10 ms·

Most Video Game Artwork Will Never Be Seen

137 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

gumballindie 3y ago
[flagged]
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Game artists are going to be one of the largest consumers of AI image gen tech in the whole industry because of how much tedious work is required to get a sketch to a 3D model. So I doubt any serious artists in that field would side with you on that statement and many are probably training their own internal models on their own work anyway.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Not an issue if they train an ai model by their own accord. The issue is the prevalent theft among ai companies that simply seal people's work to train proprietary models.
    - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
      I agree it’s wrong if it’s proprietary. But I think open models trained on scraped data regardless of where it came from are valuable enough to offset any upset about the data. If this was all locked behind Adobe they could charge 10k a month for access (if you think that sounds ridiculous look at autocad licensing) now it’s free for the first time in decades artists have a chance to own and control the next generation of tools and make them entirely free. Sad to see short sighted ones bickering about slighted that they were part of the data. Real small picture thinking that will screw them over in the long run.
      - gumballindie 3y ago
        > open models trained on scraped data regardless of where it came from are valuable enough That's theft.
        CaptainFever 3y ago
        Copying is not theft. Stealing a thing leaves one less left Copying it makes one thing more; that’s what copying’s for. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4)
        whywhywhywhy 3y ago
        It's not and plenty of pieces of art only exist in good quality today because of what you think is theft. You're wrong and things are not black and white.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
belalebrar 3y ago
Yea - even the ones Artists do get to share, it's just so much out there now. If you take a quick look at sites like ArtStation, you'll see thousands upon thousands new artwork added daily.
reassembled 3y ago
This is something I've been thinking about lately with regards to the early arcade game developers in Japan, not just in regards to the artwork and music but also the decades of technical knowledge and R&D that have gone into creating bespoke arcade boards. Individual game companies developed or commissioned unique hardware dedicated to playing sometimes a single game in an arcade setting. The MAME devs have done a lot of great work unraveling these boards. Some books and websites have compiled artwork, interviews and technical info from certain arcade developers. I just wish the world could see more from that period of time. I think about this same kind of thing with regards to the company I work in. We create video hardware and so much of the development knowledge will be lost to the sands of time. This is inevitable but a sad part of any large creative undertakings.
- zdw 3y ago
  This sounds interesting - do you have any links to examples of these early bespoke works?
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    Games weren't getting individual custom CPUs or anything that exotic, but from roughly 1980-2000 the industry was still riding the peak of Moore's Law, where chips were getting faster and cheaper seemingly every day, and arcade developers were constantly trying to leapfrog each other. Each game system really only needed to run a single game, so there was no real barrier to having unique boards per game -- if a particular game needed a few extra RAM chips, or the CPU maybe needed a higher clock, there wasn't much barrier to that. NOTE: System16 is a treasure trove of information in general, but it looks like their main landing page at https://www.system16.com https://www.system16.com has some kind of hijack ad situation going on? The links below seem unaffected. Konami was kind of the poster child for bespoke hardware; they're famous/infamous for seemingly every single game having some kind of weirdo bespoke hardware iteration: https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=5 https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=5 Sega had a more typical approach. They would typically have a minimum of several games per arcade system, and sometimes dozens: https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=1 https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=1 But, even then, there are lots of variations to the rule. Taito operated more or less like Sega, but (to choose one at random) you might see things like this where one game on this particular board (Cadash) was equipped with a faster CPU than the others: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=652 https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=652 There are some fun exceptions to what I've written though: truly one-off hardware. Namco's Thunder Ceptor, with its mode7-ish backgrounds... in 1986! https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=523 https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=523 Gaplus/Galaga3 had its own board for some reason: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=518 https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=518 Pole Position I and II (essentially the same game) had its own hardware: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=515 https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=515 I think a lot of Midway's late-80s/early-90s boards (let's say, NARC through MK) tended to evolve from game to game.
art3m 3y ago
Many completed video games will never be seen as well due to publishers decision. Which is more astounding than just artworks.
rickdeckard 3y ago
Reminds me of the even more sober fact: Even the content that made it into the game will never be seen by most users, as most buyers of a video game will never complete your game. But if the ending is not satisfying for those who complete it, they will impact the buying decisions of those who never play through it anyway. And on top of that: Before the introduction of Trophies in console games there was no way for game developers to know how far their buyers actually played the game before they stopped and moved on.
- qiine 3y ago
