Many understand that disruption can mean ‘crummy products for non-consumers’. But let us reverse that. It means the ‘core’ market would mean ‘so awesome products for so awesome consumers’. An industry ripe for disruption is not just bloated in costs and overshooting the customer, it is obsessed with prestige.
I believe one of the biggest changes in the game industry today from twenty years ago is the thirst for prestige. Today, there are many game designers who grew up playing games. Twenty years ago, they likely thought, “I want to be a game developer! Then I unleash my genius upon the world!” Way back then, the typical game company was stuck in someone’s garage. Concerned parents thought their kids should get ‘real jobs’ and lose this ‘gaming nonsense’. There was absolutely no prestige to game developers decades ago. You can tell an old school developer from a modern one because the old school developer is thankful that he can devote his life to this (instead of getting a ‘real job’) whereas the modern developer appears obsessed with having his game make a ‘social statement’, to progress ‘art’, or the ‘change the face of gaming’.
When a disruptor appears on the stage, the incumbent looks at the consumers the disruptor is serving and says, “Ewwww. Who wants those customers? Yuck.” One Sony official showed a similar distaste of Wii going after senior citizens. It is Human Nature to enjoy prestige. Everyone wants others to think they are a ‘success’. Incumbents will laugh at the disruptor, even if the disruptor has become a raving success, because they enjoy the prestige of the current core market. What holds more prestige? Making a game for the ‘hardcore’ or making a game that includes senior citizens? It is the ‘hardcore’ game that will yeild the more prestige. Wii Sports might have been the most influential game since Super Mario Brothers, but there is little prestige for such a game among the core.
Prestige follows business success, not the other way around. The first time I heard of Miyamoto was on a page in Nintendo Power. The page states he was becoming ‘famous’ in Japan but that followed the success of ‘Donkey Kong’, ‘Super Mario Brothers’, ‘Zelda’, and the Famicom in general. He certainly wasn’t famous before. The same goes for gentlemen such as Sid Meir, Richard Garriot, and Warren Spector. Only when their games kept selling and selling, only then did ‘prestige’ come to them. But they were so content with their business success that such prestige seemed a little silly.
I think a good lesson for a young developer today, or anyone in any endeavor, is to shun the ‘prestige’. All your attention and focus should go to the experience, to the game. There is this belief (probably from some marketing department) that constant interviews, constantly putting your face in front of a camera, and making ‘commentaries’ is necessary to properly ‘hype the game up’. What is hype but expectation? And when expectations are high, decent games can fall hard. I’ve seen hype destroy more games in a backlash than have built them up. But the major risk is that the developer begins to believe his own hype. When people are trying to interview you and you see your name and picture in headlines, you begin to be impressed with yourself. “Gosh, I am important.” And one’s attitude changes. As the attitude changes, so does the product. Instead of the developer being customer orientated, he or she becomes product orientated. What does this mean? For an example, the PS3 was product orientated while the Wii was customer orientated.
There are three example developers that would be good to illustrate this thirst for prestige. The first is Oliver Lejade of Mekensleep that made ‘Soul Bubbles’. The second is Luc Bernard of ‘Eternity’s Child’. The third is Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights that made ‘Too Human’.
Let us start with Oliver Lejade. Here, he says:
“My previous company was a VC funded business, and when the VCs tried to wrestle control of the company, I basically fought back, and wrestled money out of them. So that was where I found the money to fund Mekensleep, and do the game we wanted to make.”
Most developers don’t get to do the games they ‘want’ to make. It is very rare that a new company is able to do it.
And the reason we introduced that is, we found that casual gamers sometimes were completely stumped, and did not know what to do, and that’s where we had a fall-off point, a drop-out.
To help them overcome that, we put in those little stone tips. The thing is, it’s an act of the player — you don’t have to click on them. So if you find it easy, or if you think you can find it out by yourself, you can just go at the problem and actually just try to solve the problem by yourself.
Nobody forces you to hit the monolith to ask for the tip, and a bunch of reviewers have complained about those tips — but then, it’s their choice as a player to hit the tip, and nobody was putting a gun to their head for them to do it, so…
Can you see the problem here? Usually when games are fun and compelling, players will persevere regardless of being stumped. The only time people completely drop a game when stumped is when the game wasn’t really compelling in the first place. For example, take the original Legend of Zelda which features tons of areas where one will be ‘stumped’. Not only could young kids go through it, so did many adults.
