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一名玩家看电子游戏行业的沦陷原因

发布时间:2013-12-26 14:58:48 Tags:,,,

作者:Lee Bettam

电景行业与游戏行业之间存在许多相似之处。在电影行业中,那些创新而富有想象力的作品,之后总会伴随着令人失望和不满,只有原来的市场会买单的续作,这些续作几乎谈不上什么“有意义”的艺术贡献。游戏行业亦是如此,当前市场上充斥着大量预算庞大,巨额利润(其收益与好莱坞电影不相上下),但却甚至少实现题材创新的游戏。每年都会冒出一款“史上最佳”游戏新作,媒体评论员似乎忘了他们对过去作品的看法。游戏媒体的宣传令玩家相信游戏一直走在更好更强大的路线。当然,今天的游戏在技术上已经十分卓越,外观更震撼,音频更精良。但是,技术创新上以及利润增长上的追求,已经扼制了游戏的趣味性——创新的玩法,生动的故事,以及沉浸式交互体验,其重心已经转向激烈的动作场景,以及性感的角色。

也不能说过去的游戏才是最棒的。游戏经历很长的发展过程。随着游戏行业的发展,游戏产品也变得更有野心和创意,直到80年代末,许多出色的游戏开始登台,形成许多不同的题材。这是一个试验时期,当时涌现了许多热门而极具商业竞争力的游戏。当然,这其中也不乏垃圾作品。最终,游戏行业迎来了一个短暂的黄金时期,当时的技术已经先进到足以创造出可信而富有沉浸感的世界,同时也仍可兼容富有创意和想象力的旧式设计理念。对于冒险游戏题材来说,90年代早期与末期是众多经典图像冒险游戏涌现的高峰,例如《King’s Quest》、《猴岛》系列,以及许多恐怖求生冒险游戏的合体,例如《Clock Towers》、《Fatal Frames》、《生化危机》系列。恐怖求生游戏素以混合冒险游戏以及动作、角色扮演等其他题材元素而得名。这些游戏都成功把握了故事讲述、氛围和精神刺激方面的要点。

之后就是低潮时期。当时第一人称射击游戏开始崛起,其中多数游戏无耻地吸引了许多追求视觉刺激的新一代玩家。《半条命2》在其图像中使用了极富现实感的物理机制,同时还呈现了一个出众的故事情节。而《光环:战斗进化》和《毁灭战士3》则主打紧凑的战斗玩法以。《杀出重围:隐形战争》最终成了动作和角色扮演混合游戏的典型。其他题材则逐渐隐退。电脑图像的进步意味着角色身上每一个斑点、皱纹和汗珠都可以在灰色老式背景或是蒸汽朋克世界中清晰呈现。而游戏玩法却不再那么有趣。对于现代玩家来说,地图浏览变成了一项复杂的技术,这些玩家现在则习惯于依靠目标箭头指引走向一个又一个路标。

这种判断当然是纯主观性的。即便如此,假如游戏之间是以故事深度来比较,很可能最糟糕的游戏也会转败为胜。《The Maniac Mansion》以及《断剑》系列显然就是那些一度获得成功的典型例子。即使是早期的《生化危机》以现代游戏的标准来看也已经相当杰出了。这期间偶尔也有一些全新和真正有创游戏面世(例如《传送门》),但是,任何独特的创新仍然只是个例,没有发展成为庞大、持续的趋势。

那么,为何会发生这种情况呢?原因很简单也很明显——钱的问题。正如电影行业一样,不断增加的开销和追求利润会导致质量下降。这听起来似乎有违常理。但不幸的是,这个破坏了电影行业的规则也同样损害了游戏行业的创新。

游戏公司起点通常很低,很可能只是一群游戏狂热分子组队开发游戏。就Frictional Games工作室而言,该开发商是从草根起步,后来通过成功推出恐怖冒险游戏《失忆症:黑暗后裔》而成长为百万级别的游戏公司,但其设计师、程序员和美术人员仍然不足12人。该公司创始人一直高度警觉公司扩张的危险,并希望保持小而灵活的团队规模。

amnesia(from pcgamer.com)

amnesia(from pcgamer.com)

