[Teuthida]

Gotta love angry game developers. Some very good (and bias to a point) views below.

How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are ****ED [laughter]. We are well and truly ****ed. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can’t afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it’s ok because the HD era is here right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of redwood city! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation’s time there are still games to love. You can start today.
[standing ovation]

Wal-Mart drives development decisions now. When publishers minimise risk by kow-towing to the retailers, you have a serious problem. When every game has to either be a blockbuster or a student film, we got a real problem.

We’re the only medium that lacks an alternate distribution system. All we have is boxed games sold at retail. This is changing a little. But think about our competition for your entertainment dollar. First run, broadcast, reruns, DVDs.. you name it. hardback, paperback, e-book. Theatre release, pay-per-view, video, DVD. We put our thing on the shelf at Wal-Mart, it sells or it doesn’t, and OMG you just blew 10m dollars.

I don't know about you but I could have been a lawyer, or a carpenter. or a sous-chef. How many of you are here because you’re after a paycheck? [One bloke raises his hand, audience laughs and crows]. Ahuh. And how many of you are here because you love games? [all hands go up]. Right. So we’re being told that everything’s going to get bigger. Paychecks. Budgets. Consoles. But is it going to get better? I’ve been researching old board games and I’ve spotted a pattern. A new genre: it’s called One Hit Game And Its Imitators. One fishing game appears in mid-19C and dozens follow. Games grow through innovations. Creations of new game styles that spawn imitators and whole new markets. The story of the past few decades is not about graphics and processing power, but startling innovation and industry. That’s why we love games. BUT IT’S OVER NOW!

Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto.

Games keep essential social myths in place. So we have tropes in our business. Criminals are cool. The commercial game business is a non-consensual relationship between middle aged men and young boys. It’s worse than the catholic church. These are guys who have really big tyres on their trucks … and we all know why! [laughter] So the fantasies of these guys position these boys as tiny little clones: so they force you to take your genius to create this .. this .. we can’t have that fellas. Oh by the way there was a crowd in the ladies bathroom today. w00t!

GTA. I talked to 22 little boys in LA, all of them wanted to see that game. With only one exception, the thing that they wanted to see was to be able to drive by their house. They weren’t interested in stealing cars. Or the criminals. Or the back-story. They weren’t interested in that, they wanted the simulation of driving by the house.

We model male ethos in the games we design: soldier, super athlete, criminal. Anyone who was born with internet and computers are prosocial. Skaters are mainstream. We have two models of alpha maleness: skaters and ballers [I have no idea what this is referring to - A]. … we need heroes, but what kind of heroes are we making? Where’s Malcolm X, or Chavez? There hasn’t been a game about geopolitics that was worth a **** since Hidden Agenda! We should be giving people rehearsals for citizenship and change. I have to tell you, Microsoft is the walking dead. DRM is a wet dream. It’s not gonna work! Cat’s out the bag! When this happens, you have to let the cards fly in the air and fall where they may. GIVE IT UP ABOUT DRM. GIVE IT UP ABOUT OWNERSHIP. Cleave to open source! A NEW ECONOMY IS COMING. As we become further connected we will find new economies emerging. We are the wellspring of popular culture. We have a responsibility.

It pains me to say this but I recently just took a job at EA. However, I worked for Will on the game you just saw, so.. [laughter] I’m going to rant about How Sony And Microsoft Are About To Screw Your Game Design. Look, how are we going to get where gameplay, graphics and physics are all evenly well balanced? At the moment we’re the 120lb weakling, except nowadays his right arm here, graphics, is enormous.

So, as you know, graphics and physics grind on large homogenous floating point data structures in a very straight-line structured way. Then we have AI and gameplay code. Lots of exceptions, tunable parameters, indirections and often messy. We hate this code, it’s a mess, but this is the code that makes the game DIFFERENT. Here is the terrifying realization about the next generation consoles: I’m about to break a ton of NDAs here, oh well, haha, I never signed them anyway.

Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Modern CPUs use out-of-order execution, which is there to make crappy code run fast. This was really good for the industry when it happened, although it annoyed many assembly language wizards in Sweden. Xenon and Cell are both in-order chips. What does this mean? It’s cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of cores. One out-of-order core is about four times [did I catch that right?Alice] the size of an in-order core. What does this do to our code? It’s great for grinding on floating point, but for anything else it totally sucks. Rumours from people actually working on these chips – straight-line runs 1/3 to 1/10th the performance at the same clock speed. This sucks.

We hope Nintendo doesn’t follow Sony and Microsoft on this, although they totally flailed this generation so anything could happen. Think about batchable designs and simulationy systems. You wanna just write the gameplay. You could just do PC games. Luckily due to the power of Will Wright, our game is a PC game! [laughter]

Q: I am one of the bad guys: I’m working on a big budget next generation console game. I want to ask about totally legalised piracy? Not Russia and grey market – I’m talking Blockbuster. 20 dollars a year you can borrow whatever you like then give it back. People are going to rent my game for 4 dollars. I won’t see any of that. They’re robbing me!

Chris: I’m pro-piracy. I want people to play the games I make. I do it because it’s art. I think DRM is a total ****ing stupid mess. If the game industry collapses and can be reborn, I’m all for it. Pirate on!

Greg: they’re not pirating the game! Someone bought a legal copy! The world is not designed in such a way that money inherently funnels its way into your wallet!?

Warren: I never minded piracy. Anyone who minds about piracy is full of ****. Anyone who pirates your game wasn’t going to buy it anyway!