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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

The AAA side of the industry is fucked up much like the big money side of movies and other stuff is often fucked up; because it not only has to pay all the creative folks but it has to pay for a slew of empty suits and massive, massive marketing campaigns.

I think that's why we're seeing such a rise of indie developers. People credit Kickstarter but I think Kickstarter's popularity and success is a result of the move to indie development rather than a cause of it (or maybe a little of both.)

There will always be talented people who want to make games and they will find a way to do it. Look at the old days that Commander Keen, Wolf3D, DOOM and many other shareware games came from. A bunch of independent BBSes where the shareware games where passed around and talked about purely through word of mouth. Rampant piracy, far worse than today, and yet those games made money for their creators.

You may be right, the EAs, the Activisions and other bloated monstrosities may be fucked. And to them I say good riddance. I love, love, love Bioshock Infinite, but if the $100 million dollar budget games are a dinosaur on its way out, I won't mourn it too much.

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This. I remember the days of NES/Gameboy/DOS/PS games, even the case for a lot of games in other earlier consoles like SNES, Genesis, Dreamcast, etc.

These markets were literally flooded with massive volume in games. You went to the store and could literally not decide what you wanted to play, because there were 30+ games you had never seen, you wanted to play them all, and another 30+ for a console you didn't own. And then a few months later, there were 20+ new ones.

All of these games were relatively simple, creative, outside the box, not hyped nor mentioned in any advertising anywhere. And almost all of them kicked ass. Because they were still analog cartridge-ey and/or required a CD to play, you didn't want to own hundreds of games (even though you could because most were priced very reasonably), so it was amazing when things like Sega Channel came out. That was one of the truly awesome things I remember as a kid, even though it was short lived.

I miss those days. Now it's AAA title that took 3+ years to make that looks good but has almost nothing to it. Back then, a $5 game that took a company 1 programmer, 1 artist, 1 sound engineer, and about 2 weeks to make had significantly more playability to it. What happened to the industry?

Some call it progress.

EDIT: downvotes suggest I should wrap this in a sarcasm tag.

I think this is a highly contentious opinion (primarily mine, and any view that modern high-budget games mostly suck, which resonates with myself and a lot of once-gamers I know). It might be that way because of the technical nature of this community and probably because many readers of these comments might actually be involved in that industry, and so it comes off as offensive.

I don't really mean it to be offensive. We know a lot more about development today, and have a lot better tools, and I know what kinds of amazing creativity some of these designers have, so it personally bothers me to see the lion's share of investment in the gaming industry go into reproducing the same games over and over.

Those of you who are in the industry: what do you think about starting your own shops, or building kick-ass games in your free time? If you work at one of these large companies and are pursuing things like this, I'd love to see your work.

That industry still exists and is thriving more now than ever. It's just moved over to mobile.

That's definitely a good point. I've played some awesome mobile games.

The only downside is that they are producing for a platform with such a horrendously inaccurate/crappy input system. I get enthusiastic about downloading a game on my n7 only to find that it's extremely frustrating to play, or that the game has been dumbed down in some way to compensate, massive sadface. This isn't true of all of them, especially games that are designed around the touch interface, but after a while I still get bothered by it.

I'm really liking the resurgence of indie PC games, though. In the past few years I've played games produced by < 3 independent people that easily rivaled the games people tout as the "best of all time." Specifically, I'm curious why these huge companies want to produce 1 game over X years for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and still fail to be profitable when they sell millions of copies.

What are some awesome mobile games? The vast majority of the ones I've played have felt extremely shallow, and couldn't hold my attention for very long at all, so I'd love to find a few consistent go-to's for when I'm on a train and don't feel like playing a puzzle game.

These are the games that have remained on my phone (sort of in order of favorites):

plants vs zombies, middle manager of justice, minecraft pocket edition, plague inc., tiny wings, ticket to ride, carcassone, flight control, textropolis

    you didn't want to own hundreds of games

I wanted to own hundreds of NES games because they didn't have remotely as much replay value as good modern games such as Counter Strike. (Heh, Counter Strike is the best example I have of a good modern game because it's the last game I played regularly.)

    even though you could because most were priced very reasonably

Most of the NES games I bought cost $49.99 plus tax. I specifically recall that Double Dragon cost me $54.99 plus tax.

