THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CLIKC => Topic started by: Johnny C on 23 Feb 2008, 11:11
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Great interview up over at Gamehelper (http://www.gamehelper.com/magazine/features/jonathan-blow-says-fuck-that). Among other things, he says this gem:
JB:Among indies there is some kind of desire to be more like bigger companies, to be "professional" about making games. Owning a business and making money and having business cards is all part of that. But if you really care about games, it's a huge mistake, and being "professional" will only hurt your work and cause it to be mediocre. Business is, inherently, a corruptive influence on everything that is non-business.
Thoughts? I read it on Kotaku, where Maggie Greene made a big BAWWWW post about how it is has the "pretentious attitude that reminds [her] of hipster indie music people." Being a hipster indie music person myself, I found myself agreeing largely with Blow. Excellent games are usually made for a love of the medium, not money.
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I sort of see both sides. On the one hand, there are plenty of games that are made with large budgets by big companies that succeed on both the fun and the artistic level. Bioshock or Portal, anyone? On the other hand, the publisher-developer relationship is poisonous for a great many projects.
I think in many ways Blow is more like the David Jaffe of the independent scene, where he's just antagonistic for the sake of it. I hear a lot of really good things about Braid, but when he's much more known for his outspoken quotes rather than the merits of his games, I start getting suspicious that it's just for publicity, at least to an extent.
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If you plan on long-term activity and abhor the business aspect of game development this
(http://www.terra-arcanum.com/troikapedia/images/thumb/6/6d/Troika_logo.jpg/180px-Troika_logo.jpg)
is what you get. High on concept and low on execution.
You can't be Zoetrope in this business. You have to be Dreamworks.
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To be fair, Troika might have been able to keep going if they had actually released games that weren't shit-piles.
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After rereading my first post, let me see if I can articulate this better.
I don't think that making a game that is commercially viable in the modern sense of the retail market and full-time development studios and making a game out of love for the medium and confidence in what you're doing are mutually exclusive categories. If you're going to tell me that Super Mario Galaxy, a game with a (relatively) large budget and a fantastically high amount of copies sold even 4 months after its release, is made by people who don't have love for the medium, I will tell you that you are out of your fucking mind. I think that Blow is reacting to this new trend that many independent developers are making their games and shopping them at IGF or online or through other channels hoping to get picked up by a full-time studio. But that's essentially what gave us Portal: the Digipen students brought Narbacular Drop to Valve and Newell hired them on the spot. That has become the dream goal for a lot of these people who are essentially designing games in small groups during their free time, and Blow, presumably out of disenchantment with the current development model, believes that makes their products less creative or artistic because they're made with the goal of getting them hired into the 'establishment', as it were. Hopefully, it goes without saying that that is a load of crap. I don't think your delivery model makes your ideas inherently better or worse. Are concessions made to make a game more likely to sell? Absolutely, there's no denying that it happens all the time. But that doesn't prevent games with creative ideas from selling well all the time.
No matter how you look at it, Blow is being pretentious. I don't know what he does that he can afford to make games that don't sell, but clearly not everyone can do whatever it is, so he might need to stop running his mouth. In fact, you could even insinuate that Blow is being fairly hypocritical, since Braid is coming to Xbox Live Arcade, which Microsoft is the sole gatekeeper for and is for better or for worse a very closed system.
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As someone trying to get a job in the industry...I disagree with Blow. If I'm making a game in my free time and shopping it to people, I'm not trying to get absorbed by the 'establishment', I'm trying to get myself in a position where I can work on ideas I didn't have the resources for before.
I have a grandiose idea for a game that I know is going to take a studio of 300 people and several million dollars at the least. So I try to make a creative little game or something that is technologically sound and get picked up by a company in the hopes that I might eventually get to pitch this idea to the suits.
That might not be the case for everybody, in which case Blow would still be half-correct. But I'm just trying to keep my doors open.
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To be fair, Troika might have been able to keep going if they had actually released games that weren't shit-piles.
They wouldn't have, had the roles of the people working on the games been more clear-cut. The way they were working was disastrously inefficent, resulting in huge delays and barely any QA testing if that. By the end of it the only reason they couldn't stay in business was because they had fucked over every publisher they'd worked with and developed a bad reputation.
Hey now, Vampire: The Masquerade was excellent.
For awhile it was, sure. It was certainly the best game Troika made. The last third of the game is a mess (see also: Indigo Prophecy) and the more you play it the more apparent just how unfinished the game is. VTM:B is barren. There are whole areas with no objects. A few more months of work by a group of people who could actually get things done and it would've been so much better than it is.
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Well, Valve, for example, doesn't have clear-cut roles for its developers. Probably a poor example though.
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I'd wager they've got a whole hell of a lot more people (if I remember correctly less than 15 people made the whole of Arcanum), plus they've got enough cash, fan loyalty and love from Vivendi or whoever (?) owns them to take as long as they'd like and hammer out everything they want. They don't do episodic content right at all, but nobody cares because it's Valve. The greater problem with Troika was that there was that, in effect, nobody was running the company. The Big 3 "shared" duties, but understaffed as they were they weren't making deadlines while completely devoted to development.
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Valve is independent, but EA handles all their distribution.
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I'd wager they've got a whole hell of a lot more people (if I remember correctly less than 15 people made the whole of Arcanum), plus they've got enough cash, fan loyalty and love from Vivendi or whoever (?) owns them to take as long as they'd like and hammer out everything they want. They don't do episodic content right at all, but nobody cares because it's Valve. The greater problem with Troika was that there was that, in effect, nobody was running the company. The Big 3 "shared" duties, but understaffed as they were they weren't making deadlines while completely devoted to development.
Valve has about 120 employees. Vivendi used to publish for Valve, but Vivendi fucked Valve and Valve sued them and won and switched publishers to EA.