Archive for April, 2009

Trent Reznor, the idealist (link):

A lot of the big publishers have gone the route of record labels and movie companies where it costs so much to make a game and they’re so obsessed with this idea that games have to be cinematic experiences that lots of money gets spent on the marketing and the rendering and not a lot of money gets put into anything that’s innovative or interesting.

Rob Sheridan and I pitched a game a couple of years ago. We sat down with a few big publishers and we heard the same thing from everybody which was: it costs so much to make a game and we’re really only interested in sequels or movie tie-ins…

Trent Reznor has always made these complaints about the music industry, so it’s no surprise he has the same take on the video game industry.

This isn’t just the entertainment industries, this is how all jobs work. This is generally known by working adults as the “real life” effect. That’s why people use the word “job” and not “magical gumdrop happy place”.

I completely sympathize with him. As a programmer, I have dozens of cool, daring, experimental dream project ideas, and I wish some angel investor would just hand over a salary for me to work on them full time. Instead, I’ve found the next best thing: over paid sh*t work that affords me some flexibility to chase my own ideas and periodically procrastinate by posting on this blog.