I’ve been thinking about the creative process in game development, and why particular games get made, I’ve been thinking about how there are more games than ever being released these days, but that it seems like most of them are genre clones. That feels like quite a loaded statement – obviously a lot of good and original games are also still being made, but my point is just that there are, by weight, thousands of times more releases that are basically just rehashing games that already exist.
I suppose this relates to AI trends, also? I keep logging into LinkedIn and seeing AI startup founders posting about how their new platform will soon be able to generate whole games from a prompt (Soon, guys! Any day now! Honest!) and it makes me think about how their models are trained by looking at footage of existing games – these people are building machines that can automatically spit out blurry photocopies of existing games, but are fundamentally incapable of creative innovation. I don’t think it’s a consideration for them – like perhaps for an archetypical engineer the joy comes from solving a big technical challenge, without asking wishy-washy questions like “What kind of emotional experience are you trying to convey?”
I think about all the mobile developers out there making clones of Flappy Bird, Candy Crush Saga, Game of War and the like, and I think about all the AAA studios trying to develop their own Dark Souls or Diablo or – a big trend to keep an eye out for in the next few years – Essentially Roblox, but dressed up like GTA Online. I think about all the indie developers showing off their Stardew Valley knock-offs in every cozy games showcase, or the students who sit down to make a final year project and end up cloning Vampire Survivors. To produce any finished game is a feat to be proud of, and I’m not knocking that – all of these developers have added something to the collective culture of mankind. But… speaking as a introspective, overeducated design wonk… I am compelled to dig in a little and pick out what they’ve actually added to the culture, beyond recycling an existing work.
Lately, I’ve also been thinking about the games that inspired me when I was young.
I keep looking at job vacancies and feeling very put-off by the projects they’re offering; the peak example being mobile slot machine apps. When I do find something I can vibe with, interviewers often ask me whether I’m passionate about the subject of the game (eg. football, trains, Formula 1, etc). I usually say I’m passionate about improving my craft and putting good games out into the world, but quite agnostic about what those games are exactly – which to me feels like a level-headed professional attitude, but doesn’t appear to be what hiring managers are looking for.
It’s refreshing to take a step back and think about games that did spark my imagination – to think about what the ingredients of my ‘dream project’ would be, in an cartoonishly ideal world. I don’t just mean naming specific games I wish I could work on, but making lists and spider diagrams and trying to pick out the common themes and styles and elements that really resonated with me. Now that I think about it, this sounds like what Fawzi Mesmar describes as ‘creative sobriety’.
So! Let’s jump aboard our ship of imagination and reminisce about our early gaming experiences. I’ll go first.
My parents bought our first family PC when I was about 11 years old, and soon afterwards my brother obtained a home-made CD (rare at the time!) from a friend-of-a-friend, who bought it from some guy in Glasgow who ran a mail order game piracy business. There were 50 games on the disc, and most of them worked. I felt lucky to have it at the time, but it’s only when I look back now that I can see that’s a huge library of games to randomly land in a kid’s lap.
(We also had a Sega Master System, and then over the years added a SNES and a second-hand Mega Drive. But if this post comes across as being very PC-centric, it’s probably because I’m thinking about games that inspired me in connection to working on a new game of my own – and I’m most likely to be making something for PC, because it seems like the easiest platform to release on)
The point is: When I think about my early experiences with games, they feel very varied. All these developers were pursuing different ideas – technical and artistic goals – and they went about it in very diverse ways. Perhaps we can say this is a technical issue, reflecting the absence of big, generic development tools like Unreal and Unity? If game developers are making their whole game from scratch, it makes sense that they develop their own in-house style – and maybe that’s something that has become less common, these days.
Speaking as a man a certain age, I can see that I grew up in a particularly fertile period in the evolution of home videogames – let’s say after the launch of the NES but before the launch of the Xbox 360. Today, somewhere in the Venn diagram of mobile gaming, analytic data, microtransactions and commercial game engines, games feel a bit more creatively stagnant – a bit more homogenised. People are rarely figuring things out on their own any more, but instead are usually building on the back of one or two popular games from within the last few years.
