[HN Gopher] Most Video Game Artwork Will Never Be Seen
___________________________________________________________________
Most Video Game Artwork Will Never Be Seen
Author : isaacfrond
Score : 114 points
Date : 2023-11-08 08:27 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aftermath.site)
(TXT) w3m dump (aftermath.site)
| belalebrar wrote:
| Yea - even the ones Artists do get to share, it's just so much
| out there now. If you take a quick look at sites like ArtStation,
| you'll see thousands upon thousands new artwork added daily.
| reassembled wrote:
| This is something I've been thinking about lately with regards to
| the early arcade game developers in Japan, not just in regards to
| the artwork and music but also the decades of technical knowledge
| and R&D that have gone into creating bespoke arcade boards.
| Individual game companies developed or commissioned unique
| hardware dedicated to playing sometimes a single game in an
| arcade setting. The MAME devs have done a lot of great work
| unraveling these boards. Some books and websites have compiled
| artwork, interviews and technical info from certain arcade
| developers. I just wish the world could see more from that period
| of time.
|
| I think about this same kind of thing with regards to the company
| I work in. We create video hardware and so much of the
| development knowledge will be lost to the sands of time. This is
| inevitable but a sad part of any large creative undertakings.
| zdw wrote:
| This sounds interesting - do you have any links to examples of
| these early bespoke works?
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Games weren't getting individual custom CPUs or anything that
| exotic, but from roughly 1980-2000 the industry was still
| riding the peak of Moore's Law, where chips were getting
| faster and cheaper seemingly every day, and arcade developers
| were constantly trying to leapfrog each other. Each game
| system really only needed to run a single game, so there was
| no real barrier to having unique boards per game -- if a
| particular game needed a few extra RAM chips, or the CPU
| maybe needed a higher clock, there wasn't much barrier to
| that.
|
| NOTE: System16 is a treasure trove of information in general,
| but it looks like their main landing page at
| https://www.system16.com has some kind of hijack ad situation
| going on? The links below seem unaffected.
|
| Konami was kind of the poster child for bespoke hardware;
| they're famous/infamous for seemingly every single game
| having some kind of weirdo bespoke hardware iteration:
| https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=5
|
| Sega had a more typical approach. They would typically have a
| minimum of several games per arcade system, and sometimes
| dozens: https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=1
|
| But, even then, there are lots of variations to the rule.
| Taito operated more or less like Sega, but (to choose one at
| random) you might see things like this where one game on this
| particular board (Cadash) was equipped with a faster CPU than
| the others: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=652
|
| There are some fun exceptions to what I've written though:
| truly one-off hardware.
|
| Namco's Thunder Ceptor, with its mode7-ish backgrounds... in
| 1986! https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=523
|
| Gaplus/Galaga3 had its own board for some reason:
| https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=518
|
| Pole Position I and II (essentially the same game) had its
| own hardware: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=515
|
| I think a lot of Midway's late-80s/early-90s boards (let's
| say, NARC through MK) tended to evolve from game to game.
| yterdy wrote:
| >and so much of the development knowledge will be lost to the
| sands of time
|
| This is when you put on your Assange mask and start saving
| documents to leak later. Capitalism is going to eat itself,
| along with all of our technical and institutional knowledge,
| unless people put that continuity of expertise before the
| company or even their own jobs. One of the many Boomer habits
| that we simply cannot carry on into the future is, "Retiring
| without passing on what we know because it's less trouble and
| more job security."
| stepupmakeup wrote:
| A lot of companies deem the knowledge obsolete. There's no real
| reason to read 35 year old, 500-page hardware documentation
| books, or ancient assembly code from 25 year old tapes and
| floppies... if they even still exist! Much cheaper and easier
| to re-create the game.
| art3m wrote:
| Many completed video games will never be seen as well due to
| publishers decision. Which is more astounding than just artworks.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Reminds me of the even more sober fact:
|
| Even the content that made it into the game will never be seen by
| most users, as most buyers of a video game will never complete
| your game. But if the ending is not satisfying for those who
| complete it, they will impact the buying decisions of those who
| never play through it anyway.
|
| And on top of that:
|
| Before the introduction of Trophies in console games there was no
| way for game developers to know how far their buyers actually
| played the game before they stopped and moved on.
| qiine wrote:
| On steam you can see % of player that got each achievements for
| a given game.
|
| I looked at Dark soul and only 31.5% got to Anor Londo(on PC),
| its crazy because that's barely half the game, there is still a
| lot of high quality content including some of the stuff that
| made it so famous left to be experienced.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Does that include people that never even played (or installed
| the game)? Because I have lots of games I never intended to
| play but were part of a bundle and I wanted to support the
| developer.
