Mark Rein

Blame Intel, or face the music?

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=18292

Now I do agree it's wrong for Intel to brand third rate technology as top of the line hardware.

However the is no-one to blame for the appearent impending death of the games industry, than the industry itself, for they are the ones who set the bar for minimum system requirements.

How dare they not sell hardware not capable of running Unreal3? How dare they?

Yeah, stop making games that require 50% of your processor to render that dumb effect which does nothing to the gameplay.

Or just play console games like sensible people. At least you know that game you bought 2,3 or even 5 to 6 years ago will still work fine later after you've installed a ton of shit on it and 'upgraded' the OS. :)

I can see why he wants to utilize the newest technology, but surely it makes more economical sense to target a more modest level of technology.

Both my computers are according to his statements unable to run Unreal3 technology, and they aren't that old. Surely 90% of the PC people have older/crappier hardware, so targeting the top 10% seems like a bad business decision.

"We can dumb it down to run on a lower-end 7-series or 6-series NVIDIA GPU"

Does he mean a 6600? Haha!

A 6600 can run Half Life 2 just fine. HL2 easily competes with console games, and does not look like crap.

If Intel didn't put these integrated graphics chips in PCs, then a lot of PC's wouldn't have any 3D capability at all, and having some is better than nothing for the CASUAL games market. Maybe not for Epic, but it'll hardly kill the PC game industry. Just games like those Epic produces. Which are super high end stuff that is designed to showcase all of their engine's pretty effects rather than designed to be fun.

He's a funny man isn't he? He does speak some sense, but then says stuff like this,



(from http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=18293)

The PC games industry isn't even one generation old so how does he know what will happen in one lifetime? Perhaps he's talking dog lifetimes, or maybe cats?

I think we would all agree that Intels chips are sacks of crap though.

I got an Asus Mobo the other day with an intergrated Geforce 6150GT.......No idea how it runs though, as we put in a 6800 instead of relying on the inbuilt one. Might have a play one day though.

To summarise, then: "We were too stupid to see this coming and plan for it."

I'm struggling to understand what he's arguing for. Should there be no budget laptops purely because a handful of nerds want to coo over shaders?

I can understand him quite well. I've read in interviews that the most complicate task in the source engine was the huge scaleability the engine has. Valve put a lot of effort and money into this.

If you wanna spare this and have more a xbox360 plus pc in mind then pc is very frustrating because a) people with good pcs expect also good advanced graphics and b) people with crappy cards like a g950 also expect the game to run somehow on their systems.

I've also read about stats that games beside of all these puzzle games do not sell well if the graphics are too bad because people expect their hardware to be used as well so this leaves you with putting a lot of effort into the scaleability, complaining or doing a different kind of game...

It would be nice to have a more fixed range of what to support. I would welcome a better system as an intergrated intel as well as this chip is really lame. It doesn't has to be the most sepctacular card but the intel cards are really misssing so many things.

No, not really. I'm surprised how good the latest integrated Intel chipsets are, actually - the cheapest laptop you can buy is probably going to be able to make a decent stab at running Unreal Tournament 2004. What Intel are delivering is decent (though obviously not bleeding-edge-exceptional) 3D to the masses, and your business model has to be horrifically skewed for that not to represent an exciting opportunity for you as a developer.

What's got me is it's not like intel then force you to only use and integrated chipset! What is this guy whining about??? Blame anybody but don't blame me!

Yes, but you can't open up a laptop and put a better graphics card inside Hujiklo.

Or indeed a normal PC as it vialates warrenty.

But then again people who spesifically want to play games such as UT won't buy a PC or Laptop with an intel chip in it. Most Pcs, i would say, are used in general home stuff and business.

Well that's a sort of gripeable point, but a laptop is not really upgradeable in any sense of the word anyway - whatever videocard you get in there you're stuck with!

Which is an interesting point, because my 8 months old Alienware laptop with a GeForce Go 6800 wouldn't appear to be able to run Unreal 3 either (except in dumbed down mode), yet appearently neither Alienware or nVidia are in on the Intel conspiracy to kill gaming.

No statistics to back this up but...

Wouldn't the truth be exactly the opposite? The reasonably good embedded 3D will give vast numbers of people a taste of modern gaming. Some fraction of them will then upgrade.

Only if those 'vast numbers of people' are willing to pay in excess of 100USD more for their computers.

I don't think a significant portion of people buy laptops with Intel chipsets because they think it's as powerful as say a GeForce 6 or 7. They do it because it's half the price and 4-6 times the battery life.

My TabletPC, in spite of being 3 years old, still has a useful battery life of 2 hours (was 8 when I bought it). My less than a year old laptop lasts about 45 minutes.

