If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Mark Cerny

The respected games designer discusses spiralling budgets, the evolution of handheld and iteration of social games

GamesIndustry.biz Isn't there an opportunity to make sequels less expensive because there're opportunities to re-use assets, a lot of the ground work is done...?
Mark Cerny

Bad sequels should be cheaper. Good sequels require trying something new. You have the foundation, it's the springboard for something that people have never seen before. Uncharted 2 was game of the year because it added the multiplayer. It felt very fresh. If it had been the same single-player experience again it may have not seen it's Metacritic go up, it would have gone down. In my opinion it wouldn't have been game of the year.

If you look at the game it is more finely created because they understood the ruleset better. The set pieces are a lot bigger - that train scene is incredible. But also you need to do something very fresh if you want to sell a sequel and that's where the unpredictability comes in. It's not trivial to reduce you budget by any means when making a sequel.

GamesIndustry.biz You're saying that technology has stalled in terms of consoles - how long do you think that's going to last for, how much breathing space do teams have to learn their craft further?
Mark Cerny

Well, I don't think technology has stopped, it's progressing. But it's not disruptive technology, that's my point. So PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 came out in the era of the DX9 PC. DX11, which is the standard that came out a little over a year ago on the PC side, that introduces tessellation, so you can do smooth, rounded characters and they'll stay rounded as they get closer - that's not a fundamentally disruptive technology.

We don't need to throw out all of our tool chain and rebuild it. But we did have to throw out that tool chain in the transition from the PlayStation 2 era to the PlayStation 3 because we went from vertex-based graphics to pixel-based graphics and shaders. And that transition was very, very difficult to get though.

GamesIndustry.biz When you see technology like home 3D, the new wave of motion control, cloud services - do you think these are significant changes to the console business and console cycle?
Mark Cerny

I'm not a business man. Cloud services like OnLive and Gaikai are pure technology and pure business plays and I don't think too much about them. I'm sure I ought to.

GamesIndustry.biz But they're new distribution methods that could allow you to reach new audiences, isn't that what you want to do as a game creator?
Mark Cerny

They reduce friction, certainly. You can be up in your game quickly. There's not a whole lot of friction in my world either. You go to Best Buy and you get Killzone 3. That seems to work rather well.

In terms of Move and Kinect and all those things, it's been an exciting year, it really has. I am so proud to be in the same room as Alex from Harmonix last night [at the AIAS Awards]. To have Dance Central ready for launch - how did they do that? I was in awe.

GamesIndustry.biz You say console has stalled - PS4 isn't coming out next year - it seems like the growth in hardware is in mobile and tablets. Are they more important hardware shifts than what is happening now with consoles?
Mark Cerny

Well, the base hardware for consoles hasn't changed for a couple of years now, that's certainly true. iPhone and iPad are very interesting, there's an incredible variety to the games on those. But there's less depth as part of the overall economics. It's a very crowded marketplace too, it's somewhat scary.

I used to work in the arcade business where you would make your game up until the point it was indistinguishable at the start of the game to the game which was completed. You'd put it in an arcade and you'd see how many quarters it earned. You needed to make about 80 per cent of the game in order to do a playtest.

At that point at Atari we cancelled two out of three games. We're talking ten month projects, so eight months of work is gone, plus the run where you would do design and talk to hardware engineers about that you wanted to do. So you were throwing out the best part of a year on average, even the great game creators like Ed Log, who did Asteroids.

Related topics
Author
Matt Martin avatar

Matt Martin

Contributor

Matt Martin joined GamesIndustry in 2006 and was made editor of the site in 2008. With over ten years experience in journalism, he has written for multiple trade, consumer, contract and business-to-business publications in the games, retail and technology sectors.

Comments