I remember this great interview with Larian's Swen Vincke. His assessment about European and American dev culture is pretty obvious and fitting in the case of DOS and DAI:
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Me: There’s a disparity between gamers in the US and Europe – and both regions create very different RPG’s. The differences are incredibly bold.
Swen: Yes, you see them right away.
Me: To me, American RPG’s seem very ideological – they often take a stance – they are very ideological gamers. Be the best of everything; be a hero, be a good person – but their games often are unmatched in fidelity and polish.
Swen: Ideological, that’s interesting… the problem is we don’t have the polish. If we [European developers] had the resources that they have, we would be at least matched. That’s what CD Projekt is also trying. If you can have the polish of what they do, with the core values of what we do… I really think it’s a cultural thing… there’s a culture in the games that we make that you will not find in American RPG’s, and vice versa. I mean, I’ve loved quite a lot of American RPG’s – there were some really good ones in the past; Ultima is one of my favorite RPG’s of all time. There are a lot of good Russian RPG’s, they just don’t have any production values at all.
Me: Do you think European developers aim their games towards older audiences?
Swen: I think European games developers aim their games at themselves. And that American developers aim them towards a ‘target audience’, and that’s a very big difference. I’ve seen this myself – I mean, this one [Original Sin] is made for me and my girlfriend, because we were playing Dark Alliance and I said “ah, I like the fact that I am playing together with you, but there’s nothing to do. It’s just hacking and slashing,” and so from there came Original Sin. If I like it, and he likes it [points to imaginary co-developer, not his girlfriend], then there are probably other gamers who will like it too.
Me: That seems very logical.
Swen: Yeah, but it’s surprising how that logic is ignored when you look at it from a publisher perspective, when you have your stocks, charts, percentages… When you sit into those meetings – you lose your head, right! You’re just following numbers [mocks number crunching and talking about stocks] “who can release an RPG without Facebook intergration!” What the hell? [laughs].
Me: EA have a phrase they seem to use a lot: “resonate well with the consumer.”
Swen: There’s three things wrong with that. The first thing is “resonate” – what kind of word is that? Who talks about the player as a “consumer,” it’s like a product – what the hell, it’s a game? When you hear things like that – you know… I knew a marketing director from the perfume industry. He’d never played a game in his life, but he was going to tell me what an RPG needs to be. He said “I’ve done my research!” So he came up with a list of things that RPG’s had to have, and I said “what are you talking about?”
People hear these stories – they think we’re exaggerating, but they’re true! We witnessed them! Usually the marketing director is the guy who is going to decide if the game is made, or not. I was in greenlight meetings where my game was well received by everyone, except the marketing director. The others wanted to do it, but the guy didn’t want to do it. That guy hasn’t played a game in his life, yet he’s the one who gets to decide.
[Laughs] Okay I’m making a caricature of it, but this is pretty much what it’s like. Not always, not everywhere – but it’s often the case. There’s been such amount of bad games, so much money wasted if you think about it. Think of all the licensed games – movie licenses – thank god there were a few good ones, but most of them are total crap. Why did they even get made? Because there was an audience for it, and the audience was apparently larger than the hardcore gamers.
The damage that has been done to video games development as an art is enormous. It set back the evolution, the artwork, really by decades.
Thankfully, digital distributors – who are of course in it for the money – shortened the gap, and developers can now really figure out who their players are [without publishers].
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