7 ms·

I miss the old Sierra games. I'm glad we're starting to see a revival of adventuring gaming via Kickstarter and episodic channels, although I often feel like a

I miss the old Sierra games. I'm glad we're starting to see a revival of adventuring gaming via Kickstarter and episodic channels, although I often feel like a lot of the AAA games coming out these days lack a certain spark found in those old Sierra games. Maybe it's because I'm just older and more jaded now, but this quote spoke to me: ''' So I guess my thinking is that the big problems came when game developers lost control of their companies. The Broderbund guys were programmers and gamers and developers. Ken was. Quite a few of the other -- Activision was founded by a game player, and Accolade. A lot of other companies were founded by guys who knew games and as long as they were in charge, it seemed like things were better. But when gradually their companies hired professional management -- professional managers love spreadsheets and they loved evidence, because they didn't have gut feelings that said, "Yeah, that's a great idea! Yeah, that'll sell! People will love that! Look at that!" Instead, they would say, "Well, what are the numbers here? How do we compare this? What are your comparables?" ''' Compare to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9179624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9179624

ekianjo 12y ago
> So I guess my thinking is that the big problems came when game developers lost control of their companies Some willingly sold their companies to bigger ones (Garriott sold Origin to EA, and Origin's legacy was lost forever since). > But when gradually their companies hired professional management Yet professional is what's badly needed. Look at the Doublefine mess with Broken Age (massively over budget, massively late, massively under-delivering in every area).
- nazgulnarsil 12y ago
  it has good reviews and sales enough to fully support the release of act 2.. so ?
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    Protip: you're probably replying to a professional manager.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    Reminder: the initial budget secured was supposed to be for Act 1 & 2. Not just Act 1.
    - BSousa 12y ago
      I was one of the backers, and while I got out of at the loop, wasn't there also an issue with Doublefine doing a strategy game (spacebars 9 or something) probably using Broken Age money? (not to mention they sold it on early access on Steam and then decided to just stop developing it since it wasn't profitable for them)
      - makomk 12y ago
        The game you're thinking of was Spacebase DF-9, and I don't think they did use their own funds to develop it. The initial development was funded by investors; you can find press releases bragging about how they them back early using money from people buying the incomplete game on Steam Early Access. Subsequent development was I think intended to be funded entirely by Early Access sales. The reason Double Fine gave for abandoning it was that they weren't making enough money from selling the game to pay the development costs and they didn't want to sink any of their own money in. Basically, they shifted the risk of the game never being finished from themselves and their investors onto their customers, and their customers got shafted and ended up paying money for a game that was abandoned, unfinished, in a state that was apparently really unfun to play because there just wasn't much to do.
        lt 12y ago
        Well, technically they didn't abandon it, but rushed out a "completed" 1.0 a few weeks after some alpha or beta build. It's still being sold as a finished game, I believe. I haven't played the game, so I can't judge each side merits on the controversy, but it seems to me that a major issue were people expectations of Steam's Early Access model. You are buying an unfinished game, under development, to fund it. It's not a pre-order. It's not a model Double Fine created, they just experimented with it using DF-9. People seem to expect from this model frequent releases with shiny new content for an indefinite amount of time. The most popular early access games deliver on that, with a release date that never comes and frequent patches that don't necessarily have the goal to finish or polish the game for release but always adding new things. Failure and the game being cancelled should be an outcome expected from this model, as well as from the Kickstarter model. A game being released that don't meet your expectations is another, and it should be factored in your decision of buying a game that's under early development.
- andrewfong 12y ago
  That's sort of the point being made though. If you give more leeway to developers over professional management, there's a greater probability of projects going over-budget or falling behind schedule (Peter Molyneaux's games have been an example of this more than once), but there's also more opportunity for some absolutely crazy amazing stuff -- e.g. Grim Fandango would never have happened if someone had to justify it with a spreadsheet. I think the answer is that you really need both types to make things work -- an Al Lowe or Roberta Williams or Tim Schafer with a tremendous amount of creative leeway that also serves as the "client" and a project manager tasked with keeping everyone on track and negotiating with the client over what can reasonably be accomplished given current deadlines / budget. Also, for what it's worth, I absolutely love Broken Age. I mean, yes, it needs a Part 2, but it's very clear that a lot of love went into the design of that game. That's not so apparent in the latest Halo or Call of Duty.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    > there's also more opportunity for some absolutely crazy amazing stuff -- e.g. Grim Fandango would never have happened if someone had to justify it with a spreadsheet. I'm not saying you need only project managers to make stuff happen. I'm saying you need project managers as well as creators to make sure stuff gets delivered. We have seen how many kickstarters projects led by creators only have miserably failed or under-delivered.
