虚拟游戏开发天才回归现实世界

    你现在带领的初创公司团队规模比艺电的马克西斯工作室小得多，您怎么看待那些基于手机或是即将出现的下一代游戏机平台的独立开发者的崛起？

    从经济学角度看，他们在某种程度上和PC游戏开发的早期很相似。我就认识不少独立的游戏开发者，他们凭借小型团队和低廉的成本开发游戏就能过上很不错的日子。光从游戏里他们赚不到很多钱，但是让两三个人过上舒服日子是足够了。十年前，要么得花上1,000万美元开发一款游戏，要么就别动这个脑筋。而一旦真开发游戏了，结果如何就要看运气了。可能会有1/6的机会挣大钱，赔钱的几率当然就是5/6。这就导致游戏行业出现了大量的公司兼并，只有大公司才有实力连续掷上几次骰子，砸下几千万美元下注。而今天我们成功的几率却要高得多。我和几个朋友只要花几万美元就能开发一款游戏，它可能让我们挣上上百万美元。而对大型开发商来说，这种做法就会是个亏本买卖。对一个只有三个人的团队来说，他们能按照自己的想法来开发，还能靠它过上好日子。这种环境就让我们（作为游戏开发业者）能探索更有趣的小众游戏机会。换做从前，这种机会不会有人愿意花功夫。

    今年年初，艺电的《模拟城市》和微软公司（Microsoft）在电子游戏展上发布的Xbox One都遭遇了数字版权管理（DRM）问题。作为一位开发者，您如何看待DRM在当今游戏业中的作用？

    人们普遍有这样一种心态，即当我买下一款影音产品时，那就一直拥有这张光盘了。我能把这张DVD放进机器里观赏，能借给朋友，还能拿去卖掉。我们正在慢慢地过渡到一种新的理念，即所有东西都在云端，我们购买的只是权利，并不真正拥有物理形态的产品。这其中涉及法律因素，也有消费者心理因素。能在PC或任何设备上玩自己想玩的游戏当然很好。我热爱这种自由，而免费游戏就很好地利用了这种心理。从消费者的角度看，我很能理解为什么很多人都强烈反对DRM。然而如果一款游戏只能在互联网上玩，那就意味着在飞机上不能玩，掉网的时候也不能玩。微软的做法很有意思。微软对DRM的响应非常迅速，给我留下了深刻的印象。DRM将是一个持续进行的谈判过程，因为它在某个方面，至少就互联网的连通能力而言，对盗版问题来说是个很有吸引力的解决方案。游戏业长期以来一直受到盗版问题的困扰，但不能以损害消费者的利益为代价来运用DRM。这个问题我真不敢说自己能回答清楚，只是我们会逐渐让玩家们适应它。如果你有要求与其他玩家联网的大型多人在线游戏（MMO）或对等（peer-to-peer）游戏，这个问题就没什么特殊性可言了，但是很多游戏并不要求DRM保护。如果只是为了DRM而要求使用它，那肯定会让消费者不满。

    Working as a startup with a smaller team than you had at EA (EA) Maxis, what are your thoughts on the rise of independent developers through mobile and even the upcoming next-gen consoles?

    In a way it's similar to the early days of PC gaming from an economical standpoint. I know a lot of indie game developers that are able to make a nice living making games with small teams and keeping the costs low. They don't make that much from the game, but it's certainly enough to support two or three people comfortably. Ten years ago you either spent $10 million developing a game or didn't bother, and then if you did make a game you were rolling the dice and maybe one of the six times you'll make a pile of money and the other times you'd lose. That led to a lot of the consolidation in the industry you had to have a big company and were able to afford rolling the dice several times with multimillion dollar bets. Today we have a much higher ramp of opportunity. I can spend a few hundred thousand dollars making a game with a couple of friends, and maybe we might make a million bucks on that game, which to a large publisher that would have been a losing proposition. But to a small team of three guys, they get to do what they want, and they earn a nice living from it. This environment is allowing us (as a games industry) to explore much more interesting niche gaming opportunities that would have been unexplored otherwise.

    Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been an issue with the launch of EA's SimCity earlier this year and the announcement of Microsoft's Xbox One features at E3. As a developer, what are your thoughts on the role DRM plays in gaming today?

    We're coming at this with the mentality that when I buy media I own the disk or whatever for the rest of my life. I can put that DVD in my machine and watch it and share it with friends and trade it in. We're slowly moving to this idea that everything is on the cloud and I'm actually buying rights, and I don't physically own the actual product. There's a legal component to this, and there's a consumer psychological component to this. The sensibility of being able to play a game I want to on a PC or any device is great. I love that freedom and the free-to-play games have made good use of that. From the consumers' point of view, I can really understand a lot of the backlash to DRM. The fact that if something's required on the Internet that means they can't play it on the airplane or if their Internet connection goes down. It was interesting watching the Microsoft thing. I thought it was very impressive how responsive Microsoft (MSFT) was to that. DRM is going to be an ongoing negotiation because there are features to the DRM, or at least Internet connectivity, that is a very attractive solution to the piracy issue. Gaming has had a long history of piracy, but you can't use DRM at the expense of the customers. I'm not really sure I have a clear answer to this except that it's going to be something that we slowly acclimate the player base towards. It's really not a lot different from if you have an MMO or peer-to-peer game that requires connectivity with other players, but a lot of games don't necessarily require that. If you're just going to require it for DRM purposes only that's obviously where it upset the consumers.