What I’d like to know is: is EA the example all other developers/publishers should strive to imitate? Will Sega morph into another EA?
Not only does it sadden me when great games go unnoticed by the masses, but I hate to think that everyone’s purpose in life doesn’t go beyond making money.
Games aren’t born out of love anymore.
Should?
No.
Do they need to?
Probably =\
Just remember, with every new generation of home consoles/video cards, development costs rise significantly. Unless something is done to mitigate the increasing costs of development (coughcoughmiddlewarecoughcough), huge corporations are going to be the only companies left that can make anything of consequence. The R&D involved in getting up to snuff on a new console is enough to make most independent developers go bankrupt. PC is still much easier than console, but it’s a much smaller market, in that it’s much more saturated with tons of stuff.
Until the game industry reaches a point where it can support indy developers, like the movie industry can now support indy movies, we’re going to see a shift toward bigger corporations, just like Hollywood.
Games won’t have necesserillly to be more expensive in the future.
Like I said, if affordable middleware that is simple enough to use so that you don’t need to be a Programmer III to use them, sure.
But, as things stand now, every generation of hardware has increased development costs significantly.
What I’m saying is that unless things change to allow for development costs to decrease, game companies will have no choice but to merge in order to mitigate development costs (by sharing R&D costs/assets).
For instance, in the movie industry, there are foley artists with entire libraries of sound effects that movie makers license. If you have a door-creaking sound that’s super realistic/good, why bother making a new one every time? Nobody is going to notice if you use the same sound… and even if they do notice, they’re not really going to care (unless it’s a sound effect that’s immediately identifiable with something unique, like blaster sounds or lightsaber sounds from the Star Wars series). However, in games, developers often completely remake all their art and sound assets with every new title (they often share assets between games within a series, however).
If, for example, Bunjie were to make an RPG, why, for instance, would the need to make a new grass texture for it, when the grass texture in Halo is good enough?
I’ll never understand that.
I would expect someone within the industry to know the meaning of evolution.
The grass was good but it can be improved.That should be the goal of any artist I think…
That’s the reason why things are increasingly more expensive. Every time the hardware upgrades, there are new features you have to program for. More advanced graphics, more CPU power so you have to program more advanced AI, more sound, etc.
As for the grass quality, that’s part of my point. Sure, you can improve upon it, but does it actually add anything to the game at that point? Is it worth the money? When is it “good enough”?
I remember Marty O`Donnell talking about the amount of sound effects in Halo 2 and how they tested everything… it’s just insane. It’s stupid.
Well it’s insane enough to make a person like you (or any other Halo fan) care .
That’s just it Abadd.It isn’t good enough until there is room for improvement.
Then nothing is ever good enough. And nothing will ever cause development budgets to go down, if that’s how you feel.
There is a cost/quality trade-off. If what you have has an 85% quality level, and costs X amount of money, is it worth getting that extra 10~15% for double the cost? Triple? There is a point at which you have to say, “This is all the money we can allocate to this one asset, so we have to settle for X% quality.”
And if the quality is high enough, why not use that asset across multiple titles?
Take, for instance, the rooftop chase scene in the beginning of the first Matrix. Did anyone notice/care that it’s the same rooftop that appears in the movie “Dark City”? No.
When I say it isn’t good enough I mean it as a force of expression.I mean if people were to stop at a given point we would still consider the graphics in PDS to be top notch.
I don’t mean graphics should be the center of attention (quite the opposite actually) but I’m saying the industry can’t just stop.If there is a way to make things MORE awesome everyone will want to give it a shot.
I can think of a couple developers offhand (none of them big gamer-type outfits though) who’ve reused their sound assets across multiple unrelated games. I doubt most people would even notice since none of the reused materials were intended to be “trademark” sounds, but I get the impression that people think reusing old material is a sign of being “cheap” in a bad way rather than “cost effective” in a good way.