    - skuhn 12y ago
      As a backer of many Kickstarter projects, I would much rather back a project led by a creative person than a business-oriented project manager (in other words, a producer). A lot of Kickstarter video game projects have failed to deliver on time, but they were also extremely aggressive in terms of time and money (even if they didn't say so). You cannot make a game today for $500,000 without cutting corners (such as salaries). Even the "massive" amount of money that Broken Age raised would only cover 30 people's salaries for a year. AAA games today have hundreds of people on the payroll, with development cycles of 3-5 years. I'm not mad that they were over-eager and more than a little naive. A lot of these projects were from people who hadn't made a game since 1998. Game designers like Tim Schafer (and Jane Jensen, Charles Cecil, Aaron Conners and Chris Jones, Al Lowe, Ron Gilbert, Lori and Corey Cole, Ragnar Tornquist and others) should be able to work on what they excel at: making (adventure) games. With some exceptions, they weren't able to do so for more than a decade. It would be nice if all of the games from these projects were released (and were good), but I don't feel any sense of outrage if it doesn't work out that way. Imagine if creating a painting cost $1 million, and Picasso had spent the last fifteen years of his life twiddling his thumbs instead of pursuing his art. Or better yet, look at Orson Welles's late career, where he could barely get anything produced. If only someone had just handed him a blank check, how many more Citizen Kanes could have been made (or Touches of Evil for that matter)? There's a lot of outrage when a publisher interferes with an anticipated game, by rushing it to market broken or changing the creative direction or outright canceling it. Kickstarter backers have shown themselves to not have a whole lot more patience, although at least they don't wield as much power. I presume that we've seen the end of adventure games on Kickstarter, given all the bad blood. That's too bad. Creative endeavors are notoriously difficult to budget and plan and bring in on a deadline, and even more so when it's on the cheap -- in short, shit happens.
- merijnv 12y ago
  Judging by your comments you weren't a backer, so here's an alternate point of view... > Yet professional is what's badly needed. Look at the Doublefine mess with Broken Age (massively over budget, massively late, massively under-delivering in every area). reply As one of the Broken Age backers, I think you're overly harsh on Double Fine. Personally, I feel I've gotten more than 10 times my money's worth despite Act 2 not being finished yet. You describe it as massively late, but is that fair? The original plan was "we'll make a flash adventure for 300k", but because of the large budget they changed that to "we'll make a cross-platform, voice acted, hand-drawn custom engine game with a longer schedule" and I'm okay with that. I got to see the entire design and development process behind the screen, which was super neat. I saw the hard discussion on decreasing scope vs delaying the game, the discussion whether to gut Act 2 or release the first part and use those funds to create an Act 2 worth of the original scope. I think the art, music and voice acting is gorgeous. The puzzles were a bit underwhelming, but everything I've heard is that the difficulty curve is better in Act 2. All in all, for the 15 (or was it 25?) dollar backing I feel the project was a great success, massively exceeding my expectations about what I'd get for the money.
  - egypturnash 12y ago
    Yeah, I backed it and I was pretty happy with what I got, too. There is a new Tim Schaefer adventure game in the world. In part because of the $15 I contributed.
  - bentcorner 12y ago
    I thought Broken Age was fantastic, although I missed the original announcement and picked it up normally through Steam. I think the puzzles are only underwhelming in retrospect. I would have like the game to be longer, but the visuals and audio were really top notch. I found the story to be really superb as well.
- egypturnash 12y ago
  There is a balance. I used to work in the animation industry. Mostly at John K's studio Spümcø. I had a ringside seat for the debacle that was "Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon". All of the things I'd heard about on the original production of Ren and Stimpy played out before my eyes. Basically I got to see what happens when the whole production is run by an obsessive perfectionist who has nobody who can say "no, we can't afford to do this". And if you look at a ton of the animation out there, you can see the other side of this: studios run by people who only see the bottom line, who focus group the life out of everything halfway interesting and only ever deliver generic content. But when you get enough people in management who actually care about making good work, something can start to happen. Fred Seibert, for instance - he ran the "What A Cartoon!" incubator series at Cartoon Network, "Oh yeah! Cartoons" at Nickelodeon, and now runs a Youtube channel called Frederator. Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, and Adventure Time all came out of these various incubators. He's built space after space to find talented young cartoonists and give them more enough rope to hang themselves. Or to make something amazing. You don't just need professional management. You need management who gives a fuck about making good stuff, and can negotiate with the obsessed lunatics who actually make the things when they start to get overambitious. You need management that is willing to make space to experiment and take risks with small projects. There seem to be pockets of this in video games right now. Sony's been funding a lot of little weird things; Microsoft's had its hands in a few too. But then there are also titans like EA who buy up quirky Popcaps and turn all their gorgeous, laid-back games into IAP orgies.

