If I ran the games industry......

Recommended Videos

monkeymo4d

New member
Jan 22, 2012
139
0
0
The game industry isn't something which can be regulated by a single set of ideals. Different Devs/Publishers use different approaches when making and regulating their games, restricting those approaches may backfire and also restrict diversity in the gaming market.
 

ToastiestZombie

Don't worry. Be happy!
Mar 21, 2011
3,691
0
0
If I ran the gaming industry I would force every game to have Nicholas Cage voicing its main character. Everything else can stay the same.

And before you ask, yes that does include games with a female main character. Lara Croft with the voice of Nicholas Cage, think about that for a second.
 

StoopidMonkey79

New member
Dec 3, 2011
11
0
0
ON your number 5 to innovation. I feel like they should still get rewarded even without positive reviews and feedback TO SOME EXTENT (eg. Good IDea. Not executed well/improve) would still get rewarded. Kind of like how Brink and Inversion had amazing ideas. Just not executed well. Give those ideas to another company and you can have one kick ass game instead of just throwing them away
 

Palademon

New member
Mar 20, 2010
4,167
0
0
If I ruled the gaming world
Everyday would be the first day of a spring steam sale
Every gamer would have a new game to play
Etc.
Etc.

If I seriously ruled it, I would live the dream. No treating workers like slaves and customers like theieves. All shall be friends. If I ruled it, all the industry would be united, causing a self sustaining system, where developers could work on whatever they wished. Collaboration would be encouraged. It would be a golden age, where anyone with the skills could build their dream. Developers will eb free to choose when a game is finished. If they wnat to create something long, something short, something 2D, it won't matter. Games would be priced on work time taken to make it considered agaisnt number of workers.
 

ElPatron

New member
Jul 18, 2011
2,130
0
0
thejboy88 said:
1 - Heavy monitoring of online multiplayer: Gaming would be run by control freaks - you would need to give great power to humans, which are fallible

2 - Greater support for independents: They won't be independent no more

3 - Ban IP hoarding: Good intentions, but also traits of a control freak. Against free market.




4 - Removal of IP's from bad game makers: Against free market. Why would an agency have more control over an IP than the legitimate owner. Requires creation of said agency, which will probably have no jurisdiction in countries that consider it unconstitutional/illegal.

6 - No movie games: Restriction on freedom of speech, against free market



7 - Greater care with portrayal of religions, races and minorities in games: Against freedom of speech, if I can write a book or make a movie about X, I sure can make a game about X no matter how ludicrous.

10 - Game-makers get profit from second-hand games: Again, free market? Plus, if anyone wants to make a deal with the publishers then Game and GameStop are free to do it. I won't.



12 - Proper conclusions to games: If you're willing to donate the money yourself, be my guest
Have you actually considered that many of the things you are suggesting would create a gaming United Nations, which would be even more useless?

What you are suggesting could be considered illegal in many countries. Taking away property from it's legitimate owner? As far as I am concerned that only happens when crimes are involved. Making a bad game is not a crime.

And besides, you're only throwing suggestions but not actually giving your opinion of how things would play out.

Should governments waste taxpayer's money to regulate gaming in this way? Should we create an agency that would require donations from publishers and first-parties?

This would only generate more corruption, more power-tripping and more bureaucracy.
 

Kilo24

New member
Aug 20, 2008
463
0
0
They're grand, noble aims. I agree with many of the sentiments, but would hate to see these made into mandated universal standards.

For 1: All the automated stuff like chat filters are fairly easy to undermine, so you'll need a person. So, you'll need to pay at least a few people to just scan through chat full-time, looking for abuse. And, if you want to catch more than just chat, make sure your game logs everything that happens in a session so that that can be scanned too. And make sure that your guidelines for acceptable behavior are clear and fair, otherwise both your players and moderators will get quite frustrated and angry with it...

Effective moderating is possible, but it is a huge investment.

2: Great idea. Who is going to pay for it? The indie devs can't. The major AAA companies, in some sort of you-must-donate-10%-of-your-bought-advertising-space scheme? Then we'll see a lot of underhanded agreements between indie devs and AAA companies.

Don't forget that, among the good indie games you've listed, there is a huge sea of bad-to-mediocre ones that are kludged together by people without much concept of how to actually make a game - take a look at Newgrounds or the X-Box Live Arcade without sorting by popularity, and those are still sorted. If you don't separate those out, chances are more likely you'll be giving advertising to one that's crap rather than the next Bastion. How are you going to separate those good ones from the bad ones?

3: Eh... this would really encourage developers to rush games. A decently long-lasting studio that only works on one game at a time will, 2-3 games later, need to make another one of the same IP to keep it. This would benefit corporations far more than the little people; they're stable enough to keep working on many games at the same time and would be very happy to pick up IP for free from smaller studios who can't/don't want to keep whoring out their semi-recent franchises. Even if #4 immediately takes it from them, they'll still have gotten a free IP use from it.

4: What defines a "bad" game? Metacritic score? If so, then we'll see a hell of a lot more things like the Kane and Lynch review debacle on Gamespot and there'll be an even bigger corporate emphasis on arranging for good reviews by whatever means they can.

5. Define innovation. Are you going to basically shower money on Nintendo's developers for each game which includes motion controls, or gets the tablet controller to do something vaguely useful? You're probably going to get far more cheap gimmicks that interrupt gameplay than gameplay-centric innovations out of this.


6. Most movie-based games are crap. It's not something I would want to legislate, but seeing such legislation is something I wouldn't weep over. It would be better, though, if it were permitted, but only after, say, 6 months from the movies release. Usually, the biggest problem with movie based games is that they're rushed to just make for another piece of movie merchandise.

7. No particular complaints here with the grand idea, but putting concrete rewards on it would be a terrible idea. We'd see the token black guy in every game, along with the token Jew, the token Muslim, the token gay, the token girl... and they'd end up comprising the whole cast in an effort to get money. We've already got enough of that in pretty much every form of media, and it would not lead to a deeper understanding of other cultures when it was a trick to get funding.

8. So... if Journey cost $10 for a 2-hour game, any Disgaea should cost $1000 for a far more than 200 hour game? Or should Disgaea 4 be considered the gold standard of games and the only one to cost $60? There's a hell of a lot of things wrong with that idea. There's also that many games would quickly become multi-player only so that they couldn't be rated exclusively by their singleplayer.

9. Note that this wasn't nearly as big of a problem until Gamestop muscled in with its aggressive used-games-centric business model. With #10 (not a bad idea, actually), the profits for second-hand versus new games drop significantly, and probably that with the consumer backlash will solve it. Good luck enforcing #10, however.

11: I love innovative games. Unfortunately, there actually are good reasons to not pursue them and they're also rarely stable investments (not just in that they turn out poor or sell poorly, but they never make it out of development). People who don't know what the hell they're talking about are also the most likely to spout out radically new ideas, and those are rarely good game developers.

12: Proper conclusions would be nice. Good stories in the first place would be preferable, but whatever. But if it gets to the point of taxing cliffhangers... that's not a good idea.

The majority of these ideas are, IMO, things companies should follow, but should not be forced to (either legally or financially). Financial incentives speak much more persistently than artistic integrity; when the former becomes influential the latter gets abandoned. Start paying lots of people for a good artistic convention and pretty soon it loses all of the meaning that was good about it in the first place due to the legions of copycats.

And many of these rules are quite horribly subjective, which invites abuse with a red carpet and an open wine bottle.