When a player is stumped but perseveres, it means the game is a compelling experience. He wants more of the experience because he knows what he has played so far has been good.
When a player is stumped and turns off the game, it means the game is not a compelling experience. He is still playing the game waiting for it to ‘get good’ but this stumped part is too much for him to tolerate. So he just shuts it off to find a game that IS a compelling experience.
This behavior works with books, movies, and television. The ‘stumped’ part is really being bored.
Actual recognition from the state, that gaming is a valid cultural form, and that in turn has helped in financing games, which has helped us have more freedom.
That’s the first part of the equation, that makes it better than it’s ever been; and the other part is, I think, that it’s going to get even better, because online distribution, I think is going to tilt things into the direction of small creative teams more than it’s been before.
When I see those two bolded letters appear, red flags go up. (An article will appear why red flags go up over those words.) These two paragraphs are extremely important. The developer was not building the game to make money, or, rather, to make customers. He views himself as an ‘artist’. By ‘artist’, I don’t mean ‘artist’ as in a graphic artist or painter, but as some magical creative force that must unleash itself upon the world. Only in the last few decades has ‘artist’ meant this. (But that is subject to the upcoming article on the subject).
Why do people invest in you? They expect more money back then they put in. And this is why sales are important. Sales not only show who is making money, it shows how much the product is pleasing people. Yet, in those paragraphs, you don’t hear the developer talk about pleasing people. You hear him talk about ‘creativity’ and gaming as ‘cultural art form’ which means hogwash to the customer. Customer just wants fun compelling experience. Here, we can see the developer focused on the product but not on the customer.
The reason why I rail against tutorials or these ‘hints’ is that it isn’t customer orientated. Customer orientated games tend to break themselves, force the developer to do more work, redo entire parts of the game, just so the customer does not have any frustration. But a product orientated game would, IF the customer had difficulty, to throw in ‘additions’ such as tutorials and hint boxes. These are band-aids on a broken game.
How do you think the market is now for DS titles?
OL: I think it’s being killed by lack of originality. Most publishers are pushing crappy clones, quickly made for little money, and that’s having a detrimental effect on the public, because the public doesn’t know what to choose, doesn’t find any good titles, so it tends to go to established, known titles and games — Nintendo games, basically. The problem is, that’s not just the publisher’s fault. I think distribution is largely responsible for that, because they have, basically, selection companies to decide which game they’re going to put in front of their–
You’re talking about retailers?
OL: Yeah. Large retailers, mostly. They have selection companies that decide what they’re buying, and how many quantities they’re taking from the publishers, and how they’re exposing it on the racks. So the problem is, these committees, they have the publishers come in and present their games, and there are lots of publishers coming in, who have a lot of games to present, and when the publisher comes in and says — basically a publisher has about five minutes per game, to explain what the game is about.
So when you’re selling a license? It’s easy. You say, “Oh, well, we’re making this game that’s Spider-Man 3, it’s going to be blah-blah-blah,” they know what Spider-Man is, they know they’re going to be signing X quantity of it, mechanically. So that’s fine.
You’re saying, “Oh, this is a game about little girls, pink ponies, and you know that little girls are going to buy this,” it’s X number of units are going to go, it’s an easy sell. But when you come in with an original game, that they don’t have any clear reference to the gameplay of something that has been done recently, that has no license, then it’s a very hard sell. And if you have only five minutes? I can’t explain Soul Bubbles in five minutes. It’s not doable — and I made the game.
A good sign of when a developer is ‘product orientated’ is when they attack the customers. Who defines quality? It is not the developer. It is not the publisher. It is not the game reviewer. It is the customer who defines the value. Many Nintendo developers think the cell shaded way of Wind Waker is superior to a more realistic view. Sales to Wind Waker in the West said “No.” So Nintendo relented because as a customer orientated company, they know customers define value.