I feel like it’s also worth thinking about how all these memories are shaped by the fact I was quite young at the time. Everything seems new and exciting when you are young, purely because you haven’t seen anything before. When I meet people who only got into games as an adult – perhaps one day they stumbled upon one particular game they enjoyed, and never progressed any further than that – I can only wonder what that experience is like.
I’ve been applying for jobs lately, and noticing in interviews that people usually want me to be an expert in one game. Usually they want me to be a superfan of their previous game (or one particular game that someone else has recently had a huge success with) but they don’t seem to place much value on my other interests and experiences. It feels very weird to me – a stifling and myopic view of where ideas come from.
I think they think they’re optimising something. I don’t know whether this is just some sort of fallacious ‘common sense’ that older developers have, or if there’s some formal Team Lead training manual that actively encourages them to fixate on a single point. To me, it has always felt like the opposite of what I would want, if I was in their position – give me a team with a range of perspectives, who can comfortably adapt to change and pick a design apart to appreciate its component threads (and how they relate to other games and genres).
(At that time that I wrote that, I wondered if I was just feeling defensive and frustrated at not getting hired, but the next day I found the creator of Guilty Gear shares my frustrations)
I also feel very conscious that there are a lot of senior people in the games industry who do not have much personal history with games – particularly at newer studios, or in the mobile sector, or when it comes to the more business-oriented roles (which often implies they are higher-ranking people with control over budgets). Speaking as a designer it feels very strange to me, but if I racked my brains I could probably name at least one person I’ve worked with in every discipline group who just kinda fell into this business because the money was decent, they didn’t like wearing a suit to the office every day, or it just happened to be the most convenient job available at the time.
Normal human beings don’t buy or play many different games per year. I think sometimes interviewers assume that I’m one of them, and maybe that helps to explain why they ask focused questions about my taste in games – like they assume it will be very narrow, and they’re trying to understand which two games I play. I have yet to formulate a constructive way to say that I am, in fact, a voracious freak.
Looking from a broader perspective, much of the financial foundations of the industry has been swallowed up by investors who seem to view videogames as if they were slot machines – a mentality like they are just software that goes out into the world and generates revenue. I don’t have a specific link to back this up, but it’s a topic they keep bringing up on the Virtual Economy podcast, vis-à-vis the current waves of layoffs and studio closures. I get the sense that some of the big investors thought they were placing safe bets on money printers, and didn’t comprehend that games are complex artistic works that take a long time to make and can sink or swim based on all sorts of unpredictable factors.
If you asked them why they invested all that money, they’d probably tell you that they looked at the data and it seemed like a good idea. I wonder if that kind of explanation (which I just made up) reveals a deeper truth – that they did look at the data, but the red flags they missed were things that are not captured in data.
During one recent interview for a live ops role, I tried to describe my approach to retention design. I invite you to consider the following two thoughts:
- Retention is good, and it’s a sensible idea to have some retention mechanics in your game.
- Retention mechanics undermine the player’s motivation to play – as you apply more pressure, there’s a corresponding increase in player fatigue. Eventually they will burn out, and perhaps come to resent you.
Retention is good, obviously, but if your only goal is to maximise retention then you might put too much pressure on players and, paradoxically, drive them away. It may be healthier if you balance your retention features to allow allow players to take a break from time to time, develop a comms pipeline that lets them know when the next big content update goes live, and build a community culture of lapsing and reactivation. This implies that your day-to-day retention would be lower in general, but the payoff would come from a more resilient community that sticks around over months and years.
The problem is that – as far as I’m aware – we do not yet have an established KPI figured out to quantify that second thing, and it would necessarily take a long time to evaluate, so it’s difficult to judge what that trade-off would be exactly. It’s not captured in the data, but anyone who plays these games can feel it.
