Tricky Bits with Rob and PJ
Potpurri: Big and Small Media Prequel
Enjoying the show? Hating the show? Want to let us know either way? Text us!
So much of Tricky Bits is an ongoing conversation between Rob and PJ about various tech topics. This particular episode revisits some old topics around game development, its history and costs, and what factors come into play that shape the market today.
As a heads up...this one is more conversational than some of the past episodes as we build up to a larger discussion for a future conversation around big and small media in various contexts (games, movies, television).
Finally...we announce our Discord server, where you can comment on individual episodes. You can find the link to the thread for this episode here: https://discord.com/channels/1146929485694902282/1217606185159491695
Come let us know what you think!
Enjoying the show? Hating the show? Want to let us know either way? Text us!
So much of Tricky Bits is an ongoing conversation between Rob and PJ about various tech topics. This particular episode revisits some old topics around game development, its history and costs, and what factors come into play that shape the market today.
As a heads up...this one is more conversational than some of the past episodes as we build up to a larger discussion for a future conversation around big and small media in various contexts (games, movies, television).
Finally...we announce our Discord server, where you can comment on individual episodes. You can find the link to the thread for this episode here: https://discord.com/channels/1146929485694902282/1217606185159491695
Come let us know what you think!
Welcome back to Tricky Bits with Rob and PJ. You know a lot of where this podcast comes from is the conversations that Rob and I have had through the years and continue to have. Often we're going out to have a drink, and this episode is going to be a little bit different than our prior episodes. Our prior episodes we tended to have more of an outline, and this is going to be a bit more of a popery episode, but at the same time it is in many ways a prequel to a topic we've been discussing for a while, which is this ongoing discussion about big and small media as it pertains to games, movies, television shows, really the whole gamut, and we've been trying to piece a lot of this different stuff together. We haven't quite cracked it yet, but this is an episode that gets you into our mindset about where a lot of these topics intersect. Whether at currently it's a little bit of an experimental episode for us, We'll see how well you like it. Don't worry, next week we're going to go back to our outlined version, so you'll get to enjoy that again, but we're really curious to see what you think about this particular format.
Speaker 1:With that, I'm going to drop you, as they say, in media race Folks who don't speak Latin. That means in the middle of things. So one of the things I started doing research on yesterday, after we talked about the big media versus small media and I'm only at the tip of the iceberg right now is we talked about this hollowing out of the middle, and the research I'm starting to do is how has the cost of AAA games changed over the years? But I want to be able to normalize it against both inflation as well as the gaming population. What is actually the upsides for these things and really try to relate that back to the cost.
Speaker 2:I also think it's the breakdown of the cost increase of. I don't think this comes back to the Unreal Engine and do you have an engine team is fits in this same thing it used to be. It was all programs Back in, maybe one artist with lots of programming time, and over time it's shifted the other way. Now AAA games are mostly pipeline and content. If you can speed up the pipeline of how quick can an artist see that result in the game, you get better iteration and you get more experimentation. If you have to wait six hours to see the result, you're only going to do things you know work. You're not going to experiment.
Speaker 2:So I think a shorter iteration and a better pipeline gives you better games for one. And how that affects cost you can dive into it but you can just throw in the bullet points out there. But today most of the cost today is in content and if you can speed the pipeline up then you save a crap ton of money because most of the people on the team are content related and if you can speed all their jobs up, that makes things super efficient. So I think the big gains in cost reduction are in the tool side of tooling, the iteration time, not necessarily in programming. I think engine teams have been stable in size for a long time and they cost a lot of money because they all experience programmers. But in the grand scheme of things it's a tiny percentage. These days, if you spend 10 percent on programming on a game, you're probably doing it wrong.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to challenge this one, rob. Yesterday we did talk a lot about how every Unreal game looks the same right, and so if we basically say and I'm going to ignore for a second your point about spending the money on a bespoke engine team to upgrade Unreal, Let me just hold that one off to the side for a second but if content alone was the deciding factor and that was the only place for innovation, then I didn't say it was deciding factor.
Speaker 2:I said it's much the cost. Well, it's OK, that's fair. Ok. Even a triple A game takes Spider-Man. Content was much of the cost, so it's not the deciding factor. It's just that big, modern triple A games have a lot of content. They're expected to be this long. They're expected to look this good. That requires a lot of content. You've got hard surface models, you've got material models, you've got lighting. There used to be one person. Now they will separate.
Speaker 2:Separate jobs yeah, In programming you now have a game programmer, tool programmer and maybe a network programmer, but some of this is libraries. Middleware comes into it. Middleware and art doesn't really exist because it's the theme. You could use W-wise for audio and get rid of your audio programmer, or maybe have one audio programmer to integrate it and work with it. Have it the same thing. This collision could all be. You integrate with it, when for art it's a lot more difficult because whatever you do needs the aesthetic of the end result of what the art director laid down. So it's much harder to middleware art over then using a third party and giving them the design doc.
Speaker 1:Sure, I mean, that's the content houses problem that we've talked about.
Speaker 2:But bringing it back full circle. Because of that and because of Unreal, it is possible to make a game that doesn't have barely any programming stuff. Unreal has all these things. All these things that bespoke engines integrate with the programmer audio, physics, collision, lighting, whatever it may be, third party network and libraries, ai, path tracing, libraries, things like that can all be integrated by a program, but they're all already in Unreal. So you can do all these things that all the teams are doing out the box. Everybody does it the same way. You get what's in the box and that's where it looks like an Unreal game comes from. Everyone has the same tools.