| Abekkus wrote:
| There are some games that encode an achievement basically
| for starting the story or finishing an early quest, so if
| those complimentary achievements aren't 100%, you could
| make that measurement
| vanchor3 wrote:
| For your total completion stats in Steam it doesn't count
| games that you have not earned any achievements in, it may
| be the same for global stats.
| recursive wrote:
| I'm surprised the other way. I would not expect 31% of
| players to make it halfway through Dark Souls. I probably got
| about 1% through it. Regardless of the "quality", I didn't
| find it fun.
| seaal wrote:
| I still have yet to give Dark Souls a try, I was always
| hesitant to try soul types games. But I wanna shout out
| Elden Ring for breaking that cycle for me. Truly amazing
| game.
| recursive wrote:
| If I'd never played Dark Souls, I almost certainly would
| have played Elden Ring. As it is, I'm sticking to my
| lifetime boycott of the franchise though.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yeah, to specifically choose as an example a franchise
| whose entire "thing" is its murderous difficulty? I'm
| incredibly unsurprised that most people who try can't be
| bothered to grind all the way to the end.
| imtringued wrote:
| Yeah it is odd to use an example of a difficult to finish
| game as an example that people don't finish their games.
| qiine wrote:
| Ok maybe this is a special case haha,
|
| My reasoning is that its a massively popular game that
| was played again and again by all sorts of peoples, that
| became renowned for their collective efforts to explore
| every nook and cranny(including cut content still in the
| files!).
|
| But despite this unusual efforts the completion rate is
| low like many other big profiles games.
| t-3 wrote:
| Steam's statistics are very questionable. They routinely
| "lose" hours of playtime from games in my library and syncing
| savegames just doesn't work half the time.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Even if that doesn't include the players who never even
| installed the game, there's a still a fat tail of players who
| bought it on a sale, tried it for an hour and weren't
| interested enough to continue because there are just so many
| other options. Things used to be very different back in the
| era of cardboard boxes when most people didn't have an
| abundance of choice and impulse buying games was much less of
| a thing.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Same on Consoles. The ratio of Players who completed the
| Story of "The Last of Us" on Playstation (a game praised for
| its outstanding storytelling), is a mere ~28%.
|
| What's even more interesting: Almost the same stat applies
| for the PS3 (27,2%) and the PS4-remastered (28%) release.
|
| --> Something caused 72% of all players to NOT complete this
| game, on BOTH generations of the console. That's a metric you
| would file as opinionated if your playtesters would tell you
| that...
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| The fact that it's a mediocre action game might have
| something to it. If the story/characters don't pull you in
| there's not a lot to keep you playing.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| I am fairly bad at those sorts of games, but the art is so
| pretty I pick them up just to mess around.
| rednab wrote:
| The Simpsons Game (2007) on the 360 has an achievement for
| pressing the start button. It has a 93% completion rate.
|
| So 7% of the people that bought this game (and being a
| console game, it never was part of any bundles) started it up
| and then did _nothing_.
| bluedino wrote:
| Imagine all the books that were bought and never opened.
| welfare wrote:
| Looking at my shelf, I feel personally attacked.
| me_smith wrote:
| Don't need to imagine... looking at the bookshelf right
| now. One day they will be opened.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| My theory is people are buying games on sales. $15 dollars is
| loosely equivalent to a two hour movie. So as long as they
| put in a couple hours, they feel like they've got their
| moneys worth.
|
| A game is just distraction for most people, especially as the
| economy is cratering and other priorities come up.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know that the rate of people who "finished" a
| game is actually very significant.
|
| There are just so many other factors that determine this,
| unrelated to the game's actual merit.
|
| Cave Story is one of my favorite games ever and I never
| quite beat that final level. I remember trying it about
| 10-15 times and then just getting busy with something else
| in life and I never went back to it.
|
| And I'm okay with that! It was still a wonderful
| experience! The fact that I only made it 99% of the way
| through really says nothing about the game itself.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I'm one of the 68.5%. I bought it on a sale, played it for
| like 30 mins, decided I really just hated that type of
| gameplay, and never touched it again.
|
| The bigger concern for me is getting to the end of games I
| actually enjoy. What normally happens is something comes up
| in life that stops me from playing for a few weeks, and then
| when I try to pick it up again, I've forgotten how to play!
