So Pseudo and I were chatting on Steam about particular industry trends and developers/publishers when a light bulb switched on in my head - that's a discussion for this forum. So this is a thread about the general state of the gaming industry - all platforms, all genres, everything.

I think we're at a point in time where there is so much going on that it's hard to know where to begin, but there are definitely a few things I am excited about and others which I'm pretty unimpressed by.

So what I am unimpressed by... well, a few things. EA, as always. I am not a fan of Origin at all, and I don't like the way they treat their developers. Epic, well aside from having it on good authority that they're pretty big jerks in person, they also screwed up badly on Unreal Tournament 3, and haven't ventured back to the PC with anything to make up for it yet.

But the big one is Blizzard. These guys were my heroes ten years ago. I had enjoyed WarCraft 2, I had loved StarCraft, and Diablo II stayed with me for years. These guys knew how to make great games, and they took their time ensuring they did just that. WarCraft 3 was alright, I thought it was a bit mediocre, but I was pretty sure they'd bounce back with better games in future.

What we have ended up with instead, is a company that is now more focused on profits than what it is giving to it's customers. It is milking addicts on WoW as much as it can, for as long as it can. It responded to Korea's fanatical embrace of StarCraft by making a sequel that panders so much to their competitive play style that they forgot to insert the fun of the original. Diablo 3 has been made to ensure maximum profits with the auction house... I don't like my game worlds being made in to real world economies. The game takes on a different meaning. It's no wonder so many of Blizzard's best have left the company over the years.

So, yeah. Funnily enough, all my biggest annoyances seem to be with AAA publishers. But that brings me to something I'm excited about: indie developers.

These guys have struggled for a while now but with Steam (and more recently, Greenlight), mobile apps, and Kickstarter, they're undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment. Even outside of those three things, games like Path of Exile are independent, and looking really promising. I don't even know how those Kiwi's first got on their feet but they're making great progress. These are devs who get to play by their own rules (at least as far as their funding will allow them), and that's something I think the industry is really in need of. Bypassing publishers sounds like a bit of a dream come true, and it's all thanks to the new ubiquity of digital distribution.

Origin is very poor - I mean, not as poor as Games for Windows Live, but definitely right up there.

It's not that I'm particularly in love with Steam, but it generally works and it isn't too intrusive. If someone comes out with something better, I'd probably be willing to migrate (despite - or perhaps because of - Steam's stranglehold on my game ownership).

But the plan so far is seems to be for large companies to launch competitive game hubs which are markedly inferior to Steam, so I can't see it happening any time soon.



I have yet to play Starcraft II, and I really really loved Starcraft & Brood War.

Releasing SCII as three, full-price (more than full price, really - PC games are not generally £30 these days) games really rubbed me up the wrong way. I might purchase a 'gold edition' collection at some point in the distant future, when it's cheap enough. But I'm in no especial rush.



I too love the idea of independent developers being granted direct access to their customers(' wallets), and therefore the capacity to release games that might otherwise never have seen the light of day.

But a worrying trend has begun with things like Kickstarter & Greenlight, in that it's not really independent developers who are seeing the benefit, but larger companies instead.

Because of the nature of the internet, a mid-large developer can effectively hijack Kickstarter / Greenlight, using its existing fanbase to generate interest (via social media etc.), and thus produce games with very little risk, via crowdfunding.

It's not necessarily an enormous problem - the smaller, actually indie developers are still around, but the signal-to-noise ratio means that they're increasingly hard to find, and with Greenlight in particular it's those developers who already have a player base who are getting noticed, not the teeny tiny teams who are just starting out - so it is rather subverting the (perceived) intention.

I mean, we're not getting EA, Activision, Blizzard etc. launching games via Kickstarter - yet - so it's still enabling smaller developers access to the market. It's just that I don't think it's really enabling games that wouldn't otherwise have been released inasmuch as it's providing low-cost, low-risk advertising & pre-order boosts for mid-level software developers.

Starcraft II just didn't do it for me. The price tag was decent, but the original purchase was just for 120 days. I tried to rush through it to get the story but I didn't get hooked. Just recently, I got an e-mail from Blizzard letting me know that my "membership" had been upgraded to an unlimited one. With the PC issues I'm having, I haven't even booted the game.

