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In this edition of MAGOT I look at broad trends across the videogame industry for 2012 and where they're pointing us in 2013, as well as punching out my biggest concerns with the state of games right now.
2012 has been an up and down year for videogames. On the one hand the AAA industry has had a (relatively) tough time, with a lot of games failing badly enough to drag their developer down with them. The age of the current console generation and the delayed release of next generation licenced development tools like CRYE3 and UE4 that this has caused has forced even big name developers to stymie their technical development and continually release on the same engines. There’s a bit of a snowball effect here. For example, the CoD franchise has no incentive to up their engine power since they’d have to hamstring themselves on the consoles and their relatively large PC user base are waiting for the next gen consoles to hit to upgrade to rigs capable of running the shiny new stuff, since every PC developer is making damn sure even high requirement games have the potential to run smoothly on older rigs. The cost of developing an inhouse engine to rival the specialists is becoming astronomical, so the whole AAA industry has been technically stagnant, and will continue to be so well into 2013. This is reflected in stagnating economic trends at best, catastrophic declines at worst (poor THQ). The Japanese industry is suffering its own crisis with fans voting with their feet and abandoning historically beloved franchises. Japan has always depended on these strong franchises as their backbone and has an even greater reticence to innovate in terms of theme or mechanic than the west so they are in an even rougher spot until the new consoles can create the licence to print franchise money they always do. The question is, will the new machines arrive too late to prevent a permanent loss of faith in the big players?
When the giants start to show cracks, the minnows slip through them and this has been very much the case over the course of the year. Independent games whether they be Indie, self published F2P or even mod based titles like Natural selection and DayZ have run laps around the big studios, feeding off the desire for honest communication and participation that pervades gamer culture. 'By gamers for gamers' has really been the catchphrase of the year. No one has shown this more than Riot, with its intensely community focused development ethos, participatory culture and rapid, open communication about success and failure as they go. League of Legends has snowballed into a clear winner for most important game of 2012, showing how the service model of development can succeed beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Here the dilemma is whether the next big console generation will reverse the trend: are indie games just filling a temporary gap, or are they permanently changing the way development is approached.
And to cap it all off, brick and mortar games retailers are reeling under the stress of dealing with digital distribution. Steam continues to be successful and with the normalisation of console arcade and direct download services, the advent of a variety of genuine competitors to steam for people’s money and the general malaise surrounding the AAA industry whose vast advertising budgets drive brick and mortar profits, it’s been a bad year for people left behind by the increasing dominance of online distribution.
All this has served one major purpose: it throws into stark relief the strengths and weaknesses of the mainstream games industry in general.
1) Iteration is killing esports
AAA studios have been shown time and again this year to be mediocre at best, utterly incompetent at worst in terms of their capability to break new ground or even replicate solid gameplay from previous titles. At the heart of this issue is the iterative model of game design that is the dominant paradigm in the mainstream industry. Iteration is a tremendously powerful design technique for ironing out the problems in a fundamentally solid design, but no matter how much you polish a turd, it’s still a turd. I’ve spent most of this year following betas and alphas for a variety of games and it’s depressing the extent to which they rely on iteration for their core gameplay design. Heart of the Swarm is a perfect example of this, with fundamentally flawed units making it into a public beta and being cut almost on day 1. This is indicative of a pretty standard industry practice- ‘come up with a bunch of ideas and then playtest them until you find something that works’. Exactly the sort of practice that iteration is worst at helping fix, yet it is the most common design methodology around. Not only does it succeed primarily based on luck, but it also causes the gameplay to swing around wildly meaning that the end product is probably going to be somewhat divergent to what has been advertised in the hype. AAA studios don’t really know what their game is going to play like until it goes to the presses, because they are entirely relying on undirected playtest feedback to shape their design. We saw this with games like Diablo III, Dishonoured and ME 3, all examples of iteration discovering that a wild idea from early development was flawed too late to prevent people getting the wrong idea about what the end product would eventually entail.
2) AAA games developers aren’t gamers anymore
By gamers I mean people who are part of the vast social group of people who engage in community activities centred around games- hanging around on forums, making youtube content or metacritic reviews, modding or even just playing some co-op or multiplayer with buddies. This mega-clique has values that simply aren’t respected in the AAA studios- personal integrity and innovation, a strong wariness of unfounded claims and an honour code thicker than molasses. If you lie to or step out on a promise to a gamer, they’re not going to just think you’re an asshole, they’re going to make sure every other gamer in the world has enough information to make the same judgement. Too long as an oppressed and exploited minority (I’m actually serious) has turned gamers into one of the most media and politically savvy cultures in the west. If you look at gamers as a demographic to be sold to, you’re already on the road to disaster. This is exactly how AAA studios work, though to be fair to them they’re not really happy with the situation either. The professional codes of big business and gamer culture are fundamentally incompatible and so we get situations where clever, thoughtful people have to write press releases devoid of any real content to get through their own PR department and suffer the personal humiliation of being shit on by every gamer who reads it. You get people trying to bring ‘professionalism’ to esports, ultimately disenfranchising the very people who make esport the unique spectacle that it is: a fiercely competitive and colourful but most importantly loyal and tightknit group of friends with a collective vision, bonded together not by ‘professionalism’ but by honour and mutual respect. This the soul of gamer culture and when it is not respected, it withers away all too fast.