The last sentence there of being unable to explain Soul Bubbles in five minutes, which really is to give a sales pitch of the game, is illustrative that the purpose of the company was prestige as an ‘artist’. For we all know that ‘business matters’ are too low for our magnificent ‘artists’ to worry about. Some journalists have expressed this developer group was ‘snobby’ in how they treated the press. They believed they were magical ‘artists’ and were like soaring angels above the ‘rabble’ of journalists, retailers, sales pitches, and so on.
Since their game didn’t succeed on the DS, then it must mean the customers are stupid and nothing but garbage sells on the DS. It can’t be that Soul Bubbles is a game people don’t want to buy. Notice the contempt for what customers value?
Let us move on to Luc Bernard. This developer is extremely young. In fact, he is probably too young. Anyway, this is what he has to say:
I thought the videogame industry was different, but no it’s actually harder and worse than any other one, I still wonder why people hate Dennis Dylack for no reason and Uwe Boll, I don’t think if people realize the psychological things it can do to people. People love to hate for no reason, and well I’ve got enough problems in my personal life to do another game after Eternity’s Child.
Bernard is wrong about the hate. Gamers don’t hate him, they simply are not pleased with the product. Even Miyamoto has made games that didn’t please people. It happens. It also is likely to happen to a person’s first video game especially when someone is very young. The same can be said of any entertainment medium. Take writers. Their first novel is absolutely dreadful. It gets rejected and the writer is crushed. He or she takes it personally. Whereas, once they get better, the book eventually sells to a publisher. Established writers openly praise the fact that their first novels do not get published. They prefer to burn them instead so no one can see how horrible a writer they used to be. The same applies with artists, with musicians, everyone. Gamers might have hated the game, but no one hates Luc Bernard from a personal standpoint. From everyone I have seen, they all want Bernard to continue trying. Why? They see he has talent as a graphical artist. You are only a failure when you quit.
In many of the early images of ‘Eternity’s Child’, we saw strange pictures talking about Holocaust facts among other things. It appears that Bernard was focused on his game to have a ‘social message’ or something else rather than pleasing the consumer. Why have a ‘social message’ in the game? Prestige. Don’t you know, ‘great artists’ make social messages. And what other path to prestige is there? This thirst for prestige was making a game for the wrong reasons.
And last is Denis Dyack. Where does one begin with this character?
In the book industry, there are ‘tons’ of writers out there who all believe they are ‘great artists’ because they have a book published… even though they still can’t quit their day job. (This is why writers like Stephen King among others say true writing talent is being able to make money with writing and pay your light bill). I have encountered numerous first novel writers who follow this bizarre formula:
-First, the writer finds a mythology that hasn’t been mentioned much with his or her genre of fiction. Say African Mythology.
-The novel itself will be mediocre. However, it is infused with this ‘African Mythology’.
-The writer runs around saying how brilliant the work is because it has ‘African Mythology’.
-Book is not well recieved.
-Writer blames the readers. Calls them ‘stupid’ and that ‘they didn’t get it’.
This writer is almost always a shortish fattish balding male with a goatee. When I saw a picture of Dyack and him going on and on about Norse mythology, I said to myself, “How did he wander into this industry? He is supposed to be the typical failing writer!”
There is something I call the “Richard II” Disease. In Shakespeare’s play “Richard II”, King Richard II loves poetry and can’t stop quoting it and giving every speaking encounter an occassion to sprinkle airy charms. Richard might love poetry but poetry overpowers him. Instead of him understanding it or controlling it, he submits himself to it. This makes him into a ‘weak king’, and he is overthrown. (This is also the way of things with men being so enchanted [overpowered] with a woman that the woman percieves the man to really be weak.)
A person with a ‘Richard II’ disease is someone who is overwhelmed with the poetry and cannot control its power. In the examples with the first time writers, they found their new mythology so exciting and fun to ‘immerse’ themselves in, they forgot they were writing a book for readers. What is fun for the writer does not always translate to being fun to the reader. So while they were ‘in awe’ of their mythology, the reader sees a pitiful book. Hence, accusations flare that the reader is ‘stupid’ and ‘doesn’t get it’. The writer thought his work was fun and cool because he FELT it was fun and cool himself. One’s own feelings don’t always translate to the reader’s feelings.
