Net Inventions

There always has to be a first post, and this one has the dubious honour of that role. I've created this blog partly as a place to grumble on about stuff that I've done for NetInvent, and partly just to vent my slightly eccentric views on IT, web design, games development and other assorted and vaguely related topics: like international issues, Doctor Who, speed cameras, Victorian roads, and the people who rule our world today.

I'm in Victoria, Australia, and right now I'm in my in-law's garage because I'm still waiting for the keys to my house. As garages go, it's quite decent, but after a few weeks I have found myself longing for somewhere else to do my work. No offence to mechanics everywhere, but a patio table in the corner of a garage is not the best place to do web design and coding.

Historically, I'm a games programmer of the PS1/PS2/Xbox/PC DirectX variety, but I've decided games development is a typified by hard work, stress and insecurity for rates of pay that often fall below the standard contracting rates for COM / ASP developers.

It pays very well if you are Sony, Square, THQ, EA, or Ubisoft, but if you happen to be an actual developer or development company, it doesn't pay so well. Yep, another year of massive record profits in the videogame industry, and another year of what seem to be record liquidations and redundancies in development. Meanwhile the overall quality and originality of games seems to decline.

With the massive resources that will be required to produce a PS3 or Xbox360 game, I forsee we will see a repetition of the pattern from before: products will converge on existing genres and patterns, publishers will be increasingly cautious about what they fund, the money made by the top few products of the year will increase, and the money made by all the other products will decrease. The people who went into games to be creative (such as myself) grow increasingly disillusioned as publisher caution strangles creativity tighter each year.

Chances are we'll see even more mediocre licensed titles, as cautious publishers decide that linking a movie license to a game is the best way to assure some sort of profit from a product.

Every year there are less games that make a decent profit: while the rest barely pay for themselves, or run at a loss, the few top titles take an even bigger share of the pie. This is not a good thing for publishers, developers or consumers. Consumer choice becomes an illusion and developers find themselves in an increasingly insecure position. Publishers become increasingly nervous: their security comes from spread betting, and the chances of a big win diminish every year, even if the jackpot is increased. The way the odds are headed, even a big publisher can go down if their (increasingly few) big releases for the year fail for some reason.

Of course, many people imagine that the life of a game developer consists of 'playing games' all day, and that it's light, easy work with low standards of expectation and slack discipline. Typically, it could not be further from the truth: developers often work outrageously long hours, with 70 or 90 hour weeks, no overtime pay, and continual aggressive pressure from slave-driver producers. Many of the artists are so badly paid that they would earn more money pushing a warehouse trolley, while QA and level builders may be even worse off. It's usually only the drive to be creative that keeps these people in their jobs, and yet creativity in the games business is always being stamped on by increasingly cautious publishers.

Not that the lot of the publisher is all rosy. They too have been squeezed hard over the last few years, and many badly run UK and European publishers are now gone. These companies were largely incapable of developing any good content for several reasons:

1. they were frequently run by dilettante directors with little grasp of rigorous business practice who found themselves out of their depth when the game business scaled up;
2. they were handicapped by a number of empire-building managers who were employed for the wrong reasons and had the wrong abilities (in other words nepotism was rife) - thus generally preventing any good work being done under them;
3. they were unable to distinguish bad product from good (mainly because of the above points);
4. they were unable to distinguish good developers from bad (guess why);
5. if they found a good external developer, they might treat them so badly that they bankrupted them (because of point 4);
6. they did little to help developers be better at dealing with technical, artistic, game-play or financial issues.

To what extent these problems afflicted any particular publisher (if at all) obviously varies, but there is scarcely any doubt that most publishers that folded up in the last decade had problems that descended from the top down.

It seems that even a decade ago we were seeing people in publishing complaining that publishers weren't really doing enough to help developers do a better job, and things haven't improved noticably since then.

The publishers that are still around are the least afflicted by these flaws, but may still cling to unsuccessful ideas from other industries and apply them without discernment. For example, there is still a tendancy for sales requirements to drive development management: a tragic disaster, as the sales departments often seem to live in a fantasy land where nonsense like feature lists and 'expected play duration' are relevant - despite these things being shown to be meaningless in creating a hit title, again and again. I'm also a little doubtful that they have any useful and reliable statistics about what makes a game successful. If they do, I fear they are not interpreting them well.

So, you probably have figured out that I'm not too happy with the state of the games industry. While I'd love to be developing games, I can't afford to self-finance such projects, and I don't want to be in a situation where I'm completely at the mercy of a single publisher. As the latter would be the only way I could even try to develop the games I'm interested in I've had to accept that I won't be doing it. If I do more games work, it will be, as before, work for hire, and they pay will have to be good for me to consider it.

For a few years now I've been thinking I should do web design and development, and that's what I'm involved in now. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on...

posted by Peter Wake @ 3:10 pm