I think the celebrity trend is going to be pretty stronge, for instance, I am eagerly anticipating the next game to have Raph Koster on the dev team. For your point of view, Raph, you have to be considering name recognition as a selling point for any future project. You can count one future customer here.

Because of the crunch, digital distribution will be the only logical play. No. This is where your logic falls apart.

No Bryce, it does not. This is classic Gutenberg moment. The Hollywoodisation works on one condition only – if there are NO alternatives. If the only way to print a book is to put hundred clerics (animators) into monastery cells (cubicles) and have them scribe for years then Church wins. As soon as printing press is invented, Church looses no matter how fast it burns them. No matter how many clerics it will thorow at it.

Here is what I think the main point you missing. Digital distribution is not about being disc killer. Its about alternative. There is no need to kill disc if it remains unopened since the owner is upstairs browsing/playing/socializing on the web. There is no artificial squeeze/demand created by calendared releases if there are ten times more easily discoverable alternatives in long tail. The only factor to track is attention. The Church is loosing control over how we spend those 1440 minutes. That lost its permanent, unrecoverable and fatal.

Ultimately digital distribution still feels like it’s going to be the wildcard in this whole equation. Comparisons to the movie industry don’t hold up exactly as Raph noted, because game publishers don’t own their distribution.

Alternative scenario: Digital distribution services like Steam become the norm, only they’re wholly owned and run by EA, Sony, and Microsoft. They service a console, but that console is effectively a trimmed down gaming PC with support for web browsing. Huge publishers now own the hardware, the software distribution system, and one of the best ways to market their own products (their own portal).

Feels contingent upon broadband becoming cheaper and faster than the pace that content is growing in size.

In this situation, the gaming industry starts mimicking the television industry, not the movie industry. Still room for indies in this environment (see your average cable-service channel listing), but most people still watch the big dogs of network television.

We’re hitting a wall on the financial side? Yes. And that is having the effect of slowing down the number of releases.

We’re not seeing the sorts of alternative revenue streams that other media do? Yes. Which is also having the same effect.

Because of this, movie-style alternative financing won’t materialize for the average project? Depends on the projects. In the film industry, most financing is not done in this happy alternative space, it’s done via a big-publisher driven studio system which is incredibly effective in securing tax breaks, investment and all the other corporate shenanigans. Expect EA and the like to become evermore sophisticated in this regard as time moves on. The “Independent producer” movie is very much still a thing of small-fry proportions.

Our distribution channels are in upheaval? No they’re not. They’re just adapting to a too-high price point that the market will not bear. Markets do not buy at the price that they are told to, they buy at the price at which they perceive value. Since the market does not value games that highly compared to other entertainment media, they opt to pay lower instead. 2nd hand has been available as an option in the market for a long time. Its recent upsurge is a reflection of market behaviour, not retailer behaviour, and the overall result is that prices will inevitably fall.

This means a shakeout of the current Big Development publishers. Yes it does. Those that do not become more sophisticated, nimbler with their staffing arrangements, more canny about price, better at marketing and so on will be in trouble. More importantly, it will also mean a shakeout of Big Manufacturers, which is far more significant. The next next generation is going to be a one-format generation, and it’s looking increasingly likely that that manufacturer is going to be Microsoft. With Nintendo becoming a sub-section (Apple equivalent) innovation leader.

Because of the crunch, digital distribution will be the only logical play. No. This is where your logic falls apart. Digital Distribution may be many things, but it is not a disc-killer. From the market’s point of view especially, it’s a hassle. The logical play, and it’s the play which has been playing out in the industry over a ten year timeframe, is dominance. It is Hollywoodisation, of far fewer releases from only a handful of publishers world-wide (maybe 6, including the Japs) and one dominant console format which will have significant buy-in and part-ownership from this top 6.

Nintendo will remain apart from this scenario, but everyone else is caught up in it. Sony in particular are the giant ready to be killed. What you will see is a proper mass-market gaming medium, in otherwords, like the RIAA and the MPAA, wherein there will only be maybe 150 releases a year on the Xbox 3 which, by dint of their calendar spacing, high production values and heavy marketing, will break the 90% failure rate. By reducing choice and continuing towards oligopoly, the industry is absolutely on course to rescue itself financially and become stable within another ten year cycle.

