The End of Originality in Games?

Is it EA, or the Gamer that is to blame?

The other day, the New York Times ran an article ( Link ) in their technology section on the reliance of big video game publishers like Electronic Arts on video game sequels over new properties. They mainly point to the Madden football series which has been running for some 18 years now (wow… hard to believe mainstream gaming like that has been around for this long now) as the prime example of pushing out iterative titles in a franchise instead of putting out truly new titles. There’s even a quote from the CEO of EA, Lawrence F. Probst III regarding their lofty goal of releasing at lest ONE totally new title per year.

Yes, you heard right… one completely new property per year; this coming from the largest developer/publisher in the entire industry. These guys control about 25% of the overall market, they have bought up some of the best development houses in the history of games to widen their product base, yet they only are able to manage one truly original title in an entire year? Something sure is rotten in the state of Denmark.

A lot of people are vilifying EA now for this statement. Sites like Bill Harris’ Dubious Quality and Voodoo Extreme are taking EA to task saying these guys are dropping the ball something awful and/or that they’ve lost the creative edge completely. And I honestly have to agree with that to a large extent, EA (as well as many other developers and publishers) have let themselves become lazy by pushing out sequels to already successful games, looking to capitalize more on past popularity than on the merits of a new game.

However, the gamer has an equal role to play in this downward spiral of gaming goodness. Think about a company like Blizzard for example. You can argue that Blizzard really has two games, Warcraft and Diablo. Pretty much everything they’ve made has been either a sequel or a spinoff from those two properties. We have 3 Warcraft titles (6 if you count the expansions for each of them) and an MMO based on the franchise. You have 2 Diablo games (4 with expansions). And then we have Starcraft which is really just a space variation on Warcraft (with Ghost for the consoles being a spinoff of that). Blizzard is regarded as one of the absolute best in the industry, their games sell millions of copies no-questions-asked, and their beta signups are besieged by at least half a million people every time one comes up. And you know what everyone has been yelling at Blizzard lately? What they’ve all been clamoring for? Starcraft 2. That’s right, they want a sequel to a 7 or so year old game.

Doom, Unreal Tournament, Half Life, Command & Conquer, The Sims, SimCity, Master of Orion… The list goes on and on and on.

For as much as we all want to blame the publishers and developers for letting gaming grow stagnant with sequels and spinoffs, we need to realize they’re doing it because WE WANT THEM TO! We have our favorite franchises that we just want to see grown and expanded with additional titles. We know we like Game X, so we demand more of Game X. We want Game X Part 2,3,4…26. We look at “new” games skeptically and wait for a swarm of reviews before we even consider picking them up. Remember how dicey a proposition a game like The Sims was a few years back? Remember how so many people laughed at the idea of managing little people? It sounded like it wouldn’t be any fun at all. It was a new and risky idea, the fact that it paid off was good fortune (and the fact that anything Will Wright touches turns to gold)

It’s always a risk for a developer or publisher in any medium to try making something truly new, there’s no guarantee it will all come together and actually work and feel right. The situation is made riskier by the fact that despite all of our grumbling and gnashing of teeth asking for “new” games, we really only want to buy last years game with some improvements. We want Starcraft 2, SimCity 5, Yet Another Sims Expansion etc… We prove to the suits in their offices that sequels pay out better and more consistently, so it’s really no surprise that that’s all we get anymore.

As time goes on, we get better looking games, games with stunning visuals, but the same mechanics and design sitting under them that we saw back in the 90s. The hack-n-slash “RPG” has largely remained true to the form refined by Diablo so many years ago. Half Life remains the gold standard of story-based shooters and everyone has just been trying to emulate it since it came out.

Then a game like Beyond Good & Evil, something that was just a bit out of the ordinary, used some new mechanics and had a compelling story and good visuals that was critically acclaimed, but flopped in terms of sales. It was too different for most people to get into.

