Outside Opinions: The readers speak

Over the course of this blog, I've gotten quite a few reader opinions, and for this post, I think it's a great idea to let the reader opinions make up the post. First in two interviews, one audio and the other text, and lastly, in a guest post expressing opinions on developer salaries.

Interview 1

First, the audio interview with reader and game enthusiast "chiefvsmario":
Interview with chiefvsmario (Click to listen!)

Interview 2

Secondly, a text interview with another gaming enthusiast, "Fenril":

Forte: Tell us a bit about your history involving video games.

Fenril: As a very young child, I often played my older cousins' video games, under the hawk-like watch of my mother. When I was six years old I recieved my first console; an N64 for my birthday, along with Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I remember my mother telling me I wasn't allowed to play Zelda at first because of something she'd read about it having blood in it, but (luckily) there was a video game room for the "big" kids at my day-care, and without motherly supervision I was able to experience absolutely delightful games, such as Mischief Makers, Star Fox64, Super Mario RPG, Bomberman 64, Pokemon Snap, Kirby 64, Yoshi's Story, Mystical Ninja, and so on. Later, my mother actually started to like video games herself, and we purchased most of the afore mentioned games to play together at home. And by together, I mean she watched and told me to watchout for NPCs and things in the background of the stage...

Forte: Do you think video games have gotten better, worse, or stayed the same over time?

Fenril: I don't think games have gotten worse or that there are more bad games as much as bad games now-a-days have better marketing teams. Except for Megaman. Those games got worse.

Forte: Looking at the infographic on the Costly Creation blog, does the empty space on games surprise you?

Fenril: Yes it does! Although, it makes me feel sort of dissatisfied, like every time I ran into one of those "why can't I do this?" or "why can't I ever go there?" or "why was what that NPC said just flavor text and not a little easter-egg?" it could have actually been something they added into the game. Not like they didn't have space, right? On the other hand, I feel excited to know that there's ample space to work with when making games. It feels like the possibilities are so much more grand than before, and they were already amazing to begin with!

Forte: How do you feel about microtransactions, and do you think those are a good business model in comparison with traditional DLC?

Fenril: Well, since I'm a fan of certain MMOs, I really don't mind microtransactions, as long as they don't unbalance or break the fairness of the game. As for DLC... on-disk DLC is absolutely unacceptable. It's just rude for any amount of the production time going towards a game's launch to include working on DLC. That pretty much means a consumer is going to have to wait longer for their game, and then have to pay again to unlock content already on the disk of the game they just bought.

Forte: What do you think the industry should do to increase sales and decrease loss?

Fenril: I don't know what the industry in general can do, but Nintendo already did what they could. Allowing 3rd-party companies to port to Nintendo's consoles stole a vast majority of the reason to buy either Sony or Microsoft's consoles. All Nintendo needs to do now is start making house-hold appliances.

Ian Owen's Guest Blog: Development Salaries

In the past year the video game industry has had it’s ups and downs, a slight decline in overall value of the industry occurred due to the over-saturation of mobile gaming and new innovations in mobile devices. But, it is expected to resume it’s upwards trend in the following year with the rumored release of the Xbox 720 around the holiday season of 2013, as stated on bloomberg^[1]. Now, I know there has been talk about all the profits and how much the game industry has been making, so lets turn the page and look at what the actual employees are making.

References:
[1] Dina Bass & Ian King, November 30, 2012: Microsoft Said to Plan Next Xbox for 2013 Holiday Season

Wasted Space: A neccessary evil?

The infographic in the previous post illustrates quite a bit of waste from the developer's part, but honestly, is there a way to avoid that? If they worked to make a game to responsibly fill (by which I mean, put useful information instead of something like animated cutscenes^[1]) a 10gb game disc, it would probably take years to complete. Not only that, but the resulting game would also probably literally take years to play from start to finish (barring any game breaking glitches that allow the player to skip huge portions of the game). For those of us who have experience with not playing a game for maybe a month or two, then going back to it and feeling confused about the story, imagine having to play a game constantly for that long just to remember what you were doing. I'm a fan of long games and feeling like I got what I paid for, but that would be more of a chore than a game.

A chore?

Having unrealistically long games doesn't only turn gaming into a chore for gamers, but it would probably end up making consumers buy less games. I know a lot of people who grew up where their parents wouldn't buy them a new game until they were finished with the one they already had (for some children who ended up with brutally difficult games like Battletoads or Treasure Master, that was a tough order to fill!), so any frugal parents of today following that logic wouldn't see a need to buy their children another game until the next year. From another perspective, looking at video games as an art form like I mentioned in the blog's first post, would you want to read a book that took so long to complete? For most people I know, War and Peace is an intimidating work of literature simply due to its size. Even in terms of long movies, it's hard to sit in one place and watch something for so long. The same holds for video games: they need to be long enough to make us feel like we spent our money wisely, and either short or modular enough to let us play them quickly.

Modularity?

I could never call myself a proponent of short games, but I understand that average gamer of today (which is older than you may think^[2]) leads a busy life, and most probably don't have time for the lengthy quests of their childhood. However, instead of short games, I believe that games should be modular, which is to say, they should be relatively long and can even continue to have deep, well drawn out stories and characters, but be able to be put down for extended periods of time without confusing the player upon picking them up again. How that's done is completely up to the designer, of course, but I feel it's probably the best way to bring the classic feeling of video games into the modern world.

Next post, we'll be looking at what a few consumers think about the industry in the form of interviews, and a special guest blog talking about the salaries in the industry.


References:
[1] blue, March 4, 2006: DVD capacity: Team Ninja filled entire disc and had to make adjustments
[2] Jay Jackson, June 14, 2011: Today's Living: Target audience for video games getting younger