Quake artist Paul Steed on piracy, PSP, and why mobile and PC are the future |
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Paul Steed, former artist for id Software's first in the Quake franchise, is now Chief Creative Officer at Exigent, an Indian game outsourcing firm. No longer drawing gorgeous pixels for your VGA screen, Steed is now educating Indians and encouraging them to make games for the western market.We know you're probably asking, "What in the world is he doing there?" In an interview with "The Art of Gaming" haven Gamasutra, he revealed his revelation of the business of outsourcing and how he got interested in it.
After leaving Atari last September, he moved on to Exigent, and hoped to tap into the productivity potential in the Asians' love for games.
But more importantly, he sees that the future of the game industry rests on the mobile game and the PC. He said that there are more computers and cellphones in the world than consoles and "[that will] never change." In fact, he believes once his company goes from outsourcing only to part developer studio "Exigent Interactive," they will be only focused on games for the PC. He defended his position, saying, ""ThatÂ’s whatÂ’s most accessible for audiences."
Steed also spoke about Sony and the PSP. And guess what, PSP folks: he says that "Sony just lost focus" on the PSP. In the defense of his opinion, he added, "They tried to do too much with it. And God, the price. You look at the PSP and youÂ’re like, 'Hey, do you even realize your portable costs as much as NintendoÂ’s next-gen home system?'"
Piracy is commonly frowned upon by most members of the game industry - but not by Paul Steed. We'll let him explain his two cents worth on the (overrated?) issue of piracy:
My take on piracy is kind of weird. I know I canÂ’t stop it, so I donÂ’t try to stop it. I just try to create a whole fanbase. If you can buy it, buy it. I was in China and I saw a copy of my book ... my first book, translated in Chinese and it had my name on it, and I was like, 'Well, at least they put my name on it!' I donÂ’t think people mean to steal when they pirate your stuff. I just donÂ’t think they realize that it only increases the price.
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Comments [refresh]
anyone who thinks that mobile is the way of the future should be kicked in the jaw
I can see mobile computer, ect becoming very powerful put never as powerful as a desktop computer NEVER.
Just like 20 or so years ago there was no way there would ever be a 1 gig hard drive
how the heck would piracy increase the price? if you pirate it, it's free. I guess I'm one of the people that doesn't understand that too. maybe he's talking about the price for people that legally buy it. but that doesn't make sense to me either because music pirating has lowered the price of cds. and why would piraters care if it makes the legal mercandise more expensive they were already going to pirate it anyways.
man o man you really are a moron. pirate a game or whatever the sales drops. next time they release something it costs more. and so on. simple as that
they spend less developing it and produce less of them. and console games have certain caps on how much developers can charge. charging more when your selling less goes against supply and demand. does it not? according to supply and demand if the demand is low but the supply's high the price lowers. if they raise the price because less is being sold than even less would be sold. i gave what happened to cd priceses as an example. but my main point is why would people understand that getting something for free, that they will always get for free, make things pricer for them except for lawsuits. maybe he was more talking about books and other stuff you can't download for free. I can see if the price of the authentic book goes up that a pirate will charge more for the knock off.
It is a shame you can't steal an education. It's the only way you'll learn something useful.
this guy sure is a dumb bastard...
"Steed also spoke about Sony and the PSP. And guess what, PSP folks: he says that "Sony just lost focus" on the PSP. In the defense of his opinion, he added, "They tried to do too much with it. And God, the price. You look at the PSP and you’re like, 'Hey, do you even realize your portable costs as much as Nintendo’s next-gen home system?'""
Does this dumb bastard know how much gameboys and game gears cost back in the day?!?!? And they didnt give you anything near the psp's performance. Dumb S.O.B.
How is PC gaming so much more accessible than console gaming? So what if everyone owns a pc! You have to upgrade every half a year just to play a new game. I cannot see this changing as long as different manufacturers are making pcs to meet different standards and needs. The console gaming market is far more accessible.
I definetly agree with you there. Sure almost everyone has a desktop computer at home, but many of them are old computers, and some of them not even that old. Still if your computer is only 1 year old or so you can't play the new games that come up on your PC. However if you buy a console such as a handheld, you will be able to play the games that come for it without upgrading anything but the software and usually not even that, the software upgrade just comes for the PSP.. And a bit too often. ;)
For being smart enough to know it's the truth?
We all know that the smaller an electronic is the more accesible and portable it is and as an example you can use the laptops or cellphones. Many of you are contrdicting him but he says the truth, especially when he said that Sony lost focus on the psp (the psp has less games and less support now with 2-3 years after being released than the gameboy advanced or ds had in its 3rd month), the psp is officially a failure to the winning standards of Sony (very bad investment, winnings are practically a small percentage) and some of the reasons why it never had a good start is because of the price and brand, the parents went to buy their kids a GAMEBOY cause that's the name they give all portables and on top of that you smack a 250 dollar price compared to a 150 dollar GAMEBOY, in the end the psp, even having it's price lowered, can't compete cause it din't have a real start, most who bought the Gamboy aren't gonna cough up more money for a PSP. On top of that, games are mainly focused on kids because adults have no time to play videogames unless they have some tim in their hands (and most adults learn about videogames from their kids and if they have kids they're married and they work meaning they have responsabilitie s, now if you're american you should know the average foreign countries have more responsibilitie s and work to carry out than your country so in the end games are focused more on kids). The psp has very few games for kids if by luck the other barriers were passed so this blocks many sales. At the end the PSP may be better than the Gameboy but the PSP didn't have all the social advantages the DS had.
Now to JAFT, pirating regularly increase the price of the original product whether it's software or physical merchandise. The special case of music CD's is that there's a point in sale standards that you just can't increase the price anymore cause noone would buy so the few customers you had would be lost and since the music bussiness is going bankrupt they must keep people buying their CD's, and the factor that helps is that the CD is the music storage format that would be kept being used for music storage in a physical storage format so production lines don't have to be renewed or modernnized too often so they can keep the prices that way. But if you see now no new music companies are being founded and the few record companies are now sticking to music software sells through Napster, I tunes, ect. and organizing concerts.
To I_AM, in the future (10,20,50,100, some unknown year span) computers won't need being upgrade because they would be so powerful it wouldn't need more upgrades for no noticeable change, then it will happen some years later to laptops and later to mobiles, but of course the mobile would be more expensive but the mobile will catch up in the future and would be as powerful as it's needed.
To not the retard with the gay haircut, the game gaer was more powerfull than the gameboy yet it sold less than the Gamboy because it had a higher price and most importantly it didn't have the name of Gameboy which means a lot of publicity.
Go back and check the original source. Paul Steed DOES NOT say that line about the PSP - the interviewer says it.
"Paul: What happened to the PSP? In your professional opinion, why is the PSP not a hit?
Ishaan: In my opinion, what happened was that Sony just lost focus. They tried to do too much with it."
Can we please apply the rudiments of journalism here and check the sources?