[UPDATE March 18: I would like to put the following disclaimer on the crap
skewed forth below. The article in question was a second-hand description of
events and was devoid of context. It is very possible that the actual meaning
of comments as they came across in the article could have been very different.]
12 March, 2005
Can people be intelligent and moronic at the same time? I submit that the
evidence of such is overwhelming. I am basing this assertion on
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/burn_the_house_.html which is
a summary of game developer (for the most part) rants at GDC. I got the link
from Ryan's .plan.
Let me do a brief summary of a few of the rants.
Warren Spector:
Wal-mart drives business decisions, and this stifles the industry. We need to
divorce funding and distribution, and find alternative forms of distribution.
Greg Costikyan (who?):
Bigger budgets and bigger spectacle stifle innovation and promise larger
profits in return... to game developers who want to make games rather than make
money.
Chris Hecker:
Hardware developments on next-gen consoles will make innovative games harder to
implement.
It's worth asking:
If you're an artiste, and you don't care about the size of your paycheck, and
you don't like the current distribution model, and you want to innovate rather
than be controlled by your investors (the publisher), then... why aren't you
going indie?
Why stay in a system you hate? You just said that bigger budgets are a problem
and stifle innovation. You just said that next-gen consoles will have hardware
tweaks that stifle innovation. You just said that the current distribution and
funding models stifle innovation. If you're still working in the portion of
the industry that has these problems, when a different portion of the industry
does not... aren't you the foolish one? Or were you just being disingenuous in
the first place?
Now I hadn't heard of all these people, so it's possible that some of them are
already involved in the indie market. If this is the case, then I would ask
what you're complaining about? Are you trying to be vicariously bitter for all
those who work on large-scale console games and don't mind?
Either way, none of these people come out smelling like roses. Then they had
the audacity to belittle a man who asked a legitimate question about piracy.
Oh, that's right... I forgot. It's not the people who steal your game that are
to blame, it's the people that gave you the money with which to make it in the
first place.
I'm sure these are smart people... but it's hard not to label them morons.