Sunday, September 30, 2012

TGC : Be careful what you wish for...

... you may receive it.

Taken here.


I've been a dedicated follower of indie game maker thatgamecompany since their beginnings, and they've never disappointed with their releases. But things are about to really ramp up for them.

The Santa Monica-based company has just ended their game deal with PlayStation, and now they've raised $5.5 million from Benchmark Capital. Benchmark are the guys that funded Riot Games, makers of League of Legends, and more recently, Meteor Entertainment, the folks behind the awesome upcoming free-to-play title Hawken.

What to do with all that freedom and cash? Why not make more games for more platforms, reaching out to wider audiences? Founder Jenova Chen tells GamesBeat that he wants to "spread out" now, and that the funding will enable TGC to develop and release games independently.

"We got so many emails from fans saying they wished they could play our games on other platforms," Chen said. "We make games for human beings, not just gamers. Young, old, men, women, and from all countries. We want to change the concept of what a game is and show society what a game can be."

Chen confirmed that a new title is in the works, and it will definitely be a cross-platform game.

Oh boy no, you are not going to change what a game is. You certainly can't, for this is so above your abilities.
Your enterprise will fail.
Not only because anyone sane enough working in the video game industry will soon enough call you on the preposterous and pedantic bullshit you produce, and will properly militate so the debilitating heretics you are will never get the chance to confuse people about real gaming.

But also because you simply don't get what a game is.

Your "games" have constantly moved towards a movie-like experience (and a shallow one, at that), almost entirely passive, devoid of any challenging experience, so much that we honestly find more gaming in one second of Tetris than in the entirety of all your pretentious and pseudo games combined.

Try to get that once and for all: A game provides challenges, encourages players to try several strategies and makes sure said options are even, so as to be relevant and making sure that the game's rules are interesting, engaging and above all, not broken.

You and your female partner have been deceptively shy of coding any real game mechanics into your products (let's not call those games, they don't deserve that name).
You're just one notch above the shitfests of DragonVale and iOS abominations ever farted to life by Pocket Gems (mind you, the iOS platform is quite the perfect place for such shitty software).

Your heresies barely contain any meaningful choice to be made at all. You shun difficulty. You're limp and spineless and you want to disguise that pathetic weakness of yours as art. Your abortions solely sell on how nice and charming they look. But the truth is that they're all empty, and your entire rhetoric is pure pretense.
Your animated and barely interactive applications are not games.
They're fake.
You are fake.