  On steam you can see % of player that got each achievements for a given game. I looked at Dark soul and only 31.5% got to Anor Londo(on PC), its crazy because that's barely half the game, there is still a lot of high quality content including some of the stuff that made it so famous left to be experienced.
  - Pet_Ant 3y ago
    Does that include people that never even played (or installed the game)? Because I have lots of games I never intended to play but were part of a bundle and I wanted to support the developer.
    - Abekkus 3y ago
      There are some games that encode an achievement basically for starting the story or finishing an early quest, so if those complimentary achievements aren't 100%, you could make that measurement
    - vanchor3 3y ago
      For your total completion stats in Steam it doesn't count games that you have not earned any achievements in, it may be the same for global stats.
  - recursive 3y ago
    I'm surprised the other way. I would not expect 31% of players to make it halfway through Dark Souls. I probably got about 1% through it. Regardless of the "quality", I didn't find it fun.
cowboyscott 3y ago
This reminds me of efforts I've been a part of to open source libraries and others bits of code at companies large and small. The reality is that most employment contracts consider the employee's considered made for hire, meaning that ownership rights, in whole or large part, are given to the employer. Publishing works carries both risk and a cost to ensure the right works are published under the appropriate terms, and expending this effort is only in the interest of the company as a means of retention (and, ironically, letting your workers display their talent can easily work against retention). > Over 90% of the studio work I've made over my career is locked away forever Speaking as a developer, my "locked away" rate is probably >99.9% on a line-by-line basis. Glad to see the concept artists faring better, I suppose.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Most artwork will never be seen. There is too much.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Heres a question from a different angle: can we stop the unseen art from being created? Some of it may be useful internally. But a lot of it sounds like wasted work.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  In a creative environment sometimes things just created to show the rest of the team and communicate a theme, idea, vibe have a lot of value.
- pxoe 3y ago
  this kind of question really illustrates techbro level of understanding of art. like damn, it is hopeless. and some deeper inability to flip it to oneself that results in shit takes like that. 'is whatever that I'm creating that remains unseen - a "wasted work"? should I be stopped from creating "waste work"? is that what I would like?'
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  "how can we make it so that 100.0% of the code I type is shipped in the final product?"
  - wdfx 3y ago
    That's not the same argument? 100% of the code typed, or 100% of the assets created also include all of the code/assets not used/visible in the game. You'd rather prefer to "only ship the code written which is actually reachable by all possible code paths when running in production" ?
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      Not sure I understand your post but let me clarify. With art, you often need to produce a looooooot of preliminary and intermediate work to achieve the final product. This isn't wasted work, as the grandparent poster seems to think. It's similar (admittedly, not identical) in many regards with code. Each line of code stands a high chance of being revised or deleted as we iterate and get our code to a working state and then continue to improve it in the future. Those intermediate steps aren't wasted; they're how we get to where we're going.
siffland 3y ago
I remember play a game years and years ago (cannot recall the game), you come out of a mountain cave halfway up turn left and then enter another cave. However i stopped and you got a view of a desert landscape (i remember it as awe inspiring, maybe breathtaking, but it was years ago so in reality it was probably pixelated), it looked like someone put a lot of effort into the view and wondered if anyone else stopped and looked or just kept going. Point is, if i work on code, i refactor and refactor and try to make it perfect even though it already worked and wonder how many people working on games spent a ton of time on a scene in a game or background or sprite to get it perfect and no one pays attention. I have a friend who plays Super Mario Bros all the time just to beat it and has NEVER seen world 5, 6 or 7 because he always uses the warp zones (i am not implying those are breathtaking worlds, if they were he would be missing out).
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > years and years ago [...] out of a mountain cave [...] desert landscape Random-ass-guess here, but my mind throws up the "Surface Tension" level in Half Life. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZgRIifpgHQ&t=12m04s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZgRIifpgHQ&t=12m04s
MattRix 3y ago
First post I’ve seen here from Aftermath. I think the site only went live a couple days ago but seems like it’s run and owned by a bunch of veteran game journalists. I’m hoping it does well.
andai 3y ago
I wanted to argue just break the NDA and leak the art. (Anonymously, say your Dropbox was hacked, unlikely action will be taken against you.) I wanted to argue that art leaks are great for the community, even if they harm the company. But I remember reading how the HL2 beta leak tanked morale at VALVE, and arguably if the team's morale is hurt, that ultimately hurts the community too. Still at some point the culture there shifted and people who had been working on Episode 3 released their art, storyline etc (though some later regretted it).
coretx 3y ago
Bring back cracktro's, innovative Art. Most video game "Artwork" is a more of the same industrial product not much different from "Art" in advertisement. Most AI generated art will also not be seen. Honestly, I don't care & i'm not the only one.
rob74 3y ago
> Like yeah you can own the pictures, man, but you shouldn't be allowed to keep us from using our labor to secure future jobs. As a developer, I wouldn't ever consider submitting proprietary code I may still have from a previous or current job when applying for another job (not least because that may leave a bad impression of how I handle confidential stuff). Why should this be different for artists?