Their response? “We think retention is good, actually. We find it’s best if players play every day.” Well, fancy that.
If your only engagement with games is as products on a KPI dashboard, I’m not sure you can really understand what your products are. If you live on a diet of executive summaries, asking your personal AI agent to summarise the current industry trends because you’re too busy to play games yourself, you may, perhaps, be a danger to yourself and everyone you work with. There are risks at the other end of the spectrum too, of course – when you ignore all the data and market analysis stuff, and only design things based on vibes, it’s a bit like playing Blackjack while wearing a blindfold. But I think a healthy balance can be struck between these extremes.
Data analysis is a essential tool for modern game developers, but it shouldn’t be your only tool. A bit of taste and intuition regarding the intangible, experiential elements of a game can be far more powerful, reliable and cost-effective! But you can’t derive a feeling out of SQL queries or large language models – the only way to tap into this is to gather up some people whose instincts you trust, and let them cook.
I recently read a blog post by one of the programmers on SimCity 4. The part that resonated with me was where he said that EA, in its current form, probably can’t make SimCity games anymore – not because of technical limitations or legal barriers, but because the way in which they run their studios these days would not support the kind of creative culture required to invent something so playful and complex. An obvious case-in-point would be SimCity (2013) – a game which looked tremendous, but seemed to choke on a technical design that pulled it away from the kind of experience players expected.
(I also read a recent interview with Will Wright, if you’re wandering what he’s up to these days)
It feels like a widespread problem in the industry right now – a sense that the dual impact of improved data transparency, and a tsunami of private equity that demands steady returns, are squeezing out air from the creative process. Developers don’t have time to take the team out for an inspirational private screening of Koyaanisqatsi any more, because they need to crack on with delivering a fresh vertical slice. Picture the scene: There is a council of executives in a distant, smoke-filled room somewhere, who meet every six months to play your latest demo and decide whether to kill your project or not – they are not interested in funding creative experiments, when their team of highly-paid analysts have already studied the market and produced a persuasive bullet-point list of what features your game needs in order to be a global smash.
Before we had a PC of our own, I used to play SimCity 2000 at my friends’ houses. It’s one of my earliest memories of being impressed by how much more complex and powerful PC games could be – I was mainly comparing it to SimCity on the SNES, which looked like a Fisher-Price toy by comparison (in a very complimentary way). Even now, looking at that screenshot up there… okay, I find the intense blue water a little painful to look at, but as a whole it still looks great. The decision to have all the UI elements floating around in resizable windows – as if the game client was a canvas for you to devise your own UI layout, in order to interact with the hypothetical world ticking over inside your machine – has a certain kind of… pre-dotcom-bubble ‘geek chic’ quality to it, as if the game is trying to capture the experience of being an urban planner sitting at their work PC in a city hall office.
For a kid growing up in a rural part of the UK, it felt particularly exotic to be building a big, shimmering city of skyscrapers and subway systems – I always used to think of it as being like the New York I had seen in films. It was a sandbox in which to engage with these incomprehensibly large things… to ask questions and explore problems through simulated trial-and-error. Which is exactly the kind of reaction the game was designed to evoke – the experiential intent built on all that research and playful experimentation.
I feel like SimCity 2000 in particular has been having a little moment lately? It’s a game that has been on my mind, and I’ve noticed other people posting about it as a sort of iconic example of games that inspired them as a child – or the kind of holistic quality bar that developers aspire to meet someday. It is available on GOG for less than the cost of a posh sandwich.
I mentioned in my last end-of-year roundup that I had this feeling that the industry was crashing, and that we may one day look back on GTA VI as marking the end of an era – a decline tracing back to the peaks of the Xbox 360. I’ve been hearing the same concern echoed on podcasts and in online chatter, in the months since then. I’m not massively plugged-in to the business side of the industry, but I keep seeing signs of a culture that is optimising itself to death.