Speaker 2:The best games are the ones you use those tools best and the ones that rain Unreal in, because it's very easy to hang yourself. There's plenty of rope there to do anything you want and you can do in side by side. In the store you'll get effects that are the same effect water on a surface effect. One of them is real time and one of them is for offline rendering, and this one's crazy expensive but looks really good and you could pull it in your game and it will work. But you're paying the cost and unless your game is entirely based on wet surfaces and you can afford the cost, then you're going to screw yourself. It's like building a house. I got a million dollars to build a house. It's like I'm not going to spend it all on the windows. I need to do the rest of it. I need a whole house.
Speaker 2:Part of your job is knowing the limit of what's reasonable and realistic. What's the cost of authoring, what's the cost of maintaining, what's the actual performance cost in terms of GPU cycles and memory and whatever? And I think the teams that have engine programmers are far more aware of this, because they have engine programmers who are looking at this stuff all the time and looking at performance all the time, and they're looking at profiles and they're looking at memory footprint graphs and things like that and they're like oh, what happened here? Oh, that asset got added to this. Like, is that a viable thing to add to the game for the cost?
Speaker 1:Rob, do you think that's something that's missing in the general Development processes for everybody, Like everyone, not just the engine programmers, but the gameplay programmers, the artists, like everyone should actually have that performance window up to really understand, you know, what these spikes look like.
Speaker 2:And much of what everyone should. They're hard to read. You can misread them and read the wrong data from them. I do think there should be a process that runs once a day and goes oh, what happened today? You have a buyer and you have a script or code or a person that pulls out the critical pieces of information in the way that makes sense for the team.
Speaker 2:How team-a does it and how team-b does it may be different, but the information that's important for the game being made should be pulled out on a daily basis and graphed Over time. You can go, look, performance is going down as assets get added. Someone added shadows on everything and it's very easy to add light to that cash shadows and don't do anything, but you still pay for the shadow. So, working with what you have, pulling out that information and, I think, graphing it over time, even if you do once a week okay, last week with 60 hertz an hour, 40, what happened? If you do that once per milestone and you're like, oh shit, it's really slow, it's hard to go back and undo what happened then you miss the milestone. I think even a week may be too long.
Speaker 1:I was going to say probably a daily basis.
Speaker 2:I mean yesterday's build, today's build, this happened and that can be all part of the automated build process to make sure it actually builds. So you have these like look, something happened here and it's like we can undo yesterday's work without busting the milestone. We can't undo, or we can at least bubble it up to the top and be like how important is this Because it's really crippling us. Or can we reduce the quality? Can we remove it completely? Whatever it could be, it could be a new subsystem in code, it could be a new asset, it could be a new lighting Many reasons it can happen. It's not all bad. It's not all because of bad artists.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no, I get it, it's all about programming.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of reasons and games are so complicated now that spotting it is straight away Is essential. Because if something gets built on top of that problem, yeah, now it's also a problem and it can't be removed and it needs what it's built on. So spotting it straight away, fulton up to the top and deciding then and there is this need, and sometimes the answer is yes, because you all these other systems are built on top of that and that's the cost, deal with it, optimize Later on in the game. You don't know what to optimize. You went for the profiler and the problem with unreal is nothing stands out. You'll be basically, I call it death by a thousand cuts, sure, and there's nothing that stands out in the profile of the times right in front of you could see where it's all going, but there's literally a thousand tiny things that shouldn't be there.
Speaker 2:Yeah all of them together add up, but any one of them that you spend a day or two optimizing don't make any difference. Not getting those in the first place is the way to make unreal sing in terms of, like the top metrics that come to mind.
Speaker 1:I mean, is it really Frame rate and memory, or are there more that are like hey, these are like the, the hot spots you should really be looking at in that graph, or is it? Hey, it all depends upon what platforms you're targeting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it depends on the game. Ever like, oh look, this works great on good, this new thing works great on DX 12 and Super bad on DX 11. It's like how important to take 11? Can we drop support for DX 11? Does it have to work really good? Can we optimize the game all the ways? Oh look, it works great on Xbox X, but not an S. You have to release an S. What are you gonna do? Can you take the asset out of this build? Can you just make it simpler? Same between PC and both consoles, like the PC is more powerful than both the console? Yep, a lot more memory to. Should you be using that memory?
Speaker 1:You're you're operating in the triple-a space and you're saying I was want to be there.
Speaker 2:We added ray tracing now on the platforms that don't have ray tracing, so it's not only is it optimum in the optimizing, it's like what's the alternative? Does it have to be there and can we design the game around not having this? And that's part of being a good team, and I think this is why you pull the key rock stars out of a team and put them on a new team, stadia style. Then all you end up with is a basically a pit fight of a bunch of egos, big dick measuring contest, basically of who is who's right, and it's like we solved this problem this way and we were right because our game was successful. We solved it the exact opposite way and we were also right because our game was also successful. Take a step back and look at what's needed for this game, which is why teams that stick together tend to be better over time.