> Most of the NES games I bought cost $49.99 plus tax.

Wolfram Alpha says[1] that's ~$90 today.

1: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=50%20USD%201990%20in%20...

It's interesting to reflect on this number, when you realize that the latest AAA platform title (whatever AAA meant in that particular day/age) have always cost about $50-60 in the past $$ terms of that day, regards of when in the past 20 years we're talking about. So you paid $90 worth of value in 1990 and we pay $49.99 today. What I mean to say is that games were EXPENSIVE back then!

A big difference then was that you could expect to reliably sell your used game back after you finished playing it, if you didn't want to hang on to it. So if you were into playing a lot of games and only keeping your all time favorites, you could reduce that cost significantly. And at the same time, if you were willing to wait a little bit after a launch, you could have the game for a nice discount. How often are you able to sell a game you pay $60 for today? And it doesn't help that the same game is repackaged and sold 10 times over a few years by the same company, each time for $60. At best that's a DLC, maybe worth $10 or $15, not another $60. :|

Heh, here in Australia it used to be $50, now it's $90-110

I think you still have rose tinted glasses. I still remember paying about AU$80 for Sonic The Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Master System, and about AU$90 for Sonic 3 on the Mega Drive.

In real terms, games are cheaper here too.

(Another reason for lower prices would also be lower unit costs -- a ROM cartridge surely cost more to manufacture than an optical disc. And the gaming audience is now much larger than it used to be.)

I remember early 80's cartridges for Atari 2600 in the Sears catalogs being $80-120 USD a lot of the time. Though I don't think I ever paid more than about $40 myself.. I remember being REALLY disappointed in a few.. and miss a few today.

To me, the preview video for the game looks like Star Wars meets Half Life.

But market forces were very different too. You would expect thousands of sales, not millions, and your development team was a dozen people, not five hundred.

Development got harder (more art assets to make, harder code to write, more of everything) markets got bigger (100 million Wiis vs 50 million NES's) and demographics shifted (from 8 - 16 year olds to 16 - 30 year olds).

Double Dragon was super expensive. I had to get my dad to take me to a Toys R Us that was 40 miles away just to pick it up, too.

The prices weren't necessarily based on quality either, I paid $64.99 for Ghostbuster (NES) and that game was awful.

Recognizable titles did that, sure, but you could grab a used copy for less than half of that, and I recall buying plenty of games for under $24 new.

Counter Strike for me counts as a childhood game, though. I was early teens when it came out and I played it on the order of thousands of hours. It was developed by a relatively small player, Sierra, who also had some other awesome games I enjoyed prior to that, and the game was initially awesome.

I enjoyed everything up to and including 1.3, and even dabbled in competitive play. I've played every version of CS since and nothing is even comparable to versions 1.3 and below. I guess all good things must come to an end, and while I really hoped to see the efforts behind cs promod take off, nobody really advertised it (it was a re-packaged v1.3 when 1.6 and later source were basically killing the competitive scene).

Actually Sierra published the original Half-life game but didn't help develop it or Counter-Strike. CS was created by Gooseman (Minh Lee) and is arguably the most popular Half-Life mod ever. I played that game for thousands of hours too starting back in middle school.

Ah right, it was published by Sierra. What a work of art for Gooseman.

Thinking about it brings back those nostalgic days of WON with the fullscreen console. I had a 3 digit wonid, I remember when that was such a big deal, lol. Going over to a friend's house, setting up PCs, getting loads of caffeine and raiding the liquor cabinet, then doing cal scrims all night long.

Sorry, but I can't help but feel you're looking at the industry through rose-tinted glasses. There were hundreds upon hundreds of games for NES/Gameboy/DOS/PS that absolutely stunk. The vast majority were rotten, rotten games that were plain unfun from the title screen through to the end credits. I'd happily contend that the opposite is true: that if you go into a GAME store today, the vast majority of games will be at least /ok/. Whilst I don't think it's yet true that the majority of titles are AAA (check the reviews section of your nearest games mag, only a few releases per month are evidently AAA), a declining market for medium-budget games is possibly more of an issue.