Super Mario Brothers is really about ‘Alice in Wonderland’. But Miyamoto was not overwhelmed by ‘Alice’. Most people have no clue the huge influence that ‘Alice in Wonderland’ had on Super Mario Brothers for they see the end product itself, the game. Final Fantasy has many intertwined mythologies in them. But the designers were not overwhelmed by the mythology itself. God of War has mythology in it, but Jaffe wasn’t overwhelmed by the mythology. Many would say that Jaffe ‘broke’ the mythology. In a similar way, Super Mario Brothers is a shattered Alice in Wonderland. But does that matter? These are games. They are software that is to be boxed up and put on a store shelf.
But Dyack does not see his game as being a product boxed up and put on a store shelf. While he mentions many various books, economists, and philosophers, it appears he is overwhelmed by them. So much so that they have interfered with the game itself.
How does a designer like Dyack, or a new writer, make this mistake? The hard, tough lesson for the new writer is that he or she begins the novel thinking that it is the greatest thing ever written. It will make them famous, it will be cited everywhere, people will recognize them when they go to the bathroom, that sort of thing. Part of the reason new writers think this way is because they have invested so much time and emotion into their book. It is their baby. Of COURSE it is wonderful! Someone criticing their book is like someone criticizing their baby. They become product orientated. They might say, “But look at the new features this book has! It is writing in a way that has never been done before!” But the experienced writer is more customer orientated. They don’t see the end result being the book or the feelings they have to the book. They know it depends on the customers, that they define the quality of the book.
The problem is not that these developers are talentless. They do have talent. Nintendo would not have worked with Silicon Knights if they thought they didn’t have some sort of promise. Miyamoto would not have gone to the Too Human booth at E3 to check out the game if he felt it had no promise. The game community would not have noticed ‘Eternity Child’ if Bernard was not good at making interesting illustrations. And ‘Soul Bubbles’ would not have been noticed by the hardcore unless there was a solid game inside.
The problem with these developers is that they did not appear interested in making customers and, hence, make money with their games. They appeared more interested in ‘prestige’, to be known as ‘artists’, as expanding gaming ‘culture’, or whatever else. When someone is interested in becoming famous, or making ‘revolutionary art’ that will create fame, they become ‘product orientated’. They focus entirely on making the ‘best’ product possible. They focus on the quality of the product.
“But Malstrom, what is wrong with that?”
The problem is that THE DEVELOPER DOES NOT DEFINE THE QUALITY OF THE GAME. Customers define the quality. When the game fails, the developer asks customers to look at the game through HIS eyes. Can’t you see the problem here? What the developer should have done was look at the game through the customer’s eyes.
“But they did this, Malstrom! They added hint boxes, they did other things too like tutorials, and…”
No! I think they might have looked through the customers’ eyes and realized they would have to totally redo parts of their game. Since they have already made their original vision, they fall in love with what their hands and minds created, it is their baby, and the baby is already beautiful. Pleasing the customer means more work to the developer. Customers don’t want ‘culture’ and ‘great art’. They want a fun game. By fun, I mean fun ALL THE WAY. When there is a part of the game that isn’t fun, from a tutorial to a segment of the game that gets boring, it isn’t fun because the developer didn’t do his/her job there.
Bad games don’t appear solely because of lack of time or talent. Often, bad games appear because the developer was more interested in having the fun instead of the player. Making the game fun for the player instead of the developer means the developer doing things he or she would rather not want to do! The three developers mentioned above appear more interested in them having fun instead of the gamer. They mistook the notion that if THEY were having fun, then so would the gamer. It doesn’t work like that.
The game industry attracts MANY young men and all believe they are the next great game designer. (“I am so creative!!! I have SO MANY IDEAS!!!” Bah.) I think the above developers should be a sign to the up and coming ones that your job is not to create games. Your job is to please customers. Don’t be product orientated. Be customer orientated. Don’t be afraid to destroy your game, or parts of it, if customers won’t like it. With how many games are bloated these days, don’t be afraid to prune off the poor parts. “But we are pruning, Mr. Malstrom! We ARE thinking about the customers.”
You will know when you are customer orientated when you are gutting parts of the game you think and believe are ‘good’ because customers get bored or get stumped by such content. What customers find good and bad will always surprise the creator. Always.
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