Well I agree with Sledge, they have gotten alot better recently...still useless for gaming, but better.
I have a Computer with Ati x200 onboard. its about like a r7000 with shader 2.0 tacked onto it. (600mps fillrate, 10millin tris per sec, ect)

(Course I didnt buy a 300$ pc for gaming)

FlameDuck nailed this one, If you are a active Pc gamer, then you probably know Intel integrated wont run unreal3. (since most modern games wont)

Since when does Epic even target Lowest common hardware?
Afraid the upgrade craze will end?

Sam

The minute they target the mass-market, they are targetting the lowest common hardware. Unreal 3 was sold just about everywhere.

If a retailer (let's call it Walmart) sees a high return rate on a software app (let's call it "Unreal 3"), the buyer for that retailer (let's call him Zeke) is unlikely to buy the volume on future releases from that software company.

I'd say releasing playless drek with pretty graphics will kill the game industry far faster than any number of under powered integrated graphics chips.

Being on the cutting edge has never been profitable in any industry, really (at least not immediately). When your business model depends upon early adopters to pay your bills, that's the risk you take. If you see losses, attribute it to that, or mismanagement, but certainly don't blame the people who provide the platform for your application. That's like the tail wagging the dog. Software momentum encourages the state of hardware power, but it certainly doesn't drive it.

Perhaps they should scale back their efforts a bit and concentrate on the far more profitable and higher demographics of the "dumbed-down" model. Maybe the money they save on R & D of cutting edge graphics could *gasp* be applied to engineering some game play with pacing and design that's not so erratic or formulaic.

The thing I see here is, is that HL2 was designed with lower-spec machines in mind, and setting a performance budget for each portion of the game which is cant exceed to keep the game from getting jumpy...

Regarding Gears of War, I blame the fact they designed the game with the 360 specs in mind, and no sense of a fall-back for machines slower then that..., it's their fault they didn't plan ahead for a scalable PC version.


Regarding the slight bit of rant, dont PC gamers of that flavour playing PC-intensitive games of that sort usually have dedicated modern vid cards? Or am I just dreaming here...
(not ones capable of fully utilizing Unreal3 engine of course, but you know, good enough for modern games at good detail)

I think that's the demographic they get, but not the one's they want to target. (thus the whining) They want EVERYONE to be able to run their software because it obviously affects their bottom line if only the elite few with money to burn on hardware AND their software are the only ones that buy (and don't return) Unreal 3.

HL2 was designed to scale down gracefully on lower-spec hardware, but by no means was it a design target. There is a very visible aesthetic difference between playing HL2 (or any other "Source" games) on the DX9 renderer, compared to the DX7 one.

I definately agree with RocketGnomes asseration that Mark Reins problem is that he wants customers that don't have a 2:1 (or better) graphics card to computer ratio. Unfortunately that goal is somewhat incompatible with other goals of the Unreal Engine, including but not limited to "We have a large investment in out existing code base, and do not feel we want to make any significant changes to the original (flawed) design".

Blah blah blah, obviously my game will suck if it doesn't have the best graphics in the world, yak yak yak, I mean games aren't supposed to rely on gameplay to be fun and interesting, blah blah..

The sad part, is the toad is predicting the AAA industry demise for all the wrong reasons.

These guys just don't get it... The only reason they haven't all beached themselves already is because processor speeds haven't increased much in the last 2 years.

Once we start seeing affordable new faster processing schemes, which can handle EVEN BETTER graphics, they will all think... "Well obviously I can't be out of date, I have to hire 2000 artists to be able to keep pace."

These jackasses don't understand a basic foundation of our ecconomy... If something costs more to make than you are going to sell it for, you can't make a profit.

At some point they either have to wake up and understand that great looking games don't make for great selling games... (look at GTA san andreas) or hell... Geometry wars....

Right now, the only thing the AAA marketing people know how to market are:
- Graphical Screenies
- Graphical data nonesense
- Snappy technical jargon
- Raw basic numbers "30 levels with over 250 spells and skills, and 1000 items!"
- Boobies
- Butts
- Cool animations
- Licensed characters/settings

They can't promote anything else. Partially cause they don't know anything about it, and partially cause the games don't HAVE anything else.

Take one part FPS, with a pinch of RPG. Add hot big boobied barbie doll with dagger and bazooka. Smother with 'polish'. Sprinkly liberally with useless crap items and skills to raise raw data numbers. Make 1 hot tv porno er promo, add 3 magazine ads and wait for money to roll in.

Mass media is almost exclusively crap.... with the occasional piece of gold that happens when people making mass media forget what they are supposed to be doing and accidently make something good.

Its not like there aren't loads of people that could have written a better movie than "white chicks". Its that all those people didn't already write some other movie that made it big.

Lets see... what won all the academy awards last year.... ooooooohh right... Indie films.
Capote, broke back mountain, constant gardener, syriana, and...... ok munich isn't really indie... but only cause spielberg is like a company all to himself and the fact that he personally funded the movie cause no one thought it would be any good is meaningless.


