…and you can make those tools increasingly easy to use, but don’t expect them to want to make anything as a result.
I just noticed over on the IGN website that console versions of Lionhead Studios’ videogame The Movies have been canx’d due to… get this… poor sales of the PC version. This reminds me of two things:
– Paul Jaquays’ comments some time back on the Map-Center forum that increased availability of oil paints hasn’t increased the number of Rembrandt’s and Picasso’s in the world (True).
– the comments I made yesterday (with the above comment in mind) over on the MIT Convergence blog that “free” content may not save the day (Link).
You can read the IGN announcement for yourself – Link. A shame. I was looking forward to a flood of “French Democracy“-style machinima videos.
Perhaps consumers don’t see The Movies as a good machinima tool. I, of course, would cite the creator-unfriendly legal agreements required to use the game as a discincentive to purchase it. But according to some machinimists, you need to play The Movies like a game in order to unlock its best content. That’s another disincentive.
Perhaps. And I would agree that creator-unfriendly agreements don’t help, but I suspect people truly worried about those legal issues are more interested in the higher-quality stuff that can be made with games like Half-Life 2.
I’d also point out that even though the cost of making a real movie (digitally) has plummeted, I don’t see the indy film forum I spend time in bursting with budding Spielbergs. Actually, it’s gotten relatively quiet in the last year. A real shame.
I don’t know. Maybe everyone’s been turned into Passive Zombie Consumers by MSM. (“The horror. The horror.”)