Fixing the Games Industry with Jonathan Blow
- Thread starter Men_in_Boxes
- Start date
ProtoByte
Weeb Underling
Right, but what games are you playing where that's the case? At least, to the extent you're talking about? Far as I know, no such games exist. Yes, not even the Ubisoft ones.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
His point at that point about what is valuable to a gamer makes sense as it does for any other product. Just because a game costs a lot of make and is $70, doesn't mean shit. If a gmer thinks it sucks, it makes no difference.
I can buy a boring Whirlpool stove/oven for $1000. Or I can spend $5000 and get a Miele or Wolf brand. Are the more expensive brands more costly to make and fancier? No doubt. Does it cook food better. I'll assume yes. It it worth paying $4000 more? Not to me. Some people might think it's worth it, but I dont no matter how good it cooks food. Like Blow bringing up bargain binning games for 60% off, a lot of people will trend to deals if the trend is more and more deals. Set a precedent in pricing, and people remember and wait for it.
Apple would rather funnel it's costs into marketing, than put that money towards crash and burn deep discounts.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
I have this video playing in the background. I'm about 2 hours in (the video is over 2.5 hours).
Excellent video. I suggest you gaffers listen to it. Its just the two guys talking so you dont need to watch their faces, but they cover a lot of good topics.
If you purely listen to it, make note Blow sometimes thinks about an answer and goes 10 seconds in silence. So you got to be patient with his answer.
They talk about a lot from games making, budgets, hiring, DEI, wfh, etc...
Excellent video. I suggest you gaffers listen to it. Its just the two guys talking so you dont need to watch their faces, but they cover a lot of good topics.
If you purely listen to it, make note Blow sometimes thinks about an answer and goes 10 seconds in silence. So you got to be patient with his answer.
They talk about a lot from games making, budgets, hiring, DEI, wfh, etc...
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As an artist I totally get this. Sometimes you work your ass off to make something infused with all this stuff you want to share and communicate and after all that blood sweat and tears all people do is go "oooowwww look at this shiny completely random element in the corner of the frame" its completely demoralising and makes ya want to put a gun in your mouth sometimes.
He said he didn't really grow up with his parents, he shouldn't say it actually but whatever.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
Errr... gaming requires you buy a TV/monitor but movies have no upfront cost?!? Do you not see something wrong with your comparison there?
If you don't have a TV then you need to buy one to watch a movie.
WitchHunter
Banned
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Avid Reading Horse
Member
Ehh Blow was reasonably tactful there compared to Phil Fish. And Braid >>>> Fez
calistan
Member
Kind of depends where you watch the movie, really.
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
hemo memo
You can't die before your death
Is this the Fez dude?
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
The low completion rates and the sales cliff after their marketing blitz suggests otherwise. Those two things are massive issues for AAA and people want to ignore them for some reason.
KimDongHwan
Member
I really love listening to Jonathan Blow, to me he has deep understanding of what makes a game a game. You like it or not (or agree or not with him), at least he really cares about our hobby and works (even risking his financial situation) to help preserve it
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Are they lazy? Or are they just not interested in gaming?
That's why many point to the high completion rates of Sony's 1st SP party games. But there's a decent amount of people that ignore that fact too.
MacReady13
Member
It's funny that really the ONLY person in gaming doing this kind of brilliant interviewing has been completely ostracized from the mainstream gaming landscape. Ironic...
Hugare
Member
Context is important
This video was recorded during the 360/PS3 era. That was the most terrible era for japanese games, ever.
Japanese devs didnt get a good grasp of the new technologies, they couldnt experiment as much as they did in the PS2 era due to bigger budgets, Square didnt "know how to make HD towns", devs started aiming for the western market ... it was a disaster.
Now we have Capcom, Square and many other kicking ass. But back then it was dreadful.
Thanks, I appreciate the response, luck still plays a big role regardless of the genre " I'm not trolling ", you don't know what you like until you give it a try, sometimes you don't want to go through all that cause you don't have a clue whether you'll like it or not, but it really feels good if you find what you're looking for.On steam we call them "tags" and "user reviews"
"What's this? I want horror games with immersive sims elements released in the last three years? No 2D stuff either? Easy peasy:"
"Oh but some of these are certainly trash! I should check:"
"Huh, mixed. Maybe this one isn't so good after all. Reviews say it's too early in early access and game is barely 15 minutes. Lets check another one:"
"Hey, great reviews. Could this be the one? Let's see a few gameplay videos on youtube...."
