It would be great if every developer could take the route of a Valve or Blizzard, who use the mantra of "it will ship when it's ready" and refuse to send a product out to customers that isn't top shelf quality.
Rob, you kind of hit at what I'm getting at. I mean, look at Id...I read an interview months back where they said they only sign publishing contracts for one game at a time...that's how much pull they have in the industry because of their back catalogue. But it seems nowaday's that new TPD's aren't even being allowed to release one hit game without the publishers splashing their face all over it because they are seeing their work at a forum or conference etc. and so they try to put them under their wing before they're allowed to get to a point where they have a modicum of control over their own place in the gaming industry. A big stink was made of this practice years back and then it was quietly shoved under the rug. The concern about all these mergers still rages on though. Look at the recent Vivendi and Activision merger for that example...people freaked, and rightly so. But here again Blizzard, like Id, has so much pull that it's now Activision Blizzard and not Activision Vivendi.
To me, it also seems no coicidence that Steam was born after Half-Life put Valve on the map. Why is that? I think you saw, like many of us, where Steam was really heading...even though it wasn't blatantly positioned as such when it first came out. Gabe's no fool and I think he got a heaping taste of the problems that were/are negatively affecting the health of PC gaming after the success of Half-Life...both of which we're talking about here. I fully understand where the publishers are coming from and things like the 'Romero Experience' and, more recently, all the crap that went down with Vanguard has, rightly, soured some things. Here's a third aspect we haven't discusssed but which you brought up...budget.
You mentioned how big the budget is now for games but, IMHO, I think a lot of that is down to the fact that it's now the perception that you have to have specialized devs for each and every aspect of a game. Blizzard now employs over 2500 people!! Are you kidding me? That's absolutely ridiculous considering they don't exactly pump out games hand-over-fist. I'd like to see the percentage of the budget that's gone into Starcraft II and Diablo III just to fund payroll, once they've been released. I was watching the DVD special from my GoTY Edition of Civ4 that Firaxis apparently played for the GDC a few years back about the development process for Civ4. One of the problems brought up was the communication issues they had in-house because the animator/s couldn't properly convey things to the coders about how something should look. I can only imagine what kinds of things go on in much bigger studios that have umpteen animators, coders, texture artists, level designers, audio engineers blah blah blah blah blah...come on!!
You can cite game complexity if you like and the arguement has its place to a certain extent but, going by the last 6-7 years, game complexity apparently has less and less to do with creativity, playability and longevity. These are the hallmarks of a great game yet the stuff that's put out now is so one-dimensional it's not even funny. How long have we been waiting now for something to recapture the feel of classics like Fallout, DeusEx or Baldur's Gate? I recently made the mistake of biting the bullet and buying Dead Space...meh, it's OK and that's about it. If we're being honest here it's nothing special Rob, I know you're a fan of the genre but don't let that fool you (I dont' think you will BTW). It suffers from the same thing so many games do now...repetition, lack of depth/story and replayability. It's as though games now are meant to to be played once and thrown away and for $50-60, in this economy (ANY economy really), I'm not surprised why people either copy it or, like me, find myself more and more often saying "hell no" and heading off to the $20 bargain bin to pick up 2 well-respected titles for $20 less...safe in the knowledge I'm going to get 10x more for my money.
I know piracy is and has been a problem and I'm more than happy to agree to disagree on this but, IMHO, everything I've talked about is just as much a cause for the slump as piracy, if not more. Maybe I feel this way because I don't even pay attention to or partake in piracy but I'm not the only one y'know? I know piracy's out there and I know it doesn't help the dev's but I'm already doing my part because I can't be bothered with it. But on the flip side of all this piracy crap, have dev's and publishers even considered the fact that there's a whole other group of us out here; longtime gamers...adults in their 30's and 40's with jobs, who CAN afford this stuff and are mature enough to not even contemplate piracy but are just plain sick of feeling like we just paid $50 to bug test or, essentially, be BORED for a measly 10 hours? I remember when I used to buy games at release and AGAIN when they hit the bargain bin because my old disc was so scratched up by then that I couldn't get it to install when I what (???)...decided to play it, AGAIN!! I haven't had to do this since Civ4, before that Half-Life and, before THAT, Quake...I won't even bother to delve into the era of floppy. "Who put my King's Quest on top of the speaker, damnit!!"
Sorry for the long posts but like I've said in previous ones, I've done my best not to get embroiled in this debate and I just want to get it all out, now that you've water-boarded it out of me with all these vids on the subject.
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