Multi-Disciplinary Reading – Book Reviews

Blood, Sweat and Pixels, Jason Schreier, 2017 – I wanted a book to understand the video game industry and found this. Author covers 10 popular games across styles and covers their creation through interviews with the hundreds of people involved. Video games are somewhat like movies but more complex since they reside at the weird junction where art meets technology – so its a movie that gets developed like software. Budgets are big and so are the revenue which can sometimes cross even $1billion, just like a Hollywood blockbuster.

My notes –

• What it takes to produce a game? – Artists, designers, animators, programmers, QA testers, producer, art director, marketing, sound dept.

• Why making games is difficult? Interactivity, constantly-changing technology, non-standard tools, challenging schedules, difficulty in ascertaining fun factor until game is playable

• A demo for E3 is something all studios work towards where audience first gets a glimpse of the gameplay. However more often than not, this is not even close to the finished product and is built to impress and garner interest. A lot of dev time is actually wasted in this marketing effort

• Video games are a $30b industry in the US alone

• Producers fund developers who make games, publishers publish them (like music labels?) – this is standard model. Publishers are large and have a lot of leverage in this deal

• Independent game studios need to have a contract ready soon as the last one is finished or they will be in trouble. Eg. Microsoft funded Obsidian’s Stormlands and when they closed the contract, Obsidian had to let go of a lot of the team

• Standard burn rate – $10k per person. So 50 member team of Obsidian meant a $0.5m cash burn per month (hence the importance of contracts for small indie studios)

• Sometimes publishers tie-in a bonus to the developer if the game hits a certain score of Metacritic, say 85 (Bethesda offered Obsidian $1m for Fallout: New Vegas for 85 score)

• To stay afloat, indie studios can either find a new investor, find new contracts before old ones expire or fund their own games with reserves (self-produce) or appeal directly to fans on kickstarter and raise funds for a game and self-publish to retain royalties (New model)

• RPGs in the 2000s were based on rules of Dungeons and Dragons and had fixed isometric cameras (like Baldur’s Gate) but later games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came with 3D and voice acting and lesser conversations and old-school RPGs went out of favour

• When Microsoft cut Obsidian contract for Stormlands, they let go off half the team of 50 and took to Kickstarter to develop an old-school RPG (Pillars of Eternity), they raised $4m which could fund 40 devs for 10 months, which was more than sufficient for a technically less-complex old-school RPG (tools used: Maya and Unity)

• Vertical slice – A portion of demo video intended as proof of concept to demo a game

• Kickstarter not just helped with the funding but also real-time feedback. Concept art, vertical slices, weapons, strategies all got vetted by actual players who were funding. Its like 300-400 people who weren’t paid but were working for the game

• One common theme in video game dev – everything came together in the last minute

• Crunch – working overtime, until 3:00 am for several weeks is “Crunching” is quite common in the video game industry

• Naughty Dog the game studio (Uncharted & The Last of Us series) has a reputation for great-storytelling and eye-popping visuals (and extended crunches for its devs)

• Naughty Dog was founded in 1984 and developed platformers like Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Dexter. Sony bought them in 2001 to develop a new game for PS3 (Uncharted)

• A movie like No Country for Old Men is what inspired The Last of Us (Why can’t characters be gritty and leave a lot unsaid?)

• Straley and Druckmann the creative team behind The Last of Us (& Uncharted) wanted to avoid video game-y elements like boss battles, ultra powerful weapons and special enemy classes

• Uncharted 4 sold 2.7 million copies in a week and went on to make $1 billion in revenue! It took $40 million to be completed. (Hollywood mega blockbusters make $1-2b in revenue)

• Stardew valley, unlike most games that have dozens of people who specialize in art, programming, game design and music was famously developed by 1 person (Eric Barone)

• Stardew Valley took ~5 years to develop for Barone working alone with no prior experience in game development. He self-published it on Steam Greenlight (users choose what’s interesting for them). It sold 400k copies in 2 weeks grossed over $20m by 2017 ($129m now according to Steam stats)