"Oh! Its just what i wanted!"
zeroluck
Member
Guess you never saw the stream where he tried Elden Ring for 30 mins.
ProtoByte
Weeb Underling
That's always been the case for games though, and back then games were generally shorter.
The one thing that has changed is that playing hours are up across the board. Does that indicate quality?
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
Not many things in nature stay the same. Rates are either up or down.
Yes.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
I liked the convo, but Blow is nuts if he thinks all the media is left wing. He even says FoxNews is to the left. Like come on man.....
But other than that, this was interesting to see the world through the eyes of a business owner that makes games.
But other than that, this was interesting to see the world through the eyes of a business owner that makes games.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
I agreed holistically to most of what I heard in the whole video. But that part about Fox being left is totally gonzo.
ChorizoPicozo
Member
making one game every 10 years is not a way of fixing the industry either.
Last Hearth
Member
I'm talking about going to a movie theater.
bender
What time is it?
I always want to like Blow's games more than I actually do, but I'll always respect his projects and he'll always have a soft spot in my circuits for turning me onto Stephen's Sausage Roll. I'm still listening, early on even, but he's always a good listen as he's well spoken and generally thoughtful. I had no idea Braid was getting a re-release but that goes back to the discoverability problem that they address early on. I do think the major store fronts need to come up with a happy middle ground between ease of publishing and overly strict curation. The door has swung to far into the democratization of publishing and the end user experience suffers as you trade to wade through an endless swamp of shovelware.
edit: On average, there were 40 new games on Steam per day in 2023.
edit: On average, there were 40 new games on Steam per day in 2023.
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mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Yeah but this comment was made about more than the PS3 era. These were some general comments by Phil and Blow. And they were both super stupid.
And we act like the Wii didn't exist back then. For some reason people like to act like Nintendo devs are from Mars and not Japan just to keep pushing their agenda.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
It's probably because he ostracizies himself from the media. And he's probably better off for it.
Exactly! It's not an issue that has an easy fix. Nor a fix at all actually, because many people have different goals.
For instance, I want Playstation to be as strong as possible to provide me with the best experiences. Yet a shareholder may just want Sony to release all their games day one on PC, Xbox, Switch 2, and PS5 to generate the highest profits.
ME and that shareholder will never see eye to eye because we care about the same product, but for totally different reasons.
Hugare
Member
He starts with "all the modern ones that I've played". So he is being specific about that era.
If anything, Wii success reinforces what he tried to express. He said that japanese games had way too much tutorials and treat you like an idiot. Play any Wii game and see if it contradicts his statement. Wii was a huge hit with casuals for a reason.
He also mentions terrible dialogue, and tho most western games arent really Shakespeare (even worse now than it was back then), japanese games usually have utter shit dialogue. You enjoy them despite the dialogue most of the time. And thats coming from someone who loves japanese games.
Toots
Member
Lot of the lack of creativity we see nowdays in all entertainment industries is due to execs micro dosing and taking vitamin supplements instead of tons of blow like they did in the 80s...
Someone please bring cocaine back to hollywood for our sake.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Plus questioning if there really even is a war going on in Ukraine was insane too. When you view the world that way and question things that are so obvious...........I can see why he doesn't seem grounded on so many things. How can you trust anything, when something as obvious as the war in Ukraine can be questioned? No actors in that region of the war is questioning if there's an actual war happening. They maybe questioning why it's happening or how it started......but not "IF" it's happening.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
I think gaming the past 15 years (since the 360/ps3 era) really solidified giant selling IPs beyond Mario and FIFA.
So like an industry the big guys with the big sellers play it safe first. The farther back in gaming you go, studios were making all kinds of crazy shit because the stakes were low and getting 500,000 unit sales was successful. 1M sales was good enough to be classified as Greatest Hits. Now, 1M is considered garbage and only an indie studio would proudly claim that sales amount.