I’m wondering if eventually video game consoles will become so powerful that nobody will be able to reach their full potential because it would just be too expensive.
so maybe i wasn’t totally tripping when i kept hearing certain starcraft sounds in morrowind. 
i did notice some years ago that EVERYTHING started using bink video but i never understood what it did exactly. is it just a file extension and player for movies?
i’m sure R&D time/costs are increasing but isn’t this more due to the devs spending an unnecessary amount of time on details like real-time light/weight/sound physics that aren’t even integral parts of gameplay than the console generation changes?
i suppose it would work out if someone came up with the penultimate light/weight/sound physics engine and pimped it out to all the devs, but i think it’s all just plain irrelevent at this point.
Those guys must be drunk surely!
In other EA news, they were able to purchase 20% of Ubisoft on Monday. What does that have to do with sports games, you might ask. Well, Ubisoft is developing the And1 street hoops game to compete with NBA Street V3. Whether or not this puts an end to the game’s development, we’ll have to wait and see.
.> I think that EA is attempting to become the Microsoft of sportsgames. I am certainly hoping that this move will backfire onto them.
Backfire terribly…hope they don’t take Ubisoft down with them though.
Like of Ubisoft = first Rayman.
I got addicted ok??
I wonder if anyone believe this is really just a “financial transaction” like EA said. I highly doubt they’re going to buy a 20% share in one of their direct competitors and leave it like that.
I believe Bink Video is just another compression/playback format.
Not integral? Do you think Half-Life 2 would be anywhere near the same game as it is now without realtime lighting and physics? How about Halo? How about Psi-Ops, Splinter Cell, etc. etc.? Some games may use it frivilously, but such features have grown to become integral to the games themselves. When the Xbox came out and boasted a harddrive, hardware-driven pixel shading, and a dedicated sound chip, would gamers be happy if nobody actually used them? Every time a new technology emerges, gamers themselves demand for every company and their grandma to take advantage of it. Case in point: normal mapping. UT, Doom, Chronicles of Riddick, Half-Life, Halo 2, etc. all use it. As it becomes more and more prevalent, do you think gamers will accept games without it?
Every graphical enhancement (well, almost every) helps add realism to the game. It helps makes that world believable. You’d be amazed at how much of a difference a single animated/realtime light source makes in a level. Let’s say you have a non-descript dungeon hallway. Without lighting, it just looks like any other hallway. But, you add in a flickering torch, and suddenly, there’s movement. There’s life. Or, add in a swaying chandelier. Or maybe even gems embedded in the walls that flicker and glow.
That’s what Valve is trying to do with the Source engine 
But, at this point, it’s still a pretty big resource hog, and console devs have a hard time really taking advantage of it because consoles are so far behind PCs at the moment. And frankly, it’s anything but irrelevant.
I think he means that we will be still stuck in the current situation for sometime.
i did say integral to gameplay, but i’ll work with this anyway. lets look at thief 3; every object/enemy/environment casts a real-time shadow (as it boasts on the back of the box) and we know that a big part of thief is higing in the shadows. but can garret really hide in the shadow cast by a candlestick? can he somehow contort into the shape of the shadow cast by a cat? (for those that haven’t played the game: no, he cannot) not only does this abundance of shadow look bad (too well defined/sharp) it’s a resource devourer. so all those shadows cast by silverware, pieces of meat, stacks of coins serve no purpose other than to kill the framerate. the environments also heavily make use of bump mapping to cover up their incredibly low poly count.
this is just an example of a the devs not prioritizing their efforts. when a little graphical effect or gimmick hurts the gameplay, you know you have done wrong. now i’m not saying that they should just cut out dynamic shadows from the game, but i doubt anyone would care if they just used the old non-dynamic shadows on cats and forks. if they hadn’t overplayed the whole thing they may have been able to even get realistic looking shadows.
halo 2 has a usurious amount of audio programming in it, if they were to separate all the simultaneous sounds playing at any given momement (i think they said the average was 60) i bet they would find that all but maybe 10 were inaudible. i’m not saying we should all just go back to 16-bit soundchips, i just think the industry is getting way too far ahead of itself.
as you said, if something in games is established, gamers are going to come to expect it. right now i do not think current technology is ready to take on all the things we are establishing as the new standard. can it do it? obviously. but it always seems to come at some sort of cost (usually in the gameplay department IMO).