Speaker 2:The Notre Dame somnax of the world. Because of this, like everyone knows what everyone does and how they work right, kind of have an understanding of the limits. I could do this, but it's not waste of time because it's gonna get pulled, because it's gonna be too slow, or that's the ond project. I'm like we want this huge, animating, city-sized bad guy and Engine is not really made for it. But let's do it anyway, and Do it the way we would have done it all, the way art wants to do it, and Then go and look at what's happening why is it breaking? Let's increase command buffer sizes, let's increase allocator sizes so it works, and and then go from there. I'm like, yeah, naturally it's. We could do it if we tweak this, this and this, or With the lightings breaking because the assets so big or whatever it may be. It's like we can see the problems and Address them case by case if that's really required. But that's on D. Don't do that in production right.
Speaker 1:But I think it goes to your point of if. If I want my game to have feature X and it's a hallmark of the game, whether it's I want to fight a giant city or everything needs to be wet surfaces, that's fine. You're making a choice for where you want to put that investment, both in terms of art and performance, right.
Speaker 2:It's like building the house. Yeah, I want a swimming pool. These people don't. There's a cost associated with it. If I you have a swimming pool, you can have an Olympic size one and spend all the budget, and now you've just got a swimming pool, right, or I want everything clad in marble, and that means I. Everything else needs to be MDF, and I want a gold toilet right why not, but and?
Speaker 1:It means that your pipes are made of lead.
Speaker 2:Hey you're, but that's where you put your budget. That's fine. You still have to complete the rest of it, right? That's why you get games on a good tech demos and you get. That's how games get funded and that's ultimately what guts the middle, the middle class of gaming that's hollowed out right now is because of that, and I think what real does play a big role in In that. I just don't know how.
Speaker 1:I do too. This goes back to that data question. I found a great site where they look at the cost through the decades of, let's say that, the cost of a console and the cost of its game, where, like the cost of a console in In 1977 of the Atari 2600 was 200 bucks, which in 2020 dollars, which is when they were doing this article was just shy of a thousand bucks, and the average game cost in 1977 is 40 bucks, which translates to 170 in $20, and so there's a part of me that really wants to say that I actually think, as much as we talk about, oh, game prices are increasing, I Think there's actually been a massive deflationary effect in games and I suspect what is actually sustained it has been a larger game population.
Speaker 2:But I don't know, and this is like the thing I want to do. The data on this a hundred million playstations. Well, threes, fours, fives will be there soon, are you sure? Yeah 75% of them are actively used. Every every now and then. That's a lot of. That's more than right. What every was 2600 and yes, games cost a lot more to make, but there's a lot more people funding them and I think it balances out. I mean, the big game companies are not hurting.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're not. I'm curious. I said this again. This is like the Marvel movie problem that I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm curious of the flip side of that. I want I want to see stats Numbers from the games that failed. Sure, like, okay, this game got canned. Why was it purely financial? Was it never gonna technically work? But the financial ones of like, how much did you spend on what and where, and how did you not handle the Monetary budget but also the technical budget, what path was taken together today? I think there's a lot to be learned. That no one talks about it, no one does Public postmortems of like this is where we screwed up and we went down this path and we should have gone down this path. There's a lot of information there that you could really learn we could use Duke Nukem forever as our case study.
Speaker 2:Yeah and uh. But even big games are like why does it? Why did EA? Okay, why did Sony just close that studio down in London? Obviously some thought went into it like kill the whole studio, don't just let some people off, just get rid of the whole game. What state was it in?
Speaker 2:And I think there's a lot to learn there. But you only learn this by being involved with your particular game and Even, maybe for the team, don't have access to this info. So it's hard to learn from mistakes because they never talked about. Yeah, it's like came, came, go, shut down last a little bit last year of it. A leak of it may happen and you'll look at it and I go is actually look pretty cool, but that's the only Insight that you'll get be a few screenshots, maybe a leak of the of a running game, of video. You'll never get like a studio to sit down. But like okay, numbers, technical numbers, hiring, firing like that level of detail would be a huge win for the industry and I think it would show that a lot of these smaller indie, middle ground studios are doing it wrong. They're all on that path to failure. Some make it, some don't.
Speaker 1:The premise they're all on that path to failure because the economics they're working with is is there, approaching like a triple A game or what's the? What's the fundamental mistake?
Speaker 2:I think they're all on that path to failure and some some happen to survive. I think the path is the next paycheck is not guaranteed. It's like miss a milestone. What happens is like some publishers are real bad about miss a milestone. We're not gonna pay you if you don't pay you. If I don't pay my staff, you're not gonna get the next milestone. There's a lot of vicious circles that come up when you hit these, like hey, it's not up to performance, didn't quite check all the boxes on the milestone checklist, you can literally put the finger on okay, this missed milestone cause this miss payment, which calls this entire cascading effect. It's just we don't have that level of information and I wish companies would just take a step back and go okay, here you go.
Speaker 2:He's the numbers. Why are we so concerned about how much games cost? The insomniac leak leaked a bunch of money. He's off 200 million for a game. It's like it's just a number. Yes, it's a big number. If you're paying, it's a lot of money, but it's also an investment in the future. Yeah, you're hoping to get a return on that money. So why? Why is it all hidden? Why do we care if insomniac keep their numbers secret or if they publish them like who benefits or Loses from those numbers being published. Maybe insomniac themselves because competitors could be like what we can do a half a price, but can you? On paper you can, yes yeah, that's the thing again.
