Dopass.com

I've been in game development for over a decade now. I don't say that to boast (though I'd be lying if I said I wasn't proud of that), but rather to make a point:

In my 12+ years of making games, only 3 games I've worked on were actual hits.

My story isn't unique; it isn't even unusual. Case in point: the current team I'm working on contains designers of the Syphon Filter series, the Fear Effect series, Gun, Darkwatch and god knows how many other games. In theory, you've probably heard of those games, but if you have than you know that none of them were blockbuster break out hits. I can attest: it's not because of skill or talent, these people are as good as they come.

As Humphrey pointed out, in his Best Games Nobody's Played blog, it's not about quality. Plenty of quality games fail to succeed out in the market, so what does it take? Marketing? Plenty of games with lots of marketing fail, too. Advent Rising, anyone?

Industry pundits will tell you it's proper market targeting and quality control and ingenious branding and "expecation control" and all that crap... To be fair, they're probably right, but plenty of games that have had all of that still fail, so the "science" of hit making alone doesn't really account for it, does it?

I think no one knows. I think the reason that more than a thousand games get made every year and less than 10% of them make it big is that none of know what makes a great game great. I think in our arrogance we point to things we liked and we convince ourselves that what it was. Then we add those things to our games and see what happens.

You know what? I don't think that's a bad thing. Don't get me wrong - I think deluding ourselves that we know what makes a hit is the biggest mistake any of us can make, but I don't think making games that include the things we like is a bad idea. In fact, I think it's the best way to make games there is.

You've all seen me wax nostalgic about how games used to be great and they're not any more... I think too many people are enforcing "must-have" specs on designers and that's tanking our games. The difference between the games of now and the games of yore isn't quality, it isn't some incredible genius spark that's gone from the industry now (the so-called "creativity crisis"), it's that the games of yore were made by guys who had no preconceptions and no money-men and glad-handlers to answer to.

Do you think Richard Garriot wrote the ultima series thinking, "I really want this one to have broad market appeal" while sitting in a board room? Of course not. He wrote the first one in his garage, or his bedroom or wherever his apple was plugged in back then. He sold the damn thing in ziplock bags, for fuck's sake; he wasn't worried about profit, not back then... But let's flash forward 20 some odd years and look at Tabula Rasa, shall we?

the first incarnation of TR was just down-right strange. Aliens, thought-combat and a harp that could kill... All of these painted the picture of a game best called "lame," right? I wouldn't know. I never got the chance to play it. NCSoft was so terrified by the reception to the idea that it was changed into an FPS action MMO before the public really got a chance to play. The thing is, some of the early ultimas were just as strange:

This one? Oh, well first I helped this guy out in the dungeon, then I guess I sorta helped this guy, I think he's a king, then I took this rocket and went to space!

or...

This is one of my favorites, you fight all these orcs and stuff but at the end you find out the bad guy is a computer!

For all we know, LB's vision for TR could have been fantastic, but we never got to see it realized. Let me tell you, NO game looks good in mid-development. So sure, people at NCS might have said, "We played it, it sucked" but that doesn't mean it would have been a bad game.

I swear, half the time I want to go communist and start a hippie game-dev commune, just so some devs can get the chance to make any game they want without having to take crap from - or cater to - outsiders. We could grow our own all vegan hydroponic diet and sell weed on the side to make ends meet while we all worked on our vainglorious projects free of outside influence. It'd be groovy!

Sure, it's not at all realistic, but damnit if we don't find a way for that lack of regard to outside pressures to happen, there really will be a creativity crisis. I'm telling you, I've seen the enemy to good games and that enemy is us.

We're so hung up on "the market" We second guess our ideas, we second and third guess the ideas of others. As a result the only games that get made are vanilla. A uniform beige of suckification. Some of us can make our mediocre games really well, but that doesn't mean they made a new or innovative game. I mean come on, we're idolizing people because they made a game well, not because they made a good game, wtf is that?

Then again, maybe the problem isn't on the dev/publishing side at all. Maybe the gaming market has simply become so diverse that there is no standard for a good game at all. Maybe instead we're simply controlled by the whims of a fickle and constantly changing collective mind. Maybe the question we should be asking isn't "what makes games a hit?" but rather "what makes a game hit right now?"

Other entertainment media do trend forecasting and all sorts of things to account for changing tastes, but now that I think about it, I don't recall ever seeing a similar practice take place in the games market. Sure analysts forecast sales projections, etc. But no one is saying "FPS will be the genre of the spring '06 market." I wonder if that's even possible?

Maybe it doesn't matter. To tell you the truth, nothing in this game dev cycle is going to change unless we can find a way to finance indie companies or make game-dev cheap enough that publishers can take risks on titles that seem "more out there." After all, if Lord British can't get his vainglorious shared world made without having to pander, then who can?

- Snipehunter