ekianjo 12y ago

> So I guess my thinking is that the big problems came when game developers lost control of their companies Some willingly sold their companies to bigger ones (Garriott sold Origin to EA, and Origin's legacy was lost forever since). > But when gradually their companies hired professional management Yet professional is what's badly needed. Look at the Doublefine mess with Broken Age (massively over budget, massively late, massively under-delivering in every area).

nazgulnarsil 12y ago
it has good reviews and sales enough to fully support the release of act 2.. so ?
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Protip: you're probably replying to a professional manager.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  Reminder: the initial budget secured was supposed to be for Act 1 & 2. Not just Act 1.
  - BSousa 12y ago
    I was one of the backers, and while I got out of at the loop, wasn't there also an issue with Doublefine doing a strategy game (spacebars 9 or something) probably using Broken Age money? (not to mention they sold it on early access on Steam and then decided to just stop developing it since it wasn't profitable for them)
    - makomk 12y ago
      The game you're thinking of was Spacebase DF-9, and I don't think they did use their own funds to develop it. The initial development was funded by investors; you can find press releases bragging about how they them back early using money from people buying the incomplete game on Steam Early Access. Subsequent development was I think intended to be funded entirely by Early Access sales. The reason Double Fine gave for abandoning it was that they weren't making enough money from selling the game to pay the development costs and they didn't want to sink any of their own money in. Basically, they shifted the risk of the game never being finished from themselves and their investors onto their customers, and their customers got shafted and ended up paying money for a game that was abandoned, unfinished, in a state that was apparently really unfun to play because there just wasn't much to do.
      - lt 12y ago
        Well, technically they didn't abandon it, but rushed out a "completed" 1.0 a few weeks after some alpha or beta build. It's still being sold as a finished game, I believe. I haven't played the game, so I can't judge each side merits on the controversy, but it seems to me that a major issue were people expectations of Steam's Early Access model. You are buying an unfinished game, under development, to fund it. It's not a pre-order. It's not a model Double Fine created, they just experimented with it using DF-9. People seem to expect from this model frequent releases with shiny new content for an indefinite amount of time. The most popular early access games deliver on that, with a release date that never comes and frequent patches that don't necessarily have the goal to finish or polish the game for release but always adding new things. Failure and the game being cancelled should be an outcome expected from this model, as well as from the Kickstarter model. A game being released that don't meet your expectations is another, and it should be factored in your decision of buying a game that's under early development.
andrewfong 12y ago
That's sort of the point being made though. If you give more leeway to developers over professional management, there's a greater probability of projects going over-budget or falling behind schedule (Peter Molyneaux's games have been an example of this more than once), but there's also more opportunity for some absolutely crazy amazing stuff -- e.g. Grim Fandango would never have happened if someone had to justify it with a spreadsheet. I think the answer is that you really need both types to make things work -- an Al Lowe or Roberta Williams or Tim Schafer with a tremendous amount of creative leeway that also serves as the "client" and a project manager tasked with keeping everyone on track and negotiating with the client over what can reasonably be accomplished given current deadlines / budget. Also, for what it's worth, I absolutely love Broken Age. I mean, yes, it needs a Part 2, but it's very clear that a lot of love went into the design of that game. That's not so apparent in the latest Halo or Call of Duty.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  > there's also more opportunity for some absolutely crazy amazing stuff -- e.g. Grim Fandango would never have happened if someone had to justify it with a spreadsheet. I'm not saying you need only project managers to make stuff happen. I'm saying you need project managers as well as creators to make sure stuff gets delivered. We have seen how many kickstarters projects led by creators only have miserably failed or under-delivered.
