-Stratesiz-

Making games is an artform, something that is made out of love and not for sales.

That can be said about everything else like a movie, a painting, a new wicked looking toothbrush, a wine bottle and its label, a vacuum cleaner, a car, a print ad, an advertisement campaign, a building, a city, you name it.

Basically I agree, but not at all on the advertisement. Ads have the only purpose to create a demand for the product among probable customers.

Making fun and unique advertisements is a real challenge can be an artform in all its forms. ADs work with ads because they love how you mix different medias together. An advertisement agency is purely about superior creativeness that leads to profits.

Just think of Absolut Vodka for instance. Its ads are displayed in art museums! Just have a look at this site that collects Abolute ads: http://www.absolutads.com/gallery/view.php?letter=A

Let me further quote this from an article:

Kiefer said the Absolut ads are "more than just ads—they're art."

"What other ads do you see people actually collecting?" Kiefer asked. "Absolut ads get shown in galleries and sold at auctions. That's when you know you've created something truly special. Man, if I could get one of my Absolut ads displayed in a gallery somewhere—and maybe even take home a Clio in the process—I'd die a happy man."

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28248

Now that's just one example.

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."

Marshall McLuhan

Unfortunately, without money nothing works. You sell a painting, you design a tooth brush to look good in order to increase sales, you design a car to be attractive, you make a game to earn a living. As for games, it's about mass sales since if you design a game for a niche market using the same amount of resources as any other big title, you would have to price it way higher, and since there is no market for "high-end" games, it's not worth it.

Most of real big financial budgets are used for franchising, licenses and patents - things that don't really exist.

There are small companies, making small games with small budgets and they sell them, making enough profit to live from.

Same applies for music and movies - what would we do without independent-labels?

So it's not all about mass sales.

Yes it's not all mass sales but lately, the trend has been a transition to bigger mainstream projects that mean more revenue. Several independent and commercial game companies have died recently due to the number of games they have to sell in order to reach the break-even point (Troika, for example). The number of flight simulators, adventure games (puzzle solving), role-play games, etc. is increasing since such games don't sell enough even though the costs are considerably lower. The number of first person shooters, for example, has increased.

The bigger a project, the more resources required, the more perceived risk, the higher the incentive to reduce risks by playing it safe. Games of today can not be compared to paintings and such. It's a fact of life that we have to accept.

Let me quote an earlier post to contradict this:

To quote John Carmack:

In the information age, the barriers just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you dont need millions of dollars of capitalization. You just need enough pizza [added] and [insert favorite beverage] to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the deadication to go through with it.

In other words: you don't always need money to make games and you don't always have to earn money with them.

Games like Half-Life are so popular, because there are thousands of people, working for not a single dime, to extend it, and because Valve supports them doing so.

No you don't but games are constantly becoming more complex which means that they still require more resources to create. And by resources, I do not simply mean money. Increased time costs are unavoidable, time that could be used in another manner to earn a living. A year has passed since HL2 was released and there still hasn't been any serious and big mods released.

Also we don't have to accept things, just because the big guys are doing it their way. If our ancestors would have done so, the USA wouldn't be independent and we'd still have monarchic rulership.

Ben Mathis wrote an article about this (the third part to be precise), which I mostly agree with.

http://www.mapcore.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3450

Of course not, but it's still getting harder day by day as games evolve to become even more complex.

On EA again:

Sure EA has sold many good games. The problem that I and many others have with it, is that they are big and that they can't stop growing even bigger. They squeeze out franchise products - like FIFA or other sport games - one new episode, every year. Franchise is for making money, nothing else.

I have seen many people who worked for big players and small companies and every single one of them preferred the latter.

Who wouldn't from a designer's point of view. The question is can you survive alone. Some can, some don't, but everything is getting more challenging.

Making games is an artform, something that is made out of love and not for sales.

That can be said about everything else like a movie, a painting, a new wicked looking toothbrush, a wine bottle and its label, a vacuum cleaner, a car, a print ad, an advertisement campaign, a building, a city, you name it. Unfortunately, without money nothing works. You sell a painting, you design a tooth brush to look good in order to increase sales, you design a car to be attractive, you make a game to earn a living. As for games, it's about mass sales since if you design a game for a niche market using the same amount of resources as any other big title, you would have to price it way higher, and since there is no market for "high-end" games, it's not worth it.

The bigger a project, the more resources required, the more perceived risk, the higher the incentive to reduce risks by playing it safe. Games of today can not be compared to paintings and such. It's a fact of life that we have to accept.

It's funny how source is considered old after just one year since its release, even before a single serious and big mod project has been released.

Looks brilliant!

In the end, it's about making profits. Small companies usually don't posess the resources (money, human capital, time, etc.) required for future projects. Even if their product turns out to be lucrative, it still might not cover all the costs. Mainstreamization of games is inevitable since small niche markets are rarely profitable. Distribution methods such as Steam, however, have managed to abridge the value chain, enabling larger profit margins for the company, and hence create a stronger incentive to create smaller episode based projects that carry minimum risk and generate a steady flow of income.

The colors are fine. Blue, on the other hand, is overused.

Mind maps, structural models, summaries, repetition X 100...

Mind maps are fantastic if you need to remember 30+ things at the same time and how the stuff is connected. The downside is that they require a lot of time to create.

Fighting was boring, especially with the two T-rexes. It just kept going on an on. In the end I got bored and swiched on the super mode. After that I didn't have a clue what was going on due to all the effects on the screen and bad camera movement. And then suddenly, both the T-rexes were dead and the demo ended.

It lacked purpose due to the things that were mentioned earlier.

Hiding from the trex was kinda boring all together, go here, shoot here, hide here, run here, ect ect ect. I would've liked more integration and knowing somehow my ammo health, ect.

...but it was kind of boring. It was very linear, you had to go through the door, to the end, jump, swing etc, there was only one way and there was nooo leeway, nor much ability to go wrong. there is a large lack in stuff you can do, it seems like you just walk up to crap and beat the shit out of it, which gets boring. the first person part was sort of dumb too, i get a gun and my mission? run in circles while being chased by a 3 story dinosaur so two guys can open a door. it was just meh...

That was one shitty game. Awful controls, awful camera movement. There was no sense of being in control, I just clicked a few times and voila, I managed to do some flips and stuff and get to the other side of the canyon or whatever without even knowing what I was actually doing. Quick! Click your buttons as fast as you can!! Haven't we got past that stage in games already?

It was also boring and lacked purpose.

To me it looks like a visual nightmare, a junkyard.

My kitchen

Bruce Lee for Commander 64, the original BattleZone, Alleycat.

de_rats2, de_rats3, de_mice~

The first symptoms of mapcore mainstreamization.

Sigh.

His NW work was the shit

Oh yus indeed!

He worked on Nightwatch. He's brilliant!

From a modeling perspective it looks spectacular. The greenery is extraordinarily great. However the screenshots so far are not very strong on the gameplay side. Are there more open areas, multileveled action?

Lovely stuff sir~

I see a future game designer in ya for sure!

Wasn't that like months ago?

The only real defense is to achieve a high profile status so that as many people as possible will recognize the original map and its author. This is pretty much done by pimping the map everywhere.

The most common and cheapest trick is to just borrow a few screenshots from the original map, rename the shots and claim the map as your own. My first map was "stolen" this way.

http://www.ftnnews.com/evnews294.htm

http://cellar.org/iotd.php?threadid=8792

Voilà monsieur!

I remember commenting on that map at countermap.

It's a teaser, an apetizer, not a trailer. Two different things.