is the startup world.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be rewarded for creating/producing/developing, but anyone spending 40 hours a week for a year (or so) of your life on ONE product should not expect millions in their bank (or at least to receive royalties off it FOREVER!).

> I'm not sure I want to live in a world where people help make one single (semi-popular) product and expect to live off it for the rest of their lives...

But you feel good living in a world where people who don't help make products expect to live off it for the rest of their lives, right?

The saddest thing for me is how many great games and companies are on this list. The following are all games I bought, paid for and loved (one per firm):

    Thief
    Deus Ex
    Battlezone 2
    Syndicate Wars
    Magic and Mayhem
    Planescape: Torment
    Startopia
    Hostile Waters

The only one on this list I didn't play through to the end is Syndicate Wars, because it's rock hard.

Seriously, how come they don't make games like this anymore? Maybe, sadly, the answer is that I'm unusual. :(

I guess the standard answer is because games cost more to make now so publishers are less willing to risk that money on doing something adventurous. IMO this is incredibly shortsighted but I suppose I'm not quite their target market any more.

Totally sympathise about Syndicate Wars too. One thing I don't miss is that most games now seem to have a better balance of difficulty - I found that one amazingly frustrating and never finished the last few missions without cheating either. Oddly, that's one game I'd love to see a modern version of (not interested in that upcoming FPS which looks to be in name only) - IMO Syndicate Wars was hugely limited by the technology of the time.

If the companies that made games like that went bankrupt, that's probably why.

Great though that list is, I think a large part nostalgia. There are loads of great games being made these days but as adults we're more cynical and don't have the time to immerse ourselves.

I quite agree that there are still plenty of great games being made, but there are very few games like the ones on the list. Hostile Waters and Battlezone were cracking first person RTSes. Sacrifice is pretty much the only other game like it, and that's old as the hills as well.

Torment, again, is a game that no-one makes anymore. The storytelling in something like Mass Effect 2 is excellent, but it's a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. The sheer out and out weirdness of some of the story-telling in Torment has yet to be surpassed.

Deus Ex and Thief/Thief 2 were vastly better than their sequels, and it seems unlikely anyone will ever make a game quite like Deus Ex again. Even with the best will in the world, a modern 8 hour game isn't going to have the same depth as a 20 hour RPG.

The cop-out "no editorializing nudge nudge wink wink" is a bit disingenuous.

Even leaving that aside, the list is weird: you can easily argue that LGS folded because their publishers were incompetent (and therefore as an entity they "deserved" to survive), but Bullfrog were bought outright by EA--it's hard to argue that the creators of Dungeon Keeper 2 don't receive any money when in a legal sense the creators of DK2 are EA, as everyone who worked on it assigned their copyright to Bullfrog.

Perhaps "no editorial" just means "I'm a bit confused about what I mean"...it would have been nice to have something a bit more substantive (even if it's a position the author doesn't believe) so one could understand the point of the list.

It's pretty sad. I had lengthy talks with friends about this. Most of the games were absolutely awesome, but had bad marketing or had to be completed under time pressure.

Deus Ex Invisble War and Vampire the Masquarade Bloodlines for example are bot games that suffered from lack of polishing, performance problems and incomplete/disabled multilayer support. Both of them have great communities that still (yes, really) release very patches to fix bugs and enhance incomplete stuff.

I never got what happened to Startopia. It still is a great game. I think it suffered from marketing. There have been full shelves, but I guess nobody knew what it was about. It's a bit like a mix of an RTS and a tycoon game (Theme Hospital, which sadly is on that list too (and has an awesome open source engine remake called corsix-th)) like and features a lot of references to Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy, aswell as its humor. It features a good balance of micro and macro management and incorporates features from multiple genres without failing. It even has something from Dungeon Keeper, which sadly is also on this list.

A öpt pf these things could also said about other games, like Populous II, Magic Carpet or System Shock. These all have been great games. It's sad that these studios died. I think it is the reason that a lot of people switched to indie games or completely stopped buying games.

This is a list of games produced by defunct studios. Whether a business closes or not may have something to do with piracy... and maybe it doesn't. It's a fairly large jump to make, but that's the apparently desired implication.

I think the desired implication is the other way around: that these are games that it's now okay to pirate (according to a certain ethical view), because buying them wouldn't help the creators anyway.

I don't see the point. Game developers sold the rights to games, and now they don't get more money. And?

Very few, only owners founders, developers get "supported" by their creations, games or other. They are employees, making works for hire.

The idea that copyright is for, or supports creators is the most successful propaganda purportrated by the rights industry.

What about developers that left the company after developing the game, like the Diablo teams?

I don't know what the author mean by that.

Of course the people that created Tomb Raider are no longer supported!(Quake, Dune, Deux Ex, Theme Park)

Some of them made millions of profit in the process, that was a good reward. They don't need to receive rewards because they already did.

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