And what happened to the $5 games? Since 2007 the industry has seen a huge, massive surge in (successful) indie game development, primarily on PC but also distributed digitally on PSN and 360. It's definitely there, alive, strong and very visible. (Sure, they might take more than 2 weeks to make, but not many games can be made in two weeks to contend well on quality).

Sure, but it's all independent now. They used to be small game studios with the resources to push out high quality games at a pretty rapid pace. I'm not saying the people building indie games today aren't talented, but some of them spend years polishing a single title, only to have it make a few hundred K, with a few massive outliers (Braid, Minecraft, Binding of Isaac, etc).

I remember playing crappy games back then, too, but so much more of it felt like today's indie scene. It's like some big business machine marched in and bought all the "pro" talent to produce the same few games over and over again on different engines, while everyone who gives a shit about actually building fun, innovative games just started their own few-person ventures.

I think you touch on a major problem. There are two extremes now - the ultra-publisher umbrellas that push out AAA market products, and the indies composed of 5 guys in a basement. There are very few companies with 50 - 100 people in the mid-range making mid-tier games with good gameplay (not revolutionary) good graphics (not Crysis 3 here) and fill in an industry gap. They all get acquired by big publishers.

In the 80's, even when Nintendo was practically the only publisher on the block, development studios contracted to publish games with them, they weren't owned by them. Up until the mid 2000's studios weren't owned by the publishers like they are now. Look at how Blizzard / Bioware / Epic / id etc all got bought and brought under big publisher umbrellas.

  almost all of them kicked ass

The past always looks brighter from the present.

In a sense, those days are back. Despite all of the AAA games that were released in 2012 (and there were some excellent games) the Game Developer Choice Awards last week were dominated by an independent title, Journey.[1] The conference as a whole had a strong focus on independent developers.[2]

Kickstarter projects are bringing back mid-range development, with smaller studios like Double Fine and Obsidian raising millions. Some Kickstarter projects, like FTL, have already been released to award-winning success.[3] The Kickstarter for the Planescape: Torment sequel being developed by inXile has raised almost 3.5 million with 51 hours to go.[4]

There's a lot of innovation happening. Just play any of the IGF finalists if you want a taste.[5]

[1] http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-27/business/38080...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/arts/video-games/game-deve...

[3] http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2012.php?id=360

[4] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-...

[5] http://www.igf.com/2013finalistswinners.html

I agree with Estel. What you have written here is no reflection of the reality I grew up in.

There weren't a lot of games. There were just under 1000 NES games for both the US AND Japanese market (combined), and the total clocks in at about 200MB in size. The 30+ games you saw were probably the entire library of unique games for the platform.

The games we had yesteryear sucked. Really, really sucked. Most of them were bare derivatives of each other. For every Super Mario Bros. 3 there were 5 clones of Arkanoid. The controls were bad, the artwork was bad, the framerates were bad. We just didn't know they sucked because we didn't have better games yet. Look at some of the best games on the market back then, games like Megaman or Star Fox, and they are are only popular as nostalgia pieces today. I don't consider Golgo 13 or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES; PilotWings or DOOM on the SNES; Driver or Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PlayStation; to be anything close to playable games today, but I remember playing all of them for hours and liking it, because that was really all we knew.

And the games were not cheap. The NES retailed at $300 in the US when it debuted in 1985. That'd be almost $650 today. Super Mario Bros. 3 (the pinnacle of the series, IMO) debuted in 1990 at a price point of $60--over $105 in today's dollars. Chrono Trigger on the SNES debuted at $80 in 1995--over $120 today. I remember paying $70 for Yoshi's Cookie in 1992 (because I was 10 and that was all the Christmas money I had and I really, really wanted. My mother and I played it together for hours. It was great). That'd be $115 today for a puzzle game I could rewrite in a weekend now. I don't know what you're talking about with "$5 games".

You're praise of Sega Channel just further underscores that you were probably too young to understand money back in this time. It was $15/mo in 1994 when the only subscription services anyone had were telephone and TV cable (and you were "rich" if you had cable). I remember my father freaking out over a $20 telephone bill one month in the 90s: I regularly pay almost $100/mo for my cellphone today. The downloads constantly failed and you could only play the games for an hour before they reset.