Speaker 1:I will keep going back to my Marvel movie example because, like, you'll dump 200 million dollars on Infinity War but if it makes a billion back for you, great, that was a good investment. So if you're putting in 200 million to insomniac, to make spider-man or spider-man 2, guess what, you'll probably make back that investment. You know, if you have it's what 50, 60 bucks a pop.
Speaker 2:I mean across 100 million machines the money I mean in theory is that. I mean, if you sell 10 million copies, yeah, that's a crap, crap turn of money. At 600 million dollars, yeah, that's retail, though which Obviously there's all the Business tricks to that. They play up like if I publish a pace for a game, they don't pay off the development costs with retail money. They pay off the development costs with the royalty you would have got. So once you've paid it say you get, yeah, so the game cost 10 million and you're getting a dollar per copy royalty. Yeah, yeah, you've got.
Speaker 2:Sell 10 million copies to pay off 10 million, right, oh right, retail may just get to go to the store. It goes to Publisher, blah, blah, blah. But what happens when they're all the same person? Like if I buy a game from PlayStation Online, if, like, there is no store, 50% right to go to the store. Sony is getting that now, but it's not Sony development, it's Sony store, which isn't going towards development costs. So if there's a lot of fingers in the pie, which right, which make the numbers a lot less rosy than you'll think when you look at all, this took a billion dollars at retail in a week. It's. It's not that pretty for the bottom paper at the bottom, which is always the developers. The developers are always at the bottom of the pile so.
Speaker 1:So this is, this is the Classic problem.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, it's exactly that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is Pay for that term before.
Speaker 2:It is the same people or this they hang out the same thing and Same people. In a lot of the times, if everybody was in it for the same purpose, like retail money, would pay Everything off and then would be divided up. But it's not everyone wants to these. This group wants their cut from the first case copy sold, where this team doesn't get a cut, to the 10 millionth copy sold and and yeah there's the problem that is the Hollywood accountant, but that is also part of the problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of the money doesn't feed back to developers To do a second version or to super up the ante on the next version of whatever it is. We've got a lot of money coming in. We can. We can do it, and it also means a lot of games would break even before they actually do. There'd be a lot more blockbuster games. But I mean, I guess right now games are like movies. You'd get more triple a games because there'd be more money in those triple a games if they were paid at Retail value or these development costs were paid at retail and then the final money was split.
Speaker 2:You have to sell yes but obviously that money is coming from someone else's pocket. Who currently keep wants to keep it, which is why the status quo isn't gonna change. It's not like there's more money to go around. It would just be allocating it more fairly. Yes, and I think it's fair to say no one makes any money until all the expenses are paid, but that literally isn't how it works.
Speaker 1:You have the Sony store, you've got the Sony the publisher, you've got Sony licensing right, which is the one who would have the rights for spider-man.
Speaker 2:And you also have the Sony license fee for the PlayStation of like oh, every game has a Built-in fee that you have to pay even even our first-party studios, even if you're Sony here.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's just because I guess they run is totally autonomous divisions and it's like, well, that's our accountant, this is our income, that's our outcome and there's the way it is. But nice if it didn't happen. You'd get a lot better games If that wasn't the case. But the financials are going down the movie path. Games are following Hollywood and the counting is what it is. There's a lot of money in the games Only if you can overcome that hurdle, and a lot of games miss that hurdle are great games, but never make that hurdle and never pay off the development costs and they never get another one made the team this bands. Blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:But this is why we have really this, this migration up to the top of Only triple a games are making it.
Speaker 2:Yep, that's what happens, the guys who make the development payback hurdle Progress to triple a, the ones that don't either disappear, which hollows out the middle, or they migrate to a lower end, down towards the mobile space that basically draw from the center to both ends. Is what's hollowing out the the the middle there's a lot of other reasons for it too. But I mean, we just talked about unreal, about the financial reasons, they. They were all basically happening at the same time, which is a big problem for the middle of gaming, did we?
Speaker 1:invent the lower end in the last couple of decades by virtue of changing the distribution model. And what I really mean by this is that before I had to have physical media, you know, I had to have a DVD disc or a blu-ray disc to play Ration, clank or resistance, and that was a cost that was there and it had to go into a big box store. Did we Invent the lower end by virtue of changing distribution? So we have an Apple App Store, we have steam. Anyone can put their game out there now and be distributed. It may not be successful, but it can be distributed. So did we invent this by virtue of how we change Just how we even distribute these games out?
Speaker 2:I don't think one fed the other. The app store was gonna happen regardless, independent of any game thing, and I think it verified that digital distribution was possible and the big game still struggled with digital distribution when it's 100 a gig to a download. We're definitely going down that path. But it does open up that question that you mentioned of like there's more money now In the pie because we're not paying the retail store and we're not paying this. So there is more money across more gamers, which is how the games do get funded. So a lot of that cost that we're not making DVDs and there's millions of dollars there for millions of discs and that cost is now up for grabs, for example, that does get split up better across to the various teams. It's not just going in someone's pocket, but there's also a cost of the back end of ruling the online store, things like that.