3) The only winning move is not to play
A combination of these two factors is the reliance on commercial figures to determine success in the AAA industry. You’re probably thinking ‘well, yeah, that’s fair’, but bear with me a minute. Mass effect 3, diablo 3 and MW3 were all considered extremely successful games by their parent companies despite the fact all three received user metascores of under 50%. This is because success is judged almost entirely on sales figures, with a side order of professional review scores and media coverage. If a game sold well, but was universally panned, a developer isn’t going to think ‘well, man, we dropped the ball on that one’, they’re going to think ‘well, we must have done something right or nobody would have bought it’. So when they make the sequel, they’ll just do the same thing again with less bugs and more sidequests.
That right there is the biggest reason why innovation in the AAA games industry is at a premium, and it’s not entirely the industry’s fault. It’s because the universal passmark for a game is whether it is fun or not. If it’s not fun, it’s just a meh game. If it’s fun, it’s automatically worth whatever you paid for it. Interestingly enough, outside of the videogame industry there’s sometimes a far harsher judgement: if it’s not fun, it’s not a game at all. Fun isn’t the passmark, it’s the prerequisite. Gamers can learn from this: any developer, any developer at all should be able to make a really fun game. Why? Because as a human being you are intrinsically imbued with the ability to make fun games for yourself. Everyone in the world is a game designer. So if you’re someone who has years of specialist experience and is being paid a really quite substantial sum of money to come up with a game, it should be more than just fun. It should be better than sex (as the occasional success stories of the games industry indicate is depressingly achievable). It should be meaningful, educational, inspiring and/or moving. If it isn’t, it’s a failure. Make that your standard, be harsher, more critical. Don’t abrogate and hand wave away the fact that blizzard or valve made a game that didn’t utterly blow you away. The amount of money and ‘talent’ they invest in a game’s development means that they should, 100%, blow your mind with each release. If the game doesn’t do that it’s just not good enough, fun or not.
The big problem here is getting this message across. Because developers aren’t really interested in criticism of their content unless sales dictate they should be, the only real way gamers can make this point is buy not buying games. But if you don’t buy it you don’t know whether it is actually going to be one of those hits or not. It’s a tricky issue and one I’m honestly not really sure how to go about fixing.
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And so the year draws to a close, the games industry in a strange place. On the one hand it’s still going gangbusters compared to all other media entertainment. Games are taking over. But they should be doing it better, faster and be more worthy of becoming the most popular leisure activity in the west. 2013 is going to be a very interesting year, one which could go in many directions. If the big companies delay their hardware releases indie game developers might just permanently carve away a portion of their market with F2P titles like League and build their own brand names on a lower price point, more accessible form of gaming that plays to both nostalgic veterans and newcomers who might be overwhelmed by the presumptions of AAA titles. We’ll see the first full cycle games designed with a good understanding of Kinect and Move, in time to see those systems integrated into the new Xbox and PS when they finally arrive. Will they remain a gimmicky addition or will the honers get them to work as advertised? The first really indepth attempts to bring to life sci-fi style virtual reality and augmented reality systems are nearing reality, with the Occulus Rift project stepping up to the classic VR goggles challenge and Google’s first generation AR specs already available. Microsoft isn't far behind, apparently planning a proprietary version linked to the new Xbox. The interface war continues unabated and games are likely to be the proxy realm in which the battles are fought.
2013 will also mark the dying days of some of the last decade’s most influential IPs. Call of duty is due for a reimagining, and without the core team that made it happen, Activision has their fingers crossed that luck will be on their side and they’ll roll a six on the iteration dice next year. Blizzard is struggling, trying to keep WoW relevant, reeling from the critical catastrophe that was Diablo III and encountering PR issues amongst the SC community significant enough to influence their all important sales of HoTS. Valve is venturing ever deeper into service as a business model, focusing on Steam, user generated content and free to play game models, with little talk about their once market leading traditional titles. Everywhere developers are eeking all they can from sequels and spinoffs, knowing that the tide of opinion towards such products is beginning to turn. They’re desperate for fresh content, but unable to commit to developing it.
In the side streets of the industry, whispers about ‘gamification’ and ‘altered reality’ are becoming near hysterical as developers bat the concepts back and forth, spurred on by marketing and business development experts desperate for the next buzzword to launch a new business angle. Developers are being pulled from their traditional entertainment discipline to apply their skills to everything from automotive design to selling health food to kids with typically shaky results. Academics like myself are being presented with so much weird new stuff we don’t know what to study first- live action pacman, legal crises in Eve online, the gold economy, mediation of play or simply that old chestnut ‘what the fuck is a game anyway?’. As such we’re only adding to the confusion.
It’s going to be a fun year.
