What does the game industry have against innovation?

#1 My comments on this:

http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/2005/12/cage-match-innovation-vs-content-vs.htm...

It kinda evolved into a discussion of how do you FOSTER innovation, because you do need it. It's the local maxima problem - the optimal choice for the short term is NOT the optimal choice for the long term.

#2 Interesting..I think its very sad how there isn't much innovation in gaming. Especially in next gen games. Another world war II game, another sci-fi game, another medieval RPG, another post apocalypse game, etc. Quite honestly I dont think gamers are even aware of innovation in games. Why, most of the gamers I know don't even know what a model is. Most just say, "Xbox 360 has amazing graphics!" Quite honestly I don't feel most next gen developers have been using the technology available to them very well. I mean, with a GPU like the 360's that supports pixel shader 3.0, how can you not use relief mapping in places? FarCry came out back in early 2004 and was already using parallax mapping. Perhaps I'm providing on shaders too much though. Anyway, just my opinion on things.

-Matt Vitelli

#3 I found that stuff they were saying about psychonauts a bit funny. Admittedly I didn't play it for very long, but it seemed like your run-of-the-mill adventure/ladders-and-levels game to me, though with an original storyline. I think innovation is about gameplay, not plot. I would consider a WWII game with innovative gameplay to be an innovative game.

#4 I've come to think that you can be innovative, but not too innovative. You can have a fresh, different setting for your game that fosters a new way of playing/interacting, but the player has to be able to identify or be receptive to it. You can add new forms of gameplay that haven't been done before, but the player has to be able to grasp it within the course of gameplay. These days, if a player doesn't "get it" within like 5 minutes, it becomes 'unplayable'. Thats kinda sad, but a byproduct I believe, from having games that play/look/feel the same.

In regard to Psychonauts, I thought it was the setting that did the most damage. There are people out there that simply won't touch a game because it looks "too wierd" or "too cartoony". Artistic innovation can be just as effective as innovation gameplay, both positive and negative. People are supposedly tired of teh WWII scenario, but I'll bet that Call of Duty 2 sold more copies than Psychonauts. (I have COD2 myself, and honestly, it feels the same as the first game).

As far as the industry and innovation, there won't be any change if there is no reason for one. Very few businesses of various types are willing to offer a change in products or services unless the demand is there for something new. If the majority consumer is satisfied, things will remain status quo for the most part.

#5 The trick with innovation is that people usually don't like to be pushed too far out of their comfort zone.

This has been true since before PONG. Nolan Bushnell's first arcade machine was Computer Space, based on the SpaceWar! computer game he'd played at the University of Utah. The game did poorly. It was too weird for audiences at the time. Too different. Too much innovation all at once.

So he did Pong. The simplest game they could come up with, based on an analog that people were familiar with (ping-pong). The medium was still weird and innovative and unfamiliar, but the gameplay was familiar. The rest is history, and Atari enjoyed almost a decade of riding the crest of runaway success.

Years later, after people were used to the concept of videogames, a game called Asteroids became a huge success. Strangely enough, its gameplay was not too unlike Computer Space. If it had been released in 1974 instead of Pong, it might have failed just as badly as Computer Space. It was just too big of a step for the audience.

#6

Quote:
I found that stuff they were saying about psychonauts a bit funny. Admittedly I didn't play it for very long, but it seemed like your run-of-the-mill adventure/ladders-and-levels game to me, though with an original storyline.

Sam (inadvertantly) touched on an interesting point here that I'd never really given much thought to - that is: "What do gamers consider innovative vs. what developers consider innovative?"

When I stop to think about that for a moment, I'm taken back to some of my fond old favorites that, at the time, seemed fresh and innovative to me.

Tomb Raider anyone?

Let's be honest here, there was no single aspect of Tomb Raider that was truly innovative from a technological or development standpoint - running, jumping, climbing, swimming and shooting? All been done before. Solve puzzles to progress? Also been done before.

Nothing there -in and of itself- is strikingly innovative, but the combination of those elements, the overall experience that the game play provided - THAT was innovative and addictive to me. Hell, it was one of my first real inspirations to begin learning game design.

