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- WHY NON OF THE TERMINATOR GAMES WERENT ANY GOOD HOW TO
- WHY NON OF THE TERMINATOR GAMES WERENT ANY GOOD SOFTWARE
It is impossible to imagine Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios, issuing her own version of Frazzini's pronouncement: "We're bringing a lot of Amazon practices to making movies." "Amazon culture is great for product, horrible for creative endeavors."Īt Amazon, games do not get the Hollywood treatment "Amazon is run not even by finance guys but by tech guys who instead of putting their creatives outside the bubble and protecting them from the culture, hired them into the bubble and expected them to work within that confine," said one person involved with Amazon's game efforts. Many precincts of the entertainment business are run by financial professionals, but the successful ones - whether in television, music, film or games - learn to let the creative people create. Mike Morhaime spent decades shielding the creative engine at Blizzard Entertainment from various corporate owners as Blizzard created StarCraft, Warcraft and Diablo - iconic franchises all. Take-Two does not tell Rockstar what the story of the next Grand Theft Auto should be. The entire structure of most successful game publishers is built around protecting and insulating the creative people - writers, artists and designers - from the business. Turns out, the questions Amazon asked the game pros were generally incremental - "Which weapon do you prefer?" "What classes and enemies do you enjoy?" - rather than stepping back and asking, "Does this overall concept work?" That's why Crucible can feel like it was put together with bits and pieces of other successful games, rather than forging a strong vision of its own.
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So how could the company ingest that input and still churn out a mediocre product? Instead, thinking of games like tech products just leads to watered-down games without a strong point of view or creative direction.įor example, Amazon executives told me that while designing Crucible they solicited private input from hundreds of streamers and esports figures - people who play video games for a living and definitely know fun when they feel it. That product development sensibility can work for chintzy mobile games that are made to extract as much money as possible from players but does not work in creating multibillion-dollar long-term franchises that generate not just revenue but emotional loyalty. Yet games must jump through all those hoops at Amazon, according to people in a position to know. No less than great novels or films, great top-end games cannot be created through user data requirements, A/B testing, behavioral analytics, user surveys and iterative critiques by departments ranging from security to finance.
WHY NON OF THE TERMINATOR GAMES WERENT ANY GOOD HOW TO
That isn't working because video games are fundamentally a creative endeavor, not the sort of purely quantifiable mass consumer product or service that Amazon knows how to make. "We're bringing a lot of Amazon practices to making games," Frazzini told me in March.
WHY NON OF THE TERMINATOR GAMES WERENT ANY GOOD SOFTWARE
Games are art, not just a software product Why is the company struggling so badly with games?ĭiscussing the question with people involved with Amazon Games, some common themes emerge. So, what's the problem? In recent years Amazon has become a major force in television and film, so we have seen that the company can succeed in generating popular mass entertainment. The game's official page now simply says, "Coming soon." In May, Amazon and Bandai Namco, which controls the Pac-Man franchise, announced that Pac-Man Live Studio would be playable on Twitch in June. The new Pac-Man is not a major "AAA" game like Crucible or New World, but it is important to show the way forward for Twitch as a platform for actually playing games rather than simply watching them. The third major project that Frazzini's division has been scheduled to deliver this year is an innovative version of Pac-Man that can be played directly on Twitch, the wildly popular streaming service that Amazon acquired in 2014. He has not yet shipped a successful major game, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by his boss, Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, who in turn reports to Jeff Bezos. Frazzini joined Amazon in 2004 and has been the company's main cheerleader for game development for almost a decade. The recall and delay have left Mike Frazzini, Amazon's vice president for game services and studios, under considerable internal pressure, according to people close to and involved with the company's game efforts.
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In July, Amazon said it would ship next year. In April, Amazon said it would ship in August. As for New World, in March Amazon said it would ship in May.