How Jeff Vogel Saved the Gaming Industry Overnight By Being Awesome

[Ephesos]

Or so he says.

 

...another interesting post, and I can't exactly disagree with him, after years of working with Blades. Which honestly is as much about reusing assets as anything else.

 

Discuss.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Ephesos

Discuss.

What is there to discuss? Your thread title is absolutely correct in every way.

[Triumph]

That's one of the best blog entry titles I've ever seen. LOL!!!

 

The content of the blog, while not as cool as the title ( ) made a lot of sense.

 

My two cents (which hopefully make sense, but won't make you any cents):

 

Beyond the fixation on graphics and "technology," I think there is problem, in a variety of fields, with obsessing over newness. A good game is expected to be "new" and "innovative" and game reviews I read regularly mark off for a game being a "second edition" rather than a "true sequel" (or other such mumbo jumbo). They take a game that they admit is better than the original and rate it lower because it is not "original" or "innovative." I've seen it in academics (history) too, a fixation on finding something "new" and "innovative" to say, to the neglect of solidly learning and fine-tuning topics that have already been studied. This fascination with the new is present in other areas of life as well. "New" things are flashy and exciting; solidly improving older things is not.

 

Moo.

[Cthulhu]

I certainly would NOT mind playing ten games on Dragon Age's engine, it's an epic engine in my opinion.

 

Originally Posted By: Triumph

Innovation and such

 

Don't tell that to Hollywood, they apparently hate innovation in terms of story. All films are these days are recycles from a while ago in shiny new clothing.

[Cthulhu]

Drat, double post

[Acky]

I can see what he's saying about reusing the game engine of a game and adding features. He's not the only one doing it, so I disagree that he's starting some sort of trend, or at the start of a new way to make games, or whatever he was getting at. Gears of War, Modern Warfare, and the Halo series for instance have been hugely successful, and their engines have more or less remained the same, with a few added features and some fixes.

 

I don't really understand the comment about making shorter games with the same engine though. As long as we're talking big names here, $60 means I want $60 worth of content, not shorter games because people are too lazy to play through the whole game, and then complain that the game is somehow responsible.

 

Jeff is being dumb comparing his 3 manned (well, womanned by majority) crew to companies with dozens and dozens of coders and programmers. They have more to risk, more jobs to possibly lay off, more debt to go into, then Jeff could ever possibly risk. Even in that dark BoA-G3 time frame, where he wasn't making a profit. Sometimes things work on the small scale, but not the large one.

[Triumph]

Originally Posted By: Cthulhu

Don't tell that to Hollywood, they apparently hate innovation in terms of story. All films are these days are recycles from a while ago in shiny new clothing.

Ehh...there are only so many stories to tell, methinks. "Innovation in terms of story," well, I'm not sure how possible that is. Just as with the game engine, the key is not to have an "original" story with a unique plot twist no one has ever heard of ever before in the history of stories. Even in storytelling the key is to do it well, not do it astoundingly originally. I'd argue that is what Jeff does. His stories are good not because they are groundbreaking literature that tell a story no one has ever imagined, but because they tell their stories well. Jeff is especially good at creating interesting atmosphere and settings, and varies somewhat in terms of plot and characters. But the key is that he does it well, not that he achieves some some standard of "originality."

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Triumph

His stories are good not because they are groundbreaking literature that tell a story no one has ever imagined, but because they tell their stories well. Jeff is especially good at creating interesting atmosphere and settings, and varies somewhat in terms of plot and characters. But the key is that he does it well, not that he achieves some some standard of "originality."

A thousand times yes. Jeff's games aren't terribly innovative in their stories. Underground world? Cool for one game, but a little tired by A6. And A3 was just in generic surface fantasy-world, only missing elves and orcs! Jeff shines in details, not the big picture. Fortunately, most games also have pretty lousy big pictures, so we're okay.

But the engine stuff is nuts. Break the coders to turn out a game for $50, and then why not milk it for a bunch of shorter, $10 efforts? You've got most of the work done already! Neverwinter Nights seems to flirt with this, and downloadable content in general fits the bill when it's not underwhelming (Fallout 3 seems to be on the right track), but you still can't sell a totally separate game. Maybe the risk is selling the short games but not the main one and never recouping the cost of engine-building?

