Transformers: The Game Helps Activision Fiscal 1Q Outlook

Okay, spiderman 3 has no excuse especially after spidey 2 and ultimate spidey.

But transformers at least, these are the first games. Think of how bad the first spidey game was. They've still got sequels to get it right like the DS game did. (Well besides the aiming at least.)

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Feel free to come check out the Transformers Community site at


http://ds.transformersgame.com/

and come join the on going battle for the Allspark!

The main reason the gaming industry is full of half ass crappy games is pretty simple. The executives in charge of making decisions on what goes in the game and what doesn't simply don't know what a good game is. Executives decide what the game is, not the game designers. And guess what, executives don't play games! Big surprise there. Its a lot like the toy industry sometimes, MP-03 and the bogus color scheme comes to mind. Do you think the original designers of the original mold wanted Kawamori to "improve" their mold and make it that color? I doubt it.

Execs see games as any other trendy product, they want to move the product. Quality is not really a factor because they don't understand what makes a quality game, that's why they love movie games so much because you can put out a piece of shit and make a ton of money still without doing any of the hard work. Until people stop wasting there money on these crappy games, they will keep putting them out.

Speaking from experience, there are tons of great game designers out there. I can tell you it doesn't matter how good a design is or how much the designer has thought everything through for game play. It doesn't matter how many games you've played or how much knowledge of great games you have built up. Designs and concepts are not evauated on there own merit as a game design. They are approved and praised simply on the criteria that the executives like it or not. Being a designer at a big game corporation is all about appeasing executives and learning how to pursuade them to like you, so later you'll be able to get in a few good ideas of your own.

As a designer, if you can play the executive politics game, you can make a lot of money. If you simply want to make great games that people will enjoy for years, its going to be extremely difficult maybe impossible. That is why so many good designers either go to a small company or sellout and become an executive themselves. As a designer if you don't have the executive communication and persona skills, the best you can hope for is that an executive decides to take your idea and make it their idea, the designer doesn't get any credit, but at least the game will be better for it.

Actually, most of the time, the only thing executives do is make development time shorter so the prodcut is released at a certain time, or not hire enough staff. From my experience they don't have much say or care as to what actually is in the game.

Make developement shorter? I don't think so, not in the big corporations. Who then is always responsible for letting games slip? Do you even work in the industry? Executives have the final say in everything, they run the projects. Do you know the term Executive Producer, those are the project leads who approve everything.

Yes I do. The art directors have final say for our department and the game directors have final say in most other departments. Executive producers can say yay or nay if they choose to get involved but usually their biggest impact, in my experience, is the larger things like business details and release dates. My overall point is that you can have many talneted people, who some can produce things faster then others, but when the deadline is reached, they have to stop and drop what isn't finished, which can leave a game very unpolished. Perhaps whatever company you work for, assuming you do, work differently.

I also wanted to add this link that pretty much says executive producers can be involved an various things, so it can go both ways:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_producer

Ah, the 'joy' of games development...I sure wouldn't have wanted to work on this title for love nor money. Yes, it's Transformers, but I can only imagine the constant battering the dev team got from publisher and movie studio alike, not to mention stupidly-short milestones and ridiculously-long crunch sessions.

Been there enough times myself.