但是,这种策略只能建立在开发商能够持续吸引特定游戏市场的基础上,其前提还包括游戏玩家的品味不会随着时间发展而变化,以及其他竞争者不会从这个市场中分一杯羹。在多数情况下,游戏公司会因为竞争需要而被迫投入大笔资金,所以这就产生了不断增加的开销和人员增长的趋势。

这里就会涉及到经济原理。利润率下降的趋势决定了公司增加的产品投入可能让公司获得更大的收益,但公司投入的资金越多,其利润在总开销是所占比率就越小。

在2012年,Frictional Games报告其收益超过300万美元,而投入仅为36万美元。与之形成对比的是,2009年第四季度EA报告的净利润仅为7600万美元,而总投入却超过了40亿美元。动视尽管身为世界最具盈利性的游戏发行商,在同一时期却有2.86亿美元的净亏损。

大公司就要承担大风险。他们需要投入大笔资金来保持收支平衡。而为了持续创造利润,他们就得逐渐投入更多,但同时得到的回报却并不成比例。他们通过缩减特定产品环节的开支,或者扩大目标市场(游戏邦注:这其中存在需要投入更大开支的风险)来优化商业运营模式。实际上,多数游戏公司都是同时在采用这些策略。

与此同时,游戏质量却大打折扣。今天,开发预算达到成百上千万美元的游戏极为普遍。在这种投资力度下,一家公司无疑更难承受风险。由于更多人员和更庞大的预算需求,公司对利润的渴望超过了对艺术价值的需求。为了最大化销量,目标市场的扩展,游戏公司就会缩减或忽略那些并不会直接促成利润的元素。行业不是根据质量或游戏的艺术发展需求而创造新商业模式,而是基于短期的金钱收益。那些不会立杆见影的功能,例如复杂的故事和创新玩法,全部退居二线。

与电影行业一样,开发者和发行商认识到,系列游戏更具盈利性。所以他们不再提供拥有开头、中间和结局的故事,而是开发那种结尾并没有实际解决方法的游戏。如果该系列之后因为销售不济而被取消,那些之前已经在早期游戏中投入的玩家就会特别抓狂。

在此,我想以自己最喜欢的游戏《幽灵的国度》为例进行说明。

《幽灵的国度》发布于1997年,其开发商是不甚知名的英国工作室Gremlin Interactive。该游戏的雄心有别于同一时期的其他任何游戏。不幸的是,它的营销工作很糟糕(由Interplay Productions发行),销量很不济,收益甚微。尽管如此,该游戏的设计却相当出众,具有令人惊叹的细节,深度故事情节,令人愉悦的玩法(超过40小时),可靠的角色,优质的全动态影像,杰出的音效,以及极富沉浸感的氛围。这也是一款非常骇人的游戏。该游戏面向DOS平台开发,使用了在当时看起来很差的初级3D游戏引擎。如果这款游戏是今天问世,其玩家角色就会很残忍,拥有大块的结实肌肉,其谜题可轻易被删除,只需要跟随箭头走到下一个路标就能进行探索,其对话也会被减半。该游戏也可能被拆分成多个部分作为销售系列。《幽灵的国度》足以证明足够的独创性与想象力能够克服技术上的不足,并创造出真正独特的游戏体验。

未来是光明的,新游戏技术的发展预示着新一代游戏开发者兴起。例如《Braid》和《Limbo》这些成功的独立游戏就显示了预算有限的小型工作室也有开发出惊艳之作的可能。由于游戏行业充斥着许多续作,独立游戏设计师仍然具有许多机会。如果不迟快顺时而变,我们很难看到一味追逐利润的大型游戏公司能够在这个变幻无常的市场中参与竞争,并击败那些能够直接为玩家创造游戏的小型工作室。也许摆脱了以利润为游戏开发的第一动力这种观念,游戏才有可能返璞归真——回归其精神刺激和趣味本质。

原文发表于2013年3月15日,所涉事件及数据以当时为准。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

The descent of the games industry: an adventure gamer’s perspective

Posted by Lee Bettam.

