Geez, it's been almost a decade since the last good space sim, Freelancer.
I wonder why no one has made a mainstream space sim game since (X3 is a notable exception, though the learning curve is quite steep). Between this and Star Citizen, there seems to be legions of space nerds like myself, ready to throw money at even the possibility of a good game.
Actually this is a common problem caused by the large publishers. They don't seem to do much market research other than every once in a while they throw a bunch of small budget stuff out there and whatever genre sells decently gets spammed to hell and back. The other genres are essentially ignored until the selling genre is played out. Then we get the small projects again to repeat the process.
It's an old argument: publishers say "we won't make that game because it won't sell" and the market says "we can't buy that game because you won't make it".
But it's understandable, most of these companies have to show quarterly profits so they are adverse to risk. Creating a game that will cost millions of dollars and years to make for a genre that has stagnated, for whatever reason, is a huge risk.
The small developers are the key to filling this niche. Things like the recent indie resurgence and Kickstarter have made this more evident. The problem is often the large publishers buy these small developers and then proceed to destroy what made them special.
A few space sims, so to speak since SPAZ and FTL aren't quite the same, are out now and there are a few with big names attached in development by independents. If these have decent returns, on small developer terms at least, then I expect the large publishers to follow along spamming the genre.
But only if they can figure out how to get them to be fun on consoles. Which is another side of the problem of stagnating genres but that's a different discussion.
> They don't seem to do much market research other than every once in a while they throw a bunch of small budget stuff out there and whatever genre sells decently gets spammed to hell and back.
Actually they do a massive amount of market research. It's not that they're ignorant of what the market wants, it's that the type of game you want is unprofitably niche.
By "unprofitable" I mean it's a matter of where to invest their money. It's not that niche titles would be unprofitable, it's that other options will always have a better risk-reward balance.
Right -- big publishers' size and distribution model requires them to focus on outsized wins. Their overhead is too high to take on the many smaller projects they would require to feed their cost structure. Smaller traditional publishers face similar problems, having to make few and careful bets and so often having to sell out to survive.
Valve provides an interesting contrast here: with Steam/GreenLight they run a scaleable distribution channel for large numbers of small indies, taking a percentage without making particular and huge bets. It's like an index fund vs. managed fund, where the latter does intense research into specific options. Often that research in anchored in comparative analysis where someone has proven a juicy market exists (ex: Guitar Hero having a million clones in its wake).
It's easier for publishers to produce multiple, smaller titles. Economies of scale apply to some extent. And they do! But mainly as part of a broad portfolio.
Valve are not typical developer/publishers. They are the gatekeeper, like Apple, Microsoft or Sony. Everything they do is to bring customers in to their walled garden. Their games have effectively infinite budget and can be seen as loss leaders.
Greenlight isn't amazingly helpful for small indies because it requires your game to hit a critical mass of popularity like kickstarter. Unlike kickstarter you need to have already developed the game and have it float about on greenlight for 6mnths+ before you see any return (after Valve's XX% cut of sales).
If they do massive amounts of market research then I would say the response to Kickstarter projects and the indie titles shows that they suck at it. It may be a niche game that I want to play but if there's enough buzz out there for a game in that genre then there's profit to be made if one can be bothered to make a game that meets what the market wants.
The rest of your statement seems to support what I was saying about their needs of showing quarterly profits which prevents risky projects.
There's nothing stopping them from going into niche markets if they wanted, just budget accordingly. There is money to be made in the long tail but the large publishers are just unable to see it that way. But the thing is, some of the "niche" markets are potentially huge but they'll never know because they'd rather push out the upteenth version of sports games and military shooters. A number of genres are stagnating right now not because no one wants to play them but because no one is making them.
No publisher is looking at Elite: Dangerous (or pretty much any other game kickstarter) and wishing that they'd have funded it first. Even Frontier couldn't justify funding it by normal means and they own the IP.
The game will probably cost at least $5M to make. The kickstarter just scraped $1.25M by calling on the core market. The game still needs to sell at least another 250k at full retail price to break even, and that's after many of the core audience have already bought it through kickstarter. Under perfect conditions, that level of sales on PC alone would already put in in risky territory.
