One of the fun parts of prevalent social media platforms is the accessibility it gives us to those traditionally insulated 'knowledgeable' sectors of industry. Previously for insight on your favourite industry you would have to comb enthusiast magazines and pray someone says something passingly interesting- now you get a shower tweet ever other minute by a leading authority on your favourite industry just spilling the deepest darkest secrets that nobody thought would ever get out. It's gratifying for the layman who has no routes into the industry but claws fruitlessly at the door hoping for the tablescraps of those in the high table. Finally! Table scraps be landing! And I, for one, am very interested to hear the latest loose morsel slipping from the plate of Legendary Game Director Josh Sawyer! (Who'd have thought we'd get some tea from him?)
What he brought was a very interesting piece of insight into the decline of the Isometric RPG genre which occurred right after the success of two of the franchises biggest cheerleaders, more or less. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 brought the role playing freedom of Dungeons and Dragons to the video game landscape in a way that no one had quite done before, and it did so in a unique town-down 'isometric' view style that would soon catch on as the visual hallmark of mechanically complex and systematically robust RPGs- which would come to be later known under the moniker of 'CRPGs'. (Of course, the reason for this particular viewing angle was simply because that was the way the Infinity Engine ran games, and both original Baldur's Gate games, and the Icewind Dale games, ran on that engine.)
And yet that style of game started to drift away into the 2000's, until by the 2010's that style of game would be practically no more spurring on a resurgence of interest later into the decade with the rise of the Classic RPG that spawned such nostalgic gems as Pillars of Eternity, Tides of Numenera, Pathfinder Kingmaker and so on. Such also brought the return of the indepth and unabashedly complex roleplaying game, a niche that had become all but extinct in the watering down of the RPG genre to it's base components. It was the shifting tides of interest that spelled the death of the genre and a longer for more down to earth times that sparked it's renewal. Or so I once believed. With Josh Sawyer's testimony it might just seem the true culprit- is retail themselves!
Remember that there was a time when physical retailers held enormous power over the market of games sold. Those store fronts were the primary means through which publishers distributed games into the hands of players, and the war to win digital storefronts took many years to settle into any sort of popularity. Before the digital age we live in now, if a storefront simply refused to stock your game for any reason (say because you were refused a rating) then that was it, kaput- your game was a good as dead. But decisions such as that were not always made for such drastic scenarios as classification confusion. Sometimes the problem was just pure unfiltered idiocy on the part of the distributor. In fact, it was often as simple as bureaucracy.
Ask any retailer from around about that time and they'd probably recall that the falling interest in the genre is what led to poor sales, but Sawyer remembers things a little differently. Sawyer attributes the downfall of the genre largely to the influence of retailers on the industry and what he coins as "Vibes-based forecasting". Essentially we're talking about the kinds of systemic industry-effecting decisions that are decided on the wobbly whims of some spotty exec who feels his way to changing the face of gaming as we know it. Which isn't actually as insane of a prospect as it sounds when you take into account the industry that we're talking about here. (The industry of video games tends to eat it's own tail like that, we often find.)
Sawyer himself testifies to witnessing sales representatives "declare a genre/style/look was dead with zero supporting data" which would inspire them to start stocking less of that game, which means less available to the public so the game doesn't spread as far and less people become fans of the genre. Hence the self-fulfilling prophecy. And another Bioware Writer 'David Gaider' goes even further to claim that the sort of lop-sided way to view the future of the industry does no just end at the sales people. He proports a similar mindset that" creeps into dev teams- some things are simply declared dead or too old-fashioned, and there's no opposing this certainty up until someone else comes along and proves it's 100% untrue." I suspect that might draw to mind the way that Larian flipped the script on popular standards, making a numbers heavy RPG topdog once again.
And as I alluded to earlier, this kind of nepotistic and unintelligent design has been heard of before in discourse around the industry. The very state of Ubisoft, who's condition we cruelly mock like the satyr stumming his lute at the garish and unseemly, is very much due to the machinations of one Serge Hascoët- a man who's deeds I reference often but who's name I don't think has even darkened this blog before. Not because of some paranoia of receiving a ghostly visitation, I just can't stand to think of the man. (And that's a confusing name to remember anyway.) He was essentially a vibes-based Ubisoft producer who greenlit games based entirely on his extremely narrow tastes which ended up Pidgeon-holing all of Ubisoft franchise games into being watered down clones of one another. Ever wonder how every Ubisoft game started getting drones in the same couples of years, a trend that has stuck around to this day? Look at Serge!
Which I suppose begs to question what is the lesson to be learned from all of this, years on from the fact? (Except for the Ubisoft thing- they are very much yet to prove they've learned anything since the departure of Serge and Valhalla followed by Mirage is not exactly putting the most reassuring step forward.) I think the lesson is that following the whims of 'the market' is often a fools-game when we're talking about gaming, and more than not it robs genuine opportunity for the limp pursual of being the next big superstar. Of course, by it's very nature any video game development is an investment not in where the industry is today but rather where you think it might in a few years time- but there has to be some room for artistic standard in there too. Because clearly pure business mindedness leads to ruin just as surely as pure blindless would.
No comments:
Post a Comment