Gaming Industry Musings

Last night I had my first nightmare in a very long while. This was a recurring nightmare when I was a kid. It was of those where you wake up paralyzed. I won't go into the details as dreams rarely seem to make sense when retold. It was just strange as I was mentioning to someone earlier about how I hadn't had a nightmare in several years.


Anyway my main reason for posting today is to share my opinions on the state of the gaming industry. I see a few problems (See pic above....) that could be fixed that would make the end-user experience much better. It seems that everytime a new game is announced, that they are trying to recreate the wheel each time. Often a game can have an excellent concept, but then be executed so poorly. Many times that I see thins problem has to do mainly with problems in the engine of game. There have been so many good engines created, like the Source engine with it's Havok physics, to the Unreal engine. Other companies can license these engines to use in their games, but often don't. For what reason, I don't know. Perhaps the price is too large. It would be nice if there was a company that focused mainly of producing an engine and then reselling it to game developers, who will focus on making a game playable and fun. This also might help develop some standards in the game industry that will make installing/troubleshooting problems with games much easier.

Another problem I see is when a game concentrates only on the story, or the graphics. This can make an otherwise great game crap.

Another idea I daydreamed about one day was to develop an easy to use platform where you could implement a basic version of your game. Just a robust toolset and framework that will allow people who concentrate on games to realize their vision before investing millions of dollars in developing it. This wouldn't have to look pretty, or have the best performance, but it would allow for developers to see if their concept will work practically. This will also allow a small group of people to demo their game to managers/companies who can then develop it into a full fledged game.

It's not that I think the gaming industry as a whole has failed, but it saddens me to see such a potentially good game be ruined by poor controls, gameplay, or visuals. Let the storyteller concentrate on the story, while letting interface people concentrate on the interface. Let the engine be robust before other start working on graphics and such, so there's no need to change everything later.

I think Steam is a good step in this direction, but it is still proprietary and has many, many problems. Just look at some of the mod's using the Steam engine. I downloaded the new chapter of Half-Life2 and it was under 100MB. If I bought another game that had this much gameplay, it would probably come on several CD's. I like the ability to only sorry about one underlying system for all my games, rather than 100 different engines all with their own little tricks to get everything working how I want it. DirectX and OpenGL are another example of a step in the right direction, but more modularized components would be great for the gaming system.

Now of course, not having worked in the gaming industry for even a minute, I do not know the internal politics and difficulties that would be involved in implementing my ideas. But, I do end up dealing with a lot of the problems that other end users experience. I shell out $60 for a game that has been hyped up, but then am horribly disappointed by a seemingly simple annoying "feature", that was left in the game in order to ship by some arbitrary deadline. I figured the gaming industry would have evolved beyond these problems seeing as it is bigger than the movie industry. Many people will avoid a company in the future if they have problems with a product such as a DVD player or computer, but these same people cannot seem to even remember who produced the game they just bought for $60. How are they expected to avoid games from problematic publishers?

Now I see these problems the most on cosole games as opposed to PC titles, but it does effect every peice of the gaming market to some extent. I do hope that the Nintendo Wii will be a step in the right direction, and from what I've seen so far it looks like it will. The Wii looks like the best investment to me, with a lower price-point than any other console and even more so compared to building a new PC. It will also open up some opportunities for inventive gameplay, especially when you have some friends playing with you. I will even prefer some of the more "Kid-Friendly" games than the more "Mature" titles if they offer better controls and gameplay. Plus, they are making Duck Hunt 2, which is awesome.