'Oddworld' Creator On How Customer Feedback Changed Gaming

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This is a good interview but I'm not sure what Lorne Lanning is talking about when he says "there weren't internet news sites for games" back in 1998. Just off the top of my head there was Blue's News, Shacknews, VooDoo Extreme, Stomped, and many are still around today.

"Back in 1998 there wasn't YouTube, there wasn't Twitch, there weren't even internet news sites for games yet." (There were, but the fact that a 13-year-old me wrote for one should tell you all you need to know about their quality). "When we started Oddworld most people didn't know what 'www' meant."
 
There were tons of them. I still check Blue's and Shack today. I miss Voodoo Extreme. That was a fun site. It kinda reminded me of [H] in some ways. Firing Squad was kind of a hybrid (hardware/gaming) like this place too.
 
His point is well taken though, there weren't many tried and true sites back then. Most of them were still early and didn't have a lot of mass public awareness. Now you have a lot more direct critical feedback. I knew several people that worked on the Oddworld games early on and they really did seem to incorporate a lot of the feedback from testers into their games, but there just wasn't a reliable method to get real feedback from the masses at that time. I remember having conversations with them on IRC about it way back around their first release.

Now it is easier to get fan feedback, but it seems some studios care less about the consumer and more about their profits and turning games over quickly for the quick cash even if they are turds.
 
Oh ya, the Internet was just fantastic back then........party time all the time.

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:D (That Roy meme could have been done a little better, but still pretty funny.)
 
It's note like dinosaurs such as Shack and Blue's were mainstream in the sense that gaming is today. This is why almost everything gaming related I read these days is just garbage. People who started gaming at the age 20+ or when it got popular with regular folks writing articles about stuff they know nothing about? Yeah, no thanks.

A lot of really dumb and uninformed people are working in the industry these days. I get his logic but to hell with all the dumb fucks sharing their opinions and voting with their wallets. These same people enabled the whole pay2win thing which is absolutely dominating the market right now.
 
Voodoo Extreme - I miss Billy "Wicked" Wilson's sense of humor. I might have a Nyquil smoothie in his honor.
 
There were plenty of sites maybe...but numbers of followers? Back then sales of an OS were considered successful in the realms of tens of thousands.

Started online in 1993 so kind of remember when it was all trees and Times New Roman.
 
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Most of the useful information that wasn't print was still on Usenet but that wasn't mainstream for very long as the alt.binaries.* killed the ISPs bandwidth and they promptly shut down their uucp. Print had been king but the magazines were in a death-spiral at that point thanks to the whole Outpost fiasco (you know something has gone terribly wrong when the new game you just bought has an apology letter inside!). Everyone was reviewing alpha builds and design documents in a race to 'scoop' the competition and the whole shebang imploded. CGW had been a reliable source, right up until they were bought out at least, and EGM doubled-down on consoles. The three month lead time for anything printed in colour just didn't work for something as fast moving as software which is where the drive to do it online came from. Fun times!
 
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