The focus on a ship of Theseus revolving door type situation that is large AAA teams and studios always fail.
We need to think of videogames and their biggest influencers like directors, the Kojimas, and Miyazakis. Names you can follow and know will lead a project to success.
Pic related, Oct 2008, and none of these are better off than they were then.
Ubisoft
Capcom
Electronic arts
Ohnononononono
To be fair, not trusting Double Fine was the right choice, considering stuff like DF9.
That’s a good point. Hard to do in practice when they’re always answering to executives and there’s hundreds working on it. If the Expedition 33 studio makes another game, I’m looking for the the key figures like composer, writer, director, artist, etc. If they aren’t there, then I don’t care about it.
Most trusted 3rd party
ubisoft
capcom
ELECTRONIC ARTS
Square enix
most trusted developers
Nintendo
Bioware
Bungie
rockstar north
blizzard
lmao what year was this?
fuck I'm retarded and skipped over the last line on the OP
lol. The japs are infamous for slapping a famous name as director and then them not actually doing anything because they are only marketing. Don't follow shit. Just watch a youtube video of the gameplay after it releases and see if it looks good then and there.
Cult of personality shit leads to people fellating John Carmack, who released 2 good games 30 years ago and the Infune nonsense. Teams make games.
but I do
While there are always fraud hacks like Peter Molyneux, there's a bunch of worshipped names in the industry that the tech just passed by like Carmack.
Videogames are just now hitting a window where it's plateauing, and more than ever it needs visionary direction guys leading the charge to keep it new and refreshing, but it seems like there's just less of these names and they aren't given the same reigns they were to express themselves.
Miyazaki is lucky enough to have pioneering the leading evolution of the action genre and so his impact is very hands on, and Kojima is very inspired.
No, we need to stop worshipping names and start worshipping time periods. There is no creative unit, whether it's an individual or a group, which can maintain a high level of quality and relevance for longer than a few years. A team gets about two games, tops, before it's transformed into something completely different.
Individuals don't make good games. They make good teams. If Kojima goes and starts a new studio, you can trust that he'll put together a high quality team. That team will go on to make a good game. But of Kojima stagnates and stays with the same team for 10 years, or if there's a sign that Kojima may not have put together a good team this time (tencent money or something idk), then you have to immediately "drop it like it's hot".
Teams include funding sources, by the way. A team of the exact same people but with a different level, cadence or source of funding (less money, money less often, or idk tencent money) will be beholden to different financial constraints and expectations and will produce a different product.
What's the difference between Hollywood and the games industry? You can have a director in Hollywood put out ludo kinoema decade after decade, and they'll know the right actors, crew, stage etc.
Is it just entirely how the contract and laws work? Or more moving parts behind the scene because there's more money from more sources, and less trust?
YAAAAAS trust us Anon we make good gamez
Todd please
We
Not two sentences in and you already fucked up
Agreed.
Too bad most of the people here are cheap asses who can't even be fucked to crowdsource good QC.
Games cost way more to make, have way more employees, and game development itself is ridiculously complicated. To film, fundamentally you just point a camera at some actors. To make a game you have fine-tune everything from the walk speed to the force of gravity to the hitstop on an attack.
Hollywood's also way fucking older than video games. I'm sure the funding's also different, like you said. Movies cost way less.
I think most people (by that I mean everyone, including normies) will realize this when Miyamoto himself dies.
Holy shit, how far have we fallen?
What pack of retards did took this poll? What the fuck are those results with Ubishart at the top?
That was a 2008 poll. Ubisoft didn't heel turn yet, at least in the public eye. They were still known for Rayman and publishing a lot of good games by other devs.
17 years and they're the 2nd or 3rd WORST major dev/publisher still clinging to life
though realistically that shift happened like 10 years ago
Basically everything not named Nintendo on that list is either gone under or sullied their reputation that it's synonymous with the worst of the worst in gaming.
Nintendo too is a lot more corporate.