There are lots of very playable games on the SNES and Playstation - my friends and I still break out Contra 3 and Super Bomberman sometimes, and Chrono Trigger is still a lot of fun to play through for the first time. NES, not so much. Also, 1000 games for a platform is a good number. PS3 clocks in at around 700. Your money arguments are pretty accurate, though. He might be talking about FuncoLand and other used game shops?

Not sure of the particulars of your situation, but my family was by no means "rich" but had Sega Channel for the entire length of its existence. Sure beat renting games at Blockbuster (and before that, Home Vision Video, a New England chain that got pummeled out of existence) for $5 a pop, and it lasted the whole month.

We rented games once a summer.

If you take a look at the brilliant success of Minecraft, the games you are talking about may be making a comeback. I miss Zelda as much as you do, but we'll just have to wait.

And also get those CoD fanboys to stop speaking for the rest of us gamers.

I didn't really feel like I could chime in to this thread at first, because I don't play the latest COD or Bioshock, or whatever the latest gen games are.

Then I saw your comment.

The most fun I've had with a video game in a long time was Braid. A novel concept of the old side-scroller. I'd throw my wallet at the screen for a new Braid with even a few new time-altering features. It was relaxing and fun.

That isn't quite the "1 programmer, 1 artist, 1 sound engineer," you mentioned, but glancing at Wikipedia, it was close to that.

I'd like to throw out Fez as a suggestion, it was another 2-3 people platform game developed recently and a twist on a classic puzzle/platforming mechanic.

Honestly with Steam/XBLA/PSN we're seeing some of the best titles we've seen in years, even if the $60 retail industry is hurting.

>What happened to the industry?

Its still there! You just have to ignore the hype and look beneath the curtains.

http://www.tigsource.com/

EDIT: and, of course, http://repo.openpandora.org/

The industry hit a bad limit and is now in reset mode... starting again from mobile.

Been a video game programmer since 93 and I totally agree with your comparison with the movie industry. If you're going to make a AAA game you need a huge budget both for development and for marketing, which means that only the 'sure thing' will get the green light. That means the same games over and over with greater graphical fidelity, just like the big budget action movies don't stray too far from the accepted formula.

Interesting that the groups that get to define what makes an "AAA" game are the groups that can afford making such games as defined. Gamers need to get away from the AAA quality labeling as it means next to nothing these days. For instance, what's an A or AA game? Seems to me these days the number of A's only suggests the retail price but not the quality of the game.

Personally, I would put Super Meatboy or Mark of the Ninja up against any of these so-called AAA blockbuster games any time.

As far as I'm concerned "AAA" refers only to the development budget.

That's the general consensus, yeah. AAA gets lots of press, but it is not a direct reflection of quality: as has been mentioned, the large budget also includes marketing $$$.

AAA also refers sometimes to overall production values, which tends to mean amount of features and coverage of areas of experience: story, cinematics, voiceover, variety, realism, etc. Without a AAA budget you can't afford all of that and must focus on doing one or two things right and ignore the rest. This plethora of features can sometimes be mistaken for 'quality'.

I think this makes my point in more/better detail than I managed to do. This is more or less what I mean by wishing gamers would get away from using AAA as some kind of symbol of quality.

One of my absolute favourite games bootstrapped themselves on the basis of pre-orders before Kickstarter was available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Selection_2

I think they pulled it off because of the strong reputation of the original Natural Selection (which was a Half Life mod). Still pretty amazing, especially considering they developed the 3D engine from scratch.

I forget where, but the entire story of how NS2 came to life is a paean to the dedication of its fans.

IIRC they had a build out and no one cared too much - until one of their fans started putting out gameplay videos on youtube, every single day.

The firm recruited him to be their head of marketing after that.

I suspect rock paper shotgun had done the story.

This year at the Game Developer Conference, Chris Hecker had an entirely wordless rant about the state of creativity in the AAA space, essentially using AAA's PR to point out how little real innovation is happening in that space. [1] It's received quite a bit of attention and agreement in the industry.

[1] http://chrishecker.com/Fair_Use

Your movie industry comparison is probably spot on in many ways. Especially the part about the number of non-developers at a company that actually increase the cost of development even though they are not directly involved.