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| nah. sen's fortress is peak in level design. After O&S, the
| game takes a dive in quality. they got out at the perfect
| time lol
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Agree. The back part of the game is not as well regarded
| these days by the fanbase.
|
| For my playthrough, I thought certain sections were more
| annoying than before, but not to a noticeable extent.
| Besides, an okay set of levels in a FromSoft game is still
| way ahead of most games.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| How much is this just a result of the modern games market being
| so heavy on sales and things like Humble Bundle?
|
| When I was a kid I put in my best effort to play through games
| (well, at least before piracy) because they were relatively
| expensive that had to be "bought" through begging and good
| grades. Being physical copies there was also a cost to keeping
| them.
|
| Nowadays I am more likely to just buy a few year old game that
| I was interested in for like $5 and leave it in my digital
| library for if I ever have the time to play through it. Only to
| usually just go back to Factorio.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| That's a good question, but I'd say even in the 90s the
| games-market was heavily focused on sales and bundles.
|
| Question is whether the ratio of completing a game was ever
| any different.
|
| I invested alot of time in some games also as a kid, but I
| also remember lots of games I actually enjoyed but never
| finished...
| sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote:
| > most buyers of a video game will never complete your game
|
| Even content that made it into a movie won't be seen by people
| who didn't watch the movie to the end. And it won't be seen by
| people who didn't watch the movie at all.
|
| So what? Who cares?
| izacus wrote:
| > Even the content that made it into the game will never be
| seen by most users, as most buyers of a video game will never
| complete your game. But if the ending is not satisfying for
| those who complete it, they will impact the buying decisions of
| those who never play through it anyway.
|
| That's because a lot of gamers will get it in a bundle,
| discount or as part of different passes. Those aren't the core
| audience that would even be expected to finish the game.
|
| Similarly, I'd bet that "most people" these days don't finish
| Lord of the Rings books. Luckly we didn't have product managers
| telling Tolkien to not finish writing the books while looking
| at statistics saying that "most people don't finish books".
| wongarsu wrote:
| There are plenty of games I have paid good money for that I
| didn't finish for one reason or another. Sometimes the game
| just falls flat of my expectations (free demos went out of
| fashion about a decade ago), sometimes it offers me a
| compelling experience for a while, but not through the whole
| experience. And sometimes life gets in the way. I'm not rich
| by any measure, but I have enough disposable income that I
| don't have to force my way through an experience I stopped
| enjoying.
|
| Similarly there are lots of books I started reading and never
| finished, and plenty of TV shows I started and dropped at
| some point. Even some few movies I started and never
| finished. And that's ok. But unless they are highly
| recommended I don't start TV shows that were canceled, and
| similarly a bad ending is a score against me ever purchasing
| a game or book. There is a good chance the show or game will
| lose me before I ever get there, but why would I set myself
| up for a bad experience in case I do like the product enough
| to get that far?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Quite often there will be games I love, but life gets in
| the way. Then when you try to go back, especially at higher
| levels, it's very difficult to get in the pacing/difficulty
| level so you just don't pick it back up. Even though it's a
| great game and you enjoy it.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > Even the content that made it into the game will never be
| seen by most users, as most buyers of a video game will never
| complete your game. But if the ending is not satisfying for
| those who complete it, they will impact the buying decisions of
| those who never play through it anyway.
|
| How is this different from any book, movie, or other form of
| entertainment?
|
| Case in point: I have not yet watched Game of Thrones, but much
| of my momentum to watch it was stymied by fan outcry of just
| how atrocious the final season was. If I do watch it, I will
| probably stop before I get there.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > How is this different from any book, movie, or other form
| of entertainment?
|
| I'd say if you spend millions to make a movie to be shown in
| the cinema you don't expect that by default 50% will walk out
| before the finale. But even more crucial: If that would
| happen, your ticket-sales would plummet week-by-week.
|
| > Case in point: I have not yet watched Game of Thrones, but
| much of my momentum to watch it was stymied by fan outcry of
| just how atrocious the final season was. If I do watch it, I
| will probably stop before I get there.
|
| The final season of Game of Thrones was based on the success
| of the seasons before it, it was produced AFTER Season
| 1,2,3,4,...
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > I'd say if you spend millions to make a movie to be shown
| in the cinema you don't expect that by default 50% will
| walk out before the finale. But even more crucial: If that
| would happen, your ticket-sales would plummet week-by-week.
|
| Maybe walking out in the middle of the movie is a bad
| analogy, but, it would certainly be applicable to the
| streaming world, where half your audience might watch
| Episode 1 of New Netflix series but stop watching well
| before Episode 10.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Valid in some way, however there is an additional half of
| users who never launch the game at all. Several high-
| profile games on steam have global achievement stats
| where the achievement you get for launching the game /
| completing the tutorial /creating a character is only
| earned by at most 60% of people who own the game.
