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Electronic Art’s Game Changer
During this week’s conference call for investors in Electronic Arts (EA) — one of the world’s largest publishers of video games, from phone apps to console blockbusters — the company announced that its development subsidiaries are all uniting in use of its propietary Frostbite game engine. This could be another big step in the evolution of the $90B game industry.
What is a game engine? In short, it’s a software foundation and toolset for building video games. From graphics and audio rendering, to physics simulations and artificial intelligence, the “engine” provides basic code (increasingly, advanced code as well) that streamlines the creative work of game design. It automates complex processes and ensures that they cooperate with each other without exceeding delegated resources.
The newest version of the Frostbite engine will probably be revealed soon. Here is a demonstration of the old version.
Only a decade ago, it was normal for each game development studio to build its own game engine; perhaps upgrading it between projects. This meant that the vast majority of the developer’s time and money was spent laying the technical foundation for the ideas that defined the creative entertainment experience customers enjoy.
Such a development model left little time for gameplay iteration: testing ideas, chucking bad ones, testing alternatives, editing and testing them again, and so on. It also left less time for debugging the software, polishing, balancing relative systems with external feedback … and finally marketing the product based on its near-finished state, rather than on a plan not yet realized.
In more recent years, it became common to license ready-made and fully up-to-date engines from third parties. This cut down on pre-production time, but also cut into profits and required adjustments of the other company’s engine to one’s own particular needs.
Now, EA has almost completed a long-term plan to develop a single, powerful, and versatile engine for all its studios with shared investment costs and in-house support.
As CEO Andrew Wilson and EA Studios Executive VP Patrick Söderlund explained in this report to investors, this enables their developers “to deliver high quality games that are highly differentiated on a feature set level, but in a way that is both cost-efficient and quick.” Whether producing a new intellectual property or porting a game from one hardware platform to another (ex: tablet PC to Playstation 4), developers can halve the time, money, and manpower required for technical support and devote those resources to bigger, better games.
Meanwhile, EA has created a designated team focused exclusively on developing and improving the Frostbite engine: i.e., pushing the limits of visual and physical simulations, as well as intelligence simulations via experiments in neural networks and machine learning. They also minimize how much direct coding is required by game designers by honing a versatile interface.
But this post isn’t about just EA. It’s about the massive game industry as a whole. Other major publishers, like Ubisoft and Activision, are probably pursuing similar strategies. This is the beginning of a new era for the industry.
The shift to improved automation and streamlined development hasn’t been sudden. Avid gamers might have noticed that virtual worlds have been getting bigger, more detailed, and more dynamic. And while publishers are consolidating, independent developers abound. Small independent studios are creating entire universes by procedural generation.
Long story short — too late, I know — expect a renaissance of games in the next decade. Programming will always be vital to interactive entertainment, but the artistic elements are now coming to the fore.
Published in Culture, Entertainment
In my case I have been playing computer/console games for over 30 years, starting in my teens. My wife enjoys gardening, I enjoy gaming. I might spend $100 a year on a couple of good games and upgrade my computer every 4-5 years but that is the extent of my investment. I think it is like anything, my wife could spend $100s on fertilizer, soil, plants, etc. just like I could on games but everything in moderation…
I disagree – the advent of DLC revenue streams has shifted the focus of games towards those elements of the game. The game I love to play on my console is FIFA soccer. That game used to have a wonderful online community where people could play each other with any team they wished. Then they invented FIFA Ultimate Team with the ability to build your own squad from scratch. But wait – you can’t just pick players you want you have to buy packs that may contain a player or it may it. And you have to train those players with other things you get from packs. Buy more packs. Always buy more. Ugh.
The average gamer nowadays is an adult in his 30s with a family and a steady job. Many women play as well. Most gamers only play games about as many hours as older generations spend watching TV. The common perception that the medium is child-like probably has much to do with the word “play” and is one reason many developers prefer “interactive entertainment” to identify their industry. Raph Koster wrote an interesting book exploring play as an instinctive form of learning, even in adulthood.
