I am taking all the fun out of making games... Seriously!
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick (pictured above) has a very interesting take on the subject. In a recent statement given during a Technology Conference Bobby had a number of interesting and frankly disturbing things to say regarding video games publishing. And as a gamer, I must say, I am a little taken back at how he runs one of the worlds largest video game publishing companies.
He said "The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."
He goes on to state that he sets goals that "really [reward] profit and nothing else" and that keeping an air of "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" is a good method for "keeping people focused on the deep depression." Making sure his people are looking at the bottom line and nothing else.
That might be a good way to run a business and keep the profit margins in the black, but is it really the way a video game publisher fosters creative development? Is this the kind of environment that can generate truly "great" video games?
Personally, I am not so sure. I mean, sure, a company needs to be profitable. After all, everyone needs to make money and the people involved in making the game need to be paid. And more profit means more money. More money means we can continue to make more new titles and keep people employed. And all of that is good. But at what point do you draw the line and stop running things like a business and start to look at what it is you are actually producing?
I mean, at some point you have to realize that your "job" is to produce video games which are by nature "creative". Now from my experience, "creative" people generally don't do well in an overly structured environment. Sure everybody had deadlines, pressure, budgets etc... That is the nature of the business but is it really necessary to take it to the extreme? Should we put profit over product? Should we allow the bottom line to be the driving force in a an industry built on peoples passions and dreams?
I gotta believe that the answer is no. Would we have ever seen games like Beyond Good and Evil or Oddworld if the people publishing those games were so worried about the bottom line? The industry already has too few truly new IP's. If everybody thought like Bobby, I am not sure we would ever see a new IP again.
In a world already filling up with sequels and trilogies, what does this say for the future? It is certainly a lot cheeper to make a sequel than to put the money into a new IP. I mean there is no guarantee that the new game will be either popular or well received. It's a gamble. So if I am looking at the bottom line, I say we make Guitar Hero 15 and Modern Warfare 11 well before we ever look and making a new game.
The problem is, that while it may be profitable today, eventually those brands will fade away without innovation. Without new advances and creative leaps forward, no one will want to play those games. We must strive for truly ground breaking ideas, new IP's and original thought if we hope to keep the industry going forward in the direction that it has been. We have to foster the imaginations behind the games if we want truly new and amazing experiences.
Yes, the industry needs to make money, but at what cost?
No comments:
Post a Comment