| derefr wrote:
| I've purchased some of my favorite games multiple times
| -- both to support the developer, and because I prefer
| the newer platform and don't want to have to deal with
| playing the game on the old platform.
|
| But often, after the secondary purchase, I won't actually
| play the game again. I didn't feel like playing it again
| in that moment where I purchased it again. I know I
| _will_ want to replay it one day, which is why I re-
| bought it. But until I actually do, that second copy will
| _seem_ to be have been purchased by someone who has never
| played the game at all.
| imtringued wrote:
| The vast majority of games aren't bought twice or
| released. What happens is that people buy bunch of games
| at the same time and then don't play the third or fourth
| game.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| That's true. But you can look at specific trophies to
| narrow down the users who actually engage but then still
| "walk out of your story" (a ratio which of course varies
| largely from game to game).
|
| Spiderman, one of the high-profile games of PlayStation,
| has a trophy for each of its 3 Acts of the story.
|
| While 67% of the players finished Act#1, only 49%
| actually finished Act#3.
|
| So setting completion of Act#1 as a minimum to measure
| engagement, 27% of those who "sat down" still walked out
| before the end.
|
| And that is not a sign of failure but a landmark success
| of that industry. That's quite unique for a product of
| creativity.
|
| And even more odd: it doesn't even mean that those 27%
| disliked your product. They might even buy your next
| creation...
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > Maybe walking out in the middle of the movie is a bad
| analogy, but, it would certainly be applicable to the
| streaming world, where half your audience might watch
| Episode 1 of New Netflix series but stop watching well
| before Episode 10.
|
| What would be "applicable"?
|
| The streaming world of a TV series would be comparable to
| a streaming world of games. Here the gaming industry is
| largely selling products of entertainment to customers
| who pay explicitly FOR THAT product, yet a significant
| portion of that audience actually never fully consumes
| it.
|
| That's how it is different. CREATIVELY different. A team
| of possibly hundreds of people invest years to create a
| creative product which only a fraction of their paying
| audience will ever experience in full.
|
| It's like a non-Spotify world where every Artist produces
| an Album to be sold on CD, knowing that 50% of the paying
| audience will never hear more than Track 1-4.
| echelon wrote:
| > Case in point: I have not yet watched Game of Thrones, but
| much of my momentum to watch it was stymied by fan outcry of
| just how atrocious the final season was. If I do watch it, I
| will probably stop before I get there.
|
| With AI, we might one day be able to remake the last (two)
| season(s).
|
| Everything leading up to the end was magnificent and
| breathtakingly fresh. No reason it shouldn't be salvaged.
|
| I bet a lot of movies and shows will get "fixed" by fans in
| this fashion. We've already seen dozens of Star Wars OT and
| PT edits, several Lord of the Rings edits, and my take is
| that this trend will grow to encompass everything as it gets
| easier to do.
| boppo1 wrote:
| > I will probably stop before I get there.
|
| Watch up to and include season 5. Then treat it as if it was
| unfortunately cancelled.
| mjrpes wrote:
| Why not season 6 or 7? Season 8 is the one that fell off
| the cliff. Episode S6.E9 is one of the best in all of
| television history.
| mholm wrote:
| Season 6 was alright, with the ending making up for a
| largely mediocre season. Season 7 was about as bad as 8,
| but it's harder to tell because the bad moments weren't
| character/plot altering payoffs, just teleporting around
| the map and ignoring depth in favor of spectacle.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I just felt like 6 is where the writing became very
| amateurish. Iirc, 5 was where source material ran out. It
| has been a long time so I can't pick out details but I
| recall the change in quality between 5 and 6 was pretty
| Stark to me. One thing I remember is that instead of
| "smart" characters really being smart, everyone else got
| dumb as hell. Then the smart character would 'win' and
| another would make a comment basically explaining how
| smart they were.
|
| I know a lot of people think it was good right until the
| finale and only dislike it because a certain fan favorite
| has a "change of character". Except it wasn't a change &
| was obviously telegraphed since season 3 or 4.
| gothrowaway83t wrote:
| I don't think the finale is that bad. My only objection
| is that the character didn't seem to have been pushed so
| far based on the previous episodes. It would have been
| better if the previous seasons showed even more conflicts
| internally.
| wingerlang wrote:
| > Before the introduction of Trophies in console games there
| was no way for game developers to know how far their buyers
| actually played the game before they stopped and moved on.
|
| Do console games not have analytics?
| qiine wrote:
| During the xbox 360 era it was unusual, this was and still is
| a simple and effective solution.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| It's worse today than it's ever been. We've reached peak
| content, people are still playing games from the playstation 1.
| On hackernews, there was a post about someone translating old
| japanese playstation 1 or 2 games.
