centre{source}

I’ll admit it… I am a big gamer. I, CEO/President of CentreSource, love to sit back and immerse myself in a great game (alone or with a friend). While I could wax about the therapeutic value of games & their overall role in our stress-laced work force, I’ll save that for another day :) Instead, I thought I’d give you one of the funniest & best written articles I’ve seen on the current state of the gaming industry. Most of his points show that the industry is developing software in a box (or a crate if you read the article!).

Here are some great quotes from the article:

On the industries failure to target women:

Developers will be shocked one day when they notice that the world is full of women. It’s true! More than half of your potential customer base are penisless. They have money. They like doing fun things. And yet, how do you think they feel when they play a game where the heroine… [wears a] Thong-length kimono, no bra for those flopping DDD breasts [into battle].

On games that don’t use the hard drive for dynamic quicksaves:

When we’re on our deathbeds, we’re going to wish we could reclaim the time we spent wandering around for save points long after we were done playing every night. Imagine if your word processing program did this, refusing to let you save your progress until you typed six more paragraphs. Or, made you retype your last paragraph six times while zombies tried to shoot your cursor…

On the creation of ‘console marketplaces’ (my favorite):

Finally, we can have a game world where, like the real world, the rich kids have all of the cool stuff! While you’re fighting for 50 hours on an XBox role playing game to get the +50 Magical Shield of Shielding, some snotty kid just went out and bought one with real-world money thanks to his $150.00 weekly allowance from Daddy!

In my opinion, he’s spot on… many of the games feel a bit ‘formula’. Like the article points out, perhaps expanding budgets cause developers to stick with ‘what works’. Eventually there will be a market for free-lance game designers - especially if the right tools make it to the open source world. Just look at PlaneShift - its a real open source MMORPG… with players and everything!

Anyways, thank you David Wong and Haimoimoi for writing such a great article.