All ye who enter here be doomed!
As if this year's GDC rant was not enough to convince everyone that innovation in the game industry was a thing of the past now everyone’s favorite tech curmudgeon is calling a top and declaring that the industry is doomed.
Physics. Real-Time physics are next and after that believable character AI and then things will really start cooking when we innovate new interfaces and gameplay based on voice recognition.
Get the picture?
When the John Carmack’s,Tim Sweeney’s and John Ratcliff's of the industry get bored writing networked 3d rendering engines they will bring their drive and genius to the neglected sectors of game development. Keep those next-gen platforms coming because once we have photo-realistic rendering we’ll still have plenty of work for faster processors.
Didn’t someone once say something equally stupid like “no one will ever need more than 640k”?
None of this will save a doomed industry. The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?
Physics. Real-Time physics are next and after that believable character AI and then things will really start cooking when we innovate new interfaces and gameplay based on voice recognition.
Get the picture?
When the John Carmack’s,Tim Sweeney’s and John Ratcliff's of the industry get bored writing networked 3d rendering engines they will bring their drive and genius to the neglected sectors of game development. Keep those next-gen platforms coming because once we have photo-realistic rendering we’ll still have plenty of work for faster processors.
I really can't imagine this scene continuing as it is for much longer. I suspect that the next generation of machines will be the last—or at least the last in the current boom market. It will be downhill from there.
Didn’t someone once say something equally stupid like “no one will ever need more than 640k”?
posted by foolkilla at
7:18 PM
3 Comments:
Dvorak has not been my favorite curmudgeon for quite a while. It's hard to take his post seriously - it seems more likely he's trolling just to get the site hits up.
There *are* new genres being created; the process just isn't that recognizable. While it's true that a successful game will breed a bevy of clones/sequels/pretenders, the same could be said about any other entertainment medium. After all, every new book is just a rehash of an old plot.
New genres? How about DDR and Karaoke Revolution? The success of these games have proven that they are not merely gimmicks with a new input device. How about modern MMOs? Some would argue that these are just MUDs with nice graphics, but it's hard to compare a castle seige in Lineage 2 involving several hundred players with text based chat.
By
Peter Freese, at Wed May 04, 03:00:00 PM 2005
Exactly Peter! It all boils down to a Law of Conservation of Ideas: New ideas are not created but rather rearranged.
By
foolkilla, at Wed May 04, 03:53:00 PM 2005
The quest for photorealism is more emblematic for the drive by marketing and Wal-Mart for ever prettier screen shots on the back of the box. Granted the last 10 yards to that goal will face diminishing returns and there is a tipping point we are closing in on where the increase in the quality of these screenshots will drop off.
When we reach the point where a 100% increase in development costs only nets a 1% improvement in visual quality the gig will be up. Then marketing will need new ways to differentiate and sell product. At this point the focus will shift to art style, gameplay and innovative features. On the coding front this means that both CPU cycles and top engineering talent will be freed up to work on tasks like Physics, AI and new UI (i.e. voice recognition).
And that gets us to the golden age of innovation in game development!
By
foolkilla, at Thu May 05, 11:31:00 PM 2005
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