Randy Pitchford, president of Duke Nukem Forever developer Gearbox Software, says that publishers are forcing multiplayer modes onto games they do not suit because of an obsessive desire to keep pace with blockbusters like Call Of Duty.
Gearbox’s upcoming Duke Nukem Forever, a fast-paced FPS, naturally suits competitive multiplayer, but Pitchford points to the likes of Dead Space 2 as evidence that decisions are often motivated by the desire to tick boxes on a feature list, rather than for the good of the game itself.
“Let’s forget about what the actual promise of a game is and whether it’s suited to a narrative or competitive experience,” he tells us. “Take that off the table for a minute and just think about the concept-free feature list: campaign, co-op, how many players? How many guns? How long is the campaign?
“When you boil it down to that, you take the ability to make good decisions out of the picture. And the reason they do it is because they notice that the biggest blockbusters offer a little bit for every kind of consumer. You have people that want co-op and competitive, and players who want to immerse themselves in deep fiction. But the concept has to speak to that automatically; it can’t be forced. That’s the problem.”
While bemoaning the practice, Pitchford understands the realities of business: that these decisions are made at a high level, one unaware of, and unconcerned by, the creative concept of a game. With research firms like EEDAR suggesting that the more feature-rich a game is, the better its review scores, it’s understandable that decisions are often taken for what gamers and developers see as the wrong reasons.
“When the publisher is thinking, ‘When I put my money in, I don’t know what’s going to come out, but I know what I want the low and high numbers to be and I want the high number to be as high as possible’, fundamentally he’s gambling,” Pitchford says. “He’s a money guy, he has no creative investment. He’s putting money on the table and wants a return. For him, the worst-case scenario is that he just gets it back.”
Using the Dead Space series as an example, Pitchford says: “It’s ceiling-limited; it’ll never do 20 million units. The best imaginable is a peak of four or five million units if everything works perfectly in your favour. So the bean counters go: ‘How do I get a higher ceiling?’ And they look at games that have multiplayer.
“They’re wrong, of course. What they should do instead is say that they’re comfortable with the ceiling, and get as close to the ceiling as possible. Put in whatever investment’s required to focus it on what the promise is all about.”
Pitchford was speaking to us as part of our feature, All Together Now, which looks at the current state of multiplayer modes with input from Ruffian Games, Bethesda, Activision and Splash Damage. It’s in our next issue, E227, which will be with subscribers any day now and at all good newsagents from April 12.