There’s a phenomenal 1996 interview with Dani Bunten Berry that was just posted at In Newsweekly. She was one of the most brilliant and important game designers in the history of the games industry. Read the interview and you’re guaranteed to come away with some insight into the way this business works.
From the interview:
Dani: I don’t know that I should slam EA or any single publisher, because this is kind of a conspiracy of the whole system.Brenda: A conspiracy? How so?
Dani: Well, there’s the distributors that sit there in between the publisher and the player. They look through these things. They never even play the products. They look at boxes and the blurb that might tell them the “hottest such and such genre product,” and that’s how they make their decisions. Because of those folks who do not give a shit about these products, all they do is put them on a shelf with a flippy that you can look at, they control what gets produced. I think that’s a shame. I don’t know any other way to say it without poisoning my own future potential.
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Correct, and as pointed out recently in The Escapist, that distributor has become Wal-Mart. And that sucks even more.
Digital distribution is finally circunventing that problem, whether it be Manifesto, Storytronics, Wii Connect 24 or Xbox Live Arcade,
Dani also was probably THE first person to realized the importance of social gameplay.
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