Speaker 2:The physical media is what causes the yearly cycle. In the PlayStation 1, which is 2, you add Madden and NFL 1995 and it's no way to update it next year when all the players have moved around and all the teams have done Whatever they do, and stadiums get built and knocked down and things like that. So you now need my 96, because NFL is now a different world. There's no way to update that. It basically a year by year. It keeps up with what's going on in the real world.
Speaker 1:Most of the same game engine, just Couple of art changes.
Speaker 2:No, the engine does get better for sure. I mean, you look at the diff across them all. Go back to the Sega Genesis and it's like there was huge steps. When we switch platforms, the point is they have to do a year release because there isn't a way to get any more data on to that PlayStation. Right Today's world with everything being online, I Think they're taking the piss doing a game every year of like madden. If, like, you could just download that database, it'll be fine, but they won't. We've already got this model and I think that model feeds the other big franchise model, which is why we get a call of duty once a year. It's why we get one of all. The big blast dust is once a year Because it goes back to those sports games on the physical media, on the machines you couldn't update and for, for EA and for these games that have a brand name.
Speaker 1:It is in the Economic interests of those companies to keep making you pay 60 70 bucks a year To get an update.
Speaker 2:As you say, that could just be a download, yep and it's Probably Charles six or seventy books for the download. So you know the end customer is not winning regardless. Downloads Could accommodate a lot of that, or you can play this year's teams on last year's engine, for example. There is definitely like a Lot that could be done to fix the yearly updates, but there's no why people buy them regardless and it's another billion dollars on the table. Maybe we'll take care.
Speaker 1:So let's look at the flip side of this, though. With the rise of digital distribution, did we create a lower end, meaning like there was perhaps a Lower bar you needed to hit when you had physical media because of just the cost of it I and with what amounts to zero marginal cost to distribute a game. Did we craft this lower end where it know, where it couldn't exist previously?
Speaker 2:I think just the normal distribution of Developers crafted the bottom end. Some point you have to say, like, if I started a game company today, I couldn't compete with no a dog in insomniac. Yeah, no matter how good I am or matter how good a team I hire, I can't compete with them. Again, it's the, the legacy that they have, and the, the ability to work together Doesn't mean you can just create a team and replicate it. So when would I go if I started the game today? I wouldn't be triple a. I Don't think I would aim for the triple a.
Speaker 2:It'd be much better to go and lower end. Go lower than where you belong, because then you'll stand out has been really good and I think that's why a lot of really good Developers went to the iPhone and things like that. But don't kid yourself that the zero cost, the cost per acquisition on an iPhone and getting noticed in the store, is incredibly expensive and it's not much better in the PlayStation store, the Xbox store or steam. So Although it is zero cost to get it in the store, to get it out of the store onto people's devices is an expensive thing, and Is it worse than marketing traditionally? I have no idea. It's not what I do, but but there is a cost there and but I do think that also the lower ends always existed and and it could exist on the same platform. The Commodore 64 had great games and crap games.
Speaker 1:Some of the crap.
Speaker 2:Games were done by good developers and some of the good games are done by unknown developers. And you add low-end, really good games and that's still the same today. And I think having the ability to have a phone and different types of devices Moves the dynamic of the high and low end. You always say high ends, like all PlayStation triple A's, like that's the high end. What is it? You can do a lot of this on an iPhone and iPad or an Apple TV. You'd be better off making it on a PC or an iPhone and then using that to get onto the PlayStation, but by then your games already out on the the phone platform. So I think it gives an avenue for development. It gives a very nice avenue for experimentation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. It's interesting you bring up the Commodore 64 example, because when I think about the barrier of entry, I actually think about it more in the Atari 2600 NES era, where I needed a fairly beefy amount of physical material between the cartridge and the electronics to actually get my game out there, which felt like it created this, this barrier.
Speaker 1:Oh, it was contrast to the Commodore 64 where it's like, hey, a floppy is pretty cheap, even back then, you know, as long as I can get the data on to it, I can, you know, sell my, you also have the free path then too.
Speaker 2:I mean, you could send your game to a or demo of a game to a magazine, and they'd put it on the.
Speaker 2:Sure shareware disc or classic, yeah, leave a shareware demo of like oh, he's a game, it's a demo of the first level, yeah, and buy it later. Shareware to us. How it how it all all started, sure, yes, the cost of entry on the consoles Today is nothing compared to what it used to be today. You got a dev kit which is really just a modified version of the base kit. Back there, you add, the dev kit was pretty much the hardware. There wasn't a difference really between a Sega Genesis that was used for development, one that wasn't because there was no software in the Genesis per se, it was just a cartridge slot. But you would have a cartridge that had ram in it, that connected to a PC, and you download the game to that, and every now and then you'd burn one to a ROM and stick it in to make sure it actually worked. And then, as we got to the, the disk based systems, that option became a lot fuzzier. I was like how do you get the content onto the device?