I do think companies like EA need to work more on having more than one truly original title per year, but I don’t lay the blame for this stagnation completely at their feet. They make the games we’re willing to buy. If we bought more of these “out there” games, we’d send a message to the big guy publishers that a market exists for them. That’s why I like to buy from independent developers a lot.

TotalGaming.Net is a great source for non-big name games. Even the big publisher games are titles that were good but for whatever reason didn’t do big on release. I think TGN and Stardock Central is going to become a great clearing house for older games looking for a new retail home.

I also like games such as Uplink and Darwinia from Introversion, or the Diabloish game Fate from WildTangent. All are solid games, all from smaller developers who are able to try out “new” ideas and go in directions the bigger companies can’t risk trying out.

So, if you want some new gaming in your life, start looking over these smaller developers and publishers, they’re the ones who are coming up with the really really cool stuff. Sure they don’t have the $10million art budget to have the best rendered exploding barrels, but they make up for it in gameplay and visual style.

My favorite indie game houses:
Stardock ( Link )
-Galciv (1 & 2)
-TotalGaming.Net
-Society: The Game

Ambrosia Software ( Link)
Primarily Mac games, though they do have a PC port of their best game.
-Uplink for Mac
-Darwinia for Mac
-Escape Velocity (PC & Mac)
-And a bunch of other fun little Mac games like Gooball.

WildTangent ( Link)
Develop and Publish all sorts of 1st and 3rd party games using the WildTangent gaming platform. They’re a clearing house sort of like TotalGaming is.

GarageGames ( Link )
These guys develop and sell the Torque Game and Torque Shader Engines. For about $300 you can have the source code and tools to a professional-strength 3D graphics engine. They have a storefront for people to sell their Torque powered games. Great place to check out if you’re looking for an active indie developer community.

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It's a shame, and is based upon the marketing fallacy that the "brand" is more important than the substance. It is true to a point for long-awaited, legendary games like DOOM. If, though, next year DOOM 4 came out, people wouldn't be nearly as thrilled as they were after 5+ years. The only way that works is if you rest the brand for several years and biuld on NOSTALGIA, not name-recognition.

In reality I think most gamers are the kind of people that gravitate toward the new, so the old marketing junk needs to evolve for us. I think branding and hype are going to have to be rethought. More and more we have been hyped to death over games like daikatana. Eventually the hype isn't going to work anyore.

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Zoomba

Join Date 11/2002

+114

As gaming becomes more mainstream with the consoles growing in popularity, the marketing model will probably revert back to what it's always been. Gaming is transforming from what it was two or three years ago into a mass produced media product like movies or television. Sports games are the prime example of how this works. Same game, few new features, updated rosters for the upcoming season. Viola! $50 game ready to go.

The PC gaming crowd is more like you describe it Baker, but we're losing the edge in the marketplace. We're becoming a niche market for publishers to toss a bone every now and then. While this year has been very strong for PC games, the number of titles put out has dwindled. Shelf space at retailers is almost non-existant... Go check out a GameStop, I challenge you to find the PC shelf... it took me 10min to find it at the one near me, it was one 2' shelf with about 10 boxes on it. That was it. The freaking action figures got more shelf space than PC games.

I still think though that gamers as a whole, PC or console, clamor for the next installment in their favorite series more than they want truely new games. We love Baldur's Gate, Halo, Master of Orion, Final Fantasy etc... We know the quality to expect from those titles, and once we've finished the latest version, if they were good enough, we want more more more. We want new stories, in a few years we want improved visuals, fewer bugs etc. I think that still trumps the desire for original titles.

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Agreed wholeheartedly. Not much to add, I guess, except that any given line should continue at least a while. For instance, SC2K was better than the original Sim City in my opinion. But, of course, SC3K was awful. And Command & Conquer was okay, I guess, but Red Alert was the real gem. Even tiberium sun was a really good game. But RA2 sucked. Age of Empires struck gold the first time, but it had the command and conquer series to build off of. Needless to say, AoE2... sucked.

I have nothing against refinement, but it gets to a point where, like you said in your article, the next version is simply the most reliable source of income.

Dan

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