Game.Developer.2009.12.pdf

RESEARCH REPORT: GOVERNMENT INCENTIVES

VOL16NO11 DECEMBER2009

THE LEADING GAME INDUSTRY MAGAZINE

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CONTENTS.1209

VOLUME 16 NUMBER 11

POSTMORTEM

24 DOUBLEFINE'S B RÜTAL L EGEND

B RÜTAL L EGEND is Double Fine's sophomore effort, and like its first

title P SYCHONAUTS , was fraught with publisher shifts and new platform

adjustments. Here, the team discusses testing bots, lawsuits, metal

gods, its use of middleware in conjunction with homegrown tools, and

the problem of real time strategy on consoles.

By Caroline Esmurdoc

DEPARTMENTS

2 GAME PLAN By Brandon Sheffield

[EDITORIAL]

Digital Snake Oil

4 HEADS UP DISPLAY

[NEWS]

Front Line Award Finalists, T ORCHLIGHT and OGRE 3D, and

OneBigGame's charity software.

FEATURES

7 LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

A number of national and regional governments around the world

offer tax rebates, grants, and other perks to game developers. In this

feature, compiled from a longer Game Developer Research article, we

outline the major institutions in the Western world that could help you

make your next game on the cheap.

By Chris Remo

39 TOOL BOX By Shekhar Dhupelia

[REVIEW]

Projecturf's Projecturf.com

42 THE INNER PRODUCT By Daniel Nelson

[PROGRAMMING]

Fire Control

46 PIXEL PUSHER By Steve Theodore

[ART]

Unknown Unknowns

16 THE DUST OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Modeling characters in 3D is an art in the true sense, and it's quite a

challenge to make these characters appear realistic. Takayoshi Sato,

who created all the original S ILENT H ILL CG by himself, finds that adding

flaws helps to create something believable—but those flaws can't be

random. They must be carefully tied to the character's personality

and backstory. Here, Sato shares his thoughts about the creation of

compelling characters in games, something more than your average

vacant space marine.

By Takayoshi Sato

49 DESIGN OF THE TIMES By Soren Johnson

[DESIGN]

Challenging Design

51 AURAL FIXATION By Jesse Harlin

[SOUND]

Rallying Rights

56 ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT By Matthew Wasteland

[HUMOR]

Project Status Update!

COVER ART: DOUBLE FINE ART TEAM

WWW.GDMAG.COM 1

GAME PLAN // BRANDON SHEFFIELD

www.gdmag.com

Think Services, 600 Harrison St., 6th Fl.,

San Francisco, CA 94107

t: 415.947.6000 f: 415.947.6090

DIGITAL SNAKE OIL

SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES

FOR INFORMATION, ORDER QUESTIONS, AND

ADDRESS CHANGES

t: 800.250.2429 f: 847.763.9606

e : gamedeveloper@halldata.com

EDITORIAL

PUBLISHER

Simon Carless l scarless@gdmag.com

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Brandon Sheffield l bsheffield@gdmag.com

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Jeffrey Fleming l jfleming@gdmag.com

ART DIRECTOR

Joseph Mitch l jmitch@gdmag.com

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Jesse Harlin

Steve Theodore

Daniel Nelson

Soren Johnson

Damion Schubert

ADVISORY BOARD

Hal Barwood Designer-at-Large

Mick West Independent

Brad Bulkley Neversoft

Clinton Keith Independent

Bijan Forutanpour Sony Online Entertainment

Mark DeLoura Independent

Carey Chico Pandemic Studios

ADVERTISING SALES

GLOBAL SALES DIRECTOR

Aaron Murawski e : amurawski@think-services.com

t: 415.947.6227

MEDIA ACCOUNT MANAGER

John Malik Watson e : jmwatson@think-services.com

t: 415.947.6224

GLOBAL ACCOUNT MANAGER, EDUCATION

AND RECRUITMENT

Gina Gross e : ggross@think-services.com

t: 415.947.6241

COORDINATOR, EDUCATION AND RECRUITMENT

Rafael Vallin e : rvallin@think-services.com

t: 415.947.6223

ADVERTISING PRODUCTION

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Robert Steigleider e: rsteigleider@ubm-us.com

REPRINTS

WRIGHT'S REPRINTS

Ryan Pratt e : rpratt@wrightsreprints.com

t: 877.652.5295

THINK SERVICES

CEO THINK SERVICES Philip Chapnick

GROUP DIRECTOR Kathy Schoback

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Cliff Scorso

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER Anthony Adams

AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT

TYSON ASSOCIATES Elaine Tyson

e : tysonassoc@aol.com

LIST RENTAL Merit Direct LLC t: 914.368.1000

MARKETING

MARKETING SPECIALIST Mellisa Andrade

e : mandrade@think-services.com

UBM TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER David Levin

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Scott Mozarsky

CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER David Wein

CORPORATE SENIOR VP SALES Anne Marie Miller

SENIOR VP, STRATEGIC DEV. AND BUSINESS ADMIN. Pat Nohilly

SENIOR VP, MANUFACTURING Marie Myers

OF WHAT WORTH ARE VIRTUAL ITEMS?