I also got a gift subscription to D3. Still waiting on that.

I've had good experiences with indie games, however there are some games that come from big publishers that have been some of the games I've enjoyed the most: the Mass Effect series (minus the ending), the Dragon Age series, the Batman Arkham games and Assasins' Creed.

In Reply To #3

I am certainly not saying that AAA games are bad overall, each one can be judged on it's own merits. Despite my hatred, I will almost certainly be buying SimCity next year, even if it means I must use Origin. The preview videos for it, short as they are, already make it look like a game I want.

And smaller devs aren't exactly without fault. Plenty of indie games don't interest me in the slightest, and after playing Torchlight II in co-op with each of the four classes, I've more or less decided that I'm done with it. I don't think it has the replayability to keep me interested, and I think they made some strange and unbalanced design decisions - but then hey, at least it was just $20.

Pseudo - I think I am OK with mid-level developers using Kickstarter if it means they can make better games, and be somewhat less at the whim of their publishers. I am not exactly sure how a 'mid-level' dev is defined (is Runic an example, or even bigger than that, like Firaxis?), but I think that the Kickstarting and Greenlight concepts are part of a bigger movement - that is, community involvement in game development. Long betas, lots of tweaking, you know - the sort of stuff that so many games over the years, released too early, could have used.

In Reply To #4

Generally I define a "mid-level developer" as "someone who can afford to release a game"; so either they're successful enough to be their own (small scale) publisher (e.g. Paradox), or they have successfully released games with publishers in the past & can probably get the funding in the traditional way (e.g. Obsidian*)

The only problem I really have with this is that the sheer amount of social media momentum these established (albeit non-AAA) developers are able to bring to bear is now starting to drown out the people who are probably ONLY capable of producing games via Kickstarter / Greenlight.

Which I think will be a shame.

At the same time, I can certainly see the appeal for established developers going the Kickstarter way - aside from the free advertising, pre-orders etc., we've had situations recently where game studios have been closed down despite producing commercially successful games (possibly because the parent studios now want every game to be as successful as Modern Warfare)

The most relevant recent example being Radical Entertainment, who developed Prototype 2 - the best selling game in its release month of April 2012 - but were still shut down by Activision due a lack of profitability (which only says to me "big publishers are spending far too much on games")

*although why people keep giving them money without tying it into quality assurance is honestly beyond me at this point

While Epic has dropped the ball with actually releasing PC games they've done a spectacular job helping indie developers and hobbyists with the constant updates to the UDK. They got carried away with the Gears of War series. UT3, while a disappointment somewhat(actually I felt the franchise had just gotten old in general, they were kind of in that position if they changed it too much people would hate it, but if they didn't change much people would just ignore it, same pattern happened to C&C), it did crack open the door for mods being on console and at least setting precedent for mouse and keyboard setup on console as well, though both of these only being allowed on the PS3 due to MS's extremely draconian network rules. Right not they're working on Fortnite which claims to be a PC focused title(since it uses the new UE4 which current consoles can't handle graphically) so there is hope. The company basically felt like there was a split between them over console vs. PC. With Blezinkski gone I hope now they can push both platform types forward.

Blizzard was always 50/50 with me up until WoW expansions and then it just went downhill from there. Loved WC2, Diablo, D2 + Expansion, WoW Vanilla, didn't like SC, WC3,WoW "Expansions"(they don't expand crap, they just replace how the endgame plays out), and D3 just really carried no interest for me.

I have yet to try Origin and I never really had much of a problem with EA, mostly because they create few titles I actually like. I remember Steam being total shit, Friends didn't even work for the first few years of the service and it yet again broke a slew of HL mods, some of which dev teams just gave up on because they had enough of Valve's "updating". Steam's current state is decent but I worry about it being the primary digital distribution system, there really needs to be more competition. GoG and Gamersgate are pretty nice ones, GoG still needs to get retail cards in stores and Gamersgate needs to expand the stores that carry theirs. After all the hacking that went on last year I will never put a credit card on these systems again. Funnily enough about that while people bitched and moaned about Sony not notifying customers for a while, Steam didn't notify their customers for almost as long and no one raised a ruckus about that. We really need to stop this desire to see people fall, though I doubt that would ever happen.