There are many parallels between the workings of the film industry and the games industry. In films, innovative and imaginative works are often followed by disappointing and unsatisfying sequels that cater only to an established market, offering little that can be called “meaningful” artistic contribution. In games, similarly, the current market is saturated with big budget releases which generate enormous profits (comparable even with Hollywood films) but which make few advances for the genre. A new “best game ever” appears every year, with critics conveniently forgetting their own opinions of past releases. Gamers are made to think, through the self-fulfilling games media, that games are getting better all the time. Of course, today’s games are technically superior, in that they look better and sound better. However, the constant drive for increasing technical innovation, with increasing concern over profitability in order to recoup rising development cost, has choked what makes games enjoyable—innovative gameplay, engaging story, and immersive interaction—over what makes them marketable—brightly lit action scenes, manly grunting, and sexualized characters.

It would be inaccurate to say that the best games were those from the distant past. Games took a long time to develop. As the games industry evolved, games became more ambitious and creative, until finally, in the late 1980s (excuse my nostalgia), many excellent games began to appear, spanning many different genres. It was a time of experimentation. There were many popular and commercially competitive games. Of course, there was also a lot of trash. Eventually, there came a brief golden period for the games industry in which technology was advanced enough to create a believable and immersive world while still allowing the old design concepts of creativity and imagination to show through. For the adventure genre, the twin peaks of the early 1990s and the late 1990s saw the releases of many classic graphical adventure games such as the King’s Quest and Monkey Island series as well as many survival horror adventure hybrids such as the Clock Towers, Fatal Frames, and Resident Evil (Biohazard) series. Survival horror games were notable for mixing adventure elements with those of other genres such as action and role-playing. All of them succeeded by placing emphasis on storytelling, atmosphere, and some amount of mental stimulation.

Then came the fall. Precisely when it happened for the games industry was debatable. It was likely around the time when first-person shooters rose to prominence, most of which shamelessly sought to appeal to the new generation of gamers craving for visual stimulation. Half-Life 2 used realistic physics in its graphics to full effect while featuring a wonderfully arresting storyline. By comparison, Halo: Combat Evolved and Doom 3 featured intense combat gameplay that took precedence over its narrative. Though not favored initially by many game critics, Deus Ex: Invisible War eventually became the model for action and role-playing hybrid games to come (such as Bioshock and Dishonored). Other genres were gradually pushed into relative insignificance. Further advances in computer graphics meant that every spot and wrinkle and bead of sweat on a character could be animated with precision on a backdrop of some brown, clichéd, cyberpunk or steampunk world. Gameplay, on the other hand, ceased to be much fun. Map reading became too complex of a skill for modern gamers, who were now to be led slowly from waypoint to waypoint by an objective arrow.

Such judgment is, of course, purely subjective. Even so, if games are to be compared by their relative depth of storytelling, it is apparent that there has been a turn for the worst. The Maniac Mansion and Broken Sword series are obvious examples of what has once been achieved. Even the early Resident Evil games seem highly intellectual by modern game standards. Occasionally, a few completely new and truly innovative games may be released that are genuinely good (such as Portal). However, any unique innovation remains a singular erroneous blip, rebelliously situated away from what is a huge, ongoing, downward correlation.

So, why does this happen? The reason is simple and depressingly obvious—money. As in films, increasing expenditure and profit seeking usually result in decreasing quality. This may sound counterintuitive. Unfortunately, the same law that is ruining the film industry is also crippling the creativity of the game industry.

Game companies often start out small. Most likely, they are just a dedicated team of fanatics who are developing games out of pure obsession. For Frictional Games, the developer has since grown from its humble roots to become a multimillion company with the successful release of the horror adventure game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, while still employing less than a dozen designers, programmers, and artists (1). The company’s founders have always been aware of the dangers of expansion and want to remain small but flexible.