—Alorael, who for the record doesn't love Dragon Age's engine dearly. He finds it fun and serviceable, though, which means by industry standards it's genius. (For the record, he's ambivalent about its combat and prefers tiles and turn based, although he'll take the pretty graphics any day.)

[Cthulhu]

Because they don't seem to be coming up with very many original plots, they seem to be using the same old material over and over.

 

Cryengine 2 is just amazing, I wonder if a PS3 can handle Crysis on Maximum specs.

[cfgauss]

Originally Posted By: Master Ackrovan

I can see what he's saying about reusing the game engine of a game and adding features. He's not the only one doing it, so I disagree that he's starting some sort of trend, or at the start of a new way to make games, or whatever he was getting at. Gears of War, Modern Warfare, and the Halo series for instance have been hugely successful, and their engines have more or less remained the same, with a few added features and some fixes.

Yeah, tons of assets are reused, and tons of engines are licensed out to other people, so I don't know where he's getting this idea from.

Yeah, a lot of the most expensive games out there will write custom engines for themselves, but there are people out there who specialize in coding engines. And when you need to heavily customize anyway, it's easily worth it to just have these guys write you a new one... It's really not that much of an extra investment for a huge project.

Quote:

I don't really understand the comment about making shorter games with the same engine though. As long as we're talking big names here, $60 means I want $60 worth of content, not shorter games because people are too lazy to play through the whole game, and then complain that the game is somehow responsible.

He's said this a bunch of times and it never makes any sense to me, either.

Quote:

Jeff is being dumb comparing his 3 manned (well, womanned by majority) crew to companies with dozens and dozens of coders and programmers.

Yeah... don't know why he does this a lot too... If someone gave him a ten million dollar budget, and hundreds of employees, he'd do things very differently than he does now regardless of what he claims is "good" design.

And he claims that their strategies aren't good, and that his "And I'm supposed to be ashamed of my business model? Pish!" Well, your business model doesn't make you hundreds of millions in the first few days of a game's release, so.... And many of the big developers now started out as three people making games for fun, and quickly grew gigantic because people loved what they did, so I don't really get why he makes claims like this (and he does, frequently).

I mean, it's one thing to say "this is how I like doing it" or "doing other things are outside my skill-set" or whatever, that's fine. But it does annoy me when he acts like this is a better model than people who have been more successful than him have used... particularly when he does it without justification (other than justifying based on him doing it).

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Triumph

Originally Posted By: Cthulhu

Don't tell that to Hollywood, they apparently hate innovation in terms of story. All films are these days are recycles from a while ago in shiny new clothing.

Ehh...there are only so many stories to tell, methinks.

I forgot who, but somebody said "There have only been fourteen plots for all movies that Hollywood ever produced, and Shakespeare was the screenwriter for all of them"

In other news, have you heard of Roland Emmerich's new epic film 20120, in which the great psychowoohistorian and Mayan scholar Hari Seldon predicts the downfall of the Galactic Empire when the quantum harmonic feedback off the spacetinme quantum continuum of quantum dx aligns with the astrostellar harmonic plane in the year 20120, and manages to head the fall of the empire off by destroying the great landmarks of the galaxy like when he destroys the the Imperial Palace on Trantor by crashing an interstellar battlecruiser into it?

Yeah, I'm a little bitter over that.

[Cthulhu]

Originally Posted By: cfgauss

Originally Posted By: Master Ackrovan

I can see what he's saying about reusing the game engine of a game and adding features. He's not the only one doing it, so I disagree that he's starting some sort of trend, or at the start of a new way to make games, or whatever he was getting at. Gears of War, Modern Warfare, and the Halo series for instance have been hugely successful, and their engines have more or less remained the same, with a few added features and some fixes.

Yeah, tons of assets are reused, and tons of engines are licensed out to other people, so I don't know where he's getting this idea from.

I wonder how many games use the Unreal Engine...

Funny that the Media never points out the fact that only ONE of their calenders ends at that date, and they had OTHER calenders that ended on LATER dates

[cfgauss]

Originally Posted By: Cthulhu

I wonder how many games use the Unreal Engine...

billions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

[Enraged Slith]

I think he's suggesting that large game companies could do better by making multiple smaller, possibly less expensive, games rather than allocating a vast majority of their resources on releasing a high profile title every few years, especially when that cash cow flops.

