QUOTE | “The majority of what the other developers exhibited was bloody shooter software… I believe this is a revelation of creative immaturity on our part as creators in the video game industry.” — Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s legendary designer, speaking to Nintendo investors about how Nintendo can improve its position.
Elsewhere in the business of video games this past week …
QUOTE | “I do realise that some people are only interested in big-budget AAA games. I don’t really understand those people.” — Sony’s head of worldwide studios Shuhei Yoshida, wondering why some gamers haven’t tried or just don’t like indie games.
QUOTE | “The challenge sometimes is that the growth of gaming… there’s a core that doesn’t quite feel comfortable with that.” — EA’s COO Peter Moore, talking about how the game industry’s expanded customer base has led to some discontent.
STAT | 10-15 million — Number of units Destiny is projected to sell after launch, according to Cowen analyst Doug Creutz; the game is tracking better than any game has in the past four years.
QUOTE | “Where it hurts is when you feel like you’re forced, or you’re at a disadvantage or can’t do it unless you [pay money].” — Chris Early, VP of digital for Ubisoft, discussing how DLC can be regarded poorly by players.
QUOTE | “The key to this is: just start! Fire it up, play the games you love.” — Twitch COO Kevin Lin, discussing Twitch’s amazing growth to over one million channels, and how gamers can join in.
QUOTE | “My love is for games and game music, not the music by itself, so I feel a little split about the current state of music and games.” — Thatgamecompany’s Vincent Diamante, talking about the importance of sound design in games.
STAT | 105,000 — Number of development units sold so far of the Oculus Rift VR headset, according to Oculus VR; some 45,000 of those are the new DK2 set, which begins shipping 10,000 out this month.
QUOTE | “The amount of million dollar development budgets are very common now.” — Mobile game publisher Chillingo’s general manager Ed Rumley, talking about how both quality and development costs for mobile games have increased.
STAT | 70 per cent — Amount by which Sony has beaten Microsoft’s US TV ad spending for the newest generation of consoles, according to metrics firm iSpot; Sony spent $US59 million so far this year on TV spots compared to Microsoft’s $US34.7 million.
Comments
3 responses to “This Week In The Business: Creative Immaturity”
We’ve spent a lot of virtual ink talking about the reasons that people play games, and there’s a very obvious difference between the challenge freaks and the narrative carebears, just when discussing gameplay alone. But if you take any kind of read from famous artists, there’s another group who play for the aesthetics.
And frankly, there’s a whole lot that AAA can do that indies can’t when it comes to visuals. You might see some pretty games coming out and say, “The graphics are pretty great for an indie,” which is to acknowledge the fact that a two-man team is going to have to rely on abstraction and stylization to achieve any kind of aesthetically-pleasing results, compared to the ten-man team who purely works on Destiny’s skyboxes alone.
If you’re jaded by pixel art or can no longer find any charm in Limbo-style silhouette platforming because you’re aware the primary reason for that stylistic choice is so the artist didn’t have to draw any fucking foregrounds, it’s very easy to see why some people might be turned off by the indie scene.
I know at least one of my brothers has missed out on some very solid games by his loathing of, “Those shitty 8-bit games Steam keeps vomiting up.” That? That’s where there’s people who are only interested in AAA. Because if you have to reply on 8-bit-art nostalgia-homages for people who don’t even remotely feel that nostalgia, or people unimpressed at how fluid or recognizable you’ve managed to turn an abstract sprite of pixel-art, you’ve automatically lost an audience for whom aesthetics are an important part of playing a video game.
I was prepared to smash Moore for his ‘growth’ comment, but I read the article in full to get context and came away grudgingly impressed. I don’t agree with how he spins the ‘managing of expectations’ around Dungeon Keeper and how they serve the mobile market, and he’s spinning this to argue the case that microtransaction bullshit still is the ‘future of gaming’ rather than a separate market for no other reason than it suits THEM better than it suits us.
But. Best/better quotes from the same article:
And THIS is the perspective that he’s taking. That gaming is gaming is gaming, whether it’s on a power machine or a fucking mobile, the people who SELL the games don’t want to deal with a fragmented market with different needs, so they’re ONLY going to serve the more profitable market, because that’s where the money is, and the rest of us are going to have to ‘get on board’.
Eg:
So. There you have it, people. So. Peter Moore’s a sensible, reasonable business person, who plans on fucking up what you like about the industry because that’s where the money is.
So. Kudos to you, Peter, and also fuck you.
Haha well put. I think we have to be better at separating people from their jobs. What Peter Moore thinks and wants to do personally is not neccesarily aligned with what he is paid to do in the best interest of shareholders. Don’t like it? Go do it better 🙂 I’m sure there were people whinging about roads being paved because it was bad for their horses. ‘Core Riders’?
This really shows you there stance on what they did to the Wii U.
Developers don’t want to change there ports (or downgrade there graphics in case of porting from the PS4 and Xbox One to the Wii U) to fit the Wii U game pad, they would have to be creative and that’s not what the industry is about to most of these assholes, it’s about backing the winning horse and selling as many copy’s of generic shooter 589 as they possibly can.