There is much debate on the Twitters amongst games journalists (although it is applicable to journalism of any sort) with regards writing for free to break into the industry. Most detractors of the “connections and experience” argument cite Harlan Ellison’s excellent “Pay the Writer” video which I suggest you watch if you are a) remotely interested in writing and b) remotely interested in seeing the kind of person you will turn into if you succeed at it.
However, I believe that the exact same argument can be applied to game design, and I shall use the release of the excellent 2D platformer Rayman Origins to back me up.
You see, Rayman Origins is proof that game design doesn’t sell. Despite its critical acclaim, most if not all reviewers commented that it would struggle to sell at a triple-A RRP and when it failed to chart in the top 40 in the UK it appeared that they were right. At the time most podcasts were alive with discussion on why exactly this was. Could it be that it was too colourful and childish in its style and therefore off-putting to the hardcore gamer? How about the fact that it’s not a brown FPS- that’s what all the kids are buying these days after all? Is the genre itself dead?
My response would be; because I can play as good if not better 2D platformers for free.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you a little site called Kongregate, a place where you can play all manner of indie games for free. These “CV pieces” are wildly varied and can often be quite embarrassing, but unfortunately for the professional 2D platformer designer, they can also be exceptionally good.
Because anyone can make a 2D platformer. The tools to do so are widely available in various GameMaker style formats (or just a copy of LittleBigPlanet 2)- tweak the parameters for gravity and inertia and you’re good to go. The skill therefore is not in creating a 2D platformer, but in designing one, and it doesn’t matter how good or bad your graphics are, if the platforms and spiked pits aren’t put together well, it’s not going to be fun.
This need for fine-tuned perfection is not present amongst the traditional triple-A genres, no one slates you if the door positioning is a little out of place, and your game doesn’t flop if your gun’s rate of fire is slightly slow. Sure they detract from the experience, but there’s so much else there to pick up the slack- fancy 3D graphics, a sense of scale, the dozens of hours running time, hundreds of enemies, vehicles, explosions! These blockbuster trappings are what sell games and blockbuster trappings as we know from actual blockbusters take huge teams of people months if not years to produce. When customers slap £40 on the counter they’re paying for that scale, they’re happy to spend that money because it took hundreds of people a very long time to make that product, so of course its justified. It’s the classic example of quantity over quality, but not in the sense that the two are mutually exclusive, but in the sense that what customers pay for is quantity, quality is a lovely bonus.
Rayman Origins is just quality. Pure perfected gameplay crafted by designers at the top of their game with a subtly sohpisticated art style that is not only unintrusive, but also complementary to the gameplay.
Unfortunately, Braid has all that as well.
And Super Meatboy.
And if you strip away the premium animation and art, there are a lot of designers on Kongregate who can provide as high a quality of entertainment in a much smaller burst. But when it’s free you can just find another burst to make up the time.
Pure game design doesn’t cost time or resources (comparitively) it simply takes skill, and now the internet has made skill easy to discover and distribute, people become less willing to pay a premium for it. Indies are proving now more than ever that they have skill, what they don’t have is the budget or resources to make Gears of War, and it’s only by making an experience that cannot be easily replicated for much less cost, that the triple-A games remain at triple-A prices.
