We all hear it, in mantra-esque fashion, seemingly 24/7.
From industry analysts - reputable and disreputable alike:
"Games cost too much to fucking make!"
(albeit sans the 'fucking') But, once again, I think the gaming media
at large is so intent on the budding of each individual fern and spruce...
they fail to make account of the forest that's sprung up around them.
Games are getting more and more expensive, and - like the record industry before it - the
indulgence and excess of Triple-A development also happens to be killing variety, innovation
and experimentation.
But the real story here isn't the inevitable blowback from two decades of steadily-increasing
game budgets.
It's the widening canyon between the small market... and large market video game titles.
Just as the gap between rich and poor in the first and third-world has expanded during
the present worldwide recession...
so, too, has the gap between 'Indie' and 'Triple-A'.
When I made my argument - in VLOG #34: 'The Video Game Crash Part II: The Digital Downfall'
- that Indie gaming is incapable of saving an industry that is rapidly plunging in a
sustained, downward arc...
I was referring to this phenomenon, more than anything.
Look, Minecraft is a cute concept.
FTL is great.
Surgeon Simulator, The Cat Lady... all of these Indie titles are brilliant in the way
that they turn their smaller budgets and limited tech into an advantage, or... creatively masquerade
it as an aesthetic choice, but let's peel back the curtain and face the fully nude,
cottage cheese truth, here.
Not long after the advent of motion pictures, were films being treated seriously as works
of art.
Literally, within less than a decade of the medium's inception... and I think that has
as much to do with the artist's tools... as the intent with which they're wielding.
Indie gaming will never ascend to the position it must occupy in order to "save" the industry...
until it's able to get its hands on the same, bleeding-edge technology that major, Triple-A
developers have implicit access to!
If Quantic Dream could make a densely-detailed, immersive mystery out of Heavy Rain's exotic
tech, even if it was effectively Simon Says with titties... imagine what a talented Indie
point-and-click developer could do with the very same... and titties!
When that happens... gaming finally takes the next quantum leap it's been sorely needing,
and begins cultivating the same excitement it inspired at the end of the '90s!
But, unfortunately - even with Kickstarter's rabid devotees contributing seemingly endless
coffers - that's simply not a viable solution at present.
Indie gaming, as it stands, is an amusing diversion with some creative experimentation...
but it lacks the raw, technical muscle to truly take the industry to the next plane.
Looking Glass Studios - developers of the Thief, System Shock, and Ultima Underworld
series - are often mischaracterized as an 'Indie' developer.
That isn't, strictly speaking, factual.
Adjusting to elevated development budgets of today, Thief: The Dark Project... was actually
a very expensive game to produce, by 1998 standards.
They built the game's 'Dark Engine' from scratch, and that costs.
Thief wasn't an Indie game.
It was a Triple-A Indie game, and that's why it was able to push the entire industry forward,
as a result.
The exact same was true of Deus Ex, except that it was made with a heavily modified version
of the Unreal engine.
The game was still expensive by the standards of the day!
Triple-A pulls in big money, and Indie gaming is an amusing, counter-culture diversion for
pretentious fuckbags like myself... but it's only when the two meet that sparks fly and
the industry moves the fuck forward at last.
But with the space between the two now widening to a chasm... the improbability of that builds
by the fuckin' day.
But to whomever manages to clear the expanse, Evil Knievel-style... the first round's on
me, motherfucker!
I'm RazörFist.
God - fuckin' - SPEED!