- woleium 3y ago
  I guess it’s like sharing a compiled binary. As long as you aren’t sharing the “source”, I.e. the vector file or the layered photoshop image file, and just a low resolution jpeg then it’s not so bad? Not saying it’s ethically okay, just that it’s not that useful for reuse by the target in the form it’s presented.
  - dagmx 3y ago
    Except early versions of any project may show features or IP that didn’t ship, that may in the future. Or open you up for criticism and litigation for any number of reasons. Revealing stuff that’s been done isn’t free.
  - dogleash 3y ago
    What? Sharing the binary vs. source is not the kind of line you get to draw unless you're the one paying for it to be developed. I've worked on projects that are available on the market and I can't even point at it and suggest I had anything to do with it, or the companies involved with making it.
- raincole 3y ago
  Because artists are special. No, I am not being snarky. Actually artists are special: it's one of the few job where portfolios matter much more than education, and as much as (or more than) interviews.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    This seems to apply to gamedev programmers as well, though I'm not too sure.
dogleash 3y ago
Does it matter? Like, yeah, there's a seeming incongruity at first pass. But that doesn't mean it's important. Games are a consumer product meant to widely available and a big part of them is visual spectacle. Some of the visuals designed in creating that product are kept secret. I see the apparent contradiction, but the lede of this article calls that "one of the greatest injustices." You what mate?
- hwestiii 3y ago
  yes. AKA “business”
- seanhunter 3y ago
  Precisely. A huge amount of work in every field never sees the light of day. That doesn't mean it's not important, it just means the person doing the work is curating what goes "above the waterline" and what stays in the background as prep. The obvious example of this same thing in literature is Tolkein, who invented whole alphabets and languages but only included tiny fragments of them in his published works (prior to his death - obviously his estate has been releasing everything remorselessly). Or an example from a totally unrelated field, there are lots of cases in say maths where you have to do a bunch of work to choose a value but that's considered "scratch work" so gets removed when you submit the final version. So everyone sees your epsilon-delta proof of a limit for example, they see your brilliant choice of delta but the work you put into finding the delta isn't part of the proof. The proof just shows that choice of delta makes the proof work for any epsilon. Noone reading it gets to know how you figured that out, because that's not what a proof is for. In the case of games, the artwork that isn't released is part of the worldbuilding and refining the concept for the game. It's absolutely not wasted effort even if it's never seen by anyone outside the dev team.
- corysama 3y ago
  The meat of the article is not talking about an injustice to the consumer. It's arguing that there's an injustice to the artist because artists' portfolios are critical to their career advancement. It's not enough to say "I worked on this team." You need to literally show your personal results in detail to get your next job. But, artist employers are requiring that the majority of their results be locked in a vault forever. Some are even pushing to claim ownership of all art made during employment. That's blatantly a move to repress the employee's negotiating power.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
Oh, I thought the article was going to be about how it's because people suck at games. But I guess these days with lets plays you don't have to earn the right to see the later levels.
crazygringo 3y ago
This article is specifically about not being able to include some of your work in your portfolio, and this is not a problem that's unique to video game artists. It's true of all sorts of people in the entertainment industry -- writers, actors, and so forth. But in reality it's not really a problem. Sure, you absolutely cannot take past contracted work that never saw the light of day and put it in a public portfolio without permission. Rightly, no team wants any part of the creative process leaked, except when the people at the top choose to. But this still leaves: 1) A public portfolio of stuff that was actually released by the companies (final video game clips, movie clips, etc.) 2) A public portfolio of personal material -- projects of your own, designed to showcase your talents at their absolute best 3) A private portfolio of unreleased stuff that you can selectively and judiciously show in private interviews, when it's not competing (e.g. show your Dove soap ads to Snickers, don't show them to Dial soap) And that generally works quite well. Especially your personal portfolio of material (#2) -- everything you work on professionally is often compromised by top-down direction. But when you create stuff that's 100% yours, it allows you to show your unique gifts in the best possible light.
- product-render 3y ago
  It is a problem that (3) is something that could get you sued, depending on the specifics, although I'll grant that almost never happens. I have work for major big brands that I suspect would land me more clients but I can't even mention the relationship. I signed the NDA, so it wasn't a surprise, but it is frustrating that the power imbalance allows that.
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    HN skews toward believing that if you can be sued, you will be. It's the infinite monkeys theory applied to contract law.
    - hn_acker 3y ago
      > HN skews toward believing that if you can be sued, you will be. Maybe it's more like, it doesn't matter how correct you are unless you can afford a good lawyer. The infinite monkey theorem is not applicable. Lawyers who make the bulk of their money from being on the suing side (or not necessarily suing, just being hired to be able to sue) rather than the defending side are not monkeys randomly pressing keys on their keyboards. Then again, not everyone's threat model for "getting sued" is the same.
jameslars 3y ago
