Project: Buzz Kill
by Pixeleen Mistral on 07/03/07 at 7:37 pm
by Onder Skall
The BBC covered yesterday what the Herald covered last week- “Project: Top Secret” has launched in an effort to build a user-created MMO. As a trade-off for being a bit late to the party they were able to provide us with an overview of how many signups they’ve received.
At this point there are 20,000 signups, with an expected total of 100,000 by the time they close things off. Numbers like that are sure to attract headhunters trying to fill a quota, but it means a bit more than that. The music industry is notorious for ripping off artists simply because they can – after all, everybody wants to be a star. Now, with this many people vying for a finite number of positions, will the games industry suffer the same fate? Some feel that it has already.
In this same article David Perry is quoted as saying: “We are not doing this for fun; this is a professional game we are trying to make. It’s a business.” So much for doing what you love. There was a time where the difference between a good game and a great game resided solely in the passion of the people behind it. Perhaps those days have passed.
As far as the hope that this was an effort to discover some shining stars or for people to showcase their talent, two other quotes seemed to stand out:
“I hope it will prove to us that consumers are useful“
[...]
“If they deliver zero, we can still ship a title“
Well now, don’t we all feel special?
Meanwhile, over at Wonderland, Alice is just tying things up at GDC and brings us this quote from Eric Zimmerman that just might apply:
“[...] 3 or 4 GDCs ago, we had a change of emphasis. Consoles were where we always wanted to be. The ‘real’ game industry, right? Then there was a huge malaise, encapsulated in a game design keynote given by Warren Spector, and I think he sort of angered a lot of people with this talk about licensed games, and how his dream was to do a, I don’t know what, a Scooby Doo game… I realized that year that, you know what, why are we aspiring to wanting to enter the larger games industry? There’s no way we could do this interesting work that we’re doing now.“
I don’t think there’s any better way to explain why I write about games in Second Life than this.
Onder Skall also writes for Second Life Games
Curious Rousselot
Mar 7th, 2007
From the article: “The music industry is notorious for ripping off artists simply because they can – after all, everybody wants to be a star. Now, with this many people vying for a finite number of positions, will the games industry suffer the same fate? Some feel that it has already.”
I know personally a few successful, professional musicians and a few professional video game programmers and I can tell you, a successful musician is paid far more that a successful video game programmer. So, the video game industry is already taking far more advantage of the talent than the music industry.
All the video game programmers I know could make far more money developing commercial application but they work in the video game industry because it is far more fun. They are already sacrificing pay and they know it.
Nacon
Mar 7th, 2007
HAHAHHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!
It’s going to be a sad sad, sick sad success for them.