In Gamasutra's latest feature interview, game legend Yu Suzuki describes the landscape for game developers, saying that a "new generation" of famous designers will emerge to face the market's challenges.
When asked if new famous-name game creators, such as himself, will emerge from the medium as games become more ubiquitous and spread out, he replied, "I think there will be a new generation, sure."
"Lately, the big makers pretty much make nothing but big franchise titles, right? Small companies can't compete with that sort of thing; projects with 4 billion [$50 million] or 6 billion yen [$75 million] budgets competing against those with 300 million yen [$3.72 million] budgets," he said.
"However, if you make nothing but these big titles, the game industry's going to falter because of it. So I think it's great that small developers can get into these new platforms and compete on there on a more level basis. It takes up less of their money, and if they get a hit, I think that'll lead to the directors getting attention from the media."
When it was pointed out that the creative names behind such massive casual hits such as Angry Birds are unknown, Suzuki compared it to the 1980s in Japan -- when most companies hid the names of their top creators to stop headhunting. "The industry kind of got off on a bad start from the beginning that way, didn't it? I suppose it's just a matter of people going out and publicizing themselves," he said.
"With the music industry, you see the composers and singers show up in the media constantly, after all. Everyone knows the directors and the screenwriters for films, too. Video games have become just as big as both of those industries, and yet there's still this drive to hide things from each other. It makes you realize how shallow the culture of gaming still is. They're all creative fields, right?"
The full interview, in which Suzuki talks about his past hits and his future plans, is live now on Gamasutra.
"Video games have become just as big as both of those industries, and yet there's still this drive to hide things from each other. It makes you realize how shallow the culture of gaming still is. They're all creative fields, right?"
Truer words were never spoken.