AAA games are mass media... They are mindlessly made entertainment... the problem is, that movies don't cost exponentially more to make each year.

in fact... 50 years ago, some films cost a few mil to make... today, it has gone up to a few hundred mil..... while... in the 50s, 500 dollars was a "fortune" and the average person on the street made less than 8000 a year... before taxes.

so thats... what... a 10 fold increase at best?

games have seen that same percent of cost increase over the last... year? and before that 5 years... and before that 10 years.

in the entire history of store shelf, buy in a box games, the cost to buy a game has gone down then back up to about... the same price.... and the cost of making the game went from about 10-50 grand to 10 million.

Movies... in the 50s cost 10-25 cents, to watch all day. today, it is 10 bucks to just watch one movie... so... lets say they have 6 movies showing back to back (you can't watch more than one at a time) so thats... 60 bucks to watch all day.... popcorn a sode and candy was 5-15 cents... so thats gone up to about 15$ to get all of those things.... lets say you space it out, so you only do that once.

movies in the 50s cost 15-40 cents to watch all day, and today, it costs 75$ to do the same thing....

And movie companies are struggling.

How do you think AAA games are going to last another whole console cycle without growing beyond their profit capabilities.

They'll make games on the Wii... where it only costs a few million to make a game.... and eventually... they'll either die out, or learn that trying to hug the maximum capabilites of a computer by tossing people at the problem... is not cost effective.

Yet you still have to understand that trying to market to the mass media is like pulling teeth. the 'masses' are dumb. They won't respond to anything unless its shiny, sexy, and/or something they already are familar with.

With that said, how exactly do you market 'gameplay'? Its not something that is quickly visible at a glance, not something you can convince easily through words or a 30 second commercial. Gameplay usually is something you experience. you'd have to have a whole new venue or reaching customers because magazine ads, tv commercials, and store promotions simply can't convey good 'gameplay'.

Take for example, Indigo prophecy. Great game, but when it comes to trying to verbalize how 'awesome' the game was to my friends in terms of experience it becomes very difficult. usually just ends with 'you just have to play it'.

moot point really.... even if there were a better way, the nature of mass media dictates that it would never be used.

Just like with movies, you really will never no how good or bad a movie is before you go to the theater to see it. Making it really bad when you go to see a moive you heard was good, and turns out to be terrible.

Personally... I don't go to the theater anymore because it costs way too much. I rent.

Even then... I feel anxious about renting a movie... Which is one of the reasons things like netflix really took off.

Because the marketing departments aren't competeing to prove thier products worth, but rather to try to get you to pick up one likely turd over another, they don't see the big picture.

That making it impossible to know which game (or movie) is going to be good. People wait till they hit the bargin bin or rental isle. More and more core gamers are doing this. Which is sad, because this hurts the games that core gamers will like.

Greatness is overshadowed by trash that pretends it is great.

This, in itself, isn't the problem.... the problem is the cost of making the games. And the fact that everytime the graphics need to be better, you need to hire loads more people to do the art.

Think about it. Xbox games cost between 3-6 million.... xbox360 games cost 10... predictions say even 20 million.

Why? What about the games is taking so much more man hours? It isn't the ideas, or the gameplay technology... It isn't the music... not the level layouts, or any of that. It is a little bit, the increase in VO useage... but only minorly... It is the mocap, the extra textures, the engine to handle the graphics, the levels that take longer because of the graphics and the models and hand-done animations. Thats at least 3-15 (i'm giving 1-5 mil for other non-graphics related things just incase I missed something) million dollars EXTRA to have those graphics.

Are we seeing better AI? not really... we are seeing more AI, but to account for all the extra animations it has to deal with.

Are we seeing great leaps in gameplay? No... We are seeing lots of sports titles that are better games on the older system releases... lots of gameplay styles of the past with some graphics driven advances....

What about more content... after all... with more power and storage capacity to play with, there must be more levels to play through, or more things to do... Nope.. we see less... With the only acception being Oblivion... which has fancy, but really ugly when you get down to it, graphics....

It's an endless cycle of stupidity perpetuated by marketing and investment in areas that do not need the investment. If all marketing focussed on "gameplay is important", his wouldn't even be an issue.

Until recently television has been locked to (at best) 640x480x30 fps. The market was happy with that, and will continue to be happy with that as long as they're not FORCED to upgrade to enjoy the programming it allows.

In this comparison, Rein is like a television show. He thinks television manufacturers should change their technology to accomodate his programming, which is utterly ridiculous.

