Koki on 25/5/2011 at 05:40

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Sorry, this discussion is so fucktarded I don't want to have anything to do with it.

Yakoob on 25/5/2011 at 11:50

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Now on a semi-evil and anti-liberal tangent, the whole "opening doors for casual game development" has also had some, in my opinion, negative effects. While it's great that we have easy tools that allow anyone to unleash their creativity, the fact of the matter is, 99% of people don't have "creativity."

Enter the world of a thousands of copypasted generic Flash games and "artsy" indie platformers. I am not saying there aren't good flash games or indie platformers, but let's be honest, those can be usually counted on the fingers of a single hand. But of course, more choices, despite how generic or boring they may be, isn't all that bad. What is bad, though, is that if you make something genuinely unique and original, it is now much harder to get noticed in the endless see of lookalikes. Worse yet, any inventive game mechanic will be cloned to death within a week (remember when the first flash physics puzzle games came out and now they are like 90% of all flash games?) making it even harder to break through or be appreciated for your innovation.

In the olden days, and I don't mean the DOS days, I mean like 5-10 years ago, with worse tools and worse distribution channels, those factors effectively acted as a bit of a "filter," cutting out those who don't have the needed skills or motivation and merely use quick "game-maker" to capitalize on ripping off other people's ideas. And if you actually managed to get an indie project done, you were quickly picked up and noticed over the net as "check out what these guys made!"

In a sense, making a game was about making the game; if you had a solid idea and a true passion, getting the project done was enough to get noticed. Today, however, that is only half of the job; you now need to also worry about how to "market" it and come on top of thousands of competitors. Just have a deep browse through the Steam indie catalog (or even IPhone/Droid store) to see just how many quality-looking stuff there is you haven't even heard of.

So yea, just trying to point out the double-edged sword of the "ease" of content creation.

demagogue on 25/5/2011 at 18:42

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It's harder to find the jewels in all the rough, the signal-to-noise ratio gets lowered. But the flip side of your point (if you take that track at all) is that 90% of the gamers can't tell the difference between innovation and crap either. They're the ones getting lost in all the rough, but it's not that big of an issue; they deserve what they get and are happy with it, more power to them.

The 10% of gamers that do discriminate, they know how to go out and find the quality stuff out there. (The numbers or elitism part of that point don't even matter; the point is, when people know what they want, they know how to go out and find it.) So the creative devs and creative gamers find each other. I'm happier with this overall situation than most of the alternatives.

lost_soul on 26/5/2011 at 15:56

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It still makes me laugh that Nintendo basically handed the market to Sony back in 1996 when they chose to use carts instead of optical disks. It drove a lot of developers away and the sound in N64 games suffered due to the lack of space on the carts. Nice going, guys.

EvaUnit02 on 26/5/2011 at 18:55

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@Lost_soul
The past is irrelevant now. Wii is the most successful home console of the current generation. Sales have dwarfed both Xbox 360 and PS3.

It will be interesting to see if whether or not "Project Cafe" (the Wii successor) will recapture that success.