Creativity and Film

Valve’s Gabe Newell is interviewed here by Earthworm Jim creator Dave Perry on what it takes to become a successful entrant into the gaming industry with a developer.  I’m grossly underqualified to comment on any of the practical advice, but I thought one comment in particular deserved attention.

Newell:

Specialization and hierarchy are the norms in film production, and are antithetical to what needs to happen in the games industry. The reason for that distinction is that the game industry is more focused on invention than on repeatability/measurability. Programmers that can draw are going to be in much better shape than an animator specializing in putting talking mouths on cats. The solutions of tomorrow are not going to fall into the production or organizational categories of today. 

This may be true for a very specific sub-set of developers, but it’s not clear to me that this is generalizable to, well, most companies.

Valve has the luxury of considering this to be self-evident: they’re a relatively niche player with a product portfolio that has been overwhelming, if not exclusively, dominated by Half-Life and its various sequels and spin-offs.  In conjunction with Steam, Valve can focus much more on a periodic release schedule that emphasizes art and elegance; this is due in part to the use of Steam as their own distribution channel as well as their more Blizzard-esque release catalogue. 

But most companies don’t have this luxury.  Look at Activision, Take Two, and EA, which if not the most respected publishers out there at least are responsible for an overwhelming portion of its output.

Activision’s Kotick, from Wired: ”You’re not going to see a lot of cross-development any time soon,” Kotick said, adding that the new company will crank out annual editions of franchise favorites like Guitar Hero and Call of Duty.

EA CFO Warren Jensen attributed the plunge in EA’s stock price to: “[d]elays in the release of new consoles roiled the shipping schedule for new games.”

Pachter called Take-Two’s earnings an indicator of a “black hole” and their earnings releases have been a steady stream of spiraling losses.

These companies are living and dying by their execution, not their creativity per se.  They sell plenty of product, they just don’t do so profitably… and part of their strategy to do so is to allow others to come up with quality product while they focus on repeatability and sustainability.  That’s how companies weather the storm of the occasional bad release - what would have happened to Valve if Half-Life had underperformed, or HL2 bombed?  Not all good games sell.

So yes, I appreciate the take of people like Newell, because it’s important to have people focused on craft as well as production.  But to pretend that gaming doesn’t need to account for both seems wholly misguided to me.