ODDWORLD Creator Says Capitalism Is Killing Games And Indie Games Are Our Future

News & General Discussion
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Well, really the capitalism is killing the whole planet, then the AAA games too.

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The host of the video said exactly what I was going to say. Those statements contradict one another. I think what he meant to say is that corporatism is killing games. Indie developers making and selling games to compete with the big guys is what capitalism is. Unity, UE4 and the like have reduced the amount of capital required to enter the industry, but making and selling games is still capitalism. Capitalism works when there are plenty of choices and plenty of competition. Corporatism is a different beast entirely.

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The following are NOT tolerated within the Unity Developer Network;

1a. Discussions on political issues as well as grey areas…

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Games, including indie games, are still dominated by those in it for the money. Which is capitalism.

Ultimately big games need big budget which need corporations.

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The guy who made Oddworld (a game about an alien corporation cannibalizing it’s population to make short term financial gains) is anti-capitalist???!!!

SURELY YOU JEST!

EDIT: Also, what’s killing AAA games is reckless hit chasing. They’re like a gambling addict at a casino that doubles down over and over until they eventually lose. Capitalism has little to do with it.

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Talking about capitalism in a game context isn’t against our political rules.

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Here is the actual article mentioned in the video if people are interested, rather then hearing it second hand from a pod cast.

Its a weird article to say the least. Most of the anti capitalist stuff is just rhetoric. Its the same stuff you’ll find on any anti capitalist site. But to finish it off he plans to invest several million into his next game using profits from the last game? That’s the heart of capitalism.

I wonder how much of it is genuine belief, and how much of it is culture and community and marketing. OddWorld is a game that is based around anti capitalism. For the creator to take the opposite stance, and come out and say “I think modern capitalism is actually a good thing” would probably lead to a sales backlash that might last decades.

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Reading the article, I think he believes what he says. At the risk of entering the taboo area, I’ve found that almost nobody who uses the words ‘Capitalism’ or ‘Communism’ have any clue what those words mean. They are just a nice target to direct hatred. Capitalism has nothing to do with corporations other than that they engage in it. It has nothing to do with venture capitalists, other than that they are one means of acquiring capital. Just like communism and totalitarianism are not synonyms. I remember someone on one of the iPhone developer forums complaining that Apple was “communist” for rejecting his game. I kinda wish they were, I’d love my share of Candy Crush’s money. I kid, of course. But it would be really nice if people knew what words mean before they use them.

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YUP!

And most people who slur those phrases typically think the economy is a giant flip-flop switch where it’s all or nothing.

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Totally. Most often the best way forward is a middle ground. A regulated free market. A democracy with socialist policies. A corporation with a social conscience.

Or an indie studio that makes a sinks millions of dollars of profits from historical titles into a new title.

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I would disagree… but then this would lead to a thread lock on the subject.

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Capitalism will be what SAVES video games. Consumer choice, developer freedom, product variety, competitive services and prices. That’s what capitalism is

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Fair enough. I used to be far more extreme in my views when I was younger. As I get older I’ve become more moderate.

Without diversity of ideas and thinking humanity would have died out generations ago.

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But when you look over our history, our modern diversity trend is a fairly new thing… at least I think. Conformity and control seemed to be what made empires last thousands of years…

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That’s another diverse opinion :slight_smile: Curricular logic is great.

You’ll also struggle to find empires (plural) that lasted thousands (also plural) of years.

But to your actual point, it’s specialisation rather then conformity that allows civilisations to be built and empires to be established.

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Empires were necessary, I’m not convinced a unified planet needs more than itself as an ‘empire’. Having constant communication via the internet is a game changer for mankind.

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Well, I can definitely agree that the corporate mentality is something that the video game industry needs to begin learning to do without.

While corporations are not always bad, they do always have a singular motivation. Corporations make money. It is their entire purpose for being. People invest their money in a corporation as part of its creation. And they expect to have their money returned with interest. In order for this to happen the corporation must accrue monetary value. And generally speaking, that means making a lot of money, and growing the corporation.

There is much that this business model enables. There are plenty of projects scaled in such a way that they require corporate backing. Some scopes are only possible when backed with the kind of money that comes from large-scale investment. Most MMOs couldn’t be produced by privately-owned or operated companies.

The general expenses associated with large-scale publishing and promotion in the video game industry are the same way. Competing in the physical retail space requires an up-front investment in physical product, storage, and promotion that even mid-sized game developers just couldn’t afford on their own. It’s why corporate publishing giants are still persisting. Digital distribution and on-line promotion are making some of these requirements obsolete. But for the time being the physical retail space needs corporations, and the infrastructure support that they represent.