Kickstarter is still very much a wait and see with me as none of these high profile games have come out and there's been very little word on the status of any of them. If successful enough it won't replace the funding model but will hopefully break the idea that publishers are the only way to go. Greenlight...it seems like a neat idea but it was trolled way too hard early on. The $100 fee did put a deterrent from the submissions end but the user voting end really needs work as it allows for negative trolls to down vote a game even if the game would clearly have a significant audience.

As for TL2, and ARPG's general, once I beat them I never felt a need to play them much afterwards, the gear/skills were always a means to an end, not the end themselves. I'll go back and play TL2 every now and then just for some quick fun and that's what it was all designed to do. The game was never really meant to be balanced since there's no real pvp component. Hope they release the GUTS kit soon as there's a lot of non-GUTS mods out there that really need to be converted soon before there's too many and they split the mod community, creating installation conflicts and such.

On a final note you really can't talk about the state of the industry as a whole because it's way too diversified between types of games, game budgets, distribution models, funding models, platforms, control schemes, and bunch of other attributes. At best you can discuss the state of one particular piece of it at. I really dislike when people say all games must do "x", "y" or "z" or whatever because not all games are the same. There's a lot of people who don't care for the heavy cinematic games like MGS and such, yet apparently there's a lot of people who do as the games sell well each time and I highly doubt those people buying are clueless about what's going to be in them after 4 main games and a handful of spin-offs. Just because you don't like how a certain set of games work you don't have to rage about them bringing the world to an end.

Is a good point.

e.g. I'm utterly tired of Modern Warfare-type games, I don't like the tunnel-shooter-set-piece SP game because there's nothing to it, and I dislike the inbuilt lack of balance in multiplayer (which just makes it frustrating).

But MW itself (along with its sequels & games of a similar style) is clearly one of the most popular games around, so they're doing something right. It's just Not For Me.

In Reply To #6

Fortnite does actually have my interest and I hope it turns out as well as everyone is hoping. I'd agree that Epic's work on the UDK has been great for the industry, but I wonder if they're in danger of becoming more known for that than their games. Then again, that may have already happened. Crytek comes to mind when I think of that too.

I've never used a credit card on Steam or any other such programs (I had Impulse briefly, but that was just for Sins of a Solar Empire, which I now have on Steam instead). I've always used PayPal, with an account lacking more funds than I immediately need. I've had my Visa cancelled once recently because someone somewhere abused it. Being extra careful now.

Not really sure what to make of your last paragraph, we can discuss any aspect of the industry we like. I haven't seen much raging or apocalyptic predictions with the industry, but then I don't really read much on gaming sites, or forums. However I would say there is certainly a growing trend with companies I've grown up with over the years in refocusing their efforts - previously the money was the means and fun was the result, now it seems to be vice versa. I'm just glad there are growing numbers of new devs bucking that trend.

It's pretty much been that way since Unreal Engine 2 came out. UT2k3 was really just a demo for the engine/editor. And while 2k4 improved the gameplay some, it still wasn't as memorable as the original UT despite bringing back Assault mode.


Until fairly recently you still had to add funds to Paypal over the internet if you wanted it done in a "reasonable" amount of time. Now of course you can buy Paypal cards at a physical retail to add funds and I use them when the service I want to purchase from doesn't have their own retail system.



Basically what I was saying is a lot of people have such a narrow scope of the game industry and try to say everything's bad because they don't like the one facet they've zeroed in on.

What's happened with a lot of the old guard companies is the One Ups-manship that drove innovation in the past when game budgets were lower has ironically bloated the budgets up quicker than the asset creation tools could keep up with, making those assets cost more to develop by requiring more time and people with specialized training, much like any other field. In the short span of 2 or so decades we went from a few hundred thousand dollar budget to hundreds of millions. Yes they've achieved leaps in visual and audio fidelity but it came about too quickly. So now the companies can't afford to take risks. They are literally at the point where a single game makes or breaks a studio regardless of its development history. We as consumers expect those high fidelity experiences from these companies and if they make anything less despite the gameplay being fantastic we turn on them.

