Unread postby Akira » 19 Jul 2007, 14:17
OK, I want to give you some more thoughts on the situation as I see it. We rarely touch upon such important questions as working in the gamedev industry – why not to speculate on it once more... Sorry if its gonna be too amateurish, I am only a gamer.
The situation in Russia is very strange. There are a number of ‘major’ companies who create games, but their games are mostly crap. Why? Lets see.
There are many talented people in Russia – designers, artists, programmers... Many of them can do different things at the same time: say, there are level designers who can write nice texts or even programs. That’s the distinctive feature of Russian specialists: they are trained to be multiskilled, so called jacks of all trades. They are creative and experienced. Why do they produce crap over and over again then?
There are two answers. The first one is bad management. If you are rich and willing to do games you can hire a great team, but it does not mean that you can lead it in the right direction. That is why such people are overenthusiastic in the beginning, they promise a lot to the players and invest big sums in the ads, but finally the things start falling apart. And in the end of the deadline, all they have on their hands is a very raw product – namely, crap (the most vivid examples are Lada Street Racing and probably Stalker). The funnies thing here is that gamers will buy this load of waste anyway – because of their high expectations and aggressive advertising campaigns. This makes the developers think that the project turned out to be success (they managed to raise money after all!) – and they begin their new lousy endeavor.
The second answer is money. In Russia, there are skilled beginner teams who have bright ideas, but have little money... and no attention from the publishers. They try to implement those ideas on their own but fail because of limited funds. That is why their games for the most part are doomed to become crap (there are exceptions of course).
That’s how the things are in Russia (maybe everywhere else though). Now lets think about Ubi’s and Nival’s HoMM-V from this perspective. Which case have we got here? Both I guess. Nival has skilled specialists all right. But they probably lack 1) management; 2) necessary funds – because they depend on Ubisoft, which is obvious. Plus – judging from different opinions in the Russian forums – they cannot implement everything they want because Ubi push their own decisions hammering the whole process. I don’t think it is right. I think that since Ubi decided Nival would do H-V, they probably should have stepped back and let Nival doing it their own way coordinating only minor things. What’s more, thinking about this situation, I come to a conclusion that Ubi should have given Nival more money and should not have let them fire talented specialists (namely designers and scriptwriters) – for me it seems the biggest mistake here. Nival (and Ubi) will need them anyway in some time – and where will they find such experienced people? They should not have let them go in the first place.
The final trick is that TOTE will definitely sell nicely in Russia anyway – because of the expectations and famous brand-name. But will it turn out to be a great game with interesting missions, good gameplay and quality texts? Hm... The time will show.
Edited on Thu, Jul 19 2007, 11:05 by Akira
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I dislike being taxed so much as it is, I'd be even more annoyed if I were taxed for "cultural improvement". Pfft... please.
