Category: Games

The discussion in the Facebook Group “NI Game Dev Network” continues with lots of debate over definitions. It’s plain that people mean different things when they say “AA” or “Indie” when referring to budgets. Thing is – this is the same debate that’s been raging for years.

My meanings:

Indie – developed and publish by a small team (probably less than 20 people). Usually with a smallish budget and usually bootstrapped (or crowd-funded). They may do client work to make up the salary bill or they may have incremental income from a well-received but not breakaway series of games.

AA – developed by a studio which may or may not also be the publisher. The team size varies but the project is unlikely to be bootstrapped and much more likely to be funded by a publishing contract. They’ll depend on a hit or two or a major IP to maintain their growing costs.

AAA – megacorporations which own multiple studios and have budgets in the multimillions. They may have a development team with a thousand people. They’ll be supported by major hits and, ultimately, they’ll be sunk by a major flop.

This isn’t a badge of quality. Everyone has witnessed a crappy AAA game and has had a top quality experience from an indie game. This is more about market position, access to resources and budgets. Some (Hi Ryan) would say that being Indie is a state of mind. I’d agree until you see AAA publishers getting in on Indie Games Bundles. Which is just stupid.

What I’m more interested in is a criterion of success – be that commercially, critically or culturally.

According to a TechRadar article, these are the 20 best British games:

1. ELITE
2. GTA
3. Rome: Total War
4. Football Manager
5. Goldeneye
6. Tomb Raider
7. Speedball 2
8. Chuckie Egg
9. Worms
10. WipEout
11. Lemmings
12. Manic Miner
13. Timesplitters
14. Sensible World of Soccer
15. Little Big Planet
16. Banjo Kazooie
17. Populous
18. Dizzy
19. Conker’s Bad Fur Day
20. Driver

Whether or not you agree or disagree, I’m interested in why not one of them came from Northern Ireland.

Angie McKeown asked this in the NI Game Dev Network:

From your experiences in Northern Ireland making games, what do you think is holding the local game industry back?
Is there something we do well?
Is there something you struggle with?

I wrote:

Collaboration is “helping someone” not being paid for work. So I intend to open a game lab this year (if the contracting business works out) and offer free space to people in game dev and related subjects if they perform corporate social responsibility – take on placements, help polish each others games, spend lunchtimes learning and teaching. A lot of stuff that you guys do anyway but get no direct benefit from it.

Hard to argue there’s not enough artists out there when we probably have *just enough* but lose a lot and nowhere enough programmers and lose a lot too. I’d love to work with some artists but I’ve not got the capital to do it.

I’m not remotely interested in pulling together AA teams. I want a thriving group of indies that iterates quickly and is prepared to put the time in to POLISH each others games. Building large teams just means you become utterly dependent on making big hits. That’s a major fail.

I see three types of “game” out there.

1. Toys – these are games where there is seemingly no point. The complexity can vary but ultimately these tend to be open-ended and entertaining. I would classify The Sims and other simulations in here.
2. Puzzles – these are games where the outcome is usually the defeat of a mental challenge. I would classify Angry Birds, Candy Crush and Myst in here.
3. Games – these are games where there is often challenge from another player, human or otherwise. Strategy games, first person shooters, racing games.

Found these via DaringFireball

Drew Crawford:

See, in the in-app purchase model actually predates phones. It predates video game consoles. It goes all the way back to the arcade, where millions of consumers were happy to pay a whole quarter ($0.89 in 2013 dollars) to pay for just a few minutes. The entire video games industry comes from this model. Kids these days.

The problem with this contention is that in the 1908s there was no choice. So the “quarter for 3 lives” model would not translate well. Imagine if you launched a game on IOS and it was an IAP every three lives. There’d be an uproar.

Thomas Baekdal:

We have reached a point in which mobile games couldn’t even be said to be a game anymore. Playing a game means that you have fun. It doesn’t mean that you sit around and wait for the game to annoy you for so long that you decide to pay credits to speed it up.

I spent a little time with a Dublin-based company a couple of years ago and the CEO exhorted me with tales about how their game was completely data-driven. I played it and I found it trite at best and just simply tedious at worst. They had developed a heap of content and then wrapped a statistics engine around it. If you think about it they had spent a fortune erecting barriers and walls around the content they had created. And it was awful.

In the end, it’s all about the game.

Great one from @pbsideachannel—Do "Digital Natives" Exist? http://t.co/qDkQAvvfJZ #BestShowForLife

— K. M. Alexander (@KM_Alexander) December 12, 2013

I think they do, but they’re not who you think they are.

This, for me, was coming home (noting that this is probably not the same server nor the same people who ran the Masquerade MU* back in the early 90s.)

And, frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over it.

A beautifully formatted rant about the representation of women and girls in the games industry that segways into every other industry.

Carol Shaw was the first female developer Atari hired. She is best known for designing and programming River Raid for the Atari 2600 at Activision. She says never got the sense that the games she made were for one gender or another, and there was never a mandate from higher-ups to target a certain audience. When she interviewed for the job, she didn’t believe she was at any disadvantage because she was a woman, nor did she feel that video games were the realm of men. She knew not many women held bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and engineering, but she held both. She was qualified to do the job, and that was that. “We never really discussed who our target demographic was,” she says. “We didn’t discuss gender or age. We just did games we thought would be fun.“