Icculus updated his .plan file over the weekend, ranting about game development, distribution and copyright in response to a blog entry covering the Game Developer’s Conference.

The blog entry on Wonderland is a transcript of a panel with Warren Spector (creator of Thief, System Shock, and Deus Ex), Brenda Laurel, Jason Della Rocca, and Chris Hecker. The panel was IGDA Session: Burning Down The House – Game Developers Rant. (Game Developers get to rant? Uh oh).

Warren Spector put it best (excerpt):

Warren Spector:

First of all I don’t hate you, Will Wright. I just had one of those “I’m not worthy” moments in the elevator. YOU ARE the 800lb gorilla.

[argh what did Will SAY already? alice]

OK. I don’t feel very ranty actually. I tried to bail on this panel. But I have to say something so I want to say how this business is hopelessly broken. Haha. We’re doing pretty much everything wrong. This is at the root of much of what you’re gonna hear today. Games cost too much. They take too long to make. The whole concept of word of mouth, remember that? Holy cow it was nice.

Wal-Mart drives development decisions now. When publishers minimise risk by kow-towing to the retailers, you have a serious problem. When every game has to either be a blockbuster or a student film, we got a real problem. For my end of the game business all of our efforts are going into reaching a mainstream audience who may well even not be interested in what we do! My first game cost me 273,000 dollars. My next one is BLAH millions. How many of you work on games that make money? 4 out of 5 games lose money, according to one pundit who may be lying, admittedly. Can we do any worse if we just trusted the creative folks entirely instead of the publishers?

My point is coming. We’re the only medium that lacks an alternate distribution system. All we have is boxed games sold at retail. This is changing a little. But think about our competition for your entertainment dollar. First run, broadcast, reruns, DVDs.. you name it. hardback, paperback, e-book. Theatre release, pay-per-view, video, DVD. We put our thing on the shelf at Wal-Mart, it sells or it doesn’t, and OMG you just blew 10m dollars. The publishers not respecting developers, this is not the problem. We have a flawed distribution model. There are very few ways of getting a game done these days. Developers.. why should we get a huge return? We’re taking some of the risk, but the $10m, the marketing space, the retail space all belong to someone else. We have winner-take-all business that carries a lot of risk. So .. we have to find alternative sources of funding. Chris Crawford used to rant about how we need patrons.. I don’t care if it’s wealthy patrons, I don’t care what it IS, but it’s critical that we divorce funding from distribution.

We need alternative forms of distribution too. I’m not saying publishers suck, although I do believe that in many cases. [laughter] If the plane went down who would care about the marketing guys? We need another way of getting games out there and in players’ hands. If any of you bought half life 2 at Wal-Mart, please just leave the room. Has everyone bought Bioware’s online modules? JUST BUY THEM, OK, even if you don’t have the original games! We HAVE to get games into gamers’ hands. So I’m not saying publishers are evil.. if we do all this and go direct to our consumers with games funded some OTHER way than EA or whoever.. we’ll keep more of the money.. we have to find someone to pay for it and find a buyer after. We need Sundances. Independent Film Channel. Equivalents of those. Just try to find some way of funding your stuff that doesn’t come from a publisher.

The movies have this now: the studios don’t fund everything that happens out there. I’m not holding the movie business up as a model of great business practice, but you can get $ from a wide variety of sources. You know what, when the studio system was in place, that didn’t exist. Every creative person was owned by a studio. Cinemas were owned by studios. Content was limited. As soon as the supreme court stepped in and said no you can’t have development, distribution and retailing, everything changed. Now we have Bruckheimer, and Sideways. Sundance. Indies. At the very worst we need publishers to ask more than that one question: is this going to generate max profit. For most games this is NOT THE RIGHT QUESTION. Volkswagen owns rolls Royce, they understand the need for – oh the music’s running, I’m outta here. Thank you.

Brenda Laurel, on the panel (excerpt):

We model male ethos in the games we design: soldier, super athlete, criminal. Anyone who was born with internet and computers are prosocial. Skaters are mainstream. We have two models of alpha maleness: skaters and ballers [I have no idea what this is referring to – A]. … we need heroes, but what kind of heroes are we making? Where’s Malcolm X, or Chavez? There hasn’t been a game about geopolitics that was worth a shit since Hidden Agenda! We should be giving people rehearsals for citizenship and change. I have to tell you, Microsoft is the walking dead. DRM is a wet dream. It’s not gonna work! Cat’s out the bag! When this happens, you have to let the cards fly in the air and fall where they may. GIVE IT UP ABOUT DRM. GIVE IT UP ABOUT OWNERSHIP. Cleave to open source! A NEW ECONOMY IS COMING. As we become further connected we will find new economies emerging. We are the wellspring of popular culture. We have a responsibility.

Icculus links to this, and takes it a step farther in his current .plan (archived here locally without permission)(excerpt):

Spector is probably closest, though: the distribution model benefits the

upper one percent at the cost of innovation, piracy, and well, the artists.

If we can look at this from the music slant, Apple’s iTunes Music Store is a

good start, but a shitty end. Eventually we’re probably going to need, uh,

for lack of a better term, a distributed Steam…online, universal,

incremental transfer of product without a centralized publisher. The problem

with Steam as it currently stands, among other complaints, is that Valve

escapes their oppressive publisher in order to become an oppressive publisher

themselves. Apple’s a little different in that they haven’t escaped the whims

of the publishers at all (which is why every few months you see a Chicken

Little article on Slashdot about iTMS raising their prices by a whole 20

cents…the poor consumers! Poor Apple! Why doesn’t anyone ever say “poor

musicians”?)

When we can all sell online without a central authority, stream the bits right

to the user any time of the day, and be the backup when their hard drive

fails (which would be a nice feature in iTMS that Steam figured out, in case

you’re listening, Apple), then we could ship when we’re ready, do things that

are awesome without 150-man teams and millions of dollars, make more money

within a meritocracy, and not whore ourselves out to Big Publishing. Not to

excuse them, but the fact that the EA Spouse blog exists says more about the

industry as a whole than it says about Electronic Arts. I mean, it’s a safe

bet to say that everyone outside of EA has an chilly familiarity with

those stories anyhow…put another way, when you see one cockroach, it’s a

safe bet there’re hundreds more behind the walls.

There are no benign dictators in publishing. The only sane thing to do is

flush them altogether.

A new era is coming, but the question is when. DRM isn’t the answer – show me one that worked yet. Open Source hasn’t worked in gaming (yet). Steam isn’t working (talk to someone who plays HL2 or CS:Source). Gaming is at a tipping point – the rise of independent creation and independent publishing combined with ubiquitous broadband and peer to peer technologies will create a new industry. Mods to current games, and publishers like Garage Games and things like Steam and Bittorrent are only the beginning as programmers throw off the shackles of Big Media.

I encourage you to read all of the articles in full.