Schelley Olhava

Her top three economic trends for 2004:

1. The substantial increase in console-game development costs, which now average between $5 and $10 million. This is having a big impact on developer/publisher business models and relationships, and possibly, with next-generation systems, will lead to game software ASPs higher than the current ceiling of $49.99.

2. A stable $19.99 ASP for casual downloadable games. I would have expected to see more downward pricing pressure, but instead, it appears that business is healthy and growing in this segment at a $19.99 ASP.

3. The very successful JAMDAT IPO (not sure what their market cap is today, but I think it's still very healthy). This brought much validity to an industry that had long struggled for recognition and to be taken seriously.

Her predictions/anticipations for the industry in 2005:

I think that at GDC 2005 (March, in San Francisco), we'll start to hear about and witness the performance of next-generation consoles. News will continue to filter throughout the year, most likely focused at other major trade-show events like E3 and Tokyo Game Show. Sony has already mentioned plans to talk about the PS3 at E3; I suspect that Microsoft will use GDC to promote the next Xbox, and Nintendo will probably start talking about the Revolution at E3.

In contrast to most industry predictions, I don't expect any new video-game console systems to be launched until 2006. Rather, I think that there's enough life left in the PS2/Xbox/GameCube justifying launch in 2006, and competitively, it doesn't make sense for Microsoft or Nintendo to try to gain a significant time advantage over Sony.

I believe that next year will be the year of handheld gaming. Gamers will be able to choose from three great systems: the Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP, the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. Moreover, for the first time in a long time, older gamers (i.e., teens and young adults, 15 to 30) will have access to handheld gaming products specifically targeted to them that are cool, interesting, and have great content (the DS and PSP).

There's also a lot going on with wireless gaming--it's a hot and unique and innovative market, all wrapped up into one. In 2004, we saw one successful IPO (JAMDAT) and a flood of VC funding going into this market. Wireless gaming is more than just making games for mobile phones--it represents a new type of development platform to make game content for a different environment as well as pulling in a new demographic of gamers that haven't traditionally been heavy PC and/or console gamers.

Schelley Olhava is an analyst for IDC, a global market intelligence and advisory firm, where she conducts gaming-industry market research, covering videogame consoles and software, online PC gaming, online console gaming, and wireless gaming.

Raph Koster

His favorite games of 2004:

Well, the two games I played most this year were Jump to Lightspeed and Everquest II. That sort of cut into my game playing a bit! If I had to pick standout titles beyond those two, I'd list:

Half-Life 2: for coming the closest yet to putting you inside an interactive cinematic experience.

Katamari Damacy: for showing that there's always new forms of gameplay to be found out there.

Feel the Magic: the touch screen on the Nintendo DS is definitely a neat thing that opens up some possibilities.

There's also a lot of games from past years that I am still playing--the Karaoke Revolution games are a hit with my daughter, so I end up playing those with her a bunch. Donkey Konga too, and I just got Taiko Drum Master, which is similar but different. As you can tell, I do a lot of "offbeat gaming."

His favorite personal highlights from game development in 2004:

The inclusion of voiceover for non-player characters in Everquest 2 set, I think, a big new benchmark for MMORPGs. It really makes a difference. I think the [Star Wars Galaxies] Jump to Lightspeed expansion also set a new high watermark--I don't think any MMO has ever done such a massive addition to gameplay ever. It added a whole new way to play the game, and it melded twitch combat into an MMORPG.

His favorite personal highlights in gaming from 2004:

Taking off from a planet in Star Wars Galaxies and being in space and engaging in a dogfight--it was eye-opening to be able to do that. The range of activities present in GTA: San Andreas. Calling my wife over to watch me play Half-Life 2. Seeing the huge number of women at the Women's Game Conference in Austin this year. The depiction of schizophrenia in Second Life. [Thanks for the plug, Raph! -WJA] Beating Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Playing Beyond Good&Evil (I know, I'm behind...).

His top anticipations for 2005:

The PSP, no doubt! We've got something cooking for that, but I can't talk about it yet.

Raph Koster is Chief Creative Officer for SOE and, in that capacity, oversees Everquest II, Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed, and Planetside Aftershock, among other titles. His book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" was published recently.

* * *

Doug Church

His favorite games from 2004:

Katamari Damacy

Chronicles of Riddick

Yetisports.org episodes 3, 5, and 6

I also really liked the web slinging in SpiderMan 2, I must say. And Burnout 3's crash mode is awesome, though the ultra-rubberband AI really puts me off the racing areas. A lot of games just came out in the last month, obviously, but I haven’t really had time to play them. The stack is perilously tall, but I'm definitely looking forward to getting to play some of them. And I just got the two new Japanese Wario Games, with the tilt sensor for Game Boy Advance and, of course, using the second screen for the DS. And Kingdom of Loathing, of course.

His top trends for 2004:

[T]he biggest issues/changes/implications for the game industry have to be team size/budget/content creation challenges, especially as we think about next-generation products. Business/risk models, and with them content creation and distribution, seem like they must begin to change soon.

His predictions and anticipations for 2005:

I'm pretty psyched overall for DS games, at least to see what crazy things people do with it. One thing I think will make 2005, with PSP and DS, is more interesting ad-hoc wireless, more community/online stuff that isn’t MMORPG, massive time-sink stuff. People finding more ways to allow brief interactions, playing around, short spontaneous fun. I'm personally looking forward to games giving more player freedom and creating less-static environments, providing real choices and worlds with more opportunities and possibilities. But that may be a few more years off, once we get to next-gen consoles and have a bit of time to learn to really take advantage of them.