Speaker 2:when it's a disk based system and Doesn't have a disc, the dev kit might have a drive. You're not gonna burn a disc every time you build a code. So all the console, all the cartridge based consoles, pretty much had RAM based, flash based they were. They were slightly different because they had debug support and hardware level debugging but half of it would work on a retail kit. It weren't until we got to the PlayStation had they started to have disk emulation. So they had file systems that were on the PC and it would go over a high speed high higher than CD ROM speed connector to the, the actual dev kit in the custom operating system. Because I had to read from the file system and not from the drive. And Then that gets us to where we are today with them. These things became signed and they'd sign them differently for retailing dev kits and Sure the only difference today between a retail and a dev kit is mostly the signatures needed to get stuff to run.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I mean it's. It's really a Encryption issue at that point in time and, like we've talked about in the past, the hardware that is either for the PC or the Xbox. It's basically a PC and this goes back to my, my point of like to have in these cartridge base or even early disk based systems where the dev kits were expensive or, you know, burning a ROM was expensive, like you had to have a fairly Large upfront capital cost to get involved, so it didn't allow. It doesn't seem like it would allow indie developers to get into that field.
Speaker 2:There wasn't any indie developers on the on the NES.
Speaker 2:The NES in particular was brutal to get dev kits for. Like. Nintendo have opened up a lot recently, but in the early days they were Absolutely brutal to get anything on and but yeah, you have to have. They wanted to see financials of like can you afford to make the cartridges? And they made the cartridges. That's how they got the license fee and that's where the license we came from originally was like paying more than you should for having these cartridges made. And, obviously, the whole story of EA, of where an Activision, how they popped out, of Atari, because that's how the whole third party world showed up. There's a whole story there which been told many times before. But yeah, so you'd have to have the upfront cash to buy, make these things. Indeed, it wasn't cheap. It was many dollars per thing, especially with the box and everything.
Speaker 2:And If you're making a hundred thousand, you might need Three quarters of a million dollars, a million dollars, whatever it is. Just to make it a set tape or a disc was fairly easy, but still a physical thing to manufacture. Today there's none of that. You can literally just pass the store checks, the various quality control checks for any platform. Pc has steam, the Xbox, playstation have their respective stores. Yeah, apple, android have their respective stores. You can basically make a game with zero.
Speaker 2:You have the development cost of the game, but then after that there's zero cost to get it into as many people's hands as you want. There's no ongoing cost. You could count the acquisition costs, but that's really marketing.
Speaker 1:That's marketing and that was always the case, though that's why I'm separating that out that there's in terms of distribution costs nowadays, digital effectively makes it zero, and and this is also go back to your original question.
Speaker 2:I was like why are games in 2020 four dollars less than they used to be? Well, that's a factor there right.
Speaker 1:Probably higher margins by a long shot for these companies, since they don't have to actually manufacture units. What if I'd fascinating is like we go back in time, we get EA, we get Activision and we get insomniac naughty dog, all of whom came out of either console, cartridge discs, times and now occupy the space in the triple a space. I and I'm kind of wondering where was the middle previously, if not in the cartridge world but maybe in the console world, like where was our middle? Because I'm kind of wondering if we always had this, like the AAA problem was always there because of the cost of development historically, and we only have recently acquired this notion of lower to middle end by virtue of the fact that it's a lot cheaper to make these things.
Speaker 2:I think here, it's a regional thing. In the US you always had the 2600 and at the other side you had the. Apple II, for example. The UK didn't get the 2600 and it didn't really buy into the consoles until the much later Sega Genesis era is when the consoles in Europe got popular and they still were different because of the frame rates. The UK always had the home computer scene. It had the BBC Micro, it had the VIC-20, it had the a few random the Auric and the Dragon and the Amstrad and the.
Speaker 2:World. That's way later. I'm talking about the early spectrum, of course, and then that became the Amiga and the Archimedes, amstrad, and Spectrum kind of went away. The 64 was in there too, of course. I forgot that one. But all these home computers, and everyone was writing software Consoles were not a thing at all until much later, in the early 90s. So from a UK point of view, there was always this spread of quality developers.
Speaker 1:Some were crap, some weren't.
Speaker 2:And we didn't have that overhead cost, we only had the discount cassette costs. The US was very different. The US definitely went down the console path. The bigger crash of video game crash of 83 was really the Atari crash of 83 and only affected the US. The rest of the world just carried on as normal, just within the game console.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:So I think your view of that, my view of that, would be very different.
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's interesting because, from your perspective, the existence of that middle tier was perennial. It was always there by virtue of people who were just programming on these things, versus, as you say, my view, which is that we had the Commodore 64 which had those kind of qualities, sort of by Amiga, but then, effectively, there's this giant step function where you enter the console world, where these capital expenditures are huge in order to get involved. So it actually eliminates the existence of a middle tier for the US, and I think the US had more money generally, so they'd be like oh well, we'll do this.
Speaker 2:Money's easier to combine the US than it was in the UK in the 80s and people in the UK were happy with the machines they had. They were happy with the games they ran. There was the quirkiness of, like I said, NTSC, PAL update rates. So a lot of games made in the US didn't actually work very well in the UK, which is the primary reason that the 2600 wasn't there at all, because you had to program so close to chasing the beam that PAL literally changed everything. So they just didn't do it. Playing American content wasn't the easiest thing, so they just made their own and it was all on computers. There's that whole spread from the ZX80 in black and white all the way up to the Amigo and the Archimedes at the end of the 1632-bit days, and ultimately we also switched the PC a lot later. I think the PC in the US was always a bigger factor than it was in the rest of the world. It wasn't until Windows 95 that PCs in the UK really became like oh, just get a PC.