Digital distribution will force a different style of game. No again. What DD is going to do is provide an outlet for the Long Tail game consumer, like the arthouse cinema does for the serious film enthusiast. It is never going to amount to more than a significant minority interest most of the time, which suddenly bubbles up the odd crazy hit every once in a blue moon and becomes a sort of self-streaming franchise reservoir for the mainstream industry to console-ize.

The ecology of the game industry will shift to be more varied. Maybe. It’s pretty varied as is, and hard to see what exactly is sitting around the corner in the innovation bag.

The noise level in the marketplace will rise. In the DD end it will. In the actual game industry, it will become far more concentrated and calendared around key releases.

PC gaming will grow back with this market. That’s unlikely. With HD TVs and funky controllers now to hand, there’s no room for the PC any more in most gamers’ homes. The PC itself is becoming more productised and less generalist as time goes on, but it will retain the ‘home of indie’ aspect that will be important (and from which Live will continue to reap the cream of the crop)

Consoles will specialize or become more like the PC. They will generalise. One or the other of Microsoft and Sony are going to pull a Sega over the next few years and have their gaming division collapse. My money’s on BIll Gates, you may say otherwise. At the same time, the cost of doing business for manufacturers in general is going to require that they gain publisher buy-in, making a de-facto single console format. Forums and blogs and all that nonsense are irrelevant in the face of a connected network and TV shows

Everyone will be trying to lock customers into branded lifestyles associated with gaming brands. Maybe. They’re doing that crap already with minimal success though.

Games have gone on to other media Raph. Dungeons and Dragons game spawned cartoons, books and a movie, Pac-man was made into a cartoon, Mario Brothers, cartoon and TV show, more recently Yu-Gi-Oh.

Personally I think Ultima could be made into a cartoon series or perhaps even better, a movie. It has a hero, villian, king, and several other memoral characters. Even the death of a muse.. God Rest her soul.

I could possibly see digital distribution changing initial scale of games. Instead of paying $50.00 for a world and $15 a month subscription, it’ll change to $10.00 for a virtual zone. Then additional zones can be purchased. This is similar to what happens now but on a smaller scale which could hopefully provide developers and publishers with a quicker turn around and more revenue. Additional marketing schemes will need to be researched. Here’s a few ideas..

Character blogs – Generated diary of the players character with blog capabilities, adding screenshots etc.., advertisers could add revenue for small adds on these.

Toys based upon your customized character.

Well back to work.. later

I feel that there is quite a large potential for merchandising MMO contents. I am just wondering what is stopping the producers from going for it.

For example, they could make a collectible action figure series, with interchangeable equipment. Although there could be one main problem with respect to different model sizes here. (A TaruTaru vs a Galka in FFXI) for example, would each require their own size of equipment.

There is another genre of ‘collectible game’ that originated from Japan.
Their current hottest product is “Sangokushi Taisen” or “War of the Three Kingdoms”. This is an arcade game, where players control combat units to conquer an enemy fortress. Each combat unit is represented by a physical card that is to be used on the arcade machine itself. Each player have their own battle record and can gain levels of command for new abilities. Finally, a player will be rewarded a random card everytime he completes a game (consisting of 2 battles). I have not played it myself, as it would get quite expensive after a while (approx. US$1.9 per game).

We can see here that even arcade games have gained some ‘persistent world’ features.

True dat! (dat = “that”)

Lobo, Spore is certainly a harbinger of the future (hence why I mentioned procedural methods) but it’s also essentially R&D — Will & co have been working on it for years. It will take time for those methods to become broadly applicable.

Spore reference made me think about evolution of games.

The original games were extremly simple. Single cell organisms, living in harsh and hostile environment. Through specialization, they grew larger, complex creatures evolved. Through various evolutionary advances and changing world they adapted, and world became less hostile (the internet popularization, 3D graphics cards, terraflop GPUs, middleware) and they grew and expanded. Eventually, they became dinosaurs. Huge, towering beasts, masters of their world. But once, through changes done to the world they could no longer support themself. And in meantime, small warm blooded rodents established a model that survived.