|
| You are starting to see diminishing returns on even the big AAA
| games. Sony, Epic, etc are starting layoffs.
|
| You are also seeing new trends with Zoomers, where they don't
| 'play' games but have some sort of weird "meta"/"metaverse"
| around a game like Five Nights at Freddys.
| thfuran wrote:
| >people are still playing games from the playstation 1
|
| And people are seven feet tall. But nearly all people are
| outside both of those groups.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Not as much as you'd think. New fantasy writers often say
| they have to compete against Lord of Rings.
|
| Classics are still are demand and have social proof.
| thfuran wrote:
| Lord of the Rings isn't a PS1 game. A lot more people are
| reading old books than are playing PS1 games. I'd assume
| most people still playing PS1 games now are using
| emulators, but for a sense of scale: Something like fifty
| million more copies of Lord of the Rings have been
| printed than PlayStations made.
| norwalkbear wrote:
| Huh emulators are in HUGE demand especially as PC gaming
| and mobile became dominant over consoles.
| manaskarekar wrote:
| Perhaps, this is why watching someone else stream game
| playthroughs is a popular thing.
|
| You can enjoy the content/story/art/player's skill etc without
| having to pour in the time to get to that point in the game
| yourself.
| madrox wrote:
| This has had the follow-on effect of watering down of video
| game difficulty over time. It's more important to see the user
| steadily progressing throughout a game's content than see them
| getting stuck too long (even if there's an intellectual payoff
| when they finally figure it out). Many developers have cited
| this as a reason for changing their game mechanics in favor of
| ease.
|
| It's arguable if this is a good or bad thing for gaming, but
| it's unquestionable there's a connection.
| cowboyscott wrote:
| This reminds me of efforts I've been a part of to open source
| libraries and others bits of code at companies large and small.
| The reality is that most employment contracts consider the
| employee's considered made for hire, meaning that ownership
| rights, in whole or large part, are given to the employer.
| Publishing works carries both risk and a cost to ensure the right
| works are published under the appropriate terms, and expending
| this effort is only in the interest of the company as a means of
| retention (and, ironically, letting your workers display their
| talent can easily work against retention).
|
| > Over 90% of the studio work I've made over my career is locked
| away forever
|
| Speaking as a developer, my "locked away" rate is probably >99.9%
| on a line-by-line basis. Glad to see the concept artists faring
| better, I suppose.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Most artwork will never be seen. There is too much.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Heres a question from a different angle: can we stop the unseen
| art from being created?
|
| Some of it may be useful internally. But a lot of it sounds like
| wasted work.
| pxoe wrote:
| this kind of question really illustrates techbro level of
| understanding of art. like damn, it is hopeless.
|
| and some deeper inability to flip it to oneself that results in
| shit takes like that. 'is whatever that I'm creating that
| remains unseen - a "wasted work"? should I be stopped from
| creating "waste work"? is that what I would like?'
| JohnBooty wrote:
| "how can we make it so that 100.0% of the code I type is
| shipped in the final product?"
| wdfx wrote:
| That's not the same argument?
|
| 100% of the code typed, or 100% of the assets created also
| include all of the code/assets not used/visible in the game.
|
| You'd rather prefer to "only ship the code written which is
| actually reachable by all possible code paths when running in
| production" ?
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Not sure I understand your post but let me clarify.
|
| With art, you often need to produce a looooooot of
| preliminary and intermediate work to achieve the final
| product. This isn't wasted work, as the grandparent poster
| seems to think.
|
| It's similar (admittedly, not identical) in many regards
| with code. Each line of code stands a high chance of being
| revised or deleted as we iterate and get our code to a
| working state and then continue to improve it in the
| future. Those intermediate steps aren't wasted; they're how
| we get to where we're going.
| wdfx wrote:
| We agree, essentially. At the risk of really labouring
| the point though;
|
| It'd be most efficient for time/cost reasons if we only
| ship to production code which is actually used in that
| build.
|
| However, intermediate steps, or additional
| debug/test/migration/whatever code is required to get to
| the final state. You probably don't want to ship debug
| stuff into production.
|
| Therefore, of the total quantity of code written,
| somewhat less than 100% is useful in production.
|
| Therefore, you don't want to ship 100% of all code
| written to production.
|
| > "how can we make it so that 100.0% of the code I type
| is shipped in the final product?"
|
| This isn't necessarily desirable; but phrased slightly
| differently perhaps reflects more about production
| efficiency:
|
| "how can we make it so that 100% of the production code
| is the only code I typed?"