A similar realization had a major impact on how Blizzard approached end-game raiding in WoW. In the first 2 expansions, only the most dedicated players were seeing the final boss and culmination of the storylines. It took 40 players working together to get there, and those 40 players had to execute complex fights in order to reach the end. Though a very rewarding experience for those who could do it, Blizzard did the math and realized they were excluding the VAST majority of their playerbase from the coolest content. They were spending tons of money creating this content and no one was experiencing it! In the 3rd expansion and ever since then, end game content has been tuned to be a lot more forgiving and to require less people. There are still complex and rewarding fights, but ramping up the difficulty is "opt-in" generally speaking. This is likely one of the reasons the game remained so successful for so long. Prior to this mentality shift, it was very common for end game MMO content to only be seen by a small minority of the players.
- kridsdale3 3y ago
  A similar thing happened with Star Wars Galaxies. Part of the original pitch was that like <1% of players would have access to the Force. Only from there with super hard training could they be Jedi. This matches the lore of the universe, Jedi (especially in the OT era) are the most rare creatures. This was accurate, and would make seeing a Jedi in the game world the coolest thing imaginable, but it was a disaster for the finances of running the game. Obviously, EVERYONE wants to be a Jedi. So they re-tooled it so that anyone could. Eventually the whole game was replaced with another MMO that was set in the ancient ages when they were common.
SpaceL10n 3y ago
There are no examples of video game artwork in this article, sadly. I'm sure it's a good read, but I clicked it just for the art. found https://www.creativeuncut.com/ https://www.creativeuncut.com/ instead
corethree 3y ago
1 year ago this article would have been much more relevant. With the advent of image generation via AI, artwork is becoming more commoditized and this is becoming less relevant. It's sad to see this happen in a year but this is literally the first thing I thought about when I read the headline.
kossTKR 3y ago
A tangent but reminds me of the fact that even though we have millions of photographers with amazing cameras, most news and culture sites display images in low quality. So most great photos will also never been seen. I remember Boston Globe from years ago with great photo content that really captured the vibe of so many places and people in the news. These days news means boring propaganda PR pictures or tiny images with artifacts, very weird. It's like we're not as close to the actual world as we were 10+ years ago. Probably also about licensing, but it's stupid because most photos won't end up as "pressphoto of the year" or whatever they are saving their HQ versions for.
- Lord-Jobo 3y ago
  This bothers me a lot. It reminds me of old movies and tv shows using garbage low quality props that eventually look like monopoly money instead of dollars at current resolutions, because the quality of broadcast and even projection at the time of filming was so low nobody would be able to tell. future proof your work for gods sake
madrox 3y ago
This article feels like the art equivalent of engineers saying the code they write in their jobs will never be open sourced. I mean, yeah, that's somewhat unfortunate, but not all businesses can survive operating that way, and you kind of know what you signed up for when you went in. It seems like the artists interviewed in this article know that, but would like to see some reasonable limits placed on it, like a statute of limitations. I can relate. Once, say, 10 years have passed, the only people who care about that code I wrote for a job 10 years ago would probably be me, and I'd like to be able to do with it what I want.
johnea 3y ago
> "...worlds we inhabit and the characters we fall in love with." To paraphrase Lenny Bruce: What do you mean "we" kimosabe...
Atrine 3y ago
> While some of the commercial reasons for keeping game art under wraps make sense, many artists working in the video game industry say they're subject to a power imbalance, even in full-time studio positions, that sees the bulk of their work locked away in vaults, where not only can fans never see them but where artists can't share them either, not even in professional settings like job applications or portfolios. This is actually a pretty big problem. My cofounder and I run a small video game studio and we worked with our lawyers to figure out how to protect artists as well as the company in a way that seemed fair. What we came up with was a general blanket rule that if an artist's work gets used in any public way (promo materials, game launch) then they can use that work immediately for their public portfolios. In the situation where it's not released we have end dates in the contracts for when they can use their work in their portfolios.
- rickdeckard 3y ago
  > If an artist's work gets used in any public way (promo materials, game launch) then they can use that work immediately for their public portfolios Do you see this case being prohibited as the norm for other studios? (the cited section only talks about art "locked away in vaults") > In the situation where it's not released we have end dates in the contracts for when they can use their work in their portfolios. That's actually quite charitable, but IMO understandable how difficult this is for larger companies. After all your company paid for that product of work, which also reveals parts of your creative process. Imagine Ford paying someone to make five car-designs, ending up using one of them and ultimately losing full control over the remaining four...
  - Atrine 3y ago
    > Imagine Ford paying someone to make five car-designs, ending up using one of them and ultimately losing full control over the remaining four... Yeah this isn't a valid comparison in the slightest. Artists using work for their public portfolio doesn't mean that they can use the work for other employers or in other contexts. Not sure how you made such large leap here.
  - Tanoc 3y ago
matheusmoreira 3y ago
"Their" work? It's not theirs at all since they sold the copyright for the paycheck. Isn't intellectual property wonderful?
chupapimunyenyo 3y ago
[flagged]
3seashells 3y ago
Question: if the employer doesn't pay, aka violates the contract, does the IP for the art return to the artist?