As for indies, well yes, publishers already fund those as part of their portfolios. The ones that look like they're going to break even, at least.
I think I stated that the large publishers are not wishing to fund such titles and that I think they do so for the wrong reasons. It's just my opinion and I don't see how your statement is much different than what I've been saying.
The potential problems you describe sound like budget and project scale problems to me, not that the genre couldn't make money. If one wishes to spend 5 million plus on a game that only maybe 250k will actually pay for then you are destined for failure. I don't believe I stated otherwise.
If you have a large publisher funding your project, then you aren't an indie title. Plus I pointed out that they do these small projects from time to time to see if there's a chance a genre will be popular again for them to spam the crap out of. I didn't say that these projects were intended to make money.
> If one wishes to spend 5 million plus on a game that only maybe 250k will actually pay for then you are destined for failure.
Correct. But given that large, complex software projects take time and manpower to create, there is a subset of games and genres that simply cannot be developed and hope to break even.
It's not just the publishers 'at fault'. Developers don't want to downsize or go bankrupt, therefore they won't tend to develop games that won't let them pay wages in future.
There are alternative funding methods, but before kickstarter it was mostly arts grants and the like. Tale of Tales have developed several small art games on art grants, IIRC.
> If you have a large publisher funding your project, then you aren't an indie title.
No, not at all. ThatGameCompany are an indie company but Journey was bankrolled by Sony. Does that mean that it's not an indie title? Fez was created by Polytron, published by Trapdoor and distributed by Microsoft. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft at least partially funded the XBLA version of Minecraft. DoubleFine's Brutal Legend was paid for by Activision, then dropped and picked up by EA (a big court case ensued). As I mentioned above, Tale of Tales have developed games using government money. The list goes on and on, because it's a very common way of working.
I'm not saying that every possible genre out there can be developed for and make money. I'm saying that there are genres out there that can make money that the big publishers are ignoring because it doesn't fit within their no risk taking mindset. I don't think we're necessarily disagreeing with each other here.
If Journey was bankrolled by Sony, then no, it is not an indie title. But then "indie title" can mean different things to different people. My definition is the thought that a major publisher was not directly involved in the development of the title. Fez is an indie title despite being "distributed" by Microsoft; I wouldn't give Microsoft much credit as a distributor just because it was on XBLA. Minecraft is clearly an indie title whether Microsoft partially funded the port for their system or not because that was not the original game. There could be debate whether the XBox version is an indie title at that point though. Brutal Legend is not an indie title if funded by first Activision and then EA.
Eve is a great game but you cannot play effectively solo - you have to join Mega Corp X to be effective and really who needs a boss telling them what to do while playing a game...
The sound effects in the video clip attached to that article make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up!
The level of coding chops in the original game is hard to comprehend by modern standards. It had a (wireframe) 3d engine, eight galaxies each with hundreds of worlds, a dozen or so ship types and lots of different equipment and engines - and an awesome surprise endgame where after scores of hours trading and battling pirates, suddenly out of nowhere (with no warning in the early game or manual) the galactic navy appeared and sent you on a series of missions.
The RAM footprint of this game? 22KB. KILOBYTES. All written in machine code: that's even lower-level than assembler! Something to think about next time you're tempted to brag about your coding l33tness :-)
I'm enormously glad that this game has hit its target, and very, very excited that David B will have the opportunity to make the game he wants without a publisher exerting pressure on him (which was what ruined Elite II).
This game and Obsidian's Project Eternity (also on KS) are being eagerly watched by many people. If they succeed, this will be a massive turning point in the games industry, just as the original Elite was.
> All written in machine code: that's even lower-level than assembler!
Can you clarify? I don't know much about the history of this game or the BBC Micro. But do you mean to say this was written byte by byte by hand? I'm imagining someone typing each individual byte of an opcode here. If so, that's pretty amazing.
The BBC BASIC interpreter (present in ROM on all these machines) included a pretty good assembler. There may have been issues putting together a 22kb program with it -- probably had to be assembled in several chunks -- but no need to use a hex editor.
