Silicon Knights' Denis Dyack Speaks Out

Silicon Knights CEO Denis Dyack is glad E3 is dead. But that's just one change of many that Dyack believes the gaming needs. He also wants fewer games, less marketing hype and one platform. The man behind Eternal Darkness and the upcoming Too Human speaks with TwitchGuru about how to improve the industry.

This guy is spin city and a half...

"there are too many games"
"games should be shorter"
...what? If there are fewer games to choose from those games will need to hold our interest for longer. Also there's this little thing called MMORPGs... people spend THOUSANDS of hours on them. Ten times or more as much time as this dude thinks is the absolute max length a good game should be (100 hours).

"good graphics are a given and they are easy"
"we have entire teams of people taking 2 years to design a single model"
that's given as easy?

"we're spending 1000times as many man hours developing a single model as we used to"
"that won't cut into content production at all"
Throwing money and time at super-sizing a project certainly never backfires...


And I'm really not sure I buy his version of Film history or the resultant analogy he draws from it.

He makes some good points but what I really think he wants is to be able to spend 3 years making a 30hour game (that people will get bored of in a month or two and buy another one of his games) and sell a bazillion copies without spending anything on advertising or having to write any platform specific code with very little competition (if only 6 game studios are producing games at a time you could, for example, not release a FPS at the same time they release a FPS that would draw sales away from you and time your release. Great for marketing games that take years to develop and you can always spend a few more months tweaking models and doing more voice acting... crappy for consumer choice). I agree with him about the advertising part (why are we being hyped up on games that aren't even going to come out for years? I'm really not so sure it's even a good marketing strategy and certainly a huge expense I would rather they spent on making the game good and/or less expensive and/or not wasting my time and then canceling the project before releasing it) but the rest is wishful thinking of a wanna-be market controller.

I don't want games that I can beat in a week while working full time. I don't want to choose between only 6 studios (too many games??? That's what reviews are for). Video games are too easy. It shouldn't be a matter of time to "beat" one. It should be HARD. Final Fantasy and Mario Brothers hard. There are millions of people who LOVED those two games and never beat them and, unless you were high, special effects and technology had nada to do with it. There was no audio director, no art director, no voice actors, nuklearpower.com has spent more time and talent on the crappy 2D sprites that we had for "models" then the game developers ever did. And they were GREAT.

As games become more complicated what we need is re-useable and open source (or at least reasonably priced licensable) game platforms and components. That's how studios can have good graphics and mechanics that are "given" and the competition can be played out in who the better "story teller" is. As it is now I can choose between a plethora of games, Denis wants me to only be able to choose from the only 6 studios who have the finances to hire 5 teams of producers for 3 years before ever releasing a product.

Ouch! Uwe Boll? That's a little harsh, don't you think? Eternal Darkness is a great game, after all.

I guess I have a different perspective on game marketing and hype. I see it constantly, and it makes me gag. I think Dyack is correct -- it makes no sense to tease a game that isn't finished (hello, Fable and Fable 2!). It will only lead t o disappointment -- either when the preview is shown (like Halo, which nobody thought would be any good when the first demo was revealed), or when the game is finally out and it looks nothing like the demo you played at E3 a year ago.

I don't know about eliminating the the whole hype machine alltogether. I do think that many games start getting the hype treatment too early. Spore is an example. Shortly after I saw those videos I was ready to go out and pay extra for a collector's edition and do nothing but spore for days.

Now... well... I am still looking forward to it but honestly... I am no longer as excited as I was for the first month or two.

If they started the hype machine as soon as the game went gold and is sent to the printers to start manufacturing then it would be good. That way the hype is still fresh and the excitement is still there.

There are some games however that benefit from an early build up. Games where the developers work with the community during the development of the game to fine tune things and get suggestions and such definitely benefit from it, but that sort of thing seems fairly rare.

There should never be another DN:F however. Starting the hype machine that early is just sheer lunacy.