A Horrible Industry
I think money and the majority of gamers, is the important. but no matter what thing, with people as the key, the only people who are interested in, can design the do better and more attractive.
[quote name='Dmytry' timestamp='1341172849' post='4954631']
I don't see myself working in any game studio. There is not much innovation going on, the pay is not very good, etc.
That depends a hell of a lot on the studio.
There are good places to work, and they do plenty of innovative stuff, with competitive pay rates with non-gaming programming jobs. They're hard as hell to break into, sure, but they do exist.
It's the same in any industry or any career. If you want to work for the top 1% of companies, you better be a top 1% employee. Life in the first two standard deviations is not all roses and rainbows in any business. I've had my share of experiences like frob's in the non-games software world where the quality of life was utter rubbish - both as a contractor and as a full-time employee. Overall it comes down to how hard you're willing to work to get into a good position, and how qualified you are to stay on track in that position over time.
Compared to the horror stories I hear coming out of the supposedly "good" employers in the non-games software world, I'm pretty damn happy to be working for a studio.
[/quote]
Well, I know Valve is pretty good, and they pick up projects like Portal... but overall I dunno, I just don't see any of big guys making something particularly new. Even something as old as generating unique faces is omg super innovative there. The other software industry is also not very good of course. It's all mostly redoing old shit over and over again everywhere with few exceptions (Google's self driving car for example of real exception).
I just don't see how a big name studio would end up paying me as much as I got on Polynomial. Someone might, now, after I've released a competent game, but now I can make a next game and avoid the mistakes I made, and that should pay off better. (Polynomial was my first game. There's one thing I am sure I did right - going very obsessive on polish - and it was correct to make very basic gameplay for the first game - but it'll be better to have more diverse gameplay in the second)
Regarding role of luck: it shouldn't be either overstated or understated... something like angry birds, well, there's a lot of such games, many of them good, just 1..2 uberpopularity slots, whichever takes them is up to luck because nobody's really doing some sort of careful comparing like in sports. On the other hand, mmorpgs, that's heavy monetary investments, someone puts in more money than anyone else (including into marketing), has actually a good game, and captures the niche, not a lot up to luck.
I don't think that masses are dictating something. They believe what the media said and media says what was paid for. Most people believe in what they hear or read not too much on their experience. That is normal because today more people are playing games and the level is going down.
There are so many games which had excelentn first and second versions (or games) and then when companies grows they produced garbages. Look at Cossacks->American Conquest->Cossacks II; or Stronghold; or AOE 2 compared to AOE 3. Many good games were forgotten, no way to buy them, no mods, no new things, no working servers.
Companies are becoming larger and spent more money to do the same work with worse quality. Especially these tamagochies-free browser games called RTS...
There are so many games which had excelentn first and second versions (or games) and then when companies grows they produced garbages. Look at Cossacks->American Conquest->Cossacks II; or Stronghold; or AOE 2 compared to AOE 3. Many good games were forgotten, no way to buy them, no mods, no new things, no working servers.
Companies are becoming larger and spent more money to do the same work with worse quality. Especially these tamagochies-free browser games called RTS...
I don't think that masses are dictating something. They believe what the media said and media says what was paid for. Most people believe in what they hear or read not too much on their experience. That is normal because today more people are playing games and the level is going down.
There are so many games which had excelentn first and second versions (or games) and then when companies grows they produced garbages. Look at Cossacks->American Conquest->Cossacks II; or Stronghold; or AOE 2 compared to AOE 3. Many good games were forgotten, no way to buy them, no mods, no new things, no working servers.
Companies are becoming larger and spent more money to do the same work with worse quality. Especially these tamagochies-free browser games called RTS...
Money is votes, and games which get the most money get voted the highest. Game companies which see their games earning lots of money will naturally assume that there's interest in a sequel. It's a safer bet to invest your money into a sequel for a popular game which already has an established player base than to invent a brand new IP. That's why we see a lot of companies making lots of version of Call of Duty, The Sims, Diablo, Halo, Deus Ex, etc. There is quite a bit of new and fresh content within the sequels (there has to be, or the sequel to the sequel will fail).
Note that if you're planning on releasing a new sequel or version every year or two, your next release is going to be competing with your current release. Every version of Microsoft Word is a very good word processor. Once you have a good word processor, why buy the next version? Keeping that in mind, would you intentionally leave out features from your current release so that you can include them in the next release? If yes, then your current release is slightly crappier. If you do it too much, you run the risk of gaining the reputation that your last release was crap. If you make the most perfect software you can possibly make, you can't release a subsequent version which improves on it, and thus are out of business. This might be a plausible explanation on why the quality goes down for franchises which have a monopoly on a segment of the market.
I am a musician. I joined this site hoping to start making music for video games.
You want to talk about bad industries, I can send you to quite a few musicians to talk to! haha
You want to talk about bad industries, I can send you to quite a few musicians to talk to! haha
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