David Cage of Quantic Dream sees gaming diversity as a chicken-or-egg problem.
“What I like about cinema and literature is the great diversity,” says Quantic Dream’s David Cage. If you want superhero movies, he goes on to say, there are plenty of them out there, “but at the same time, if you are looking for dramas, comedy, tragedies, or very different types of films, you can also find them.” But when it comes to gaming, Cage adds, “action, violent, and platforming games are 90 percent of the industry,” and that’s something he hopes will change.
It’s a which-came-first problem, Cage admits; the chicken, or the egg? “Do people buy the same games because we just give them the same games?” he asks. “Or do you we make the same games because this is what people want?” Ultimately, Cage believes, it’s up to the developers to create, not gamers to tell developers what they want. Cage is a fan of Henry Ford’s principle, that “‘if I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse'”; Cage emphatically does not think developers can expect gamers to tell them what gamers want to play.
It’s his belief that there are always markets for different kinds of content, but the inflated budgets that triple-A gaming thrives on inhibits risk-taking. “So let’s make a shooter because we’re pretty sure that we’re going to sell some,” Cage says. “We know that the market wants that.” Maybe the independents will be the ones to push through and spark a gaming revolution, much as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas did for film back in the 1970s.
“All these things happened through 100 years in cinema,” Cage says. “I’m impassioned to see them happening in the game space and hopefully it will take less than 100 years.”
Source: Game Informer
Published: Feb 26, 2013 03:35 pm