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Well, I don't disagree with what you typed there but I
| think we're off in the weeds a bit.
| "how can we make it so that 100% of the production
| code is the only code I typed?"
|
| We certainly want to eliminate as many unnecessary steps
| as possible.
|
| But much of that intermediate work iteration is
| inseparable from the discovery and refinement process.
|
| To answer your question literally, "how can we make it so
| that 100% of the production code is the only code I
| typed?" would only be possible if you moved all of that
| discovery and iteration and refinement out of the coding
| loop or whatever.
| techdmn wrote:
| Another approach would be to ship that first iteration,
| no matter how broken! Though I wouldn't recommend it.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| With this idea of "wasted work", it's no wonder that many
| people don't think twice about using AI image generators in
| unethical ways.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| In a creative environment sometimes things just created to show
| the rest of the team and communicate a theme, idea, vibe have a
| lot of value.
| raincole wrote:
| Congrats. You invested waterfall.
| imtringued wrote:
| The answer is to never make a single mistake.
|
| This is also what I consider to be one of the reasons why
| Austrian economics is silly. They call this work
| "malinvestment". Making mistakes is part of the process and not
| some unfortunate distortion of it.
| siffland wrote:
| I remember play a game years and years ago (cannot recall the
| game), you come out of a mountain cave halfway up turn left and
| then enter another cave. However i stopped and you got a view of
| a desert landscape (i remember it as awe inspiring, maybe
| breathtaking, but it was years ago so in reality it was probably
| pixelated), it looked like someone put a lot of effort into the
| view and wondered if anyone else stopped and looked or just kept
| going.
|
| Point is, if i work on code, i refactor and refactor and try to
| make it perfect even though it already worked and wonder how many
| people working on games spent a ton of time on a scene in a game
| or background or sprite to get it perfect and no one pays
| attention. I have a friend who plays Super Mario Bros all the
| time just to beat it and has NEVER seen world 5, 6 or 7 because
| he always uses the warp zones (i am not implying those are
| breathtaking worlds, if they were he would be missing out).
| Terr_ wrote:
| > years and years ago [...] out of a mountain cave [...] desert
| landscape
|
| Random-ass-guess here, but my mind throws up the "Surface
| Tension" level in Half Life. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZgRIifpgHQ&t=12m04s
| MattRix wrote:
| First post I've seen here from Aftermath. I think the site only
| went live a couple days ago but seems like it's run and owned by
| a bunch of veteran game journalists. I'm hoping it does well.
| andai wrote:
| I wanted to argue just break the NDA and leak the art.
| (Anonymously, say your Dropbox was hacked, unlikely action will
| be taken against you.)
|
| I wanted to argue that art leaks are great for the community,
| even if they harm the company. But I remember reading how the HL2
| beta leak tanked morale at VALVE, and arguably if the team's
| morale is hurt, that ultimately hurts the community too.
|
| Still at some point the culture there shifted and people who had
| been working on Episode 3 released their art, storyline etc
| (though some later regretted it).
| coretx wrote:
| Bring back cracktro's, innovative Art. Most video game "Artwork"
| is a more of the same industrial product not much different from
| "Art" in advertisement. Most AI generated art will also not be
| seen. Honestly, I don't care & i'm not the only one.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _Like yeah you can own the pictures, man, but you shouldn 't be
| allowed to keep us from using our labor to secure future jobs._
|
| As a developer, I wouldn't ever consider submitting proprietary
| code I may still have from a previous or current job when
| applying for another job (not least because that may leave a bad
| impression of how I handle confidential stuff). Why should this
| be different for artists?
| woleium wrote:
| I guess it's like sharing a compiled binary. As long as you
| aren't sharing the "source", I.e. the vector file or the
| layered photoshop image file, and just a low resolution jpeg
| then it's not so bad? Not saying it's ethically okay, just that
| it's not that useful for reuse by the target in the form it's
| presented.
| dagmx wrote:
| Except early versions of any project may show features or IP
| that didn't ship, that may in the future.
|
| Or open you up for criticism and litigation for any number of
| reasons.
|
| Revealing stuff that's been done isn't free.
| dogleash wrote:
| What? Sharing the binary vs. source is not the kind of line
| you get to draw unless you're the one paying for it to be
| developed.
|
| I've worked on projects that are available on the market and
| I can't even point at it and suggest I had anything to do
| with it, or the companies involved with making it.
| raincole wrote:
| Because artists are special.
|
| No, I am not being snarky. Actually artists _are_ special: it
| 's one of the few job where portfolios matter much more than
| education, and as much as (or more than) interviews.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| This seems to apply to gamedev programmers as well, though
| I'm not too sure.
| norwalkbear wrote:
| Exactly I'd get sued into oblivion.