137 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

gumballindie 3y ago

[flagged]

whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Game artists are going to be one of the largest consumers of AI image gen tech in the whole industry because of how much tedious work is required to get a sketch to a 3D model. So I doubt any serious artists in that field would side with you on that statement and many are probably training their own internal models on their own work anyway.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Not an issue if they train an ai model by their own accord. The issue is the prevalent theft among ai companies that simply seal people's work to train proprietary models.
  - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    I agree it’s wrong if it’s proprietary. But I think open models trained on scraped data regardless of where it came from are valuable enough to offset any upset about the data. If this was all locked behind Adobe they could charge 10k a month for access (if you think that sounds ridiculous look at autocad licensing) now it’s free for the first time in decades artists have a chance to own and control the next generation of tools and make them entirely free. Sad to see short sighted ones bickering about slighted that they were part of the data. Real small picture thinking that will screw them over in the long run.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      > open models trained on scraped data regardless of where it came from are valuable enough That's theft.
      - CaptainFever 3y ago
        Copying is not theft. Stealing a thing leaves one less left Copying it makes one thing more; that’s what copying’s for. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4)
      - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
        It's not and plenty of pieces of art only exist in good quality today because of what you think is theft. You're wrong and things are not black and white.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

belalebrar 3y ago

Yea - even the ones Artists do get to share, it's just so much out there now. If you take a quick look at sites like ArtStation, you'll see thousands upon thousands new artwork added daily.

reassembled 3y ago

This is something I've been thinking about lately with regards to the early arcade game developers in Japan, not just in regards to the artwork and music but also the decades of technical knowledge and R&D that have gone into creating bespoke arcade boards. Individual game companies developed or commissioned unique hardware dedicated to playing sometimes a single game in an arcade setting. The MAME devs have done a lot of great work unraveling these boards. Some books and websites have compiled artwork, interviews and technical info from certain arcade developers. I just wish the world could see more from that period of time. I think about this same kind of thing with regards to the company I work in. We create video hardware and so much of the development knowledge will be lost to the sands of time. This is inevitable but a sad part of any large creative undertakings.

zdw 3y ago
This sounds interesting - do you have any links to examples of these early bespoke works?
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Games weren't getting individual custom CPUs or anything that exotic, but from roughly 1980-2000 the industry was still riding the peak of Moore's Law, where chips were getting faster and cheaper seemingly every day, and arcade developers were constantly trying to leapfrog each other. Each game system really only needed to run a single game, so there was no real barrier to having unique boards per game -- if a particular game needed a few extra RAM chips, or the CPU maybe needed a higher clock, there wasn't much barrier to that. NOTE: System16 is a treasure trove of information in general, but it looks like their main landing page at https://www.system16.com https://www.system16.com has some kind of hijack ad situation going on? The links below seem unaffected. Konami was kind of the poster child for bespoke hardware; they're famous/infamous for seemingly every single game having some kind of weirdo bespoke hardware iteration: https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=5 https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=5 Sega had a more typical approach. They would typically have a minimum of several games per arcade system, and sometimes dozens: https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=1 https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=1 But, even then, there are lots of variations to the rule. Taito operated more or less like Sega, but (to choose one at random) you might see things like this where one game on this particular board (Cadash) was equipped with a faster CPU than the others: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=652 https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=652 There are some fun exceptions to what I've written though: truly one-off hardware. Namco's Thunder Ceptor, with its mode7-ish backgrounds... in 1986! https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=523 https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=523 Gaplus/Galaga3 had its own board for some reason: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=518 https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=518 Pole Position I and II (essentially the same game) had its own hardware: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=515 https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=515 I think a lot of Midway's late-80s/early-90s boards (let's say, NARC through MK) tended to evolve from game to game.

art3m 3y ago

Many completed video games will never be seen as well due to publishers decision. Which is more astounding than just artworks.

rickdeckard 3y ago

Reminds me of the even more sober fact: Even the content that made it into the game will never be seen by most users, as most buyers of a video game will never complete your game. But if the ending is not satisfying for those who complete it, they will impact the buying decisions of those who never play through it anyway. And on top of that: Before the introduction of Trophies in console games there was no way for game developers to know how far their buyers actually played the game before they stopped and moved on.

qiine 3y ago
On steam you can see % of player that got each achievements for a given game. I looked at Dark soul and only 31.5% got to Anor Londo(on PC), its crazy because that's barely half the game, there is still a lot of high quality content including some of the stuff that made it so famous left to be experienced.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  Does that include people that never even played (or installed the game)? Because I have lots of games I never intended to play but were part of a bundle and I wanted to support the developer.
  - Abekkus 3y ago
    There are some games that encode an achievement basically for starting the story or finishing an early quest, so if those complimentary achievements aren't 100%, you could make that measurement
  - vanchor3 3y ago
    For your total completion stats in Steam it doesn't count games that you have not earned any achievements in, it may be the same for global stats.
- recursive 3y ago
  I'm surprised the other way. I would not expect 31% of players to make it halfway through Dark Souls. I probably got about 1% through it. Regardless of the "quality", I didn't find it fun.