The point being, there are innovations that will win accolades from other developers, and there are innovations that win accolades from gamers - those two are not necessarily the same thing. (C;

#7 It's harder to be innovative these days. 20 years ago, every idea was fresh and new. But they were so basic and obvious. How many more ways can you shoot, climb, fight, jump, fly, puzzle solve, swim, race, build/manage, and go adventuring? Every game after the first couple are just clones and remakes. It's not as easy anymore. On top of this, great things are far and few between by nature. How many players have been in the NBA since it started? Now how many Jordan caliber players have there been in the NBA to date? Only a few. How many Ladanian Tomlinsons, Jeff Gordons, Einstiens, Tupacs, and John Williamses, and Dinzel Washingtons are in their respective industries? Only a few.

Also, I believe it's no longer Microsoft, Sony, Square-Enix, and EA's job to think up new and interesting ideas, completley different from what we have ever seen. They aren't willing to take risks on a fresh idea when Madden 92-2006 and Final Fantasy 1-12 are still selling like crazy. If I was a large corporation where my main priority is money and business, I would take the same stance.

But instead of complaining about how the industry isn't making innovative games anymore, you should be excited by this fact. I believe this gives us indies a chance to give something to the gaming community that nobody else is willing to do. It's now our responsability to make these fresh new games. We don't have a choice but to make an off the wall title because we can't compete with Bungie and Capcom. But it's a good thing.

Now when EA *coughteamworlddominationcough* starts making small "indie" caliber games (EA Pogo I think it's called), then we're in trouble. They'll just take our ideas and market them as their own innovations and use their widespread advertising power to make our games look like the copycat. Fight Nights innovative hip roll that brought boxing games back to life was originally thought up in a little unknown PS2 game that came out in 2002 called Victorious Boxers.

So basically what I'm saying is instead of complaining, take advantage of this (possibly small) chance to be innovative and reap the benefits of it while you can, and fight to keep it ours.
-Ajari-

#8 Hey, even 20 years ago... heck, let's say THIRTY years ago... innovation was mostly technological rather than gameplay. You know how many PONG clones (and variations) there were? How about the number of titles that were basically "Space Invaders."

And lets not talk about the number of Pac-Man variants that appeared on home computers around 1981-1984.

And the "Breakout" clones never did stop coming. Just look for number of paddle-and-ball Aquanoid type games that come out each year from the indies. Game Tunnel even has those games in their own CATEGORY because they are so plentiful.

The "Side Scroller" game came into its own with Super Mario Brothers back in 1985 or so and never went away. Acclaim built its business on licensing the videogame rights for major movies or comics, slapping new art in their basic 2D side-scroller engine, and releasing it on multiple platforms (well, Nintendo and Sega).

The "innovation problem" isn't new. It's exacerbated by the skyrocketing costs of developing mainstream games, so I'd conceed its worse than it used to be, but it's hardly new.

#9 Yeah your right Jay. Your a little older than me so you would know about all the clones from back in the day. This is kind of new news to me, the only other games I know like Pac Man are Mrs. Pac Man and Pac Man Jr. (I'm an Atari 5200, NES kid and didn't really hit arcades until Street Fighter II around '91), but makes perfect sense and seems like exacly what would happen.

On top of this, not everybody wants innovation in thier games. The mass consumer can't wait for another Burnout or Metal Gear. While Halo 1 and 2 are NOTHING new, I've slowly become a Halo fan over the years and have come to the conclusion that when Halo 3 drops for the 360, I don't want anything to change except for updated graphics, a couple of new weapons, (pretty much like Halo 2 to Halo 1) and a few new "wow" moments during the story mode. Why mess up a good thing. Yeah it's the same old same old, but that doesn't mean it's still not a great game that's fun to play. Eventually it'll fizzle out like Street Fighter II and it's many upgrades, but until then, I'm enjoying a game that's in the moment, and a genre that I'm familiar with. Besides, it won't come out for another two years as is, so can you imagine how long it will take if they tried to reinvent it. By then their window may have closed. In the mean time I'm trying to dream up something fresh and creative to offer the world. Not easy at all. These big companies have it a lot easier than we do, and when your in major business making major money, you wouldn't want it any other way.