EA
before spore....
worshipping time periods
I'm afraid I don't understand, can you elaborate?
You don't look at individuals or studios.
You look at each individual member of a team (core members for bigger projects) and their career, who works with who and how well they engage with each other over the decades.
I lack the will or numbers autism but what you would want is.
Stage 1: Create a program that shows a dev's track record summarized as a score with more weight given to his more recent titles based upon the reception of every project he has been on.
Stage 2: Allow a full team to be imputed and have the aggregate score of the team be posted.
Stage 3: Separate out each project into various roles and average people for their actions in each role separately alongside a generalized score and have a separate mode of analysis for general and specific to the role I.E a team score on average and a team score with each person in a specific role.
Stage 4: Add more weight depending on how certain team members have worked together in the past.
Stage 5: Have each role weight differently in the generalized score and on the projects they work on, I.E being a Level designer will weight less for the overall aggregate than being a Game Director.
Again its a lot of work, and while not prefect if such a system was made it could better let people manage their expectations for a project.
And also strike fear into the hears to devs with a poor track record.
Bioware
lol
NTA but a team of 20 guys in their 20s with all the ambition and excess working on a shoestring budget and raw passion with little oversight, make a different game than a bunch of guys in their 40s managing a team of 5000 for billions of dollars with cooperate breathing down their neck.
For example the Golden Age ID team existed in a very specific period of time where a bunch of guys of varying ideals and personalities were able to gel and make good stuff.
However that period of time only lasted so long with Romero getting booted being the big indicator of a change within company policy and staff.
Id is not good, varying eras of Id where certain people at certain stages of their life worked there and there were certain expectations and limits to be navigated, were good.
indie and AA studios are the future and the equivalent of what game studios used to look like in the golden age of vidya in the 90's.
AAA video games are inherently bloated and can not be sustained on honest monetization and release practices. They need to make their games exploit the gamer to make up for the amount of people they paid to make the video game.
Don't buy AAA trash. Stick to Indie and AA
EA Sports BIG
Also
Stage 6: Keep adding increasingly nuanced parameters as optional additions to the weighing like how a person work on a game with X budget compared to Y budget, and X amount of devtime compared to Y amount of devtime.
Really break down each aspect of the dev experience till as many aspects of a person creative output can be measured based upon whatever data is fed into the system. For the sake of a strong buyer awareness going into a game.
did you guys know you can play the video games you want to play and not play the video games you don't want to play it's this kinda cool trick i figured out the other day
first step : give the word "developper" it's original meaning and only use it for the programming team. everytime you see a "dev" on social media it's a forum janny or a freelance artist.
The truth is outside of 5-10 mega-games at a time, the industry as a whole caps at 7th gen levels of resources in a healthy games market.
It's not like following individuals works either, time makes fools of us all. How many games out there have made by creator of thing or with writer of thing that turn out to be shit anyway because they're just past their prime.
you look like this
and sound like this
vocaroo.com
Not even focusing on individual creators works though. Very often when a game is marketed as 'made by the creators of [good game]', the game still sucks.
Fucking lol anon, I appreciated that response to my autism
High effort shitpost. Unless this is AI slop. Hard to tell.
Maybe it's a lack of anyone actually giving a shit now. There's too much content, nobody actually cares about the people behind the games, they just want a fish to fry and a studio of nameless employees does the trick, you don't have to know who did what to know they fucked up.
I was thinking back to movies, television and the stark difference is that the industry then loved to award praise to workers in some regard. Creation of award shows, that individually credited people who worked on sound, costume design, sets, etc. because putting those people in front of the camera with a bit of Hollywood magic and it was advertising. They all were local to the valley.
Now award shows are dying and nobody gives a shit about them either in Hollywood. So that couldn't work to distinguish the different skilled departments.
Also another thing I suppose is that casting an actor is casting an actor, in videogames they're stylized and the art/design department gets a bit too much of a say in resigning their bone structure even when mo capped
Culture around 2015 or so became atomized and so shit like award shows that make individuals household names before stopped mattering.