  - skuhn 12y ago
    As a backer of many Kickstarter projects, I would much rather back a project led by a creative person than a business-oriented project manager (in other words, a producer). A lot of Kickstarter video game projects have failed to deliver on time, but they were also extremely aggressive in terms of time and money (even if they didn't say so). You cannot make a game today for $500,000 without cutting corners (such as salaries). Even the "massive" amount of money that Broken Age raised would only cover 30 people's salaries for a year. AAA games today have hundreds of people on the payroll, with development cycles of 3-5 years. I'm not mad that they were over-eager and more than a little naive. A lot of these projects were from people who hadn't made a game since 1998. Game designers like Tim Schafer (and Jane Jensen, Charles Cecil, Aaron Conners and Chris Jones, Al Lowe, Ron Gilbert, Lori and Corey Cole, Ragnar Tornquist and others) should be able to work on what they excel at: making (adventure) games. With some exceptions, they weren't able to do so for more than a decade. It would be nice if all of the games from these projects were released (and were good), but I don't feel any sense of outrage if it doesn't work out that way. Imagine if creating a painting cost $1 million, and Picasso had spent the last fifteen years of his life twiddling his thumbs instead of pursuing his art. Or better yet, look at Orson Welles's late career, where he could barely get anything produced. If only someone had just handed him a blank check, how many more Citizen Kanes could have been made (or Touches of Evil for that matter)? There's a lot of outrage when a publisher interferes with an anticipated game, by rushing it to market broken or changing the creative direction or outright canceling it. Kickstarter backers have shown themselves to not have a whole lot more patience, although at least they don't wield as much power. I presume that we've seen the end of adventure games on Kickstarter, given all the bad blood. That's too bad. Creative endeavors are notoriously difficult to budget and plan and bring in on a deadline, and even more so when it's on the cheap -- in short, shit happens.
merijnv 12y ago
Judging by your comments you weren't a backer, so here's an alternate point of view... > Yet professional is what's badly needed. Look at the Doublefine mess with Broken Age (massively over budget, massively late, massively under-delivering in every area). reply As one of the Broken Age backers, I think you're overly harsh on Double Fine. Personally, I feel I've gotten more than 10 times my money's worth despite Act 2 not being finished yet. You describe it as massively late, but is that fair? The original plan was "we'll make a flash adventure for 300k", but because of the large budget they changed that to "we'll make a cross-platform, voice acted, hand-drawn custom engine game with a longer schedule" and I'm okay with that. I got to see the entire design and development process behind the screen, which was super neat. I saw the hard discussion on decreasing scope vs delaying the game, the discussion whether to gut Act 2 or release the first part and use those funds to create an Act 2 worth of the original scope. I think the art, music and voice acting is gorgeous. The puzzles were a bit underwhelming, but everything I've heard is that the difficulty curve is better in Act 2. All in all, for the 15 (or was it 25?) dollar backing I feel the project was a great success, massively exceeding my expectations about what I'd get for the money.
- egypturnash 12y ago
  Yeah, I backed it and I was pretty happy with what I got, too. There is a new Tim Schaefer adventure game in the world. In part because of the $15 I contributed.
- bentcorner 12y ago
  I thought Broken Age was fantastic, although I missed the original announcement and picked it up normally through Steam. I think the puzzles are only underwhelming in retrospect. I would have like the game to be longer, but the visuals and audio were really top notch. I found the story to be really superb as well.
egypturnash 12y ago
There is a balance. I used to work in the animation industry. Mostly at John K's studio Spümcø. I had a ringside seat for the debacle that was "Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon". All of the things I'd heard about on the original production of Ren and Stimpy played out before my eyes. Basically I got to see what happens when the whole production is run by an obsessive perfectionist who has nobody who can say "no, we can't afford to do this". And if you look at a ton of the animation out there, you can see the other side of this: studios run by people who only see the bottom line, who focus group the life out of everything halfway interesting and only ever deliver generic content. But when you get enough people in management who actually care about making good work, something can start to happen. Fred Seibert, for instance - he ran the "What A Cartoon!" incubator series at Cartoon Network, "Oh yeah! Cartoons" at Nickelodeon, and now runs a Youtube channel called Frederator. Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, and Adventure Time all came out of these various incubators. He's built space after space to find talented young cartoonists and give them more enough rope to hang themselves. Or to make something amazing. You don't just need professional management. You need management who gives a fuck about making good stuff, and can negotiate with the obsessed lunatics who actually make the things when they start to get overambitious. You need management that is willing to make space to experiment and take risks with small projects. There seem to be pockets of this in video games right now. Sony's been funding a lot of little weird things; Microsoft's had its hands in a few too. But then there are also titans like EA who buy up quirky Popcaps and turn all their gorgeous, laid-back games into IAP orgies.