The topic of this thread is "What does the game industry have against innovation?"
I've learned that 9 out of 10 questions can be answered very simply with one universal answer. Money. The lack of it, the fear of losing it, the hopes of gaining it, and having too much of it. Why don't I have a a million dollar music studio (yet)? Why don't I quit my day job? Why am I trying to start my own businesses and going to school on the side? Why does everybody on Mtv Cribs have more cars than most of us have changes of underwear? The same reason the game industry isn't big on innovation.
-Ajari-

#10 It's all about risk. It's pretty obvious that psychonauts bombed. It got about the same number of sales as a somewhat embarassing game a company I worked for made, Michelle Kwan Figure Skating. That game targeted small kids probably 4-10 year olds and yet 2-3 years later the game had sold over 60,000 copies to mostly 18 - 30 year old women.

So Psychonauts which has moved nearly 51,000 copies on the Xbox, not quite 23,000 on the PlayStation 2, and a little more than 12,000 on the PC, didn't do well at all really.

Another game that we did was Hotwheels Stunt track driver, basicaly a rotating low poly car in front of pre rendered video. The first copy had sold well over 400,000 copies on the PC by the time we worked on the sequel.

I think Indies, if we can make games that are a little different, solid gameplay, the same polish as commercial games and half decent visuals. We do have a good chance of suceeding, we don't have to have a runaway success in the first month like the commercial games do. We can build up our sales and tweak our games over 1-3 years and work at making the games hits, without spending the vast ammounts of money retail requires. We just need to make the games and have good business and marketing sense. Something that most indies don't have unfortunately.

#11 Good points. Another game that doesn't seem to change much at all is Unreal. Now I was too young for the original unreal but the later versions that I've played have seemed like Tribes duplicates. Unreal1 was released in April 1998 while Tribes was released in November 1998 I believe. From the videos of Unreal1 it doesnt look at all like the new Unreals gameplay wise. I could be wrong though.

Ubisoft has taken a few risks. I mean, King Kong was pretty original in my opinion. It took some of the things I loved so much in Carnivores and gave a totally new twist to things. And it's a movie game that was pretty good just like Riddick was.

#12 I was reading a book called Theory of Fun in Game Design http://www.theoryoffun.com/ which I got for christmas that ligthly covered this. In essance it is that people like what they are already good at and the stranger games that people aren't used to don't slide into this.

#13 I think Psychonauts was innovative because it tried to tap into a different market than other XBox developers have (the definition of the word is broader than most think). This game was geared towards the XBox, which only caters to a specific audience right now and Psychonauts was not following in the footsteps of the other developers pumping out the same repetitive stuff on that system. XBox's limited game selection in comparison to PS2 is the main reason I do not own one.

A major problem for Psychonauts was lack of support from a major publisher and the media (including Gamespot). I have seen some of the worst games get great sales just because of hype generated by Internet and print media. They let themselves get worked up by the publishers, and if Psychonauts had a big publisher with a great marketing department sales would probably have been different.

Innovative, in my opinion does not have to mean creating something that has never been seen before. It can mean creating something that has never been seen before on a specific platform, like putting an MMORPG on PS2, or making a cartoony, stylized, platformer game on XBox. If Psychonauts was successful on XBox, could it have opened up the market on that platform for developers who make platformer, Nintendo style games that focused on gameplay and appealed to a younger audience? If Psychonauts successfully did this would it then be considered innovative and forward-looking?

#14 Once you get rid of people like SOE's Smedley innovation will come.

Right now they just want you on a level grind... complemented with a constant "patch" of changes.

Instead of presenting finished works of art that people can get into.

#15 I read somethign which said that most of the time, reviewers eschew giving kudos to the true innovations. Here's the link and some selected quotations.

www.squidi.net/blog/2005/blog05.12.php#05.12.22

Quote:At the same time, I started (finally) playing Romancing SaGa. Despite being a remake of a much older game, it's new to me and I think it is extremely unique. Gamespot gave it a 6.0 (it was so bad, the review link doesn't even work). Unlimited SaGa, which is even more unique, got a... wait for it... 4.3!!!