It's nonsense, elite was written in assembler. Nobody but masochists were programming directly in hex. The only time I've done it was because there was a quick hack to be done on an apple II and I knew most of the opcodes by heart and how to compute branches. (And the reason for that is that I'd written an assembler). So unless you had no tools you really did not have to program by poking bytes into memory directly. Apropos, BBC basic came with an assembler built in triggered by the [ character.
In ye olde days, machine language and assembler/assembly language were often referred to as the same thing although of course they are different. Assembly language is translated to machine language by the assembler. I believe (but may be wrong) that Elite was written in assembly language as one would have to be a masochist to write directly in machine language.
The Elite source code can be downloaded at Ian Bell (the other original author)'s site, http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/archive/index.htm. It is indeed written in assembly language (using the BBC BASIC assembler).
I remember an interview with Linus Torvalds where he said he wrote directly into machine code in some of his early (pre Linux) programs. Mainly because he couldn't afford an assembler and didn't yet realise the difference.
Speaking of l33tness, there was recently (2010) a version of Elite finally made for the Oric-1/Atmos family of machines, which never got the game franchise back in the 80's, when they were on the market, and it .. too .. is an act of pure l33tness.
Its Elite, for the Oric-1/Atmos, and its called .. 1337:
If you're into Elite, give this one a try (It runs perfectly in the Oriculator emulator (http://code.google.com/p/oriculator/), and amazing on the real hardware, should you have one stashed away in the closet somewhere) - and it was made by a very skilled developer who wanted to see the title on the Oric machines, at last. As an avid Oric-1/Atmos fanboix, I can't tell you how amazing it is, finally, to have this title in our collection .. the Oric-1 still LIVES!!!
They also listed a load of items in the manual that weren't actually in the game. I'm disappointed I never found the massive space transporter thing that was supposed to be in there.
That's interesting, but what about a nice turn-based (or otherwise think-bound) strategy or at least an RPG?
It seems to me that all the modern gaming is about running around with guns. Boring and no food for thoughts. I've switched to Roguelikes, but still mourn for a good strategy.
Master of Magic. Alpha Centauri. Civilization & Colonization. Master of Orion. In that order.
What makes MoM special? It's PvE. It's so much more replayable than anything else.
What makes Alpha Centauri special? There are no things about Alpha Centauri that aren't special.
Also, to the lesser extent, Heroes of Might and Magic series.
Hex grid wargames (Battle Isle, Fantasy General, Battle for Wesnoth) are nice too but, having no economy, aren't so interesting.
I don't know what do you mean by puzzle games and why is that a bad thing.
I really hope they succeed, but sadly, I'm seeing all the typical signals of games that fail to launch, due to gigantic scope and feature creep. When you focus so much on technology and your answers about the game are all "we plan to support that", that's a bad signal.
You start a game with rock solid game design - throwing procedural generation, multiplayer code, and other cool features together gives you a tech demo, not a game. The smallest changes in game mechanics deeply affect things like networking code. Mix this with a crowdfunded project (where everyone who pledged is a stakeholder and wants a different thing) that's a recipe for disaster.
Yes, but only if they want to do everything on launch day.
The part about the galaxy changes reminds me a lot of the 'real ecology' from Ultima Online, which had to be scrapped since there's no way ecology can work with players as predators.
I think it's been quite encouraging that, while they are talking about a whole load of features that they'd like to include in the future, they're being pretty clear about the things that they won't support in the first release (landing on planets and so on) and that the pledgers will only influence the game, rather than dictate that any feature must be done a particular way.
The things that I worry about are things that were not a part of previous Elite games like networking, the multiplayer element and, above all else, making the economics and politics work. If other massively multiplayer games are anything to go by, a few large alliances will figure out how to game the rules so as to be able to dominate the game and I bet that the developers will always be playing catch up to that.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 98.8 ms ] threadI wonder why no one has made a mainstream space sim game since (X3 is a notable exception, though the learning curve is quite steep). Between this and Star Citizen, there seems to be legions of space nerds like myself, ready to throw money at even the possibility of a good game.
That should not prevent smaller operations from succeeding. The 'space' theme is still used (see SPAZ, FTL even if they are indies).
