Nintendo president: “Game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated”
Nintendo president: “Game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated”
Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has explained to Japanese magazine Famitsu that video game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated in the future and that mergers…
I love long complicated games, like breath of the wild, but I think the world also needs more concise games, those 20-40 hour masterpieces that keep you wrapped up without having to memorize 3600 pages of back story to remember where you left off.
What the studios (especially Nintendo) don't understand is you can't charge the same ~$60 for both games. People don't hate shorter simpler games, they just hate paying the same price for less content.
Right now, Nintendo is selling the Switch version of Link's Awakening for only $10 less than TOTK ($60 vs $70). That's right, a remake of a 20+ year old game with a pretty limited story is selling for almost the same as the largest most complex and expansive game Nintendo has ever produced.
I don't know why they're so fixated on matching prices between games that took orders of magnitude different amounts of effort to produce.
the world also needs more concise games
Yeah!
those 20-40 hour masterpieces
...wait, concise?
"And games will be less fun of course"
Has Nintendo slipped in quality? Their practices aren't the great, but when it comes down to it, they have some of the most consistently high quality games.
They also have some of the longest tenured pros of game design and programming in the industry in its entirety… something sadly far more rare outside of Nintendo… but especially Japan.
Shigeru Miyamoto, for example, has been designing at Nintendo for literally 4+ decades at this point.
Turns out you can master a craft after doing it for a majority of your adult life.
But - in the US at least - the executives at publicly traded game companies would rather shut down literal smash hit dev studios like the guys who made Hi Fi Rush than cultivate a few master class devs of their own over a few decades…
It has never been easier to make A Game. The only thing getting harder is meeting shallow expectations imposed by empty suits. What a small team can accomplish in a few months keeps expanding, and unless you chase some zillion-dollar trends, what they can do is plenty.
Shareholder puppets like Microsoft should figure this out - they demand instant turnaround. They own enough studios to have several of them try cranking out six games in two years. If you want it to happen faster, use fewer people. I dunno, build a friggin' pipeline for indie devs to slap together a killer idea that gets fixed-up, art'd, and polished by different teams. Then you can sell more things to more people for more chances to trip into a brand new trend. You don't have to perform ritual sacrifice when a decade-long project makes a shitload of money! You can still get angry when the actual profits are less than the number you made up in your head! Just-- put money behind cool things that cost $20, instead of constructing situations where people have to spend $140 each or you lose. It's like a fuckin' Mad TV skit. Spend less, sell more.
What he's saying is that major studios are locked playing chicken with each other, and that the industry is going to remember the 1983 crash fondly in comparison with what's going to happen.
There are too many breakout indie hits developed by one person or a small team that prove this isn't true across the industry.
AAA development may be that way because there are higher expectations, just like blockbuster movies invest heavily in special effects and A-list celebs. But at the end of the day gamers just want to be entertained.
We have to go back
"I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding 😎"
Indie games are kind of this, but it's hard to make the "paid more" work consistently at scale. Largely because there's a shitload of people making really good indie games and I can only play so many of them.
It doesn't have to though. Tools are so easy to use now and the gaming industry will never have a shortage of people trying to get jobs in it, there is no reason that so many games need to be spending 5+ years in devepopment.
Have you ever worked on a game?
Yes, I have. A small team can launch a small/medium size game in less than two years using current tools. Game jams, albeit almost never ending up with complete games, last for usually one week and the end result is basically a vertical slice of a game nearly always built by a single person.
Again, there is no reason a game spending 5+ years in development should be considered average or normal.
Even in the past, AAA studios could complete successive games in a shorter amount of time. Metroid Prime 2, Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the good one from 2005), and Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask were all developed by reusing code and assets from the games that came before them, and game development tools were not as easy to work with then as they are now. Metroid Prime 1 was developed in 3 years, Ocarina of Time was developed in 3 years, and Battlefront 1 was developed in 2 years. All of these were developed with AAA funding and took less than 5 years on tools with less accessibility than modern tools.
Because they ban us from changing the source code: that's what they won't tell you.
What does one have to do with the other?
how about no?
Sooooo
Phisticated
Antici
phistication 😎
Just as long as they don't hop onto the procedurally generated bandwagon. While I appreciate the attempts at making unique gameplay while focusing less on level generation, those types of games end up making me feel like a hamster on a wheel.