Pure vision vs. player feedback | 10 Years Ago This Month
The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.
Sometimes this column lets us look back on a problem facing the industry and see who was right, who was wrong, and how different a situation seems with the benefit of hindsight.
Other times it's a reminder that some problems are just intractable and the games industry will be probably be grappling with them in different ways for as long as people play games. This is one of those other times.
In August of 2013, the topic of discussion was the relationship between the creator and the audience, and what role the latter should play in shaping the former's creations.
We'll start with Schell Games' Jesse Schell, who told us in an interview that there's one mistake successful game companies always make, "and that mistake is listening to their customers."
Customers, Schell argued, will always want the advantages offered by new technologies, but they don't want it from the existing market leader. At the time, the example he cited was Microsoft, which had recently announced digital restrictions for the Xbox One, and then backtracked on them in light of fan backlash.
As Schell described it, "Basically, Microsoft said, 'We're going to be Steam. You like Steam, don't you?' And we all said, 'No, we hate that. We hate you. You're an idiot to do that.'
"They came out and said, 'We're gonna do this
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