You might expect that all the improved sources of data and more flexible monetisation options we’ve developed in the last 20 years would mean game publishers have a stronger understanding of their audience than ever before, and new ways to meet them. And yet! We’ve seen a number of examples in recent years where publishers have invested incredible sums of money over a 10 year (!!!) development cycle to produce some absolute turkeys… or sometimes that they made a perfectly decent game, but the money people had become convinced that it would sell an impossible number of units at launch and based their budgeting on that assumption.
There’s something weirdly poetic in the way that the executive class (at large) seem to be trying to replace human labour with generative AI, and develop pipelines that could (hypothetically) analyse today’s consumer habits, generate an outline of what kind of game would be popular right now, and then squeeze out some Gen-AI slop to meet that product spec with minimal human intervention. Based on what I’ve seen so far the games look terrible, but also… in the process, they’re driving up hardware prices to the point where nobody can afford to buy games anyway. The money machine seems to be melting itself away to nothing.
It’s also true that ‘the videogame industry’ has grown and splintered into lots of different sub-sectors, and that some of them are doing better than others. Most of my doom-mongering here relates to what I’d describe as mainstream commercial games for PC and consoles, but there are many other types of game being made for other audiences – Leigh Alexander’s 12-year-old essay on the subject remains spot-on. I expect the reason I see so many vacancies for mobile slot machine apps is because it’s a growing market.
There’s also a current trend for successful indie developers to start indie publishing businesses and use their money to help fund other projects they like, and lots of laid-off developers coming together to form new studios – which feels a bit like watching a forest regrow after a bush fire. Games will continue to be made, and played, but there’s a feeling in the air that mainstream commercial games for PC and console is evolving into a niche, luxury hobby for old people.
Speaking as an objective observer, it’s not unusual for giant investment groups to slither through an industry, buying up companies and asset-stripping them; as a consumer who generally enjoyed the products being made by those companies, it sucks to see it happen; as a professional who works in that industry, it can be pretty mortifying. There is a viable business model in making copycat mobile games with carefully optimised monetisation systems, and it probably is more financially reliable than making quirky indie games. You can call these games a success in the sense that they make money, and for a lot of people that’s all that really matters, but to someone whose brain has been fermenting in games since childhood, they feel creatively bereft.
One last thread of thought on this topic is my ongoing efforts to enhance my niece and nephew’s gaming literacy. For years now I’ve been buying cool old games on GOG to install on their family PC, and donating a few essential console games to their collection. I feel like there’s a certain sense of closing a loop, or passing on the torch – dropping a stack of great games into their lap, just like I had when I was their age. But – with a few notable exceptions – it’s been difficult to lure them away from playing Roblox, or random shovelware games on their phones.
It makes me wonder: While I sit here reminiscing about significant games from my youth, what formative experiences are they having?
How will free-to-play games and UGC platforms shape the new generation’s expectations of games, going forward? For example, I get the feeling that niece and nephew generally expect everything to be a third-person action game with a customisable avatar – they seem to struggle with things like management sims or RTS games, where you don’t have a clearly defined character to control. They aren’t used to playing competitive games face-to-face with their opponents, or slogging through a losing game for the sake of good sportsmanship – they’re used to something more like a ‘battle royale’ experience, playing alone in a match-made multiplayer game, where they are either in contention to win or immediately out of the game and back into a new matchmaker queue. I expect that’s good for retention.
There are more games coming out than ever before, but the pursuit of data-driven optimisation means that new players are being exposed to a artificially narrow range of experiences. I can only assume that someone, somewhere is making money from this, but it seems bad for… I guess I want to say the cultural health of the medium, or something. I want to urge people to give kids good games – buy them a cheap Ambernic and load it up with a tasteful collection of ROMs, if that’s what it takes – and push back against the mechanical winnowing of creativity.
It feels a bit futile, but then again… what isn’t?