cowboyscott 3y ago

This reminds me of efforts I've been a part of to open source libraries and others bits of code at companies large and small. The reality is that most employment contracts consider the employee's considered made for hire, meaning that ownership rights, in whole or large part, are given to the employer. Publishing works carries both risk and a cost to ensure the right works are published under the appropriate terms, and expending this effort is only in the interest of the company as a means of retention (and, ironically, letting your workers display their talent can easily work against retention). > Over 90% of the studio work I've made over my career is locked away forever Speaking as a developer, my "locked away" rate is probably >99.9% on a line-by-line basis. Glad to see the concept artists faring better, I suppose.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Most artwork will never be seen. There is too much.

nonethewiser 3y ago

Heres a question from a different angle: can we stop the unseen art from being created? Some of it may be useful internally. But a lot of it sounds like wasted work.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago
In a creative environment sometimes things just created to show the rest of the team and communicate a theme, idea, vibe have a lot of value.
pxoe 3y ago
this kind of question really illustrates techbro level of understanding of art. like damn, it is hopeless. and some deeper inability to flip it to oneself that results in shit takes like that. 'is whatever that I'm creating that remains unseen - a "wasted work"? should I be stopped from creating "waste work"? is that what I would like?'
JohnBooty 3y ago
"how can we make it so that 100.0% of the code I type is shipped in the final product?"
- wdfx 3y ago
  That's not the same argument? 100% of the code typed, or 100% of the assets created also include all of the code/assets not used/visible in the game. You'd rather prefer to "only ship the code written which is actually reachable by all possible code paths when running in production" ?
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    Not sure I understand your post but let me clarify. With art, you often need to produce a looooooot of preliminary and intermediate work to achieve the final product. This isn't wasted work, as the grandparent poster seems to think. It's similar (admittedly, not identical) in many regards with code. Each line of code stands a high chance of being revised or deleted as we iterate and get our code to a working state and then continue to improve it in the future. Those intermediate steps aren't wasted; they're how we get to where we're going.

siffland 3y ago

I remember play a game years and years ago (cannot recall the game), you come out of a mountain cave halfway up turn left and then enter another cave. However i stopped and you got a view of a desert landscape (i remember it as awe inspiring, maybe breathtaking, but it was years ago so in reality it was probably pixelated), it looked like someone put a lot of effort into the view and wondered if anyone else stopped and looked or just kept going. Point is, if i work on code, i refactor and refactor and try to make it perfect even though it already worked and wonder how many people working on games spent a ton of time on a scene in a game or background or sprite to get it perfect and no one pays attention. I have a friend who plays Super Mario Bros all the time just to beat it and has NEVER seen world 5, 6 or 7 because he always uses the warp zones (i am not implying those are breathtaking worlds, if they were he would be missing out).

Terr_ 3y ago
> years and years ago [...] out of a mountain cave [...] desert landscape Random-ass-guess here, but my mind throws up the "Surface Tension" level in Half Life. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZgRIifpgHQ&t=12m04s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZgRIifpgHQ&t=12m04s

MattRix 3y ago

First post I’ve seen here from Aftermath. I think the site only went live a couple days ago but seems like it’s run and owned by a bunch of veteran game journalists. I’m hoping it does well.

andai 3y ago

I wanted to argue just break the NDA and leak the art. (Anonymously, say your Dropbox was hacked, unlikely action will be taken against you.) I wanted to argue that art leaks are great for the community, even if they harm the company. But I remember reading how the HL2 beta leak tanked morale at VALVE, and arguably if the team's morale is hurt, that ultimately hurts the community too. Still at some point the culture there shifted and people who had been working on Episode 3 released their art, storyline etc (though some later regretted it).

coretx 3y ago

Bring back cracktro's, innovative Art. Most video game "Artwork" is a more of the same industrial product not much different from "Art" in advertisement. Most AI generated art will also not be seen. Honestly, I don't care & i'm not the only one.

rob74 3y ago

> Like yeah you can own the pictures, man, but you shouldn't be allowed to keep us from using our labor to secure future jobs. As a developer, I wouldn't ever consider submitting proprietary code I may still have from a previous or current job when applying for another job (not least because that may leave a bad impression of how I handle confidential stuff). Why should this be different for artists?

