GDC 2010: "Fear and Loathing in Farmville"

I can’t believe one of the most important figures in strategy gaming, the guy who had a major hand in bringing us absolute classics like Civ 2, Alpha Centauri, Rise of Nations, and Rise of Legends is now Chief Designer for those creeps at Zynga*. This is not a recent development, I know, but I was reminded of his defection after reading about a GDC session he was a part of at Gamespot. After reading malphigian’s post, I’m throwing them (and OnLive) into the group of Companies That Are Doing Horrible Things to Gaming and Deserve to Die a Gruesome Death.

*I think he did it to make some real money and get his personal life back. Part of the appeal of these Facebook games is that they don’t require 6 months of 80 hours-a-week crunch time to make, right? So I don’t necessarily blame him. I’m sure he has a wife, kids, and interests outside of making games. It still sucks.

From people I’ve talked to who work there, Zynga’s a sweatshop. I don’t think Brian’s doing crazy hours, but many others are.

-Scott-

In honor of my similar loathing, I created a Facebook group that will accomplish little, but it is still better than “I bet I can get 1,000,000 strangers to eat a banana before 1,000,000 others will eat an apple.”…only slightly better.

Zynga can suck it!!! Just sayin’.

Or maybe it can be a springboard for a revolt. I mean, we can reach the 50,000,000 people that play daily and get them to boycott, right?

I’ve read this a number of times since (more or less) the arrival of the current console generation. And I don’t understand it.

For the last several years, AAA games have been produced to Xbox 360 specs. Which means you should be able to buy most of the tech and tools for a production from companies that specialise in developing tech and tools for Xbox 360-spec game production. Which further means the price ought to go down as more games are produced.

So is the problem that you guys all re-invent the necessary tech & tools from scratch, in-house, between each production? Or am I missing something?

I think a huge part of the issue at hand is that it takes more time and better artists to created HD assets. Even if you keep an engine unless you’re making a sequel that looks the same you still have to come up with all of those assets.

Very true! In my experience, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that, with the extra amounts of detail brought by HD gaming, more and more developers seem unable to test or judge gameplay without fully realized assets. This makes it impossible to build quick prototypes, and increases the amount of work thrown away.

Back on the topic, I think the big scary thing about Zynga’s games is the realization that the “mass market” of 70+ million people that Zynga has tapped, is not interested in the quality and depth of the experience, but in its instant appeal and reach. The first wave of “next-gen” social games headed by stuff like Civ Network will prove to what extent the social games market is related to videogames at all, compared to other forms of entertainment.

No, the cost of games nowadays is creating the assets, and in general you need to recreate them for each game.

There was actually a GDC talk “What’s bringing big game designers to social games?”. Someone commented “So the talk was pretty much – ‘the answer is money, thanks for coming’”.

I don’t think the social games format (we’re talking Facebook games here, short play sessions over many days, generally asynchronos multiplayer, etc) is inherently bad. Zynga’s games in general, though, are hard to defend. The real world currency tie in is of course the primary way they make money, but it’s really toxic to the game play.

That said, the optimist in me once to see them as a potential gateway game that might draw people to explore more gaming who wouldn’t have otherwise.

In that case, perhaps it’d be worth investigating to what extent you guys can establish some asset norms without limiting yourselves too badly.

Anyway, thanks for demystifying the problem (Lux too).

And remove one of the prime avenues of differentiating your product? I don’t think so.

The future is then probably asset outsourcing, to places like India where they will work for peanuts. I know that Heavy Rain and the Project Gotham Racing titles made extensive use of assets made in India.

I am not in the games development business, but work for the military in a training organization and we use and fund the development of simulations to support training. Rising costs with AAA titles is an interesting issue.

We spent a lot of money on developing databases, ORBATs and 3d models, textures, etc. for various military simulations. That was a huge cost and time driver (particularly time, which you can’t buy past a certain point and slowed down the tempo we could put on exercises) for military training. We have made huge headway by standardizing formats across simulations and maintaining libraries online for terrain, ORBAT, models and so forth that all the services can access. That has saved us a lot, which translates into affording more exercises and having more in a given year.

Obviously such an approach wouldn’t map so well over to a commercial marketplace filled with competing companies, but within a company how much re-use or standardization of assets are there? How much does that drive costs down? Is it necessary to have so much novelty with art assets or could more be done with existing assets and product differentiation carried out through cheaper avenues?

In addition to experimenting with different game development models, everyone is also continually experimenting with ways to keep development costs down.

