Eric Nofsinger, chief creative officer at High Voltage, has criticized what he believes to be the short-sightedness of game developers. He's accused games of having bloated budgets with little regard to the future, claiming the industry has "stars in its eyes."
"I think that we, as an industry, have become dazzled by the bling," claims Nofsinger. "We've all got stars in our eyes for Hollywood, with twenty, thirty, forty million dollar budgets over night and hundred-person teams working for years on titles without ever running a P&L to see if anything could support that."
Nofsinger, whose company is currently working on Wii FPS The Conduit, also adds: "What we’re seeing right now with the number of layoffs and the numbers of studios closing [is] the repercussion of that very short-sided view where all we wanted to eat was candy. Everybody rushed towards the candy house and now we’re getting eaten by the witch."
He also used the Wii to illustrate the same mentality, suggesting that everybody rushed to put half-hearted crap on the system thanks to the "big old dollar sign" hanging above it. " As long as the 360 and PS3 are seen as the lead SKU, it’s problematic," he warns.
As a technological industry, it's natural that videogames would want to embrace current machinery and make the most visually impressive titles out there, but Nofsinger is right when he suggests that budgets are running out of control. With the next generation of systems making a threatening silhouette on the horizon, one dreads to think just how far beyond studios' means the price tag will get.
A price tag that will, of course, be transferred onto us.
Contest:
11:00 AM on 02.06.2009
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As far as budgets go, let them crash and burn, like everyone else does. We will pay the price only in so far as we actually want to pay out of our pockets, nobody is forcing us. If prices become prohibitive then the industry will simply shrink and only the best and the smallest will survive. While that may be sad, it is capitalism and we pick it everyday over the alternativs.
But Emrah is right too. It's not like developers (or not only that) decided to go for "power". Really good looking games go down becouse they don't catch up to the top. If screenshots are not haveing same amount of polygons and indirect ligthts as competintion - many gamers will just forget about it.
But I'm not worried so much. After copyright finally kicks the bucket thing will probably look up.
I'm not complaining...
I actually enjoy my Wii.
There is just an extreme drought of reasonable must owns.
Do you mean "must owns" that are specific to one console or just the lackluster amount of "must owns" in general?
Anyone can point to any one console and say that it's been a long time since any console had a "must own" specific to itself, but I think there's a drought of "must owns" in general, even on the PC.
I said from the time I saw the first Conduit trailer that the game looks good, but many others here savaged it. Now we all know the Wii could have had a bit more kick in its guts, but the lack of that is down to Nintendo. While Nintendo's cheaper philosophy makes sense, it clashes with what gamers really want, to a degree.
Nintendo created Wii with a very shortsighted view, based on interface and little else, following their ideas but forgetting the basics that gamers require (decent online play, hard drive etc, establish last generation). It could have easily gone wrong for Nintendo, but I hope their success doesn't go to their head and paper over the cracks of being two steps behind, tech wise. Had they paid attention to this and gamers/developers needs, more developers would be gracing Wii.
What flies in the face of this Conduit guys opinion, is that Xbox was on par with what GC/Wii is doing, and still had all that spiffing online play, hard drive etc. Nintendo can never convince me, that they couldn't have done a similar spec system to Xbox, including a hard drive and those Wii controls. I feel it was Nintendo's lack of thinking from a tech viewpoint that tagged the Wii with development apathetic lepresy.
When Nintendo create their next system, they should be going around asking developers, what would you like to see in a new system roughly. And when that feedback comes in, they should then respond accordingly (I feel Sony and MS are more likely and aware to do this). This is the best way to keep everyone happy, but sooner rather than later, Nintendo's cutting up the tech card doesn't play well and may come back to haunt them.
We all want a balance between a cheaper and powerful, feature laced enough console. So far, 360 fills this gap, hence why its so popular with developers. Nintendo need to grow a pair and look carefully at the competition, if they want to attract developers more next time. It's not all about them and their IP anymore (which it seems Nintendo put first above others on their systems, and to hell with 2nd/3rd parties needs), most of which don't require high spec graphics.
So yeah, I agree about the 'dazzled by bling' thing, but had Nintendo stepped up to the plate with Wii more in the first place (just looking at the Wii specs, shows they only care about Nintendo, because their games come first), we wouldn't have minded paying a little extra (especially for a hard drive based Wii), and the industry landscape would be a lot more even, with Wii still being unique and ahead in its own way.
Hope The Conduit does well anyway, it deserves to do so. Let's hope more of those casuals pick it up.
In all fairness, how well was Nintendo doing last 2 generations?
They didn't even expect the Wii to sell out at launch.
Nintendo did co-up with that company making holo-data.
So who knows what their next thing will be =).