I know I’m not the first person to notice this but I’ve been saying for a few years now that the video game industry is in the same sort of situation that the movie industry must have been in at some point. From what (little) I know, sometime around the 1920’s the tools of making movies finally started to stabilize. I see a similar thing happening to the games industry. The process of making games is starting to be fairly well understood, including the tools, processes and even the social dynamics of the people involved. At some point the filmmakers stopped building their own cameras, developing their own film, and found a system that generally worked for making and selling movies in a reliable manner. Something much like that is bound to happen to videogames.
It seems reasonable to predict that at some point, commercially available game making toolsets will be good enough to create a commercially competitive game with a minimum of technical skill on the part of the game maker. Sort of like not having to know about chemistry to get film developed or the physics of light to use a camera effectively, game makers of the near future will not be burdened with the task of creating technology just to make a game. Game production systems will continue to be improved by the technology folks, but in the end the tools for making games will be a completely different part of the industry than those who actually make games. The people putting the stories & character ideas out there will not be interested in making production systems & infrastructure; they will just buy tools that provide the core features of making a game and hire as (or if) needed for some special effect the tools don’t directly support - yet. They will be buying (renting?) the videogame version of lights & cameras and hiring artists & writers to make good use of it all. They won’t be hiring people to reinvent things that they can just buy, that’s for sure.
This might seem like a scary thought to those of us in the field, because our jobs generally depend on making the systems that I’m theorizing will eventually be made less relevant if not obsolete by middleware created by companies whose sole purpose is to do one thing right, be it art production pipelines, rendering, physics, whatever. The good thing is that we will be free of the seemingly endless cycle of making core game engines, exporters, render engines, and all the training that goes along with each unique propietary tool we all have to deal with over the course of creating games today. We’ll have a situation where people can hop in and produce at much higher efficiency than they typically do today because tools will be more uniform, code will be more modular, and while it may not be perfect or exactly how I or you would have designed things, it will be good enough for the job and better than we have time to do ourselves anyways.
Now I’m certainly no movie expert but it seems to me that probably the biggest reason why one movie is more interesting than another is the script. I figure that at some point, the same will be true for games. Until then, the eye-candy and special effects are what will carry most games to mass market success and it will only be the lucky few who win customers based on actually being fun and compelling instead of merely being the latest combination of cool render effects that happens to have good marketing. I think we’re almost past the point where games as a spectacle in and of itself can be successful. Hopefully soon we’ll see games have their own version of a Citizen Kane breakthrough, but I expect it will have to wait until the industry as a whole is able to move away from “everything proprietary” mentality and make it possible to gain the efficiencies of scale that exist when many people know how to use standard tools that work together at every level of production. I don’t see it happening just yet, but I expect it will and sooner rather than later. The economics of making games practically requires that this comes to pass.
So where does this leave us, the programmers & technical sorts, in the future of making games? I think most of us will be faced with a decision. Go highly specialized and hope to be involved with the development of an engine that has a future in licensed use, or become more involved in the higher level aspects of game creation which is where the story meets the scripting. The middle ground, for better or worse, will soon be taken by the middleware engines because the economic realities of the industry will not allow us to continue to reinvent the wheels of game and render engines for much longer.