Speaker 1:It was interesting because for us in the US in the middle of the 80s you had three at least in my mind, three contenders. You had kind of the Windows slash PC world because IBM still had its own IBM DOS for a long time. You had Mac and then you had Commodore and we as a family and Commodore was the smallest but I mean, well, I take it back Commodore 64 sold really, really well. So we had a Commodore 64. We actually had a couple of them and then I later, in the early 90s actually, as I was entering high school, got an Amiga 500. And so it was still kind of in contention for a little bit. But there was this like a curl that was happening where, especially like Windows 3.1 coming out and then Mac started like taking a lot, and then Commodore made a few mistakes where you basically only had a bifurcation of choices a Mac or a Windows box.
Speaker 2:And that's the same today for the most part. But I also think there's a big difference in how the machines were used In the US. Commodore was very much aiming for the business users. They weren't any real great Amiga like push the envelope, Amiga games coming out of the US. There's lots of business software coming out of the US for video toasters and things like that. Where the UK didn't do the business side so much Like, the Amiga in the UK was very much a games machine. It wasn't really used for its operating system or it's the other things they could do. It was in some situations but they were very much a games machine. Apple wasn't a thing in the UK in 80s and 90s. We didn't have the Atari so we had, like the Commodore machines or the A-Cord machines, the Spectrums and the Amstrads and things like that and gaming was on the forefront of all these home computers in the UK where it wasn't in the US, I would say a lot of the gaming that came out on the 64, on the Amiga from the US was very bland.
Speaker 1:I'll admit that there were a lot of stuff that I did with the Amiga that had nothing to do with games.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the opposite in the UK. So I just think how these markets just merged together and now it's I think it's where a lot of good programmers came out of the UK. A lot of game programmers in the US today are from the UK. I think that's part of it. Unfortunately the UK lost that position. Back then they had some great and this has nothing to do with games today, but it had the.
Speaker 2:The BBC obviously came out the whole story of how it was related to the computer program and they were going to make the whole country computer literate. And they did make the computer program and they did teach people to program and all that and I think it literally took a whole generation and made them great programmers. And later on that just kind of faded away. And if you do computer science in the UK, if you do it in high school, it's more or less how to use a computer Like how they work is just not taught anymore and back then it was very much like this is how it works, don't tinker with it, the whole. And now it's obviously that's 40 years ago when I was part of that whole 1980s computer program mentality. That mindset's gone and it's unfortunate, I think I don't think the UK's kicking out great programmers these days, like it was 40 years ago.
Speaker 1:Really unfortunate that we're not teaching the lower level stuff. Earlier on I saw a book in the library where it was like, hey, teach kids how to program and it's it's Python basically, but that's not going to really get you into the guts of the electronics that way.
Speaker 2:It's not a bad way to go. It's a different time, isn't it? Back then, you had to get into the guts of the electronics to make anything happen. The OS didn't get in your way. Today, it's so difficult to even draw a triangle on a screen. You need to understand DirectX. You need to understand a Windows app. You need to understand the concept of brain buffers. You need to understand visual studios. They're a very complicated tool. You need to understand the build process.
Speaker 2:There's a whole lot of things to learn and a lot of boilerplate code. You have to write a shader. You have to understand the 3D math just to get a triangle on the screen. Where there's a lot of that, that won't work first time. If I wrote a single triangle on the screen right now, I'd have to run it a thousand times to get the damn thing to work.
Speaker 2:What did you learn? You learned to put a triangle on the screen. You could do that Python too. In Python, you can just go draw a triangle and use some library and bang there it is. It's very much like the old days of instant gratification.
Speaker 2:I think Web has some of these properties today too, where, in basic, you could go draw a rectangle. Boom, there it is on the screen and tweak it, run it again. It was just like instantaneous feedback. It wasn't this massive knowledge base. You needed just to draw one square on the screen. The amount of code, the amount of work it takes to get something to be in the place where you can experiment freely.
Speaker 2:It's ridiculous today, which I think is why, even for things like experimenting with 3D and drawing graphs and things like that, I think is why Python is used, because it's there and it's easy and it is quite powerful. I mean, mackiddy was experimenting and it's all Python and they use some library which deals with all the boilerplate and it just makes it instantaneous. You can say draw a triangle, draw a triangle, draw a triangle, and they just appear exactly as you said. You could say plot circle, there's a circle. It's not fast, but that instant gratification is how you learn. It's like you'll get into the performance. And how would I make a game with this much, much later? But today you kind of have to start in the middle, you can't start at the beginning.
Speaker 1:You can't, I mean. So the good news bad news is compared to when we were coming up on this stuff. I mean, at best we were experimenting on ourselves, which could be great, and getting it from magazines. The good news bad news is that all this information is out there on the internet. So if you had the same drive that we did, all that info is there to start playing around with stuff. Right, I mean, we're not limited by, basically, lack of information sources today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that all takes the entire conversation full circle of why not just use Unreal it does. It's like I could concentrate on the behind interest. If I'm a gameplay programmer and I'm all by myself, yeah, and I want to play with gameplay things. Do I have to write a 3D engine first so I can see what I'm doing? It's like some gameplay you could do with, like text and A star things like that you can do without any graphical support. But generally it's like a lot of gameplay today needs the 3D or the 2D or whatever environment of the game is before you can do anything. So that's what takes a lot of individuals to Unreal.