| dogleash wrote:
| Does it matter? Like, yeah, there's a seeming incongruity at
| first pass. But that doesn't mean it's important.
|
| Games are a consumer product meant to widely available and a big
| part of them is visual spectacle. Some of the visuals designed in
| creating that product are kept secret. I see the apparent
| contradiction, but the lede of this article calls that "one of
| the greatest injustices."
|
| You what mate?
| hwestiii wrote:
| yes. AKA "business"
| seanhunter wrote:
| Precisely. A huge amount of work in every field never sees the
| light of day. That doesn't mean it's not important, it just
| means the person doing the work is curating what goes "above
| the waterline" and what stays in the background as prep.
|
| The obvious example of this same thing in literature is
| Tolkein, who invented whole alphabets and languages but only
| included tiny fragments of them in his published works (prior
| to his death - obviously his estate has been releasing
| everything remorselessly).
|
| Or an example from a totally unrelated field, there are lots of
| cases in say maths where you have to do a bunch of work to
| choose a value but that's considered "scratch work" so gets
| removed when you submit the final version. So everyone sees
| your epsilon-delta proof of a limit for example, they see your
| brilliant choice of delta but the work you put into finding the
| delta isn't part of the proof. The proof just shows that choice
| of delta makes the proof work for any epsilon. Noone reading it
| gets to know how you figured that out, because that's not what
| a proof is for.
|
| In the case of games, the artwork that isn't released is part
| of the worldbuilding and refining the concept for the game.
| It's absolutely not wasted effort even if it's never seen by
| anyone outside the dev team.
| corysama wrote:
| The meat of the article is not talking about an injustice to
| the consumer. It's arguing that there's an injustice to the
| artist because artists' portfolios are critical to their career
| advancement. It's not enough to say "I worked on this team."
| You need to literally show your personal results in detail to
| get your next job. But, artist employers are requiring that the
| majority of their results be locked in a vault forever.
|
| Some are even pushing to claim ownership of _all_ art made
| during employment. That 's blatantly a move to repress the
| employee's negotiating power.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I don't buy the argument, there are way too many game studios
| for them all to be like that, some will offer friendlier
| terms and will become somewhat more attractive to artists,
| while the restrictive studios will become somewhat less
| attractive.
| corysama wrote:
| I get what you are saying. I also received a settlement
| check from a group of major game & movie studios who
| admitted to actively colluding to suppress wages.
|
| This case isn't even explicit collusion. It's a "That's
| just the way it is, kid. Deal with it." implicit collusion.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Oh, I thought the article was going to be about how it's because
| people suck at games. But I guess these days with lets plays you
| don't have to earn the right to see the later levels.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This article is specifically about not being able to include some
| of your work in your portfolio, and this is not a problem that's
| unique to video game artists. It's true of all sorts of people in
| the entertainment industry -- writers, actors, and so forth.
|
| But in reality it's not really a problem. Sure, you absolutely
| _cannot_ take past contracted work that never saw the light of
| day and put it in a public portfolio without permission. Rightly,
| no team wants any part of the creative process leaked, except
| when the people at the top choose to.
|
| But this still leaves:
|
| 1) A public portfolio of stuff that was actually released by the
| companies (final video game clips, movie clips, etc.)
|
| 2) A public portfolio of personal material -- projects of your
| own, designed to showcase your talents at their absolute best
|
| 3) A _private_ portfolio of unreleased stuff that you can
| selectively and judiciously show in _private_ interviews, _when
| it 's not competing_ (e.g. show your Dove soap ads to Snickers,
| don't show them to Dial soap)
|
| And that generally works quite well. Especially your personal
| portfolio of material (#2) -- everything you work on
| professionally is often compromised by top-down direction. But
| when you create stuff that's 100% yours, it allows you to show
| your unique gifts in the best possible light.
| product-render wrote:
| It is a problem that (3) is something that could get you sued,
| depending on the specifics, although I'll grant that almost
| never happens.
|
| I have work for major big brands that I suspect would land me
| more clients but I can't even mention the relationship. I
| signed the NDA, so it wasn't a surprise, but it is frustrating
| that the power imbalance allows that.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| HN skews toward believing that if you can be sued, you will
| be. It's the infinite monkeys theory applied to contract law.
| jameslars wrote:
| A similar realization had a major impact on how Blizzard
| approached end-game raiding in WoW. In the first 2 expansions,
| only the most dedicated players were seeing the final boss and
| culmination of the storylines. It took 40 players working
| together to get there, and those 40 players had to execute
| complex fights in order to reach the end. Though a very rewarding
| experience for those who could do it, Blizzard did the math and
| realized they were excluding the VAST majority of their
| playerbase from the coolest content. They were spending tons of
| money creating this content and no one was experiencing it!
