Requiem Part Two
Apparently, E3 is dead.
Or it is for game journalists, who miss the free swag, extra advertising dollars on their sites, free booze, feeling like they're closer to actually being in the game biz, and the free booze.
Untold is how much better life is for developers, and how much better games are. Last year was the first year that there was no E3, and it was a *stellar* year for games. Think that's a coincidence? Maybe not as much as you think.
When E3 was still "alive", we, the game developers, had to start thinking about it in January. The day after Christmas vacation was the first day to a long slog to get an E3-quality playable level ready. As May drew closer, the pressure mounted. The publisher wanted a basically finished game in the form of a playable level. All the graphics tweeks needed to be in. It needed to be fully optimized because you were stuffing as much crap in there as possible. All the programmers, all the artists got sucked in to making that one level. The programmers wrote hacky bandages to keep the demo together: hacks that would later have to be taken out or they would cause serious bugs. Artists would create fantastic effects that only the finest machines could run so the look of the demo could be competitive.
In other words, you would lose 4 months development time on almost everything else in the game just so you could make the demo. Further, the E3 crunch was always much worse than the crunch you would have to do for actually shipping the game. At the end of the game, all the assets are in, all the gameplay set. You're just fixing bugs. For E3, there were no testers, just management telling you there needed to be more excitement, better art, and less embarrassing crashes. It was unquantifiable.
Now, there's no E3. No rush to get the demo out. No big, fat speedbump that totally unbalanced your game and caused long-lasting programming bugs that would frequently cause the hair to fall out of the programmers who realized at the end of the product that their Jenga-like pile of code was built on a faulty block of code written by a junior programmer at 1:00am in the morning three days before the convention.
Yeah, the reviewers can complain, but you know what, they certainly don't complain when a Bioshock, a GTA4 and a Portal all land in their laps in a 6 month period.
Or it is for game journalists, who miss the free swag, extra advertising dollars on their sites, free booze, feeling like they're closer to actually being in the game biz, and the free booze.
Untold is how much better life is for developers, and how much better games are. Last year was the first year that there was no E3, and it was a *stellar* year for games. Think that's a coincidence? Maybe not as much as you think.
When E3 was still "alive", we, the game developers, had to start thinking about it in January. The day after Christmas vacation was the first day to a long slog to get an E3-quality playable level ready. As May drew closer, the pressure mounted. The publisher wanted a basically finished game in the form of a playable level. All the graphics tweeks needed to be in. It needed to be fully optimized because you were stuffing as much crap in there as possible. All the programmers, all the artists got sucked in to making that one level. The programmers wrote hacky bandages to keep the demo together: hacks that would later have to be taken out or they would cause serious bugs. Artists would create fantastic effects that only the finest machines could run so the look of the demo could be competitive.
In other words, you would lose 4 months development time on almost everything else in the game just so you could make the demo. Further, the E3 crunch was always much worse than the crunch you would have to do for actually shipping the game. At the end of the game, all the assets are in, all the gameplay set. You're just fixing bugs. For E3, there were no testers, just management telling you there needed to be more excitement, better art, and less embarrassing crashes. It was unquantifiable.
Now, there's no E3. No rush to get the demo out. No big, fat speedbump that totally unbalanced your game and caused long-lasting programming bugs that would frequently cause the hair to fall out of the programmers who realized at the end of the product that their Jenga-like pile of code was built on a faulty block of code written by a junior programmer at 1:00am in the morning three days before the convention.
Yeah, the reviewers can complain, but you know what, they certainly don't complain when a Bioshock, a GTA4 and a Portal all land in their laps in a 6 month period.
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