The other aspect I'm curious over is if these AAA titles don't meet their sales quota is an attempt by publishers to get out paying royalties and bonuses to developers. It's a common tactic in Hollywood and there's evidence of it in the gaming industry already.

if your a publicly traded company your pretty much bound to have scads of people who do not contribute directly to the end product but merely exist to deal with all the regulations and laws that said companies must adhere too. It is frightening how much is spent to maintain compliance. It is not uncommon for large companies to have both internal and external auditors to ensure it.

Then toss is all the people needed to support the developers, artists, and their managing teams.

Ever read the credits at the end of a movie, count the people. Some video games have the same or bury it in a manual if your so lucky.

While what you say is true, those people should not be rolled into the development costs of the game. Their costs are the burden of the company, not the the developers whether they are an internal group or external studio. Most developers, well I believe this still holds true, have projects that are financed by publishers. The money handed over to the developers is the true cost of development. There will be people in the development group that won't have a hand in the project directly but are paid for through such funds, there's no way around that.

But the people that work at a publisher that funds an external development project should not be included in any way in the credits of the game. That's stupid and deceiving, I consider it an insult to the people who actually worked on the game. Much like those never-ending credits at the end of a movie that lowers the value of having your name in the credits in the first place.

If a publisher is rolling all those costs into the reported development costs of a game then they are inflating that number for some reason and I'm willing to bet it benefits no one but the publisher. As I stated elsewhere, it heavily feels of the Hollywood tactic of claiming a project never makes money to avoid having to make payments based on profit required by contract. A developer never gets royalties if the game never makes money.

Remember, Return of the Jedi is yet to turn a profit.

Add to it the impact mobile has had on consumers who are increasingly used to getting games for somewhere between free and 99 cents.

There is a mad rush to free to play right now in order to capture that audience. Although the market is much bigger, I fully expect the attempt to squeeze as much money possible out of the players will results in more and more painfully annoying games (most free to play already fit in that category.)

On the upside, free to play allows you to try out the game before fully investing on it. On the downside, if it's good enough, you will probably be milked more than the typical $60 retail in DLCs and in game items.

I personally don't buy games at launch anymore. I just wait for it to go on sale on Steam.

"and yet those games made money for their creators."

Did they make enough money to offset what would be fair salaries for their creators throughout the time they were being made? If not, then the comparison isn't very valid since the creators would have been working for free.

I'm sure they did, since those games were humongous hits and the developers are still famous for them.

While synergistic, Kickstarter is definitely on the right side of the indie dev movement.

If there were no kickstarter, there would still be an increasing amount of indie devs. Of course their life would be much harder, and we would not be seeing the new Torment game.

Kickstarter hasn't done a lot of delivery yet. It's captured people's imaginations, but due to the relative lack of tangible output at this stage, the warts are yet to be seen.

What about Blizzard? They seem to be the exception to the rule. They deliver very few titles but they seem to be raking in cash on each of them.

I highly doubt Diablo 3 has been the cash cow they had hoped for, and with the first Starcraft expansion launched with no sign of a monetization route with custom games I can't imagine their ROI on it is anything breath-taking, given the developmental resources required for a game as widely played as SC2. All of this is set the back-drop of a rapidly waning WoW playerbase and revenue.

Blizzard is the exception to the rule in that they typically deliver very high quality games, actually making enough money to fund that level of quality has not been consistent, while making strategic moves toward more money has consistently ended up burning them (WoW paid pets and mounts showed up about the time the player base started to get bored and diffuse to other things, the D3 RMAH has been an utter disaster since it launched)

Diablo 3 has sold over 12 million copies on PC. That's an extremely high sales number for a single platform. Also, the RMAH has been a success as far as I can tell. I don't have access to any major statistics, but anecdotally speaking I know several people who make a nice profit in the RMAH, and Blizzard takes a juicy cut all the time.

I think they rely heavily on their sterling brand for that consistency. Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 have done very well commercially, but most of the enthusiasts I talked to were fairly disappointed, and some of them even remarked that Blizzard has left their "autobuy" list. They were one of maybe two developers on that list for me, but I think that explains their very consistently massive success - they used to turn out games that were consistently much better than the competition's, especially in terms of replay value, and so they got on that list for a lot of people.

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