Through evolution of games, very little has changed. What do todays RPGs offer that rogue didn’t back in the day? What do FPS offer that space invaders didn’t? How is Grand Prix (sp) series different from Spyhunter. Presentation has improved, content hasn’t.

All development done in this time has gone exclusively to the technical merits. Anything dependant on content (adventure games for example) has died in the process.

Perhaps the future depends on a catalyst. But not a technical one (or why not), but not to further technical excellence, but to further substance.

Hollywood productions received something similar with advent of CG. And still their priority was recreating old movies, old stories with new presentation. All the advances provided very little in terms of content (Shrek 2, for example, is content-wise just a huge parody).

Are games destined to go the same way? Is the technical advancement just concealing evolutionary dead-ends?

Meh, if Raph is right on some, most or all of his forecast it all amounts to a correction. Take mmos in particular, the only thing that has gone up is the cost. We still have game after game of rewrapped tank, healer, damage dealer. Where is the ocean? Where are the flying machines? Where is the mounted combat? Where are all the neat ideas and innovation? Oh yea, thats right, all much too difficult for the average player. Except of course when it comes to patching and troubleshooting technical difficulties. Have you read some of the tech support pages out there?

Is it any mystery why costs are high when a game spends thousands upon thousands of dollars for voice actors, hailing it as one of the defining moments of next gen games. Then they put in an option to turn it off. Half of the players turn it off immediately for performance, the other half turn it off after hearing once or twice.

The big conglomo companies are now faced with smaller companies being able to turn out higher quality products at a fraction of the cost. No longer can they sit back and churn out the same old worn out template, adding nothing but bugs and frustration to a market that no longer tolerates half baked games.

Oh, in case you a wondering. The oceans are in the upcoming Flying Lab game “Pirates of the Burning Sea”. The mounted combat is in “Mount and Blade”, made by a team from behind the old iron curtain. The flying machines are in “EVE” from CCP, a small company from Iceland (well not so small any more). You’d think companies with 5 times the amount of budget of all three of these combined could have added one of them to a game along with the trinity.

Morgan:

Thankfully, that’s not possible with console and handheld titles.

Good point Which is why they’re so popular to develop for. Much as I like watching the march of technology, it would be nice for the PC world to settle down for long enough to devise some kind of homogenous hardware standard.

On the graphics front though, I get the feeling that what we’re really suffering from is a lack of decent tools. After looking at Spore (Link to Homepage) I realized just how out of date a lot of the tools we’re using really are. 3D Studio is a great program, very powerful at what it does, but the amount of work needed to make a good high-poly model in it is huge. MikeRozac mentioned Assembler and C++, and I find the analogy fitting, although I’m not sure if I’m thinking along the same lines – current graphical design programs are like Assembler, and we need to create some tools that automate a lot of the functions that currently have to be done by hand, in order to speed up the process and allow the artist to make higher quality models, faster – a 3d model should take no longer to make than, say, a clay sculpture (okay, a great sculpture could take months or years to create, but a good sculptor can make a decent model in a matter of tens of minutes). With more intuitive tools, high quality graphics should be no harder to produce than low quality graphics – after all, those low-qual gfx are based on concept art just like the high-qual ones are, and what needs to be reduced here is the gap between making concept art and making the end product.

Disclaimer My own artistic skills are fairly limited, that is to say, null, so if anyone with more experience in the area feels I’m way off base, feel free to say so

I know this is off topic, but I just had to respond…

Mike: I don’t know what game you’re developing or why, but I think you need to partner with a software tester. The recommended ratio is a single tester per programmer. Granted, this would mean you would be spending more time on fixing bugs; however, ultimately you would produce a higher quality product, and you wouldn’t be spending time finding bugs. Those of us in software quality assurance typically voice the unwiseness of even allowing programmers to test their own software. We have bumper stickers!