However, such a strategy is only sustainable if developers are able to consistently appeal to a particular specialist sector of the games market, and that is assuming gamers’ tastes do not change over time and that other developers do not compete for a slice of the pie. In most cases, game companies feel compelled to spend in order to compete, so the tendency is towards increasing expenditure and expanding infrastructure.

Here is where the principles of economics come into play. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall stipulates that increasing spending on production by a company (in any sector) may result in the company earning a larger revenue, but the more capital the company invests, the smaller profits become as a percentage of total expenditure.

In 2012, Frictional Games reported a return of over $3 million USD on an investment of only $360,000 USD (1). By comparison, Electronic Arts reported a net profit of only $76 million USD on a total revenue of over $4 billion USD for Q4 2009 (2). Activision, despite being the publisher of the world’s most commercially successful games, reported a net loss of $286 million USD for the same period (3).

Big game companies run big risks. They need to spend large amounts of money just to break even. To consistently make a profit, they have to progressively spend more whilst receiving less back as a percentage. They streamline the business operation by reducing expenditure on certain areas of production or by trying to expand their target market (at the risk of possibly incurring greater expenditure). In practice, most game companies engage in all of these tactics simultaneously.

In the meantime, game quality suffers. Nowadays, it is not unusual for a game to have a development budget of millions of dollars. With this kind of investment, a company is understandably less likely to take risks. Given the need for more staff and a larger budget, concern for profitability is greater than that for artistic merit. In going for maximal sales, the target market broadens, leading to a pursuit of the lowest common denominator. Conversely, elements that are not considered important because of their apparent lack of profitability are curtailed or ignored. New business models are created, based not on quality or the desire to contribute to the artistic development of the games industry but on the pragmatic need for short-term monetary gain. Features that are not immediately marketable, such as complex storytelling and innovative gameplay, become secondary.

As with films, developers and publishers realize that a series is likely more profitable for games. Instead of providing a satisfying story arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end, games are being developed to end part way through a story with no real resolution. If the series then gets canceled because of poor sales, gamers who have invested in the earlier games will be left wholly frustrated.

Here, I feel inclined to self-indulgently mention my own favorite game of all time as an illustration—Realms of the Haunting.

Realms of the Haunting was released in 1997 by a relatively little known British game developer called Gremlin Interactive. The game had ambitions unlike any other games of its time. Sadly, it was poorly marketed (especially considering that it was published by Interplay Productions), had poor sales, and made little money. Despite this, the game was a triumph in design, with awe-inspiring attention to details, a deep storyline, satisfying gameplay (over 40 hours), relatable characters, well-acted Full Motion Video cut scenes (honestly), excellent sound, and an intensely immersive atmosphere. It was also a very scary game. The game was developed on the DOS platform and used a rudimentary 3D game engine that looked rubbish even then. If the game was to be made now, the player character would be an inhuman, grunting lump of muscle (or in the case of a female, the character would be an athletic nymphomaniac with disproportionate breasts, occasionally hinting at having girl power so to deflect any potential criticism of sexism), the puzzles would simply be deleted, exploration would amount to just following the arrow to the next waypoint, and dialog would be halved. The game would also be released in several parts as a running series, each adhering to the same episodic structure with repetitive cliffhangers, before it would get cancelled halfway through. Realms of the Haunting was proof that ingenuity and imagination were enough to overcome technological failing to create a truly unique gaming experience.

The future is bright, however. The development of new game technologies has heralded a new generation of game developers. Notable successful indie titles such as Braid and Limbo show how it is possible for small studios with limited budgets to develop compelling games. With the games industry saturated with mostly derivative trash, indie game designers have an excellent opportunity. It is hard to see how, without drastic adaptation, big game companies that are concerned principally with profits can continue to compete in a changing marketplace in which smaller developers can create and easily distribute their own games directly to the gaming community. Perhaps with the removal of profit as the primary motivation for game development, games (adventure or otherwise) can finally return to being about what they are always supposed to be about—mental simulation and fun.(source:adventureclassicgaming


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