Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Game Developers Interviewers Suck

cliffski

Since when did game developers all become indoctrinate dby marketing and PR bullshit? It seems now that a lot of the interviews you read with actual coders and designers (not the publishers) have stuff like this in:

“It was an incredible thrill and privilege to be able to leverage the awesome IP from that title to provide a compelling and dynamic experience for this platform, and it will be available across multiple SKUs”

Nobody wants tor ead that crap except shareholders.  What I want to know is the honest thoughts and opinions and experiences of people. But you don’t get that, just a lot of marketing speak. People are interviewed, then everything interesting gets censored by the marketing dept until its just character-less, souless mediaspeak.

Here’s some brutally honest comments by me on some of my own games and indieness. if I had a PR manager, he or she would never let me say this stuff:

“Starship tycoon is basically transport tycoon in space. I was originally doing a space combat game, but for some reason I don’t even recall it got converted to a space trading one. I was a pretty crap coder when I made that game, and although generally it runs well 90% of the time for 95% of the people, you should check out the demo first, because it *does* have some bugs in it, and tbh they are not about to get fixed.”

“Kudos 2’s days at work are the low point of the game. I just didn’t have the budget, manpower and time to write enough events for all the differnt jobs, and I was delusional thinking I could do it. When I play the game, I do find myself skipping the text descriptions of my day at work. It’s the one design bit I don’t like.”

“Right now there is a price war going on between the casual games portals, and it’s going to seriously squeeze a lot of the smaller casual game developers out of business. Personally, I don’t care that much, because a lot of them are just churning out diner dash rip-offs for someone else anyway. Would we really give a damn if they went out of business?”

Wouldn’t it be more fun if every develoepr interview was mroe like that? I think so :D

6 thoughts on Game Developers Interviewers Suck

  1. It’s worse than indoctrination, what is really happening in many cases are that what is marketed as developer interviews are neither.

    The answers aren’t written by developers, they are written by PR people. At best the answers are reviewed by the development lead that puts his name to the article. This isn’t only done for the reason to be evil, but to save precious developer time… Still a lie though.

    Second, they often aren’t really interviews to begin with, that is the questions too are written by in-house PR departments themselves, then the “exclusive” interview is pushed into the press hands in exhange for good exposure.

    I am so glad you are different!

  2. Most good interviews come from Post Mortems of failed games/x-employees. Like Blacksite: Area 51, or HellGate: London, they had GREAT interviews with Producers or Directors after the fact that read like “Yeah, we suck ass. The Game was shit.”… I think in Blacksite’s case, they literally said that.

    Depending on the Publisher is depending how incredibly muffed the interview seems to be… EA must have somebody with their finger on a tazer trigger attached to the Dev’s balls when you read the interviews with them (except Will Wright, who can say whatever he wants but still plays the game), Take2 hasn’t given many interviews this year because of the near-buyout situation…

    You’re right though, the problem is that it ceases to be an interview with an actual Developer… and more like a paperpusher Director or Producer, half of which couldn’t tell you how to beat the first stage of the game if you were to ask them… or the name of the Final Boss.

  3. Looking at just some of the interviews done on The Reticule over the past few weeks and you can certainly see what Cliff is saying. The C&C interview was very limited and really quite generic, though I wasn’t give much to work on, so that didn’t help.

    The interviews with the indie guys, like the one with you Cliff, were so much better, a lot of depth and honesty, really quite refreshing to read.

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  6. So are we making Starship Tycoon 2 still? Because… I can’t wait anymore. lol. Ill send ya 50 bucks right now! j/k anyways. good will developing

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