woleium 3y ago
I guess it’s like sharing a compiled binary. As long as you aren’t sharing the “source”, I.e. the vector file or the layered photoshop image file, and just a low resolution jpeg then it’s not so bad? Not saying it’s ethically okay, just that it’s not that useful for reuse by the target in the form it’s presented.
- dagmx 3y ago
  Except early versions of any project may show features or IP that didn’t ship, that may in the future. Or open you up for criticism and litigation for any number of reasons. Revealing stuff that’s been done isn’t free.
- dogleash 3y ago
  What? Sharing the binary vs. source is not the kind of line you get to draw unless you're the one paying for it to be developed. I've worked on projects that are available on the market and I can't even point at it and suggest I had anything to do with it, or the companies involved with making it.
raincole 3y ago
Because artists are special. No, I am not being snarky. Actually artists are special: it's one of the few job where portfolios matter much more than education, and as much as (or more than) interviews.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  This seems to apply to gamedev programmers as well, though I'm not too sure.

dogleash 3y ago

Does it matter? Like, yeah, there's a seeming incongruity at first pass. But that doesn't mean it's important. Games are a consumer product meant to widely available and a big part of them is visual spectacle. Some of the visuals designed in creating that product are kept secret. I see the apparent contradiction, but the lede of this article calls that "one of the greatest injustices." You what mate?

hwestiii 3y ago
yes. AKA “business”
seanhunter 3y ago
Precisely. A huge amount of work in every field never sees the light of day. That doesn't mean it's not important, it just means the person doing the work is curating what goes "above the waterline" and what stays in the background as prep. The obvious example of this same thing in literature is Tolkein, who invented whole alphabets and languages but only included tiny fragments of them in his published works (prior to his death - obviously his estate has been releasing everything remorselessly). Or an example from a totally unrelated field, there are lots of cases in say maths where you have to do a bunch of work to choose a value but that's considered "scratch work" so gets removed when you submit the final version. So everyone sees your epsilon-delta proof of a limit for example, they see your brilliant choice of delta but the work you put into finding the delta isn't part of the proof. The proof just shows that choice of delta makes the proof work for any epsilon. Noone reading it gets to know how you figured that out, because that's not what a proof is for. In the case of games, the artwork that isn't released is part of the worldbuilding and refining the concept for the game. It's absolutely not wasted effort even if it's never seen by anyone outside the dev team.
corysama 3y ago
The meat of the article is not talking about an injustice to the consumer. It's arguing that there's an injustice to the artist because artists' portfolios are critical to their career advancement. It's not enough to say "I worked on this team." You need to literally show your personal results in detail to get your next job. But, artist employers are requiring that the majority of their results be locked in a vault forever. Some are even pushing to claim ownership of all art made during employment. That's blatantly a move to repress the employee's negotiating power.

wly_cdgr 3y ago

Oh, I thought the article was going to be about how it's because people suck at games. But I guess these days with lets plays you don't have to earn the right to see the later levels.

crazygringo 3y ago

This article is specifically about not being able to include some of your work in your portfolio, and this is not a problem that's unique to video game artists. It's true of all sorts of people in the entertainment industry -- writers, actors, and so forth. But in reality it's not really a problem. Sure, you absolutely cannot take past contracted work that never saw the light of day and put it in a public portfolio without permission. Rightly, no team wants any part of the creative process leaked, except when the people at the top choose to. But this still leaves: 1) A public portfolio of stuff that was actually released by the companies (final video game clips, movie clips, etc.) 2) A public portfolio of personal material -- projects of your own, designed to showcase your talents at their absolute best 3) A private portfolio of unreleased stuff that you can selectively and judiciously show in private interviews, when it's not competing (e.g. show your Dove soap ads to Snickers, don't show them to Dial soap) And that generally works quite well. Especially your personal portfolio of material (#2) -- everything you work on professionally is often compromised by top-down direction. But when you create stuff that's 100% yours, it allows you to show your unique gifts in the best possible light.

product-render 3y ago
It is a problem that (3) is something that could get you sued, depending on the specifics, although I'll grant that almost never happens. I have work for major big brands that I suspect would land me more clients but I can't even mention the relationship. I signed the NDA, so it wasn't a surprise, but it is frustrating that the power imbalance allows that.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  HN skews toward believing that if you can be sued, you will be. It's the infinite monkeys theory applied to contract law.
  - hn_acker 3y ago
    > HN skews toward believing that if you can be sued, you will be. Maybe it's more like, it doesn't matter how correct you are unless you can afford a good lawyer. The infinite monkey theorem is not applicable. Lawyers who make the bulk of their money from being on the suing side (or not necessarily suing, just being hired to be able to sue) rather than the defending side are not monkeys randomly pressing keys on their keyboards. Then again, not everyone's threat model for "getting sued" is the same.