[Cthulhu]

Originally Posted By: cfgauss

Originally Posted By: Cthulhu

I wonder how many games use the Unreal Engine...

billions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

/whistles
That's amazing, Epic must be making a killing off the engine licensing.

[cfgauss]

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith

I think he's suggesting that large game companies could do better by making multiple smaller, possibly less expensive, games rather than allocating a vast majority of their resources on releasing a high profile title every few years, especially when that cash cow flops.

And I'm suggesting: many do, and many of the ones that don't do really well. As they say, you can't argue with success. And they are sucesseor than he is.

[waterplant]

Originally Posted By: cfgauss

And I'm suggesting: many do, and many of the ones that don't do really well. As they say, you can't argue with success. And they are sucesseor than he is.

Success depends on what you set out to achieve. S/W games are accessable, affordable and enjoyable. Jeff gets to make a living doing something he is interested in and has a chance to express himself intellectually and literarily. I'm not sure how successeor you'd want to be.
Not everyone is in for the mega-bucks.

[inni]

Originally Posted By: waterplant

Not everyone is in for the mega-bucks.

yes they are, they just wont admit it.

but jeff is right about old engines, im playing a game now that was made on a pre-made engine and its great, they were able to get multiplayer working in just a weekend, not sure if other game companies do that or not but it doesn't make him less right.

[Ephesos]

Originally Posted By: Master Ackrovan

Gears of War, Modern Warfare, and the Halo series for instance have been hugely successful, and their engines have more or less remained the same, with a few added features and some fixes.

FALSE. Gears used the Unreal Engine for both games, but Halo used a new or wholly re-structured engine for all three main-series games (to say nothing of the spinoffs). Also, Call of Duty has had so many games that they have switched engines from time to time, and weren't even all designed by the same studio. Just wanted to point that out.

[Student of Trinity]

A company that throws hundreds of person-years into a game had better be a lot more successful than Jeff, just to avoid being a disaster. Paying say $100K per person in total costs per year, for three years, that's $30 million development cost for a game. That might be too much, but the ballpark for major game development is probably tens of millions of bucks these days. At $50 a copy, you've got to sell around a million copies to break even. That's probably in the ballpark of getting at least 10% of potentially interested gamers to pay for your game. I don't think that's so easy. It's starting to look a lot closer to the Hollywood feature film business than to Jeff's world.

[Triumph]

Interesting. Usually when I hear business discussed, people talk about how much easier it for the big corporations than for small business. The big corporations have various advantages and such. But this discussion seems to be suggesting the big game companies have extra difficulties that Jeff doesn't face, that it's easier for him working in the smaller scale.

 

It's just an odd reversal, considering the usual stuff about economies of scale and such.

 

/ two more cents

[Student of Trinity]

Going for an economy of scale is always a potentially Faustian bargain. You invest a lot in the equipment or staff to do a certain thing on a large scale, and it's efficient because you're going to do an awful lot of the same thing. If it should happen that people stop wanting an awful lot of that same thing, you've got a big plant and big workforce specialized in doing something nobody wants.

[tehpineapple]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

What is there to discuss? Your thread title is absolutely correct in every way.

QFT

[Acky]

Quote:

FALSE. Gears used the Unreal Engine for both games, but Halo used a new or wholly re-structured engine for all three main-series games (to say nothing of the spinoffs). Also, Call of Duty has had so many games that they have switched engines from time to time, and weren't even all designed by the same studio. Just wanted to point that out.

My point was that they didn't upgrade much throughout each of their series, and remained successful. This is more to the Halo Combat Evolved to 3 and the CoDs. A better example then Gears would be the total war series. From Shogun to Empire, the game has remained the same, just improved as the series has gone on, like what Jeff has been doing.

Halo:ODST (its technically an expansion to Halo 3, but it was sold at the same cost as a regular game and was treated as such) has the same engine as the main series ones. Reach will be using the same engine as well.

[Rowen]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

What is there to discuss? Your thread title is absolutely correct in every way.

Jeff should start selling posters of himself on the site store that say "Jeff Vogel Is Awesome."