I think that the 'simulation' genre is not as popular as before, flight simulators (combat or otherwise) have become rarer.
It's an old argument: publishers say "we won't make that game because it won't sell" and the market says "we can't buy that game because you won't make it".
But it's understandable, most of these companies have to show quarterly profits so they are adverse to risk. Creating a game that will cost millions of dollars and years to make for a genre that has stagnated, for whatever reason, is a huge risk.
The small developers are the key to filling this niche. Things like the recent indie resurgence and Kickstarter have made this more evident. The problem is often the large publishers buy these small developers and then proceed to destroy what made them special.
A few space sims, so to speak since SPAZ and FTL aren't quite the same, are out now and there are a few with big names attached in development by independents. If these have decent returns, on small developer terms at least, then I expect the large publishers to follow along spamming the genre.
But only if they can figure out how to get them to be fun on consoles. Which is another side of the problem of stagnating genres but that's a different discussion.
Actually they do a massive amount of market research. It's not that they're ignorant of what the market wants, it's that the type of game you want is unprofitably niche.
By "unprofitable" I mean it's a matter of where to invest their money. It's not that niche titles would be unprofitable, it's that other options will always have a better risk-reward balance.
Valve provides an interesting contrast here: with Steam/GreenLight they run a scaleable distribution channel for large numbers of small indies, taking a percentage without making particular and huge bets. It's like an index fund vs. managed fund, where the latter does intense research into specific options. Often that research in anchored in comparative analysis where someone has proven a juicy market exists (ex: Guitar Hero having a million clones in its wake).
Valve are not typical developer/publishers. They are the gatekeeper, like Apple, Microsoft or Sony. Everything they do is to bring customers in to their walled garden. Their games have effectively infinite budget and can be seen as loss leaders.
Greenlight isn't amazingly helpful for small indies because it requires your game to hit a critical mass of popularity like kickstarter. Unlike kickstarter you need to have already developed the game and have it float about on greenlight for 6mnths+ before you see any return (after Valve's XX% cut of sales).
The rest of your statement seems to support what I was saying about their needs of showing quarterly profits which prevents risky projects.
There's nothing stopping them from going into niche markets if they wanted, just budget accordingly. There is money to be made in the long tail but the large publishers are just unable to see it that way. But the thing is, some of the "niche" markets are potentially huge but they'll never know because they'd rather push out the upteenth version of sports games and military shooters. A number of genres are stagnating right now not because no one wants to play them but because no one is making them.
The game will probably cost at least $5M to make. The kickstarter just scraped $1.25M by calling on the core market. The game still needs to sell at least another 250k at full retail price to break even, and that's after many of the core audience have already bought it through kickstarter. Under perfect conditions, that level of sales on PC alone would already put in in risky territory.
As for indies, well yes, publishers already fund those as part of their portfolios. The ones that look like they're going to break even, at least.
The potential problems you describe sound like budget and project scale problems to me, not that the genre couldn't make money. If one wishes to spend 5 million plus on a game that only maybe 250k will actually pay for then you are destined for failure. I don't believe I stated otherwise.
If you have a large publisher funding your project, then you aren't an indie title. Plus I pointed out that they do these small projects from time to time to see if there's a chance a genre will be popular again for them to spam the crap out of. I didn't say that these projects were intended to make money.
Correct. But given that large, complex software projects take time and manpower to create, there is a subset of games and genres that simply cannot be developed and hope to break even.
It's not just the publishers 'at fault'. Developers don't want to downsize or go bankrupt, therefore they won't tend to develop games that won't let them pay wages in future.
There are alternative funding methods, but before kickstarter it was mostly arts grants and the like. Tale of Tales have developed several small art games on art grants, IIRC.
> If you have a large publisher funding your project, then you aren't an indie title.
No, not at all. ThatGameCompany are an indie company but Journey was bankrolled by Sony. Does that mean that it's not an indie title? Fez was created by Polytron, published by Trapdoor and distributed by Microsoft. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft at least partially funded the XBLA version of Minecraft. DoubleFine's Brutal Legend was paid for by Activision, then dropped and picked up by EA (a big court case ensued). As I mentioned above, Tale of Tales have developed games using government money. The list goes on and on, because it's a very common way of working.