Epic is lucky that they weren't developing software back in the days of the Amiga, Commodore 64, Atari 2600, NES, etc.. when graphics were on a level playing field and you sank or swam on your originality and playability.

the problem with mass media is the "mass" part.... we live in a more and more personal world, where we have more and more personal media. No longer do I have to watch tv when everyone else does, I can tivo it. No longer do I have to wait around or go to a store to get things I enjoy, I can find them online. I don't have to count of my local megamart to carry a product, I can find it online, and that product's makers can ship to the entire world from day one. They can ship their fake dog doo, or religiously inspired sex toys to the entire globe, and only exist on the few people who are interested in it.

For the entire history of humanity, we have had to deny our individual likes in favor of likes we share with many other people.

Mass media. TV, movies, games, books, newpapers, magazines, comics, and many other things... these can't or at least DON'T exist without grabing the biggest piece of the market they can.

Look at cable... the whole Idea was to have 100 diverse channels that played everything from sports on this one, to kids shows here, to cartoons there, to science here.... but what happened to that dream? The channels all, by the nature of ratings, promote shows that lots of people watch, and the problem is that people who don't follow the curve lose their shows...

I lost my Tech TV... because they started getting a hipper audiance watching some shows... and the geeks are outnumbered. So they started making more shows for the less geeky... and started changing older shows to get the less geeky to watch.. and the problem is, that Tech TV was supposed to show TV for the geeks and nerds.... and when they stopped doing that, they lost the audiance they had forged... and when their popular shows started to lose their novelty... the whole station tanked.. and merged with G4 and now there are only 2 people from Tech TV still on the air in the USA... (X-play with morgan webb and Adam Sessler) Which, in itself, is only still around because they give the best game reviews you can get.... period... anywhere.


We have a culture of very diverse, but also overlapping likes.... and people who don't like the things that tend to overlap, they get lost in the surf.

There is very little I can stand to watch on TV anymore.. I'm not big into sitcoms... I do like medical and cop dramas... but I can only take so many.. I don't need 3 CSIs and 5 Law and orders... All these shows are pointless to watch more than once.

I love educational TV... Discovery, TLC, Food Network...

Even they have shifted to a more samey lineup... with countless "American" whatsis and boring lets watch some asshat build a monster car and not tell anyone how they are doing it, types of shows... I can't learn how to make a bike watching American Chopper...

Discovery still has some great shows... they have a more movielike, comedy arranged, SENSATIONALIST style... with MEGAVOLCANO this and Dirty Jobs, and Survivorman... but they are also full of fantastic information... Course... as of late, all these learning channels need to hit the books more and fact check... ESPECIALLY Mythbusters..... its like... Lets just make crap up busters.

Even Cartoon Network has been showing live action movies as of late.... Really? The first time Batman has been shown on TV in 10 years and was highly advertised on every channel got really good ratings compared to Time Squad? No crap?


The time has come for personal media... Where the money comes from diversity and simplicity, not from large productions.... People don't care about large productions. Look at the shows people love... Southpark... Family Guy?... Jeopardy?... Reality TV... none of these shows have high production values, and really, aside from the "fun" shots in stuff like House, and CSI... those shows don't have great production values...

People still love movies from the 70s and 80s, even though the color wasn't as nice as today... I mean... How could they love those movies.... How can people still love star wars?

The same way they still love mario.

Mass Media is bloated... there should be lots of games made to hit that Mass audiance, and those games surplus should fund games that grab the rest of the people...

This is what movie directors do... They make crap to finance thier little genius films... Like.... Capote, Broke Back Mountain...


Munich, Saving Private Ryan, Shindler's List, ET..... I wonder how those movies got made... ohhhh right.... Spielberg paid for all or more than half of the costs for them out of pocket.



But there are what seems like NO game designers who finance their own games to sate artistic vision.... and when they do... the games normally blow ass.... Like Scrapland...

The only good one I can think of is Psychonauts... and that doesn't count because those guys were fired from lucas arts when they stopped making adventure games.



There need to be more industry guys who do what spielberg and lucas and tarentino and scorseese do/did.... Make the every day crap to get some dough... then turn around and spend it on genius games that may not make returns... sometimes will... but normally don't....

Why do many academy award winning movies barely make a profit or flop?



I think, that over the years, people will gravitate towards indie games more.... but only if those indie games are good.... I have seen all the same problems with indie games as I have with the big ones.... people make the same crap over and over and don't self-regulate a way to decern the good from the bad.....

Indie games suck as bad as the AAA games do... and they focus too much on graphics and not enough of gameplay or meaningful content... and they are clones...

Indie games will only gain more respect and be able to sate the Personal Media Market... if the devs stop making tetris clones and arkanoid, and make really origional games... Tiny, quickly built, addictive games...

There is a market for it... and the best part is that the more diverse and just plain, the more games you have, the more you can make with them... Especially web-games... Flash games...

I haven't found a really good web-arcade with games I would come back to over and over... Or games I would pay to get more content for... The ideal situation is to have a flash version that gives you the gameplay.... and screenies and a whole system to really test a game before you buy the downloadable game...