If EA or Activision or Ubisoft made something like Minecraft first, it would have most likely been a flop because we would have demanded better graphics. Look at LittleBigPlanet(or more specifically LBP2), a game in the same vein as Minecraft, while certainly well received it didn't have the phenomenal following despite looking better and having a greater degree of flexibility in creating things(note that the first LBP actually predates Minecraft by a few years).

On top of that when they have tried different things it just didn't work out. Both L.A. Noire and Mirror's Edge didn't quite pan out. Dishonored, while a good game, hasn't been a run-away success. Despite the major marketing campaign Darksiders II hasn't done that great. Sleeping Dogs hasn't helped Squarenix much. Dragon's Dogma didn't quite make a great impact. Spec Ops: The Line while having some controversy didn't garner great sales. Prototype 2 got received both good scores and was liked by gamers but still didn't sell well enough to keep the studio together. Then there's the whole Kingdoms of Amalur company fiasco. Resistance 3 despite being a solid game and actually bringing FPS back to the more traditional side didn't quite fair well. Unfortunately the major consumers have told publishers if your name isn't CoD or Battlefield or Bioware d20/Choose Your Own Dialog Adventure Book or Bethesda Kinda Do Your Own Thing But In A Really Shallow Environment it will not be bought in large quantities, not even enough to turn a small profit let alone break even.

I don't think that's quite true.

Most of the games you listed did really quite well, sales-wise.

I'll return to Prototype 2 (just because it's one I'm more familiar with) - it was the top selling game across all systems for the first 6 weeks after release, and it wasn't released at a weird time of year with no competition, but in April (other stuff released in the same period: The Witcher 2, Devil May Cry, Star Wars Kinect, Diablo 3, Max Payne 3, Dragon's Dogma - of which only Max Payne 3 went on to beat P2 in initial sales figures)

That's the sort of thing you'd normally expect to mark 'massive success'. But it led to the studio being shut down for a lack of profitability.

Why? Because Prototype 2 clearly cost an absolute SHITLOAD to produce. So no matter how successful the game was, unless it was AAA successful, it wasn't going to turn a profit. But it was never going to be AAA successful (it's a sequel to an at most A game), being released during a dismal financial period (raw sales numbers were actually down across the board, for everything).

That's an industry development which really needs to fuck right off, because it's creating a situation where really quite good studios are being dismantled because they're creating successful games, which is perverse in the extreme.

The fault here is clearly with those who hold the pursestrings - too many large developers clearly have unrealistic profit goals, which is causing them to spend millions on games that should really be produced on a lower budget (and therefore with slightly lower graphical oomph, which people are - I think - willing to accept (especially as a lot of the extra expense goes on things the majority of gamers don't even notice)), because these games will NEVER be as astronomically successful as WoW or CoD.

UDK (and similar things, like Unity) might be great in some ways, but they've become far too popular for their own (and anyone else's) good. The problem is a lot of universities now consider it perfectly acceptable to run a degree in 'Games Development' under the guise of being a Computer Science degree which is little more than a three year course in UDK/Unity with some lightweight theory that can be totally ignored by anyone taking the course.

Whereas a more 'traditional' CompSci/GameDev course would require people to learn C++ to a decent standard and teach a lot of computer graphics theory, the new courses teach a bunch of skills that might be useful if they happen to end up working on some indie project. Which isn't good for them because they don't have the skills that are required in the real world of development - this is a problem we've run into at work when hiring developers in the last few years. But it's also not good for the industry, because there aren't enough graduates with the right skills to be developers, and it's not good for gamers because it means although there may be a glut of cheap indie UDK/Unity games, none of those indie games will be able to do anything really novel because they're trapped in the functionality of those engines.

