Posted by Brice on June 27, 2010
“Blizzard and Nintendo don’t care about money; they only care about making fun games. Zynga just wants to turn a profit by making terrible games.”
Not exactly.
Video games, like painting, music, film, and theater, are a form of art. At the very least, they are a creative media that can be used to express any number of themes, ideas, fictional stories or worlds and convey experiences. For this reason, many players and developers have deep emotional attachments to the games that they play, games that touched their hearts and took them places they had never been before.
Companies that make these kinds of games are held in the highest esteem by players and fans. Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda games have always been known for their charm, easy-to-understand controls and challenges, and their flair for presentation and playability. Valve’s Half-Life and Portal games have many die hard fans who greatly respect the artistic integrity of the plot, storyline, and characters surrounding Gordon Freeman’s adventures. And Blizzard’s Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo franchises have given the company a seemingly unshakable reputation for high quality, polished experiences that are near-perfect. Each of these companies make the highest quality games in their own way, and saying that a game is “A Blizzard Game”, “A Valve Game”, or “A Nintendo Game” carries with it a mark of passion and dedication associated with those development teams.
However, other companies make games that are not as popular with the traditional gaming crowd. Currently the popular scapegoat is social networking companies, such as Zynga or Playdom. Games like Farmville or Sorority Life are wildly profitable, but they are often criticized for sacrificing fun and player entertainment in exchange for turning a buck. Clicking on crops day in and day out just doesn’t seem to have the same “labor of love” feel that went into a Zelda game. Rather, these games appear to some to be evil slot machines designed to maximize monetization.
This complaint is a serious misconception of the intentions of game companies. Those who voice this complaint believe that commercial games must be fun, that they must be of the highest quality, and that their number one, ultimate goal is to make a critically acclaimed product.
This is false.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Brice on May 22, 2010
“You should definitely check out the first game. But ignore all the ones after that. They’re all crap.”
“I enjoyed the first movie, but by the time they got to the second and third film, it was just more of the same, and I had already seen the same. Boring.”
“The first one had such soul, but the second was just an attempt at a cheap way to make more money.”
How often have you heard phrases like this? Welcome to the hazardous world of sequels.
Super Mario Galaxy 2, the latest massive title in the world’s most successful video game franchise, is currently on track to match the seemingly impossibly-high quality bar set by its predecessor. Reviewers are floored by the first ever 3D sequel to a Mario game on the same platform, calling it a “dazzling high water mark in Mario’s career”.
While making a game like Super Mario Galaxy is an incredible feat in itself, following a successful title up with a sequel or spin-off is often a far greater challenger for a game developer. Sequels are seldom seen from members of the student or independent game development community for several reasons. First and most distressing, many student game projects never get completed in the first place, much less built into a sequel or follow up title. There is less of a profit incentive for young game developers to create a sequel; it’s seemingly much more interesting to come up with an entirely new idea. Out with the old, in with the new.
Second, many independent developers have a bitter view of sequels. While original new titles are often viewed as artistic visionary products, sequels can be seen as money-grubbing attempts for a corporate machine to pump more dollars out of what used to be a piece of art, turning it into a soulless hunk of code. The marketplace is flooded with poorly executed sequels that not only fail to please their original fans, they tarnish the name of the original product that was once praised. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Brice on November 24, 2009
Photo: DeeKnow
[In this guest post by Rodain Joubert, he discusses ways that independent developers can spread the word about their game with no money in thebank. You can find this and more of Rodain's articles at Dev.Mag.]
Today’s game market is, by all accounts, saturated. There’s simply not enough time for people to play everything that’s on offer out there, even if everybody dedicated their lives to hunting out – and playing through – as many titles as humanly possible.
Because today’s gamers are so spoilt for choice, it’s easy for new limelight seekers to be intimidated by the teeming throng of “play me!” titles and quick fixes that constitute the marketing rat-race. In the worst case, a particularly shy indie dev may just upload a small demo, paste the link in a small corner of his/her personal blog, tentatively approach one or two friends and basically just stay put and hope that somebody with media clout walks by, shouts, “oh my word!” and wakes up the digital neighbourhood for you.
That’s not to say that such windfalls don’t occur. They are, however, incredibly unlikely. A lot of people regard these success stories on the Internet as the norm, unaware of the fact that for every runaway success they hear about, there are at least a thousand other less exposed games still hiding in the shadows. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »