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« on: January 03, 2007, 10:12:00 pm »
I'm baffled.
The industry is finished for start-up teams now. It's a fact.
I've been doing this for 23 years and I've seen the once great UK games scene turn into a ghost town. Pixels aren't going to go away, but making a really good living out of them is proving to be increasingly difficult.
I've freelanced for most of my professional career and the handheld development scene in the UK and Europe is pretty much a thing of the past. I had some great years with GBC and GBA and can actually remember it going POP!
The year is a bit vague now but I'll never forget it was a September and all my clients just disappeared.
The industry drew it's horns in and decided to try something else.
Too many people jumped on the handheld bandwagon thinking that it was fast and easy money. None of that "let's take 3 years to develop a ps2 title that might not even sell if it's finished" bollocks. No, these guys saw development times drop from years to months and imagined the revenue they could generate by turning out 3 titles a year instead of one every 3 years.
Acres of crap was produced, I worked on some of it; I'm not ashamed, when someone offers you money you don't say "no thanks. I don't want to pay my mortgage this month. I would rather keep my integrity intact."
It would be nice to be able to do that, but this is reality and anyone who actually DOES that is either rich already or clinically insane.
Working on titles you like, or titles that you are proud of is a rarity, for the above reasons. Freelancers and in-house artists have little or no input in what titles they work on or indeed the design of the title itself. Unless you are working for a small company and you are part of the start-up team that is.
But most people want to work for established companies, with years of experience and shed-loads of cash behind them.
These companies are machines. They seldom care about the true quality of their titles. If they did they wouldn't fill them with hours of pointless FMV and waste countless hundreds of thousands of pounds / dollars on said FMV. They would spend it on the best designers, the best artists and take the japanese on at their own game and make quality titles.
But let's be honest (cynical, yes, but honest as well.)
Most games today are a clone of some earlier and more successful title.
Bully/Dog eat Dog call it what you will is GTA with kids. It's the Sims with violence. Who in their right mind would want to sit building Sims year after year?
Wooo...they have different hairstyles in this version!!!
Hoo-bloody-ray!
If you come into the games industry you must realise that what was once fun becomes the way to pay the bills, pure and simple. And if Microprose offer you a quarter of a million to develop Strawberry Shortcake or Muppet babies. You snatch it out of their hand so fast their heads spin. And hopefully you can try to do the best Strawberry Shortcake or Muppet babies title ever.
But that's debatable, because EA and THQ and Microsoft and all the other behemoths now have the industry in a stranglehold.
Having a demo for one of the consoles is very unlikely, Dev Kits cost a small fortune.
Even the mobile scene, while still paying my bills in a semi-erratic manner is lost and confused. It tries to take on the consoles and shouldn't.
It's a new beast and should act like one, but it too has it's own inherent problems. Try designing a game for a mobile sometime. It's a nightmare. The control system is a pig.
Mobile companies open and close at an alarming rate, but not for much longer.Again the behemoths are coming along and buying up the teams who have been around for a few years and have one or two titles under their belt.
Starting afresh these days is, while not impossible, at least terrifyingly difficult and I wouldn't encourage anyone.
The handhelds are on something of a hiatus. Most titles are developed in the States, not many of them let's be honest. And the Stateside dev scene is almost sewn up by the likes of Vicarious Visions etc.
We'd all love to work on a clone of our favourite game, but as I mentioned in a ost that got people really annoyed with me many years ago on the old Pixelation site, "Why develop a Castlevania clone when people can buy Castlevania?"
Licenses sell.
Painful but true. Your small team of empassioned mates may have created this entire fantasy world and drawn some beautiful sprites and backgrounds. Your coder might have written some of the best code ever. But if it's not a movie or tv license, it's almost guaranteed that no-one will touch it with a bargepole. Or if they DO actually buy it then it will sit on the bottom shelf while the kids run out and buy the latest Naruto title or Harvest Moon 7.
All of the points the guys mentioned above about following the rules are all very well and good. But the bottom line is this.
Do you enjoy what you do?
Do you want to get paid for it?
Are you prepared to relocate? (the chances of finding a local company are astronomical)
If all of the above apply then you are going to be working for an established company. Most BIG companies have designers seperate from artists, so they won't want to hear your ideas. they pay a designer for that.
And if you DO get a job with a BIG established comany, you will have NO say in what type of games you develop graphics for. The Suits at the very top decide that and they won't even know you exist. They seldom if ever come down from their ivory towers to meet the workers, and even if they do they have more pressing things to fill their time with than remembering the name of someone they most likely will only ever see from a distance at the company Christmas party.
You must learn to balance what you do with WHY you do it.
You got into pixels because you love it. The job you do from 9 to 5 will pay for your house, your bills and your family. (I know that mst of you are probably too young to even have left home yet, but go with me on this.)
The Job you do from 9 to 5 will be filled with a lot of crap you don't want to do. But do the best possible. Bite the bullet. If you kick up a stink and complain, there's loads more kids out ther who will jump at the chance to sit at your desk.
If you want to do games for fun, do them at night. Freelance every now and then. Small jobs.
Draw your brains out. Draw amazing things.
These will NEVER make you rich anywhere except inside.