Second, and more importantly… is your stance really that noone should ever bother making something new, because cliche experiences are entertaining enough for you? Cause that’s honestly all you said.

Next one has to ask oneself: Is my cool game a MINORITY taste? Is the gameplay too complicated for average retard? Is pacing too fast/too slow for average gaming retard? Is the art/aesthetics appealing to a wide variety of people? What is the size of the population that will be interested in my game? That’s one big question people forget to ask themselves in my opinion in when they complain about how the gaming industry is stale. You can make awesome games but the population of paying customers that ALSO have an interest has to be there.

Art direction, theme of the game, and ‘interface’, is what “sells games”, a lot of the time. You’ll see trends if you analyze the whole gamespace in what people gravitate towards.

Most games that feature technology over FPS man with a gun have very uneven sales or much lower sales then mainstream

See: Descent 3, Freespace 1 & 2, Freelancer, etc, mechwarrior

I’ve been playing games since the NES days and there are certain kinds of games that will ALWAYS be good, provided they are encapsulated in a decent theme and have ENTERTAINMENT value:

FPS
Sports
Racing
RPG
Action/platformer

God of war was probably one of the MOST cliche’d games in existence but it was the BEST executed cliche’d gaming experience I’d had since the Super Nintendo days, I’ll tell you that much! And I’ve played god damn near every game across every genre and even forced myself to play games I didn’t like to understand what the appeal was to others. I analyze games as an academic matter and also as deep personal interest of mine, and one must take into account the psychological makeup of the gaming population before one wants to make a game. “Vison” and “Creativity” are more often like random search against a populations psychological likes and dislikes.

Psychonauts is not the first ‘great game evar!’ to bomb horribly, the problem with psychonauts from the outset if I was an investor would be: The theme and art was just all wrong, i.e. it was fucking lame! People are herd like animals, they are most of all dull average beings. This is why many entertainment sectors, even in Japan, complain about how their markets only like “X,y,z” and stories that are something a ‘13 year old can understand’.

You also can’t get away from the fact that finding gameplay, controls, and interfaces that’s accessable isn’t an easy task. I hate World of warcrafts interface and I’d love it if WoW played more like God of war, but that’s a personal objection of mine. There are many people that HATE being in direct control of a character, because they find it psychologically irritating.

Psychonauts problem was it’s wacky ass theme, you have to cater to your audience’s tastes and make compromises if you are going to be ‘visionary’. The game industry has people in it that have really fucked up minority tastes, lets face this fact please! They have huge amounts of gaming experience under their belt that others do not, their perspective is somewhat warped. And I admit even the gaming audiences sometimes have really fucked up tastes! I hated Grand theft auto, I could not understand how such a piece of shit is seen as the 2nd coming of gaming. But lots of people like being able to shoot hookers in the face, and live out their criminal fantasies of what they can’t do in the real world.

But I realize that: Many gaming audiences are younger and have no exposure to old games, so what seems like crap to a veteran gamer like me is AWESOME to someone who has NEVER played a game or many games before.

Game dev’s frequently forget that many of their customers do not have huge gaming histories that they do. Then they wonder why the same shit sells over and over again: Because new kids have no memories of past games to pollute their fun factor in many regards.

Not to rain on you guys parade, I’m all for making great games but cliche’s well executed count for a lot (See God of war, God of War 2).

David Jaffe is probably my favorite game designer in my opinion because he knew with god of war that the point of the game was to ENTERTAIN. The work that went into the sets, monsters the camera angles, etc.

Their teams combined the best of what cinema learned with putting the viewer into the story, while still maintaining a camera angle that allows one to actually game, instead of the camera fucking over the experience.

You can see the problems with the camera by looking at a game like Supreme commander, a game that could have been great but fell way short of the mark, the strategic zoom made all art for the units practically irrelevant and yet if you look at the video in the main menu of the original Supcom, it looks awesome but the games does not play in a way that allows you to witness the canarage in the way the video shows you.

There’s a lot to learn about the camera angles and what exactly is entertaining for the gamer IMHO in terms of the single player experience. Often times I think they should fork strategy games into a single player and mutliplayer aspect, where one is for pure game-movietainment ™, with awesome camera angles and structured gameplay flow, while the other is for the hardcore where camera angles dont matter so much since you want to play the fucking game.