Speaker 2:And I think it comes back full circle as to I'll just use this because everything is already there. It only matters when you care about what's there. If I just need a 3D engine because I'm working on some really cool fighting dynamics in animation, I don't care how fast the render is, I don't care what it's taking. I got my dynamics, I can do what I need to do and I can add my physics and I can do this and that you only care about the bit you're interested in, and I think Unreal is fantastic for that. It's got a lot of people into game development that would never have been there.
Speaker 2:I think Unity is the same too. There's so much boilerplate, there's so much that has to happen to get to where you want to be that you just use one of the engines.
Speaker 1:And this goes back to our points that we made earlier about where do you want to invest, and we talked about it a lot in terms of where do you want to invest your development dollars, but in this case we're talking about where do you want to invest your development time as an individual, learning these things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, An artist on the wheels, perfect. Where else are you going to be able to do real time 3D modeling and get an idea of what the performance is? So, yes, you can do it in Maya, but the performance is offline. So again, I think, on one hand, unreal is awesome. On the other hand, it's got a lot to ask and so forth, what it's done to the market.
Speaker 1:We've done a lot of tracing back in time. I could make a proposal that we look at what you talked about in terms of UK, where you had a spectrum of programmers that were there and you were able to send it to a magazine. You were able to have some level of distribution. I have this kind of concept that again I'm coming from this perspective that the US market was really locked up in terms of games and distribution for a very long time. It was big box stores, it was big consoles. There's a lot of capital expenditure.
Speaker 1:I look at today and it's not to say that this justifies anything, but there is more opportunity today, it seems, whether or not you use Unreal or not, where you have the steam distribution. You have Facebook and Instagram for marketing. You have these tools that have never been available to anyone like previously to actually craft a game and distribute it. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be successful. Again, the marketing side of that is there for everybody. The difficulty in making a good game is there for everybody, but I'm wondering if actually what we've come to today is there is more opportunity in the marketplace, but it definitely requires work on individual's parts. There's no trusting that some big game publisher is going to come in and swoop down and save us. We have to do it ourselves, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a take. I guess the market's much easier to get into today because of the likes of Unreal and things like that. You can be a bunch of artists and make a game, and it has happened, I'm not even trying to praise Unreal and Unity at this point in time.
Speaker 1:I look at them as tools, the idea that my iPhone is a dev kit now for iPhone and my PC. Basically, I could be distributing PC games regardless whether or not I use Unity or Unreal.
Speaker 2:The distribution cost is gone. There isn't any distribution cost. There is because you have to pay fees to these stalls and things like that. You can make it free and then don't pay. But that distribution cost now becomes server costs of like. These stalls are not cheap to host. There's a lot of data being moved around.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I guess right, but to you it's zero cost.
Speaker 2:If you make a free game in the Apple Store, it's free to you to pull up there. It cost Apple to host it and it cost Apple to check it. I think this bottom end of the iPhone and the whole how it introduced free gaming and like pay to play type gaming, and there's a whole story there too, which is a whole mess. I think that was bad for gaming and I think that's trickled into big games with the loot boxes and things like that and obviously there's been a huge stink over there, lawsuits etc. And it's not to say the bottom end. Games are bad. I mean, there's been lots of fantastic games that have came out of the iPhone that are actually just fun games and I really appreciate that.
Speaker 2:People experiment down there and if steam too, to some extent, less so on the consoles. For a while there was an indie scene on the consoles and it seems to have just gone away. I mean there used to be a section in the store. Now they just in the same store as everything else and you'll never find them. It's a healthy market in some ways. It's just there's no middle ground. It's gone. You either make little games, experiment down there and hope for a success and they can be very successful. Or you try to make a team and aim for AAA and ultimately you might get your funding cut and you never make it. If you get over that funding hurdle and get over that payback royalty hurdle, welcome to the AAA space. You were made it, but there aren't many going in and out of that space. It's fairly static and it takes such a long time It'll be five years before the scene even changes.
Speaker 1:I mean the players we're seeing there are the players that have been there for 25 years or 30 or more, and do they just basically occupy that space in the same way that studios occupy the space they do for films?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it happens in movies too. You get the Blair Witch project. Every now and then. Something like that shows up and takes the entire industry by storm. And it was cheap and it was indie and everyone tried to copy it. No one could.
Speaker 1:And they even tried to make copies themselves with sequels.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it was just like it happens in movies and there's lots of indie movies too, of like that would fill the space of most smaller games, and they just don't get the site that the blockbusters get. They don't get the marketing, they don't get the TV ads, and I think the same for movies. It's a big hollowed out in the middle too. There is no just. It's just a movie. It's either AAA blockbuster quality or it's this independent movie scene, and I think games are just following the exact same path and that is all financial.
Speaker 1:And that is our Popory episode, at least the first one. We hope you enjoyed it. One thing that we have been doing that you might not realize is that every episode now has a Discord thread on a Discord channel that we have. So if you go back and look at the episode webpage which should be available in most players you should be able to click on that and get access to a Discord thread and channel that we've created. Give us some feedback. What did you love about the episodes? What did you hate about them? Every episode now has its own thread so we can dive into particular details and, yes, you will be talking to Rob and PJ directly. We do not have an AI chatbot talking back to you. Maybe that'll be fun one day, but right now you'll just get pure Rob and PJ. So come join us on the Discord channel, let us know what you think and we look forward to talking with you.