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Greg Costikyan: [...] Games grow through innovation. Through the creation of new game styles that spawn whole new markets, and whole new audiences for games. Innovation extends the pallet of what is possible in games. The story of the last 20 years is not as you have been sold--the story of increasing processing power and increasing graphics--it's been the story of a startling burst of innovation and creativity. That's what created this industry, and that's why we love games. But it's over now!

[laughter]

As recently as 1982, the average budget for a PC game was $200,000. 1992. Today a typical budget for an A level title is $5 million, and with the next generation it'll be more like $20 million. As the costs ratchet up, publishers become increasingly conservative, and decreasingly willing to take a chance on anything other than the tired and true. So we get Driver 69, Grand Theft Auto: San Infinitum. And license drivel after license drivel. Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto. How many of you were at the Microsoft keynote? OK.

Jason Della Rocca: The room wasn't big enough!

Greg Costikyan: I don't know about you, but it made my flesh crawl!

[laughter--applause]

The HD era, bigger, louder, more photo-realistic 3-D, teams of hundreds, and big bucks to be made. Not by you and me of course. Not by the developers--developers never see a dime beyond dev funding--by the publishers (and Microsoft, presumably]. Those budgets--those teams ensure the death of innovation. This is not why I got into games. Was your allegiance bought at the price of a television?

[laughter--applause]

Then there's the Nintendo keynote. Nintendo is the company that brought us to this precipice. Nintendo established the business model under which we are crucified today. Nintendo said, 'pay us a royalty not on sales, but on manufacturing.' Nintendo said, 'we will decide what games we'll allow you to publish,' ostensibly to prevent another crash like that of 1983, but in reality to quash any innovation but their own. Iwata-san said he has the heart of the gamer, and my question is what poor bastard's chest did he carve it from?

[laughter--applause]

And how often do they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?

[laughter]

My friends, we are f***ed! [laughter] We are well and truly f***ed. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised and raised, until no one can any longer afford to risk anything at all. The sheer labor involved in creating a game has increased exponentially until our only choice is permanent crunch and mandatory 80-hour weeks, at least until all our jobs are outsourced to Asia.

With these stakes, risks must be avoided, but without risk there is no innovation, and innovation is what drives growth in games. But it's OK, because the HD era is here, and big bucks are to be made. It doesn't matter if all we do from here to eternity is more photo-realistic drivers and shooters with more polygons on the screen. It doesn't matter if our idea of innovation becomes blowing into a microphone. [laughter] Because after all, look on the bright side. Bing Gordon's wallet will be thicker. I say, Enough! The time has come for revolution.

Unknown Speaker: Amen!

Greg Costikyan: It may seem to you that what I've described are inevitable forces of history, and there is some truth to that, but not fundamentally. We have free will, and our current plight is the consequences of individual choices. EA could have chosen to concentrate on innovation, rather than continually raising the graphic bar to squeeze out less capitalized competitors. But they did not. Sony could have chosen to create a Miramax of the game industry, a subsidiary funding dozens of sub-million titles in the process of planned innovation to establish new world beating game styles. But they declined. Nintendo could make dev kits cheaply available to small firms with the promise of finding and publication of the most interesting titles, but they prefer to rely on the creativity of one aging designer.

You have choices too. You can take the blue pill or the red pill. You can go work for the machine, work mandatory 80-hour weeks in a massive sweatshop, publisher-owned studio with hundreds of other drones, laboring to build the new compelling photo-realistic driving game with the same basic gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can defy the machine

You can choose to starve for your art, to beg borrow or steal the money you need to create a game that will set the world on fire. You can choose to riot in the streets of Redwood City, to down your tools and demand an honest wage for an honest 8-hour day. You can choose to find an alternative distribution channel, a different business model, a path out of the trap the game industry has set itself. You can choose to remember why you love games, and to ensure that a generation from now, there are still games worthy of love. And you can start today.

[applause, standing ovation]

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Chris Hecker: [...] Here is the terrifying realization about the next generation of consoles. I'm about to break about a zillion NDAs, but I didn't sign any NDAs so that's totally cool!

I'm actually a pretty good programmer and mathematician but my real talent is getting people to tell me stuff that they're not supposed to tell me. There we go. Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Why is this? Here's our technical slide. Modern CPUs, like the Intel Pentium 4, blah, blah, blah, Pentium [indiscernible] or laptop, whatever is in your desktop, and all the modern power PCs, use what's called 'out of order' execution. Basically, out of order execution is there to make really crappy code run fast.

So, they basically--when out of order execution came out on the P6, the Pentium 6 [indiscernible] the Pentium 5, the original Pentium and the one after that. The Pentium Pro I think they called it, it basically annoyed a whole bunch of low level ASCII coders, because now all of a sudden, like, the crappiest-ass C code, that like, Joe junior programmer could write, is running as fast as their Assembly, and there's nothing they can do about it. Because the CPU behind their back, is like, reordering that guy's crappy ass C code, to run really well and utilize all the parts of the processor. While this annoyed a whole bunch of people in Scandinavia, it actually…

[laughter]

And this is a great change in the bad old days of 'in order execution,' where you had to be an Assembly language wizard to actually get your CPU to do anything. You were always stalling in the cache, you needed to like--it was crazy. It was a lot of fun to write that code. It wasn't exactly the most productive way of doing experimental programming.

The Xenon and the cell are both in order chips. What does this mean? The reason they did this, is it's cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of core--you know--one out of order core is about the size of three to four in order cores. So, they can make a lot of in order cores and drop them on a chip, and keep the power down, and sell it for cheap--what does this do to our code?

Well, it makes--it's totally fine for grinding like, symmetric algorithms out of floating point numbers, but for lots of 'if' statements in directions, it totally sucks. How do we quantify 'totally sucks?' "Rumors" which happen to be from people who are actually working on these chips, is that straight line gameplay code runs at 1/3 to 1/10 the speed at the same clock rate on an in order core as an out of order core.

This means that your new fancy 2 plus gigahertz CPU, and its Xenon, is going to run code as slow or slower than the 733 megahertz CPU in the Xbox 1. The PS3 will be even worse.

This sucks!

[laughter]

There's absolutely nothing you can do about this. Well, you can actually hope that Nintendo uses an out of order core, because they're claiming that they're going to try and make it easy to develop for--except for Nintendo basically totally flailed this generation. So maybe they'll do something next generation. Who knows? You can think about having batchable design simulation-y systems, but like, I'm a huge proponent of simulation in gameplay, but even simulation in gameplay takes kind of messy systems under the hood. And this makes your gameplay harder to write.

You want to just write the gameplay. You don't want to have to like, spend 6 years of a super hardcore engine programmer's time to figure out how to make your gameplay run super scalars. You could do PC games. They are still out of order cores, but a lot of people don't think that's an option nowadays. Luckily due to the power of Will Wright our games and PC games--ha ha ha. Or you could rant, which is what I just do. Thank you very much!

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