The few cases you mention are sad cases, but not all publishers think that way, some are more open than others, and not every hit game made thus far is an example of absurdism as Dead Rising is.
Again, picking one example as a kind of mitigated success (or non-success) proves nothing safe that yes, you’ll always find “cases”, and yes, there’s room for another system, but it’s no excuse to ignore the hits these giants have churned out for decades. You see no logic in Rez’ case? I see one: keep a talented designer with visions instead of pissing him off and have him leave the boat. It’s not like Rez is a AAA title either. Yes, the salary men didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about the “art” in it, but Rez is not your everyday game.
The point is, the actual corporate logic works rather well for a system that concentrates on producing blockbusters and games just below that level, stuff that’s openly meant to sell, not indie-style games, which Rez almost was. For some publishers, the sales value of a pitch can wear a great important to them, while other (eventually smaller) publishers like to care a bit more about different content.
There’s no doubt you’ll find exceptions, but dissing the whole system is nonsense. Yes, we all agree it has great flaws, but your over generalization is annoying. If it’s not an attempt at putting everybody in the same basket, then why insist picking cases, since I’m in agreement with the need for variation?
That’s just disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, and this is absurd.

It’s not the most innovative thing ever, but it’s got a good mix of elements that makes it fun and it had a lot of sales potential. It shipped 500,000 units in North America in the first two weeks alone. I think it’s sold a million worldwide (correct me if I’m wrong on that). And that’s only on one platform (Xbox 360).

The game also won IGN’s award for Most Innovative Design for Xbox 360 in 2006. And Gamespot’s Best Action Adventure Game of 2006. And X-Play’s Most Original Game of 2006.

How did this game get approved? Was it a careful weighing of what people in suits believed would sell? No. As I described in my GDC 2007 reports, Inafune-san forced this game through because he passionately believed in it. He lied to his company executives and told them he was working on a racing game so they wouldn’t bother him. He then developed this game secretly with an entire team…for 9 months! Even when he showed them what he did, they still did not want to approve the game. He *fought* them and refused to back down, and somehow, he got this game made.

Not everyone is so fortunate as Inafune-san in having the ability to force ideas through. And yet, I’m very glad that Inafune and Mizaguchi did what they did. There is no real framework for them to develop what they believe in, unless you count lying about what their projects are or starting a new company (Q Entertainment).

As for the examples, I just happened to pick big names. You can always find cracks in them I suppose, and EA is obviously one of the easy targets.
I didn’t borrow the names of japanese publishers either, nor first party ones. I mean, I didn’t plan to roll out the full list of major publishers. Besides, I don’t think anyone would sincerely claim that SCEI had no plan, no logic, no “real judgement”, when they gave us Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. :)
Ubisoft and Activision are still giving, in my opinion, a tad more multifarious content than EA. All relative though, they’re still big publishers after all.

Sure, all those publishers like EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc. owe their decades of survival to sheer dumb and clueless luck?
You may not fancy/agree (with)/understand [i]their[/i] logic, but it’s one that’s been working for quite some time. Now, it doesn’t mean it’s the best one, nor does it preclude the existence of other logics (different publishing system).

“Note that I also said it would be nice to have both this model and the current studio model. So there’s not much to complain about if someone starts up an alternative model (and as pointed out above, this sort of thing is already kind of starting). Unfortunately we still have no way to take advantage of a random game designer with amazing ideas/skills other than hiring him into a company. Meanwhile a random screenwriter has an entire system setup to accept and sift through scripts. We could really be doing a lot better in games.”

Yes, it is a system that needs to be explored, but I don’t think it will end being so close to what script writers rely on. I am not speaking about the quality of that hypothetical system. I am adressing the fact, to me eyes, that there’s much more that goes between a GDD and the final game than between a script and what actors say in the movie, which is what the audience hears in theaters.
Ultimately, the role and organization issue is left to the appreciation of the parties involved, and is not a problem here. GG actually has a good standard company model here.

As far as how to pick winners, I can only say that probably have no idea how projects are currently picked. You probably think logic and real judgment is involved. If that were true, it would be hard to accept that GRGM could judge any better than anyone else. But the real state of decision making on what’s funded is so far removed from anything that almost any careful judge would do better. It reminds me of phone handset companies that for years developed phones that were intended to appeal to phone carriers. Then Apple came along and made a phone that appeals to actual users of phones. How did they know what appeals to users of phones? Why not just predict failure and let the standard makers of phones-that-appeal-to-carriers keep chugging along?