• Diablo-III came after massive success of Diablo-II and had to match up to the hype. Developed by Blizzard (of Warcraft and Starcraft fame). The game was procedurally generated so everytime it felt fresh

• Diablo-II had different difficulty modes – Normal, Nightmare, Inferno etc. In III, the game design introduced a chicken-and-egg problem where you would get best gear only in Inferno mode and you can’t get to Inferno without best gear. They introduced a model in which you could pay for weapons but people saw it as a ‘pay-to-win’ than a ‘play-to-win’ game

• Game economics is so difficult that one problem can introduce several more. For people that didn’t want to pay, Blizzard introduced a mode in which you could gather loot by smashing pots. People spent more time smashing pots than playing the game

• Blizzard completely revamped Diablo-III post launch and made it so that difficulty level will scale up with the player and shut down the Auction house which had earned it a bad repute (Making money off virtual items and retaining your reputation is hard)

• Ensemble, a studio that made the Age of Empires games for over a decade was bought by Microsoft in 2004. Ensemble’s employees were stringent in hiring and spent 100 hour weeks over years together (crunch work culture)

• RTS (Real-time strategy) games like AoE requires the computer to make thousands of decisions every second on when to construct buildings move units around the map (very compute intensive). Pathfinding is also a difficult problem to solve in an RTS

• Halo Wars – Microsoft directed Ensemble to work with Bungie (original creators of Halo) to create a MMO on the lines of World of Warcraft (WoW). This sort of collaboration is very rare in the industry and very hard to pull off due to clashes in work cultures

• RTS games are typically made for PC as it requires a Keyboard and Mouse to play effectively. Halo Wars was the first to adapt a RTS successfully to the Xbox 360 controller

• Companies with serious bad rep win worst company of America (annually polled) – won by AIG in 2008, BP in 2011 (oil spill). Electronic Arts (EA) won it back to back in 2012 and 2013 (Reason: Micro-transactions in its games, online-only SimCity reboot & buying BioWare. EA had a history of buying great studios only to shut them down later)

• BioWare was started by medical doctors – in ‘98 produced the D&D based RPG Baldur’s Gate which inspired Pillars of Eternity and The Witcher 3 and also Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect

• Dragon Age took 7 years to develop from 2002-2009. BioWare hoped it would be the Lord of the Rings of video games. It was a massive success and sold millions of copies. EA wanted BioWare to develop a sequel in just over year – Dragon Age 2 was a serious flop in 2011

• Game engines provides a physics system, a graphics renderer, a main menu (Re-usable things across games). Transitioning Game engines are sometimes made as business decisions but these are technically very difficult to accomplish

• Dragon Age : Inquisition had to ship with a new game engine, gameplay, across 5 platforms in roughly two years and was heavily inspired by Bethesda’s Skyrim (Such big shifts are rare and technically super complex)

• Bungie broke up its tie-up with Microsoft post Halo 3 (Microsoft owned the Halo IP but Bungie owned all technology) and started work on Destiny as a way of getting out of Halo’s halo

• Activision signed up with Bungie for $500m for Destiny – biggest dev deal in video game industry

• Most video games aimed for campaign length of 10-20 hours. The Witcher 3 came out with a campaign that 100 hours long!

• The Witcher 3 unlike the other games here was developed in Europe (Poland), developed by CD Project Red (company that started with selling pirated game CDs in Poland in the 90s)

• Best way to build a great game was to spend a lot of time in pre-production, talking, prototyping, answering questions

• In film-making everything existed to serve the story. In games everything existed to serve the gameplay

Sheer number of moving parts make game development highly unpredictable and exciting and requiring pretty much anyone who developed games to be a workaholic. It is clearly not an easy industry. The book gave a very good glimpse into the people and companies that build games, their motivation, struggles with a brief bit of economics and logistics of it. Not too deep, not too shallow. 8/10