jameslars 3y ago

A similar realization had a major impact on how Blizzard approached end-game raiding in WoW. In the first 2 expansions, only the most dedicated players were seeing the final boss and culmination of the storylines. It took 40 players working together to get there, and those 40 players had to execute complex fights in order to reach the end. Though a very rewarding experience for those who could do it, Blizzard did the math and realized they were excluding the VAST majority of their playerbase from the coolest content. They were spending tons of money creating this content and no one was experiencing it! In the 3rd expansion and ever since then, end game content has been tuned to be a lot more forgiving and to require less people. There are still complex and rewarding fights, but ramping up the difficulty is "opt-in" generally speaking. This is likely one of the reasons the game remained so successful for so long. Prior to this mentality shift, it was very common for end game MMO content to only be seen by a small minority of the players.

kridsdale3 3y ago
A similar thing happened with Star Wars Galaxies. Part of the original pitch was that like <1% of players would have access to the Force. Only from there with super hard training could they be Jedi. This matches the lore of the universe, Jedi (especially in the OT era) are the most rare creatures. This was accurate, and would make seeing a Jedi in the game world the coolest thing imaginable, but it was a disaster for the finances of running the game. Obviously, EVERYONE wants to be a Jedi. So they re-tooled it so that anyone could. Eventually the whole game was replaced with another MMO that was set in the ancient ages when they were common.

SpaceL10n 3y ago

There are no examples of video game artwork in this article, sadly. I'm sure it's a good read, but I clicked it just for the art. found https://www.creativeuncut.com/ https://www.creativeuncut.com/ instead

corethree 3y ago

1 year ago this article would have been much more relevant. With the advent of image generation via AI, artwork is becoming more commoditized and this is becoming less relevant. It's sad to see this happen in a year but this is literally the first thing I thought about when I read the headline.

kossTKR 3y ago

A tangent but reminds me of the fact that even though we have millions of photographers with amazing cameras, most news and culture sites display images in low quality. So most great photos will also never been seen. I remember Boston Globe from years ago with great photo content that really captured the vibe of so many places and people in the news. These days news means boring propaganda PR pictures or tiny images with artifacts, very weird. It's like we're not as close to the actual world as we were 10+ years ago. Probably also about licensing, but it's stupid because most photos won't end up as "pressphoto of the year" or whatever they are saving their HQ versions for.

Lord-Jobo 3y ago
This bothers me a lot. It reminds me of old movies and tv shows using garbage low quality props that eventually look like monopoly money instead of dollars at current resolutions, because the quality of broadcast and even projection at the time of filming was so low nobody would be able to tell. future proof your work for gods sake

madrox 3y ago

This article feels like the art equivalent of engineers saying the code they write in their jobs will never be open sourced. I mean, yeah, that's somewhat unfortunate, but not all businesses can survive operating that way, and you kind of know what you signed up for when you went in. It seems like the artists interviewed in this article know that, but would like to see some reasonable limits placed on it, like a statute of limitations. I can relate. Once, say, 10 years have passed, the only people who care about that code I wrote for a job 10 years ago would probably be me, and I'd like to be able to do with it what I want.

johnea 3y ago

> "...worlds we inhabit and the characters we fall in love with." To paraphrase Lenny Bruce: What do you mean "we" kimosabe...

Atrine 3y ago

> While some of the commercial reasons for keeping game art under wraps make sense, many artists working in the video game industry say they're subject to a power imbalance, even in full-time studio positions, that sees the bulk of their work locked away in vaults, where not only can fans never see them but where artists can't share them either, not even in professional settings like job applications or portfolios. This is actually a pretty big problem. My cofounder and I run a small video game studio and we worked with our lawyers to figure out how to protect artists as well as the company in a way that seemed fair. What we came up with was a general blanket rule that if an artist's work gets used in any public way (promo materials, game launch) then they can use that work immediately for their public portfolios. In the situation where it's not released we have end dates in the contracts for when they can use their work in their portfolios.

rickdeckard 3y ago
> If an artist's work gets used in any public way (promo materials, game launch) then they can use that work immediately for their public portfolios Do you see this case being prohibited as the norm for other studios? (the cited section only talks about art "locked away in vaults") > In the situation where it's not released we have end dates in the contracts for when they can use their work in their portfolios. That's actually quite charitable, but IMO understandable how difficult this is for larger companies. After all your company paid for that product of work, which also reveals parts of your creative process. Imagine Ford paying someone to make five car-designs, ending up using one of them and ultimately losing full control over the remaining four...
- Atrine 3y ago
  > Imagine Ford paying someone to make five car-designs, ending up using one of them and ultimately losing full control over the remaining four... Yeah this isn't a valid comparison in the slightest. Artists using work for their public portfolio doesn't mean that they can use the work for other employers or in other contexts. Not sure how you made such large leap here.
- Tanoc 3y ago

matheusmoreira 3y ago

"Their" work? It's not theirs at all since they sold the copyright for the paycheck. Isn't intellectual property wonderful?

chupapimunyenyo 3y ago

[flagged]

3seashells 3y ago

Question: if the employer doesn't pay, aka violates the contract, does the IP for the art return to the artist?