Like films and TV shows, games can be merely fun or they can be compelling in a more serious, dramatic, and thought-provoking sense. The push for graphical photo-realism by many developers is driven largely by a desire to make players emotionally connect with game characters. Players can practice moral choices in simulated environments.
As for monetization strategies, yes, expansion content and add-ons are common. Imagine being able to buy optional episodes for your favorite TV shows to explore character backstories. Or imagine being able to customize the characters to fit your own preferences.
In EA’s conference call, it was mentioned that many gamers are buying fewer games but spending more time in them. It’s like if you only had time for one TV show, but you’re so facinated by that series that you watch all the behind-the-scenes features.
There were numerous EA games using Unreal as of just a couple of years ago.
Yes, DLC and add-on models can be implemented well or poorly. Some options for additional purchases are almost invisible to players who prefer the core experience. Other games make micro-transactions unavoidable.
It’s mainly a problem for competitive games. I haven’t played FIFA, but I expect the revenue model is more frustrating for people who enjoy online competition against other players than for people content to play alone against AI teams.
On the other hand, you have games like Arkham Asylum that offer fun add-ons but a rich experience without need of DLC. The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is an extreme example. The game is gigantic with enough content to entertain a player for years, yet many players were willing to buy expansions.
I suspect, if there are cost savings, they aren’t in the engine lab. Rather, the idea -if I read the press right -is that by having all the developers use the same engine, they will get good at it. The issue is that having your design teams spend all their time perfecting the engine means that they don’t spend much time on the game.
In that sense, it’s an internal version of the “long console cycle.” When the Xbox 360 spent, what, nearly a decade, in stores, the developers working on the hardware got really good at getting the best performance out of it. You can see massive gameplay and graphical improvements between Halo 3 and Halo 4 -released on the same hardware, 5 years apart.
Same here, constantly working with the same engine will allow them to make better games because they won’t be spending a lot of time getting up to speed on four different engines.
In that sense, the engine chosen doesn’t matter -just that there’s only one. And EA already has Frostbite.
I also hope this will lead to the artistry of games taking more of a lead. I play games the same way I read a book or watch a movie. If the developers aren’t spending huge amounts of time on getting the game to run, maybe they’ll write better stories *cough* Mass Effect 3 *cough*.
Kind of. In practice this was already the case. If you used Unreal (as say Bioware did for ages) you already had all of that figured out. Switching to Frostbite (DA:Inquision(*shudder*)) means relearning already learned lessons on your previous platform.
Modern engines also update to the newest platforms regularly. Unreal and Unity are two I have experience with, and support for new consoles comes fairly effortlessly.
I don’t see much of a difference with this change for EA. Developers have long moved past spending significant amounts of their time on engines. Yes, they write lots of custom code for any given game, but you might be shocked how much of basic game logic is handled by modern engines out of the box.
By the way, folks, I am not an experienced programmer (yet). So take this as the perspective of a gamer who follows industry news.
To reiterate, I think the significance of this strategy by EA depends on its adoption by other major publishers. My main consideration is that the industry is coalescing around a handful of fundamental technologies and strategies, perhaps signifying another step in its general evolution. It’s like Hollywood’s transition from one era into another.
At the very least, it is significant that game engines have advanced to a point that artists can now litter virtual environments with details and modeling techniques are being combined with real-world photography. Photogrammetry and motion-capture of real actors are common in development of blockbuster games now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCp8CdAB8fc
Well that brings up the question of whether EA’s announcement applies to just their internally-developed titles or if they are somehow requiring all future third-party developers will be required to use Frostbite. I can’t imagine that is what they mean.
Bioware is one of their owned studios which once was separate. Most of their other studios are EA-branded. It looks like they are forcing Frostbite onto those that they own. Probably not on third-party developers. Aaron, do you know if that is the case? If they are forcing all partners to use Frostbite, then that is “game changing” and not necessarily in a good way.
There may be a couple of third-party developers who publish through EA but are not owned by them, but the vast majority of EA titles are owned by EA at this point.
As an enthusiast gamer I’m rather pleased when any publisher decides to work with an engine that is reputed to work with Multi-GPU configurations.
I also have a very frail hypothesis that it makes things easier to make the switch to DX12 if there is enough interest in it.