I do somewhat agree with Mr. Lanning, though. Investment, scale, and polish have never been the real strength of this medium. Creativity will always be a core strength of game development. It brings us some of our best and most enduring experiences. And creativity does NOT need corporate sponsorship in order to survive and thrive.

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RANT-TIME IS THE BEST TIME! :smile:

I think that @HemiMG_1 is right. Sounds like he misworded it. Assuming he did mean corporatism, I’d tend to agree. Although I don’t think indies are the future, since they have their fair share of exploitative dipshits.

In my opinion some of the best games of the last years were those middle-sized games, where the line between ‘big-for-indie’ and ‘small-for-AAA’-budgets start to blur.

The first Amnesia game had development costs of 360k USD, which is far above what most indies have to work with. This game was amazing.
On the big-name side we have games like Dark Souls, Dishonored and XCOM: Enemy Unknown that were really good, but had budgets that were laughably small compared to titles like GTA or the other AAA titles that publishers spend ridiculous amounts of money to market.

When you look at the huge AAA-releases, all those exploitative practices that can be attributed to corporatism start becoming more frequent:
Let’s add a multiplayer nobody bloody asked for in order to justify always-on DRM that never worked reliably (SimShitty).
Let’s have so many different versions, DLC-packs and pre-order bonuses that the player needs a table so he knows what kind of content he gets, depending on when he bought it, where he bought it, what version he bought and which platform he bought it for. (Watch Dogs)
Let’s create huge titles every year and knowingly shit them out in a completely broken state, to make a quick buck before the word spreads. (AssCreed Unity)
Let’s mis-manage games so hard, the development costs inflate to the point where it’s absolutely unrealistic that the game will be a financial success, and try to fix it by redesigning the games ingame economy so we can add microtransactions as an additional source of income. (Dead Space 3)

And finally, everyone’s favorite:
Let’s take a franchise that is beloved due to its uniqueness and improve sales by making it more generic to appeal to a wider audience, completely undermining why it sold in the first place, alienating the original fan-base and closing the studio once it stops selling enough.

However, as I implied before, indies aren’t the opposite of this. The two biggest issues independent developers tend to have are a lack of budget and/or skill which handicaps many interesting games and a lack of professionalism.

Big publishers aren’t the only ones releasing crappy, unfinished and sometimes even flat-out broken games.
Don’t point your finger at big publishers and pretend like Air Control, Zen Fish Simulator, The House, The Tower, Alpha Zylon, The Forgotten Ones, Island Light, One Day For Ched, Slaughtering Grounds, Guise Of The Wolf, Ghostship Aftermath, I Will Escape, The Interview, Pineview Drive, Revolution 60, The Hat Man, Mountain, Recycle: Garbage Truck Simulator, New York Bus Simulator, Grass Simulator and almost every ‘ironic’ simulator out there, don’t exist. Typically containing stolen content and have the ‘developer’ swiftly deleting any form of criticism and negative reviews, preferably by abusing the DCMA feature of YouTube.

Don’t pretend that the big, evil publishers are the only ones that are killing creativity by homogenizing every release.
Amnesia caused a huge wave of “you can only run away” horror-games to spawn.
Slender caused a huge waves of “you collect notes and it kills you once you look at it, but no, we totally aren’t Slender” games to spawn, along a million-billion clones.
After Flappy Bird, we got Flappy Everything.
After Surgeon and Goat Simulator, we now have crappy “simulators” with for everything; Preferably sold under the pretense of irony, which falls totally flat because you’re still charging money for something that is utterly broken.

Relatively speaking, the independent market has just as big issues as the AAA one. What just occurred to me is that indies even have their own version of the AAA’s pretentious cinematic games: “Art games”.

To wrap things up:
I don’t think that the future of videogames will be saved by indies. My prediction is that shitty developers and their shitty games will be found throughout the entire market (just like now), while good developers and their good games will too.

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If you want to maintain creativity, and keep yourself emotionally invested in a project, you can’t be doing it just for the money. There has to be some level of genuine enthusiasm there.

When you are a corporation, you are doing it just for the money. It is the nature of a corporation for this to be the case. Individuals within a corporation can have differing motivations. But the corporation as a whole, is always doing it for the money. Just the nature of the multi-headed beast.

If you work for a corporation, it is still possible to put out a decent game. However, you will always be struggling somewhat against the corporate mentality, where everything is influenced by the desire to make money. There will always be a certain degree of inertia, and all creative decisions will have to be justified on how much money they can return.

For smaller companies that don’t have investors hanging over their heads, they have considerably more freedom. While there are significant trade-offs for that freedom, it is still freedom to act. They can make risky or experimental choices, and never have to worry about investors second-guessing their decisions. While there are certain games that can only happen in a corporate environment, there are also some types of games that can only happen in a non-corporate environment.