Doug Church is currently at Crystal Dynamics. He was a lead developer behind the acclaimed games Ultima Underwold, System Shock, and Thief: the Dark Project, among many others.

* * *

Marc Laidlaw

His favorite games for 2004:

Thief 3: Deadly Shadows: A well-rounded conclusion to one of the most solid trilogies of games yet created. It could have used a bit more play testing, as some of the newer elements didn’t feel completely baked, but I loved every minute of it, including the wrap-up.

Pikmin 2: Pikmin 2 blew off the first game’s shackles and finally stopped penalizing players for doing all the things they naturally want to do in the Pikmin universe: explore every nook and cranny, cultivate mobs of Pikmin, soak in the ambience. This is Nintendo at its most adorably sadistic, a marvel of polish and attention to minute detail.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. Clever as hell, pure fun, minimal frustration. The English-language translations in the new generation of Nintendo titles (from Animal Crossing to Pikmin 2 to Paper Mario 2) are as entertaining as the games themselves. I actually sent fan mail to the Nintendo translation team.

The most frustrating game I tried to play this year was Boktai: Even at Noon on the summer solstice with my GBA SP held up to the zenith, I could hardly get enough solar power to play the game here in the Northwest. [Boktai employs a sunlight sensor to play, requiring you to complete some levels while being outside. -WJA] I’ve never seen a game so determined to not let me play it.

His proudest contributions to Half-Life 2, for which he was the writer:

Dialog in games tends to borrow from movies and not stand up very well on its own merits. I was hoping I could pack HL2 with memorable dialog and some good one-liners, and I’ve been happy to see the fans quoting favorite phrases.

Over the course of writing HL2, I learned a lot about creating dialog and working with actors to refine it. This is a skill I couldn’t have gotten any other way. If I’d written a movie script, I would have been a thousand miles away from the actors doing their lines. But I got to work with them directly through successive drafts, and that was incredibly valuable for me. Then I got to work with our talented animators and level designers to turn all that dialog into real-time scenes far beyond what I could imagine. It was very satisfying to see the script through from the earliest scribbled meeting notes to polished interactive scenes, and to hear terms like “headhumpers” pass into common parlance. I’m particularly proud of having worked a lot of nonessential details into the game--such as Lamarr. [Lamarr is a loveable headcrab. -WJA]

His response to the complaints from many gamers, regarding the ending of Half-Life 2:

I have read some speculation that the story was gutted or edited or otherwise wrested out of my hands; nothing could be further from the truth. While the plotline has to remain flexible enough to be altered on the fly while we are adding and deleting levels, and creative compromises are in the nature of the process, the ending is the one we always intended. I would have tweaked it a bit in retrospect (there’s always room for improvement), but overall there is little I would change. I think it’ll prove itself in the long run.

His favorite personal moments in gaming from 2004, as game developer and gamer:

The Shalebridge Cradle [level] in Thief 3. An assault on the player’s expectations, featuring brilliant stealth monster design in a relentlessly frightening environment. Shalebridge Cradle shoulders its way into the top ranks of the scariest level in the Thief series--which is to say, among the scariest levels ever created.

Whacking Beady Long Legs in Pikmin 2. In a game full of unusually fun boss battles, the payoff for this one had me cheering like a little kid at a parade.

The positive response that HL2 has received since its release has been the ultimate reward. I thought the game was good, I thought we had succeeded at what we’d set out to do, but somewhere along the line I started to fear that maybe we were crazy and gotten so far out of touch that we were going to be in for a rude awakening. Along the way, the continual astonished reactions from non-gamers, when we showed them the characters and world of HL2, meant to me that we were breaking through into a new level of accomplishment.

Marc Laidlaw is Writer/Designer for Half-Life and Half-Life 2, from Valve Software

* * *

Greg Costikyan

His favorite games for 2004 (in no particular order):

Katamari Damacy

Crusader Kings

Pikmin 2: This improves on the original largely by omitting the somewhat-daunting time limits of the first game. A priori, I would have said that controlling an army of critters with a console-game interface was basically impossible, but Miyamoto's team shows how to do it. As usual with Nintendo titles, the highly colored and anime-goofy world makes a dramatic and welcome change from the dark, nasty tone of so much modern product. I find the omnipresence of product placement somewhat irritating, however.

No Press Anthology: This collection of eight highly experimental tabletop roleplaying games from the indie RPG movement shows that hobby gaming creativity is not dead, and has important things to say about the intersection between game and story.

Oasis

City of Heroes

His anticipations and predictions for 2005:

I'm hopeful that we will finally start to see games that take advantage of wireless-connected mobile devices (notably the DS and N-Gage) to provide interesting types of multiplayer worldwide gameplay from handheld devices.

World of Warcraft is likely to be the first MMORPG that bridges the Asian/North American divide and proves successful in both markets; it will be interesting to see whether other products can do the same.

In general, 2005 is likely to be the breakout year for mobile games in the States, with dramatic growth in dollar volumes, albeit based mainly on remarkable dull product.

Greg Costikyan is a veteran game developer currently with the Nokia Research Center. His most recent games are the mobile-based Alien Rush, and Paranoia XP, an award-winning tabletop RPG set. He also publishes a blog on gaming.