As noted, art resources are jumping fast. It takes a lot of effort to detail a space to look good in current resolutions. Yay the hardware can push enough polys and texture density to achieve that level of detail, but painting it all in takes enormous effort.

And memory! The effort we all go through to crunch down the resources enough to fit in memory, to not take forever reading off disc, to not be noticeable as lazy-loaded resources “stream” in…

As the world gets more detailed, everything within it must improve in fidelity to match, lest it stick out as inappropriate. So before where an object might fall at a simple linear velocity, bounce once and stop, now we have licensed rigid body physics solutions that can simulate what an object roughly bounded by jointed capsules would fall like as it tumbled off the railing to the stairs below. Except that thing is the ragdoll of a humanoid, and the joints can’t just bend without constraint and still look natural, so now you need to feed constraints back into the solution…

And why didn’t that little wooden chair shatter when I hit it with the shotgun? Maybe we should look into that materials solution the Star Wars guys used (Force Unleashed). It’s pretty expensive; should we try to roll our own?

And so on.

Art outsourcing is growing fast. For FMVs, the results are pretty good. Blur is a good example. In-game outsource assets generally come back with more mixed results. The Gamasutra post-mortem articles frequently bemoan the communication and quality problems arising here and swear they need to do it better next time.

On the engine side of things, middleware is equally so-so as a cost-cutting measure. Witness all the times Epic has had to stress that licensing Unreal won’t save you any development time. The costs of making an engine with the expected levels of visual fidelity are high and getting higher.

I’ve seen 2 intriguing developments recently that give me hope for some reduced costs. First is the growth in high quality procedural generation. That technology looks like it’s getting to the point of feasibility again. Second is smarter use of template assets, as seen in Infamous and Borderlands. Stamping out bunches of prefabs with a modest toolbox – building worlds lego-style – will save big bux when applied smartly.

The present, you mean. Art outsourcing to China is VERY common. Most of the big publishers have studios in China specifically to bring those ‘outsourced’ artists in house.

I don’t work in the industry so can someone explain why treadmill and traditional games can’t co-exist. Just because someone plays Farmville it doesn’t mean they won’t buy Civ 5 right?

This threat exists only in the minds of some very silly people.

Or can someone explain why traditional game design will vanish in the face of this new paragim?

It won’t - it’s just that a lot of the money, talent, and publishing and promotion will shift over from one to another. Strategy games and wargames used to be a major part of the computer gaming market - when FPSs suddenly became the largest piece of the market, those consumers didn’t go away, and there are still designers and publishers who cater to them. But they’ve stopped being anywhere near the mainstream of the industry, or the cutting edge of the technology, because the industry has moved on. Now the same thing might happen to people who play FPSs, because Farmville & its ilk are just that much bigger.

But you’re right, it really isn’t something to lose sleep over. Times and tastes change, and even if traditional game design does become something that belongs to an old-fashioned enclave… well, it’ll be a pretty substantial enclave.

If we are moving on to the ‘why do games seem to always cost so much to make’ theme, my take on it is this:

Game developers are either cynical and miserable, or inexperienced.

The atmosphere of long hours, poor management, low salaries, bonuses that don’t happen and canned projects means that most developers leave the industry when they are actually getting good at it, and the ones who don’t are miserable as hell.

I reckon most dev studios run at about 20% efficiency. At least 20% seems to be lost due to people surfing / chatting on msn. 20% is lost due to tiredness causing silly mistakes. 20% lost due to poor management and lack of prototyping meaning work gets thrown away. 20% more due to demotivation or simple lack of experience.

There was an animator at lionhead who was like a machine. He wasn’t very chatty at all, and he didn’t work long hours. He was just amazingly focused. At the end of each day we would have a little roundup of what people had done, and he seemed to have churned out about 5 times the work of everyone else.
That’s what its like in more mature industries. I guess it doesn’t help that so many people go from college straight to game development and still think they are hanging out in the dorm.
Bah!

Uh, no.

I think cliffski has a point, actually. Certainly it seems like productivity comes from focus, and the things he mentions (long hours, ‘deferred’ bonuses, frozen pay, poor colleage morale, poor project management) are very distracting - and probably form a feedback loop.

Certainly seems to me that I do my best work when I am concentrating on a clear task, but I can only do that in short bursts; before long I need to communicate with other people on the team. After all, it is a collaborative project.

Sure, crunch impacts efficiency. Not all game companies crunch. Not all game companies have “bad management”. His analysis based on a single anecdote is completely incorrect for many studios and just too simplistic to really mean anything with respect to the rest.