|
| In the 3rd expansion and ever since then, end game content has
| been tuned to be a lot more forgiving and to require less people.
| There are still complex and rewarding fights, but ramping up the
| difficulty is "opt-in" generally speaking.
|
| This is likely one of the reasons the game remained so successful
| for so long. Prior to this mentality shift, it was very common
| for end game MMO content to only be seen by a small minority of
| the players.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| A similar thing happened with Star Wars Galaxies. Part of the
| original pitch was that like <1% of players would have access
| to the Force. Only from there with super hard training could
| they be Jedi. This matches the lore of the universe, Jedi
| (especially in the OT era) are the most rare creatures.
|
| This was accurate, and would make seeing a Jedi in the game
| world the coolest thing imaginable, but it was a disaster for
| the finances of running the game.
|
| Obviously, EVERYONE wants to be a Jedi. So they re-tooled it so
| that anyone could. Eventually the whole game was replaced with
| another MMO that was set in the ancient ages when they were
| common.
| SpaceL10n wrote:
| There are no examples of video game artwork in this article,
| sadly. I'm sure it's a good read, but I clicked it just for the
| art.
|
| found https://www.creativeuncut.com/ instead
| corethree wrote:
| 1 year ago this article would have been much more relevant. With
| the advent of image generation via AI, artwork is becoming more
| commoditized and this is becoming less relevant.
|
| It's sad to see this happen in a year but this is literally the
| first thing I thought about when I read the headline.
| kossTKR wrote:
| A tangent but reminds me of the fact that even though we have
| millions of photographers with amazing cameras, most news and
| culture sites display images in low quality.
|
| So most great photos will also never been seen. I remember Boston
| Globe from years ago with great photo content that really
| captured the vibe of so many places and people in the news.
|
| These days news means boring propaganda PR pictures or tiny
| images with artifacts, very weird. It's like we're not as close
| to the actual world as we were 10+ years ago.
|
| Probably also about licensing, but it's stupid because most
| photos won't end up as "pressphoto of the year" or whatever they
| are saving their HQ versions for.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| This bothers me a lot. It reminds me of old movies and tv shows
| using garbage low quality props that eventually look like
| monopoly money instead of dollars at current resolutions,
| because the quality of broadcast and even projection at the
| time of filming was so low nobody would be able to tell. future
| proof your work for gods sake
| madrox wrote:
| This article feels like the art equivalent of engineers saying
| the code they write in their jobs will never be open sourced. I
| mean, yeah, that's somewhat unfortunate, but not all businesses
| can survive operating that way, and you kind of know what you
| signed up for when you went in. It seems like the artists
| interviewed in this article know that, but would like to see some
| reasonable limits placed on it, like a statute of limitations.
|
| I can relate. Once, say, 10 years have passed, the only people
| who care about that code I wrote for a job 10 years ago would
| probably be me, and I'd like to be able to do with it what I
| want.
| johnea wrote:
| > "...worlds we inhabit and the characters we fall in love with."
|
| To paraphrase Lenny Bruce:
|
| What do you mean "we" kimosabe...
| Atrine wrote:
| > While some of the commercial reasons for keeping game art under
| wraps make sense, many artists working in the video game industry
| say they're subject to a power imbalance, even in full-time
| studio positions, that sees the bulk of their work locked away in
| vaults, where not only can fans never see them but where artists
| can't share them either, not even in professional settings like
| job applications or portfolios.
|
| This is actually a pretty big problem. My cofounder and I run a
| small video game studio and we worked with our lawyers to figure
| out how to protect artists as well as the company in a way that
| seemed fair. What we came up with was a general blanket rule that
| if an artist's work gets used in any public way (promo materials,
| game launch) then they can use that work immediately for their
| public portfolios. In the situation where it's not released we
| have end dates in the contracts for when they can use their work
| in their portfolios.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > If an artist's work gets used in any public way (promo
| materials, game launch) then they can use that work immediately
| for their public portfolios
|
| Do you see this case being prohibited as the norm for other
| studios? (the cited section only talks about art "locked away
| in vaults")
|
| > In the situation where it's not released we have end dates in
| the contracts for when they can use their work in their
| portfolios.
|
| That's actually quite charitable, but IMO understandable how
| difficult this is for larger companies. After all your company
| paid for that product of work, which also reveals parts of your
| creative process.
|
| Imagine Ford paying someone to make five car-designs, ending up
| using one of them and ultimately losing full control over the
| remaining four...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-08 23:01 UTC)