They gave Dragon Quest 8 (a series not known for innovation and though liked for its story and design, considered a backwards step in mechanics by most DQ fans - I haven't played it yet) a 9.0. Actually, looking at their top rated PS2 games, all but two are sequels and only a handful could be consider non-derivative (God of War, GTA3, etc). Now, I know they've got different people doing the reviewing and stuff, but shouldn't they practice what they preach?

I mean, how can they bitch and moan about the lack of innovation when they have NEVER rewarded innovation itself. There is no partial credit for trying something new, and I dare suggest that perhaps credit is taken off by these backseat game designers. This goes beyond the traditional most-hyped-games-get-best-scores thing (there are rumors that perhaps certain someones going by the initials of GK may have accepted more than two dozen bribes in the past year to artificially increase a score, or decrease a competitors). If you look at the games with NO money in advertising, the generic stuff still wins out over the "weird" stuff. I use "weird" in quotes because different is not wrong, though you wouldn't know it by game "journalists". I use "journalists" in quotes because they are anything but. Harry Knowles is harder to buy off.

Quote:I have a sneaky suspicion that if you rated each game based on uniqueness (not including sequels and spin offs), you'd find an inverse relationship with the average review score. I say uniqueness rather than innovation because nobody can agree on what positive innovation is, and I suggest excluding sequels just because they tend to be rated equally poor for the same reason that they would be rated equally high otherwise.

Quote:However, if it is a unique game with a lot of exposure (like say, being by Square-Enix) it will not get a free pass from reviewers and will end up with very harsh reviews that dwell on bugs and balance issues that something like Metal Gear Solid 3 would pass with flying colors. I heard a review of Geist which complained about the footstep noises being monotonous. I've read reviews of tactics games that were called imbalanced by reviewers which gave Final Fantasy Tactics a perfect score (I'm saying that FFT is bad - I love it, but you can't deny that the Final Fantasy named helped it a lot more than the Tactics Ogre lineage. Tactics Ogre got horrible scores).

Ooh! And here, he challenges the indie game makers.

Quote:Smaller, independant company does NOT mean unique games. In the US, at least, most small companies basically recreate old genres like puzzle games or shooter with a few elements taken from other games. Most of these companies literally reivent the stone wheel with their games, the risk being actually creating a game and releasing it - NOT creating a NEW game and releasing it. Many of these games seem new only because either you don't know which game they are copying (apparently, the Spectrum days were quite popular), or the complete lack of ANY diversity in the game industry at all makes what little diversity seen by these smaller companies seem more interesting. I'm being harsh, but it is earned. You guys CAN take the risks when the larger publishers CAN NOT. So... why don't you? My guess. These companies are made by artists or programmers, and not game designers (though I'm sure that their business card has all three listed - *sigh*).

Innovation happens in small steps. For instance, making an RPG without hitpoints is a tiny innovation. However, people only worship innovation if it is significant and unique. Most game series evolve slowly through such baby steps (Tony Hawk series is the PERFECT example of this). However, for it to be really noticable, it needs to be a more unique experience. If they made a science fiction Tony Hawk rather than grinding the seven hundreth sidewalk, then all the minor additions to the series would carry more weight. This is a minor innovation itself. If they made it scifi but didn't have any other changes to the game, then it would still suck. Got to compound small innovations together so they create a unique experience as a whole.

And for the record, Beyond Good and Evil isn't really that innovative. It plays really a lot like Legend of Zelda to me but with the occasional other bit thrown in there like the Looter Chases in the caves. Its a fun game, but its not something that was really a major piece of innovation.

I think people confuse uniqueness, innovation and quality. JUst because you got it right where toehrs have failed, does not mean that you are being innovative. If anything, you're proving that something can be done, but I'm not sure if that's innovation.

Eh.. What do I know.

And I know he made a mistake about Darwinia. THat was out months before he said anything about it and it was re-released on Steam that week.

#16 An old thread, but I have only one word on this ...

Dominions. Written by a development team of two. And the third version comes out in a couple months, the series has been wildly successful in a genre that's supposed to take tons of people on the development team. Innovation still brings success, if you do it smart.

#17 Innovation is a POV term, thats why publishers don't like it.
Some people think waving the Revolution controller around to use a lightsaber is innovative, but others know the technology has been used for a decade. Most games incorperating original ideas have them overshadowed by common gameplay issues that weren't focused on during development.