As for Greenlight; I think it's potentially a really neat idea. I have a project that I'm looking at launching on Greenlight fairly soon, and I see it as much as a way to help build a following as a way to get on Steam. It's a centralised place where people with a declared interest in indie games will go look and and discuss indie games, and gives them a way to pass that game around to friends in a simple format, without requring the developer to spend time designing and setting up a website. Also, I'm looking at it as being a good way to gauge interest prior to a (potential) Kickstarter project, which makes it a nice way to try things out and see what people are interested in and what they're not rather than rushing straight into Kickstarter.

I'm totally in favour of the $100 fee, too, because it means that small developers don't have to compete for attention with spam and trolls as well as with bigger, already well known projects. On the other hand, it'd be nice if the fee was different in different countries, because $100 isn't a huge amount to me in the long term, but then I'm a software developer in the UK. It must lock out people from countries where $100 is a lot of money, and I'll bet there are quite a lot of would-be indie developers from places like that.

Most Computer Science degree programs don't even touch C++ anymore, favoring Java which abstracts the computer out of the whole equation. It's no longer Computer Science anymore, more like Software Development as there's no real science going on anymore in a lot of these programs.

As for people not doing anything novel with these engines, that's the developers' fault, the engine is just the framework they use to get more of the common menial tasks done. UDK can use C++ via plugins(and with UE4 on the way, C++ will allowed to be edited during the running of the proram) and Unity has access to most of .NET through Mono(although Unity seems to be taking their time updating their version lately). So it's hardly the engines that are restricting these people, it's their own lack of vision and dedication. Ironically one of the most novel and fun games started out as a UT mod, almost became a UDK standalone and is now it's own game using Unity, that being Air Buccaneers.

Now for Universities offering Game Design programs with these tools, its the fault of the consumer(yes a person who pays for "higher" education is a consumer in this regards) for not educating themselves on these programs before paying for them. To me there's no such thing as a non-profit education organization, that profit isn't just always pure money, but they need that money as a means to their own ends, which is their profit. But that is a completely different discussion for another topic.

Actually, my uni taught programming mostly in Java, but while teaching the theoretical basis as well, we were only taught in C++ for the computer graphics/game dev stuff. It's a tough tradeoff, because most people starting Comp Sci. have never done any programming and Java is easier to pick up, and there are far more jobs for Java developers than C++ developers too. Even for the universities that don't teach much theory, I wouldn't call it a degree in Software Development, because they rarely teach anything about the realities of doing it as a job. It's more just a degree in Programming.

I'd agree that if people are taking games design style courses without doing the research and realising it's pretty much a dead end it's kinda their own fault, but it's still alarming quite how many decent universities are offering the courses. But yeah, I don't doubt it's more of a financial decision than an academic one.

My point about people not doing anything novel with the engines wasn't as much that it's not possible, but that the people who tend to use those engines just don't have the skillset to extend them in any way, and most of them don't even realise they're lacking those skills. We hired a guy with a Unity/UDK background (who had worked as a 'developer' on a fairly well known UDK game) as a developer where I work, and he could barely write functional C++ code. He, however, did not realise this. He is now a tester.

That's a failure of your HR department not checking if he met the qualifications for the position you were hiring him for, not the failure of a tool set.

As a personal side note, just for my case, I find Java a bit harder to read than C++, especially when it comes to "shortcut" or less typing kind of code. I just like a more verbose writing of things. I have the same problem with mathematical short hand, hate it to death and can really only understand a bit of it. Show it to me in long form or in the structure of a programming language, I'm all over it. Again another discussion for another topic about people understanding things differently. Now if you purposefully try to obfuscate things then we're going to have words(I'm looking at you old style C programmers!!).

In Reply To #14

We don't have a HR department (fairly small company), but yeah, we totally shouldn't have hired him. He did awfully in his programming test, but they were fairly desperate to hire new staff at the time.

Again, I realise it's not really a failing of UDK that he doesn't know stuff, but I guess it just amazes me that it's possible to make a game while being as ignorant of the technology behind it as he was. He did go to one of the worst universities in the country though, so probably isn't the average case.

I actually much prefer C++ to Java too, and did as soon as I got to grips with it (our introduction to C++ was a single hour long lecture about how it differed from Java, which wasn't exactly sufficient in the long term). But a lot of people I knew at uni who had never programmed before found Java much easier to pick up.