Note that I also said it would be nice to have both this model and the current studio model. So there’s not much to complain about if someone starts up an alternative model (and as pointed out above, this sort of thing is already kind of starting). Unfortunately we still have no way to take advantage of a random game designer with amazing ideas/skills other than hiring him into a company. Meanwhile a random screenwriter has an entire system setup to accept and sift through scripts. We could really be doing a lot better in games.

I don’t think so. It was his premise, as “I have plenty of money, so now I’m independant and here’s how I’m going to run a business.”
http://grassrootsgamemaster.blogspot.com/2008/01/lottery-ticket-videogame-company.html

Bits from the guy’s own article:
“I win the lottery <i>and</i> get to finance a videogame?”
“And that’s how I do it <i>if</i> I win the lottery ticket.”

Wins lottery, then funds some game. :)

The lottery is nothing more than a shortcut, a cheat code to start with $1,000,000 in the bank.

It’s problematic to me that you defend his article so much, but miss that rather simple point. That said, it’s not crucial at all to his main argument, so just let’s put this behind us. ;)

From what I see, his point is that he hires a designer and keeps him, does the prototype with him and hires more people to do that proto, has a small duo/trio test the stuff at the same time, and this ends after 6 months, when the first “final” prototype is cooked.

At that point, the baby is largely outsourced. It’s not clear if the designer is still there, nor how all cells communicate between each other.

In the end, the game reads as:

<i>Monkey Balls II: The Island of Tits</i>

With something like “based on a design by Alan Smithee” pasted somewhere on the box…

Well, it’s the same old problem about technician vs. progenitor/thinker, and who gets his/her name on the cover.

I’d be tempted to say that as long as the game works, and I get paid adequately, for the moment, having my name on the box is not a priority. Finding a good business system and signing a good effective deal is <b>much more</b> important.

Problems:

In his second article, in chapter “Suspension of Judgment & Iteration”, GG says that they suspend judgement at the beginning, after getting the first draft, and the more they prototype the game, the more they let themselves judge of the quality of the concept.
On several levels, this seems contradictory with his claim about being able to evaluate the merits of a concepts even before signing it, and is very risky.

The reality is that if you have a mechanism to gauge a concept, what you can know is, eventually, a how much it could cost you - a point I’d like to hear GG give his methodology on - and eventually the chances it could sell, based on its genre, the audience it can reach, how strong the game can be on its own (succesful genre, known IP, etc.).

However, there’s no solid way to know if a concept will work. You can *think* it’s good (well, you better have to if you’re going to fund it, duh), but that’s about as far as it gets.

There are cases of GD freelancers, but they seem to struggle at the moment, possibly because the industry is not ready yet.
It doesn’t mean the actual studio pattern is bad. We just probably need a bit of both, and as things evolve by hiccups, at one point, we could see that designer strike coming. :)

The real problem here is that I don’t see how GG, being so sure he can spot the good concepts, really knows when he has to greenlight one, especially as he admits himself that his system requires any judgement to be made much later during the prototype development… which will need funds anyway.

That is contradictory. You must need to make a judgement, refine the concept (you picked) as much as possible before even starting the prototype, and then I think it starts to look like something good. Of course, the document is not rigid by that time, and even going through that pre-prototype phase will require time and money, but at least the costs still remain low for the time being.
The problem, though, is that it’s generally a good thing to prototype as soon as possible, so there’s obviously a balance to find here between a concept version everybody agrees on, and the beginning of prototyping. On that point, GG seemed to say that he’s not really concerned about time schedules. Well, he does what he wants with his money, but no one likes to loose money.

The most important aspect of that is to keep a book of contacts, make a community like he says, so you can rebuild similar teams everytime you’re going to start a new project.

That said, his second post talks about a core team, and there, I don’t see anything new at all. You can already find studios having a core team and outsourcing parts of the project. Outsourcing itself can have advantages and dangers. It seemed that in the first post, there wasn’t such a clear entity as a near complete “mini-studio”. It seemed even more mini than that (though there definitely was a team present there to develop the prototype even before even outsourcing anything).
Well, just a minor nitpick, which may not change a lot here.