If Journey was bankrolled by Sony, then no, it is not an indie title. But then "indie title" can mean different things to different people. My definition is the thought that a major publisher was not directly involved in the development of the title. Fez is an indie title despite being "distributed" by Microsoft; I wouldn't give Microsoft much credit as a distributor just because it was on XBLA. Minecraft is clearly an indie title whether Microsoft partially funded the port for their system or not because that was not the original game. There could be debate whether the XBox version is an indie title at that point though. Brutal Legend is not an indie title if funded by first Activision and then EA.
If you have no greater ambitions than the average MMO gamer, you can do well solo. And if you are smart about it, you can amass quite a lot of wealth.
If you want to own territory or have fleets, then you do have to join a big corp.
(http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD603D8234AE51EF0)
Have you tried Vendetta Online ?
The level of coding chops in the original game is hard to comprehend by modern standards. It had a (wireframe) 3d engine, eight galaxies each with hundreds of worlds, a dozen or so ship types and lots of different equipment and engines - and an awesome surprise endgame where after scores of hours trading and battling pirates, suddenly out of nowhere (with no warning in the early game or manual) the galactic navy appeared and sent you on a series of missions.
The RAM footprint of this game? 22KB. KILOBYTES. All written in machine code: that's even lower-level than assembler! Something to think about next time you're tempted to brag about your coding l33tness :-)
I'm enormously glad that this game has hit its target, and very, very excited that David B will have the opportunity to make the game he wants without a publisher exerting pressure on him (which was what ruined Elite II).
This game and Obsidian's Project Eternity (also on KS) are being eagerly watched by many people. If they succeed, this will be a massive turning point in the games industry, just as the original Elite was.
Can you clarify? I don't know much about the history of this game or the BBC Micro. But do you mean to say this was written byte by byte by hand? I'm imagining someone typing each individual byte of an opcode here. If so, that's pretty amazing.
You used an assembler (turbo assembler, those were the days).
assembly: lda #00, sta $d021, sta $d020,
generated machine code: a9 00, 8d 21 d0, 8d 20 d0
Anyone else remember what this would do on the c64? :)
Its Elite, for the Oric-1/Atmos, and its called .. 1337:
http://1337.defence-force.org/
If you're into Elite, give this one a try (It runs perfectly in the Oriculator emulator (http://code.google.com/p/oriculator/), and amazing on the real hardware, should you have one stashed away in the closet somewhere) - and it was made by a very skilled developer who wanted to see the title on the Oric machines, at last. As an avid Oric-1/Atmos fanboix, I can't tell you how amazing it is, finally, to have this title in our collection .. the Oric-1 still LIVES!!!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13292450
may have to eat socks (See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4748382)
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem
It seems to me that all the modern gaming is about running around with guns. Boring and no food for thoughts. I've switched to Roguelikes, but still mourn for a good strategy.
Imho single-player strategy is usually just a puzzle game.
What makes MoM special? It's PvE. It's so much more replayable than anything else. What makes Alpha Centauri special? There are no things about Alpha Centauri that aren't special.
Also, to the lesser extent, Heroes of Might and Magic series. Hex grid wargames (Battle Isle, Fantasy General, Battle for Wesnoth) are nice too but, having no economy, aren't so interesting.
I don't know what do you mean by puzzle games and why is that a bad thing.
You start a game with rock solid game design - throwing procedural generation, multiplayer code, and other cool features together gives you a tech demo, not a game. The smallest changes in game mechanics deeply affect things like networking code. Mix this with a crowdfunded project (where everyone who pledged is a stakeholder and wants a different thing) that's a recipe for disaster.
The part about the galaxy changes reminds me a lot of the 'real ecology' from Ultima Online, which had to be scrapped since there's no way ecology can work with players as predators.
The things that I worry about are things that were not a part of previous Elite games like networking, the multiplayer element and, above all else, making the economics and politics work. If other massively multiplayer games are anything to go by, a few large alliances will figure out how to game the rules so as to be able to dominate the game and I bet that the developers will always be playing catch up to that.