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Rowen

Originally Posted By: Dantius

What is there to discuss? Your thread title is absolutely correct in every way.

Jeff should start selling posters of himself on the site store that say "Jeff Vogel Is Awesome."

What I want is a shirt with a line portrait of his face like the one of Che, but with "Vogel" below it.

[Kelandon]

I've had this thought (people should recycle engines more) quite a lot. I'm working through a bunch of the old SCUMM games now from LucasArts — ScummVM is an awesome, awesome program — and am quite enjoying watching the engine slowly progress from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Monkey Island to Monkey Island 2 to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. (Yes, I know it started with Maniac Mansion and didn't end until many years after Indy Fate, but I haven't gotten there yet.) That was a great engine development in the style of Spidweb.

 

I had a similar thought playing through Myst IV recently. Unbelievably awesome game, on an interface that isn't terribly dissimilar to that of the original Myst. (Presumably the internals radically changed, but the parts that the players see didn't much.)

[Alorael at Large]

Somehow Jeff's initial point that many game design companies are closing down got lost. They're losing business. His is, apparently, better than ever. It's not as good as theirs was at its peak, but he's still doing what he loves. Or tolerates, or whatever his grumpy attitude permits

 

He also touches on but then largely ignores the fact that the programming side of the industry chews people up and burns them out. Games are great for a few people, but for a large plebian underclass that sadly gets no epic, storyline-driving uprising, the process is miserable and not very lucrative.

 

—Alorael, who thinks that Jeff's right to tell big companies what to do comes solely from building his business. He's not successful at their level, but for the companies that are also failing to be successful at their level, his advice might carry some weight. Hey, if you can't be Blizzard, be Spiderweb!

[VCH]

Starcraft 2 will save blizzard. It will outsell anything ever released, guaranteed.

[Alorael at Large]

Blizzard doesn't need saving. Blizzard has WoW and is raking in money hand over fist.

 

—Alorael, who considers it a testament to Blizzard's game design that WoW, an antiquated game by normal technology turnover rates, is still so dominant. And Starcraft still has televised tournaments, apparently.

[Cthulhu]

Blizztard made a cool 2 million in less than an hour selling a virtual horse for $25 a pop.

[Dintiradan]

Record time?

[Rowen]

Originally Posted By: Cthulhu

Blizztard made a cool 2 million in less than an hour selling a virtual horse for $25 a pop.

And boy did the WoW community ever cry over it.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: VCH

Starcraft 2 will save blizzard. It will outsell anything ever released, guaranteed.

Yeah, but I'm sure that when it is released in 2173, the computer gaming industry will already be extinct.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Jeff Vogel

I'm most interested in the bit about how I have not changed my core technology in ten years. And you know something? They're exactly right. In fact, my "core technology" is so rough and low-budget that I am embarrassed to call it "technology." I still use it year after year.
...
But it's gotten to the point where a company is expected to be ashamed for using the same engine for more than one title and a few DLC packs.

That's because you've basically found what works best for you, while the rest of the industry is still looking—and, in my opinion, they're never going to find it.

[Cthulhu]

Yay, SW is getting a ton of free publicity; Jeff is also getting compliments left and right on:

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/04/22/1433208/How-I-Saved-the-Gaming-Industry

[Hypnotic]

 

P.S. You only need to watch a little of this to get the gist of it. Unless you wait till the end, when you see Cinderella's dress that can change colours. How I wish my clothes would do that.

[Hakkeshu]

I played Geneforge back in the days when the 2nd one was released but didnt play dude to lack of real life interfering. Now that I am older and have plenty of free time I gave it a whirl again. I finished the shareware version and then played AV4. I was so impressed with their gameplay and story etc. that I plunked down the cash to get Genforge 1-5, AV4-6 and since I got it a bit cheaper, Nethergate: Resurecction. I am really looking forward to Jeffs next game when it comes out. On the part of Blizzard, I am also looking forward to Diablo 3 when it comes out, I loved the hell outta two but its so dated now.

[VCH]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Originally Posted By: VCH

Starcraft 2 will save blizzard. It will outsell anything ever released, guaranteed.

Yeah, but I'm sure that when it is released in 2173, the computer gaming industry will already be extinct.

It's in public beta now.