Mark Danks

There were a couple articles which were posted that game developers would find interesting.  One is by N’Gai Croal, the video game writer for Newsweek.  Monday Morning Quarterback is an email discussion between N’Gai and Geoff Keighley.  While there are parts which I disagree with, overall, it is a very balanced view about the battle occuring between the 3 hardware platforms.

The PlayStation 2 set such high expectations for the PlayStation 3 that there was no way that it could meet them.  While I wish that the PS3 was selling even more, the price is obviously a huge issue.  I have no “inside info” about it but, everyone I talk to knows that until the price drops, Sony is not going to be pushing a lot of units.  I was pleased to see them discuss the lack of 3rd party success on the Wii as well.  All of the games that Geoff mentions at one point (Super Smash Bros Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy, Metriod Prime 3, Brain Age Academy, and Wii Health) are all 1st party titles.  Even if the Wii continues to sell (which I am not convinced that it will), I just do not see 3rd party publishers actually making any money off of it.  From a game development standpoint, I think that the Wii is the same as the Gamecube.

The other article was an interview with Bing Gordon, the Chief Creative Officer at EA.  In the article, he makes reference to how the Renderware technology basically failed within EA.  I was one of the people involved with trying to use the Renderware technology, both on The Godfather and on LotR: The White Council.  We tried to use it but, the Renderware technology had a ton of problems, much of which I described in an internal EA whitepaper.  However, the EA culture is just not set up to use a central technology.  There are too many games which are too different, and the politics between the studios and between the game teams is fierce.  Without any incentive to cooperate, Renderware was doomed from the beginning.

Of course, in the end, EA got Burnout and Black, which have already made back way more than the $48 million purchase price for Criterion.  Also, the disruption that EA caused for the rest of the industry who was using Renderware was massive.  The irony is that EA thought that they were purchasing a technology suite, but really got some game teams.

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