That does not excuse the lack of interest from the public, it only incentivizes worse outcomes.
Also take not of how steam chart threads have than off, its because solid numbers in a industry where things as basic as proper sales numbers are hidden is appreciated even now. So the creation of a database that leas people temper their expectations before a product comes out by uploading a games list of known staff would help a lot. The majority wouldn't care about the nitty gritty only the big averaged out score which lets them temper their expectations.
thinking the 'pr guy' actually makes the game
ask todd howard to make a video game from scratch, he literally couldn't. he could give input, sure, but not actually program and design even a basic videogame.
ask any designer or programmer to make a videogame. all of them could do it, quite easily. just shows where the bulk of the actual work is done
John Romero
Cliffy B
Peter Molyneux
I agree with the sentiment that it's too narrow to look at individuals and the team composition is important. OP brings up Miyazaki as an individual but he's been working with the same teams for all his successes.
Still, you don't need a whole damn scoring system. Just look at those in key roles and if you've liked their other work then that should be enough to get a feel for what they'll make.
Whenever you see that as part of advertising the 'creators' they refer to are either the development company or a few people who weren't important, not the actual directors and designers. People falling for that kind of thing proves the OP right, if anything, there should be more focus on which individuals are making good games.
I was thinking back to movies, television and the stark difference is that the industry then loved to award praise to workers in some regard. Creation of award shows, that individually credited people who worked on sound, costume design, sets, etc. because putting those people in front of the camera with a bit of Hollywood magic and it was advertising. They all were local to the valley.
It's pretty embarrassing that The Game Awards focuses more on trailers and products than the awards and people who win them. Some awards they don't even let the winners speak more than a few sentences. A lot of awards don't have anything to do with the various departments, as opposed to the Academy Awards. I guess that's the difference between an awards show being for those in the industry vs being for the consumers.
My issues is most people are to lazy for
Just look at those in key roles and if you've liked their other work then that should be enough to get a feel for what they'll make.
So one dedicated person putting in the data and getting a nice number they can post wherever, while reductive is immensely more helpful in making consumers even a tad more aware.
I think you'll get the same effect with only a few people doing the research and spreading the word on how good the dev team is. Reducing it all to a number doesn't work because there's too much individual taste. For example, I dislike Fromsoft games but I imagine your system would rate them highly.
Old good new bad. Always.
That's fair, but also the general public already likes Fromsoft games and that's who would benefit the most.
You already know you don't like their work and so would be able to make your purchases accordingly, I'm talking about joe Q Public here.
Also again this is all hypothetical, I'm not going to do this and I certainly don't expect anyone else to actually do so either.
We didnt know what we had yet
i mean both would help, and nobody catalogs what people actually do in the videogame industry in blogs etc either
we never know what exactly that nameless guy did unless they brag tweet about it
It's not possible to keep everything the same over time. Even if you give the exact same people the exact same conditions to make a game (the same office, the same amount of money, the same tools, etc.), it wouldn't be exactly the same. They will have changed. The market will have changed. The game they're making will be a different game, because you can't just make the same game twice.
Some guy's mom is going to have died and he'll be a bit depressed. Some guy's going to have had a kid and he'll be stressed and tired. Some guy's going to have thrown out his back or started balding or his favourite ice cream place will have closed. The same team five years later is not the same team. And in practice, they won't have exactly the same team, they won't have exactly the same office, they won't have exactly the same amount of money and the same amount of freedom.
Probably Good Games Inc. can make another good game four years later. They might even be able to make a pretty good game eight years later, if they can retain the same composers and writers and sound guys and no dumb intern threw any of the old files out. But ten years? Twelve? Nah. It's changed. People have moved on, and they aren't the same as they uses to be anyways. I think From's a great example because they DID manage to make more or less the same game over and over again for 13 years... although the most iconic ones were made in only a 5 year span, and it's pretty clear that Elden Ring is not remotely the same game as Demon's Souls.