GI.biz covers in their weekly newsletter this week the announcement that most of the major film distributors are cancelling or massively scaling back their future UMD format releases, and talks about the death of an unloved and mostly unwanted format. I think most of us were saying that right from the start, when they announced the format the PSP would use, and then touted it as a portable movie player. Why would I pay money for another (lower quality) version of a film I already have on DVD, to watch it on my PSP on the few occasions where I have a couple of hours to kill? How it made business sense to Sony in the first place I have no idea.

I also had the pleasure to attend a BCS lecture given by one of my old colleagues from VIS, who was talking on the nature and history of the games industry. He brought up some points relating to the exponential growth of the size of game team needed to produce a top flight title, and it struck me just how bad things actually are these days in the games industry. Anyway, in the post lecture drinking session, I found myself expounding various different problems in the industry today, some of which have solutions which we [the industry] just aren’t doing, some of which I can’t see a fix for.

Anyway, I think I’m going to write up some thoughts on my stance on the whole she-bang, and make a new category here called ‘Industry Rants’. Don’t get me wrong, I love the games industry and am dedicated to it, but some things about the way we work today are just stupid.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 6:55 am and is filed under Tales from the grind-stone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.