VIRTUAL ITEMS ARE THE SUBJECT OF MUCH

contention. Are free-to-play games devaluing retail

products? Are they changing the industry? Early

this month, I was having a discussion about this

with Metanet’s Raigan Burns, in which he argued that

virtual items represent the equivalent of digital snake

oil—you’re paying for a few altered lines of code.

It’s a question of degrees, because all games are

lines of code after all, whether they be many or few.

And in fact Metanet’s latest game, N+, is primarily sold

via digital distribution, in many ways a larger, more

involved virtual item. But I understand his point very

well. The idea of paying money for something that a

designer maybe spent an hour tweaking, or which an

artist adjusted the colors on just doesn’t sit well with me.

This is rooted in our consumer-oriented society.

Ultimately all value is perceived. Why is a diamond

more valuable than cubic zirconium? Mostly because

we say so. As a society we’ve decided that between

these two similar subjects (though the latter is

synthetic), one is worth more, and the other less.

Meanwhile both are worth more than food, which we

actually need to survive.

Food, air, and water have intrinsic value, because

we can’t live without them. Aside from those stand-

out examples, our entire value system is fabricated—

so depending on one's desire to have these things,

they're worth as much as or more than anything else.

It’s quite relative, and in a society in which most of us

actually do pay for the water we drink, this perception

of value is very important to a lot of people, including,

I’m dismayed to say, myself.

allow the owner to farm gold more effectively and then

sell the gold on the black market or whatever. But even

that is a contrivance, the developer could easily modify

a variable to let the player do a lot more damage, they

don't "need" the sword—it's an artificial constraint

imposed by the developer.

“This is typically benign in ‘normal’ games because

it's done in the service of gameplay, but once you

enter virtual goods land though, the rules are designed

to extract more money out of people rather than to

provide people with an enjoyable experience. This

seems very different and possibly awful.”

I do agree with Raigan, mostly, and my

discussion of perceived value was largely to be

contrary—but it’s also exactly the reason this model

is working. There are people for whom the physical

element of the purchase isn’t important—they’re

paying for added fun, and if that fun is in the form of a

yellow shirt, so be it.

That’s perhaps the most important part—for

those who play these games, these items aren’t

perceived as designed to extract money, they’re part

of a fun experience. For instance, I’m not a religious

person—but what seems to me to be a method of

controlling a populace appears to others as a way to

approach the divine and achieve personal fulfillment.

It’s all a question of perception.

GIMME THAT OLDE-TYME RELIGION

» While the concept of paying for something

so virtual initially seemed alien to me and my

experience, I thought back to good old La Val’s Pizza

in Berkeley, where I grew up. How many quarters

did I scam out of my parents so that I could get

a few more lives in F INAL F IGHT , or another go at

R AMPART ? In essence I was renting time with the

game—the virtual items I was paying for were lives.

In practice, these free-to-play games that run on

microtransactions (subscription or pay-per-play

games even more so), which many core or oldschool

players decry, extrapolate from a revenue stream

that comes from the very source of electronic games.

Like Raigan, I am curmudgeonly reluctant to

admit the value of the piecemeal experience over

the whole, finished one. But the fact is that more and

more people see that free-to-play experience not

as piecemeal, not as incomplete, but rather a living

experience that can grow and change. Or a new kind

of experience with a low required investment.

And some of us fogeys may do well to recall that

this model is not so different from that on which

we were raised, or for the fogey-er amongst us, the

games we created. The trick is how to make these

virtual items actually worth what the users pay for

them. But that’s a yarn for another day.

— Brandon Sheffield

DR. SHEFFIELD’S CURE-ALL

» For me, if there’s an object I can own versus an

digital version, I’ll go that route every time. I still buy

CDs, DVDs, and records, and prefer physical copies of

games I really enjoy over digital ones. Over time I’m

letting go of this—after all, my enjoyment of these

media is not based on their physicality, but rather the

data contained on them.

For a lot of people, that need for the physical simply

isn’t there, and that’s why the perceiver is the most

important part of perceived value. For someone playing

M APLE S TORY who really wants that purple sword because

it matches their outfit, that sword is possibly one of the

most important things that person could buy.

Raigan’s point was this: “Goods like a paperback

novel, a pen, or a shovel might have a resale value

that's close to zero, but they still have some sort of

‘functional’ value in that they can be used for some

purpose, i.e. I can read or write or dig a hole.

“In comparison, most virtual goods are purely

useless. Of course, I'm referring to A NIMAL C ROSSING 'cool

yellow shirt'-type goods; something like a really good

sword in W O W would actually be useful, because it will

GAME DEVELOPER | DECEMBER 2009

WWW.CMPGAME.COM

HEADLINE

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in Georgia and receive a 30% tax credit!

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Visit georgia.org/gamedevelopment or call 877-746-6842

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