This is a great article on techcrunch on why the gaming industry needs to wake up and try new things and not keep on going for IP that has already been done before again and again. Sometimes gamers actually want new and fresh games not the next FPS.
It's not "sometimes" - it's some gamers most of the time. Look anything from Mario to Madden. The majority like the status quo, and the likes of Braid and Minecraft still aren't making EA money. Additionally, the creative thinking required to make these games don't scale to the masses of average knowledge workers employed by the big companies.
Read on. As tl correctly points out, EA doesn't employ 1,000 Minecraft developers. Their staff consists of maybe 3-5 Notch-like people, quite a few idiots, and 900 thoroughly average developers.
This specific group of people maximizes profits by producing big AAA titles which require some genius but mainly a lot of solid work. If they started churning out 1000 pseudo-Minecrafts every year, 99% would crash and burn. The rest would make good profit -- not as much as one Call of Duty, though. For EA- or Blizzard-like entities, the Minecraft-model makes a lot less sense than producing predictable juggernauts like Starcraft III and Halo 43.
Call of Duty: Black Ops credits 60 artists. It's very clear, watching Minecraft, that they have hired zero artists.
Making a commercial game is not merely about hiring 900 average developers. Frankly it's becoming clear to me that many people posting here have never been involved in a large creative project, even something as common as stage crew in your high school musical.
I don’t get the point you are making. Could you elaborate?
I don’t really see the connection to Minecraft. It managed to be commercially successful and critically acclaimed without any artists, isn’t that just the point? It’s nice that economies of scale allow us to throw 60 artists at a game and that’s something independent games can probably never deliver but that doesn’t automatically make games by big studios better than those that cannot afford 60 artists.
I don’t really see the connection to Minecraft. It managed to be commercially successful and critically acclaimed without any artists, isn’t that just the point?
The main difference between Notch and EA is not that EA has 900 "thoroughly average" developers, that's the point. If EA has 900 developers it's probably because they have dozens of projects going on at the same time. The difference is that EA's approach to game development typically requires a diverse array of specialized talent, which incurs administrative and organizational overhead, which is costly and slows everyone down at least a little. But, the goal is a game that could not be made by just one person. The number of "notch-like" developers they may have would just be one factor in the success of the game.
EA is old, enormous, and there is almost certainly full of bureaucratic inefficiency and mismanagement that a single programmer won't have, but "900 thoroughly average developers" aren't representative of those resources.
Are you sure your sickness isn't being caused by an unnaturally small or high Field of View (FOV)? This is a common cause of motion sickness-like symptoms in gamers. Usually adjusting to a FOV of 90-100 degrees fixes this (depending on your screen's aspect ratio).
