Rebecca Heineman Interview
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There's a hefty interview with Rebecca Heineman on No Don't Die this evening, which covers a range of topics from her current work at Olde Sküül to her history with Interplay to why the gaming industry has worked itself into a rut. First, a bit on games being recognized for success only by their Metacritic rating and gross revenue:
Do you think this is harming the industry in some way?
Yes. Oh, it's totally harming the industry.
The problem was is that one of the things Interplay did was because we had so much money from some of our earlier titles, we were not afraid to experiment. Granted, we did some games you're going, "What were you thinking?"
But other games were ones where they were just diamonds in the rough and they become franchises on their own. A good example is, like, Interplay did a bunch of later -- after we did the Bard's Tale series, Wasteland, we started doing other games like Planescape: Torment and we did a bunch of the D&D games and so forth. But most other publishers wouldn't even touch that. And it made Interplay well-known for that type of game. But then we did a whole bunch of experimental games.
However, right now. Today. Everybody is so risk-averse that if I go in there with an original concept and say, "Hey, here's a brand new game. It's never been done before and I really think it's gonna sell a million copies. Like, I don't know, Minecraft." Every publisher out there is going to tell you, "No, no, no, no. But if you come in here with Harry Potter 7 or Call of Duty 9, sign you up right now."
Because the idea is if the Call of Duty or Harry Potter or whatever game that's already been done has grosses on it, they'll rate you based on those grosses. "If Call of Duty grosses $1 billion, so if we add some more stuff to it and put in movie stars and put some more money on it, we should gross $1.2 million next time. Let's green light that!" Instead of, "Hey, let's pay this little tiny company Sweden, I don't know, a couple hundred-grand and make a little puzzle game for kids and see what happens!" [Laughs.]
And then a little something on the current state of the gaming industry:
So I have two areas I want to zoom in on from that quickly. One of them is just -- how do you feel the game industry learns from its mistakes?
[Laughs.]
They don't.
If the game industry learned from its mistakes, then we wouldn't be going through these cycles that we are right now. The whole problem is you have a bunch of people in a bunch of different companies that all want to carve out a share of the market for themselves and everyone else be damned.
Like, Zynga, is going around stealing other people's games.
You have everybody doing a race to the bottom.
The major players are just doing sequels. It's very rare that they actually do an original title.
At that point in time, sooner or later -- and then, of course, the fact that right now in many ways the use of Unity and Unreal have actually made the problem worse because before the bar to entry to make a game was so high because you needed to have a very competent technical staff that only a few companies could actually make games.
Today, anybody who's good at art or asset collection can make a game using Unity.
And as a result, look at how many games are on the market right now that were made on Unity.
And sadly, while there are a lot of games created in Unity that are awesome, the problem is there are too many awesome games.
