John Carmack Interview - part #2 - briefly
(hx) 04:03 PM CET - Jan,11 2007
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Game
Informer has posted the second part of their id Software interview with John
Carmack And Todd Hollenshead by amending the original article. Topics in the
second part include the Nintendo Wii, episodic gaming, Steam, QuakeCon and the
DOOM movie. Here's a taster:
GI: What are your thoughts on episodic gaming?
Carmack: You know, it's one of those things that sounds like a good idea
initially, but I'm not sure that-it'll probably have some degree of
success-but I don't think it's necessarily a method that's going to cover the
majority of the gaming market right now. I think it does tend to feel a
little bit-it's all in market psychology and all of that, and I won't claim to
be any kind of an expert on that there. It would be nice if games could be
developed more piecemeal like that, but it still is so heavily front-loaded to
build your basic core on there. It would be great if you could go ahead and
release episodes regularly after that, but I think the customers feel to some
degree that if they buy a game and they can get episodic additions to it, that
there's this sense of, "Why didn't they just put that on there when I bought the
main game itself?" I think there are some barriers to overcome. It would be
nice when Internet distribution does become the main way that people get their
games and you can just continue carrying out additional upgrades as long as
you've got enough people willing to buy them. I think that would be good for
game-development studios. But, so far, nothing's come along that really
satisfies the same thing as the blockbuster commercial release. Of course, it's
a tough market, with winners and losers, but even if you're in the winner's
slot, that's still where the big successes are. But I do think it's possible for
a lot of the less-conventional marketing strategies to get to a lot of game
studios. There's probably a lot of good business there, but it's not the same
thing as if you've got the possibility of doing a triple A title, there's
nothing that's currently drawing you away from that.
Hollenshead: If you're doing a triple A title, I think there are
substantive reasons as to why you would choose to go that direction. I mean, the
first thing, as John said, is that the costs are front-loaded in terms of time
and the expenses, and basically the game has to be done, especially from a
programming standpoint, by the time you release the first episode. You can add
some features as you go along, but the fundamental aspects of what you're going
to be able to do from a significant level are going to have to be done. You
incur all the time and expense to create that, and typically the media creation
is not something that's gating you for release anyway. So, there's a bit of
out-of-sync between how you incur time and cost and how you would actually
recoup that through sales. Plus, there's the way that the market is set up and
the way consumer expectations are set, certainly, publishers' market games are
for games with a large launch with maybe some potential upside. You saw a
game like Battlefield: 1942 that had a big launch, but then when it caught on it
still had a crescendo of support. Typically, the game-sales curve is that you
have your biggest month in your launch month, and it decays from there as
retailers devote less and less shelf space to it, publishers devote less and
less marketing dollars to promoting it and those sorts of things. So,
talking about a long-term cycle of continuing to have to support that from a
retail channel of support and a marketing dollar channel of support-it's very
difficult for the market to understand how exactly that's going to work.
Carmack: Obviously, the retail chain's going to hate it.
Hollenshead: They're not going to like it, because you have effectively
one product that gets split into, let's say, four boxes at lower price points,
and that's the exact opposite direction that retail wants to be in. If you're
talking about Internet distribution, there are issues there, but the main one is
that even when you look at Half Life 2 and the episodic content, the biggest
litmus test is taking a triple A title, where you have retail distribution and
Internet distribution, and the choice that Valve made was to have both, which I
think tells you that even with a company that's extremely motivated-because they
have their own proprietary distribution system-to go exclusively with that
distribution system understands that from a market reality standpoint that if
you want the big dollars, you're going to have to be in retail stores, too, at
this point in time.
Carmack: That is one of the interesting things about the cell-phone
market, where instead of the fall off on sales curves like with PC titles, the
cell-phone ones actually tend to grow with time as word-of-mouth gets around.
And it's an interesting different sales dynamic, and I do always hope for
something that-it's sort of a shame, where with a cell phone, most of the
content comes over the air, which has this weird dynamic with the fact that
memories are getting huge on the cell phones and you have a little straw to suck
the content through, and that has its own set of issues. It has the potential
there, where if people are always buying the games on there, where it should be
this egalitarian system where you should be able to get any sort of content
through there, but because of the way that it is tightly controlled by the
providers on there-who are not exactly nimble, quick companies-and they have
that aspect of that, dealing with the actual cell-phone companies does stink.
It's interesting to play around with different distribution strategies and
technologies on something like that where you're not talking about sinking
thirty million dollars on development into something that you want to roll the
dice on.
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