So if people drinking pop or gamers wanting really innovative games got to look elsewhere…. Indie studios. Just like if you want to get away from coke and Fanta mainstream stuff, you got to look at bottles of craft soft drinks. But the marketing is so strong, the listing presence is so strong and people are just happy enough that Coke and orange Fanta is good enough. Maybe for gaming we got to a point things are kind of good enough so people just hum along with similar games now.
Just about every industry things level off when it hits a saturation point of quality and performance. I don't think microwaves have gotten better in 20 years aside from the trend at some point where they became stainless steel because way back they were all white or black shelled cases. Everything leveled off.
At some point gaming will probably get lifelike graphics (and that's a big maybe). But diminishing returns. Can audio get better? Maybe but seems pretty good to me. Frame rates seem to be generally good and once it hits stable 60-120 it's good enough for my eyes. Online functionality is standard. So what's left? Gameplay and modes? Unless studios amp up that up Indont really see gaming really wowing all of us like previous gens where a next gen console was holy shit! And then online console gaming became standard which was cool too. So no more wow factor there either.
Denton
Member
I love gaming, but it sure as fuck ain't "active" xD
But obviously your point stands, social media is even more passive than gaming, doomscrolling can be easy and addictive "entertainment".
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Chuck Berry
Gold Member
Great interview. Love me some Blow....insight.
Even though he was speaking a bit haphazardly and all over the place I got the gist of everything he was saying and I think he was pretty spot on, especially his thoughts on WFH and gaming just not being the "it" thing anymore. The youth is much more dominated by social media and watching others play through shit. You could tell he wanted to get much more into socio political issues. He really was all over the place. Cool guy though. At least he has some fucking balls.
Even though he was speaking a bit haphazardly and all over the place I got the gist of everything he was saying and I think he was pretty spot on, especially his thoughts on WFH and gaming just not being the "it" thing anymore. The youth is much more dominated by social media and watching others play through shit. You could tell he wanted to get much more into socio political issues. He really was all over the place. Cool guy though. At least he has some fucking balls.
Killer8
Member
I have always defended their point of view, even if they delivered it with zero tact and embarrassed this poor Japanese man in front of hundreds. You have to remember when this was filmed: 2012.
Many people forget that the Japanese games industry went to complete dogshit during the seventh generation. You had Square Enix infamously grappling with 'HD towns' and delivering some of the worst Final Fantasy games in the entire franchise. Due to rising costs, companies like Capcom farmed out much of their development overseas, handing the likes of Lost Planet, Devil May Cry, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City and Dead Rising over to incompetent Western teams. Konami did the same with Silent Hill and Contra. Meanwhile internally, the Japanese developers were not faring much better, making some of their worst games ever - see RE6 at Capcom and Ninja Gaiden 3 at Team Ninja.
Much of the talent in Japan focused on the handhelds, the Wii and emerging mobile game markets. Because that was where the Japanese money was going. That's not to say that Japanese output on those systems was bad - often the contrary - but they basically ceded the HD software market to the West. The stand out games most people remember from that gen were the likes of Call of Duty, Halo, GTA, Mass Effect, BioShock, Portal 2, etc. Another thing people forget is that when this video was made, the Japanese were even beginning to falter on the handheld front. Both the 3DS and Vita had abysmal launches.
It took until the PS4 gen for the Japanese to find their footing and they have since caught up spectacularly. In fact now most of what is worth playing is Japanese made. I think a lot of credit for that goes equally to the PS4 being much easier to develop for, better Japanese support in engines like UE4, and the Switch raising the bar so that every developer is now at least targeting 'HD'.
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Nothing count solid until we get %110 clean from the pandemic, there are many valid reasons, some shakes what's behind the scenes and show stuff we haven't even heard of without this incident literally, it took only 2 years from this gen but people will keep talking about it, and in numbers, that's not actually 2 years, it's more than that if you count game development period, it did more damage to big aaa games and some didn't even recover from last gen, that's a huge hit for these people, some may change their opinion about aaa and it's future, it's not just 2 years if you take all that into account.
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Hudo
Member
Is he still busy reinventing the wheel (with JAI)?