Zod95 said:
Effort can be translated into number of man-hours work. And that's objective. Yes, I have no way of knowing that but I have several ways to estimate it. Let me give you one example: TrackMania. Nadeo hired 12 bands to create exclusive music tracks to TrackMania Sunrise. The result was: 13 tracks, most of them with vocal parts. Then they made Nations and United, each one with a brand new soundtrack this time instrumental-only: Nations got 4 tracks and United got 8. Do you know who made them? One guy. That's all it needs to create instrumental-only music. Not 12 bands, 1 guy. Of course I don't know if the previous 12 bands spent only a few ours and this new guy spent thousands of hours creating those musics, but I'm confident this was not the case. Let me give you another example, this time out of videogaming: Rurouni Kenshin. Aside from the openings and endings, do you know how many music tracks the anime has? 92. Do you know who made them? One guy. Again, I don't know whether he spent his entire life doing that. But I'm pretty sure it took a lot less than that. I'm a fan of instrumental-only music and I know a lot more cases than these two. And, by my experience, I'm inclined to say that this kind of music usually takes a lot less resources to be made than vocal music. Of course I know some other cases where such music demands an entire orchestra. Here the effort is similar, since it takes more people but less time (again, this is only considering my knowledge as a fan of instrumental music). But these cases are not common in videogaming. Now let's look at Sonic and Mario. Sonic Adventure 1 has: 7 vocal music tracks and around 30 instrumental music tracks. Mario 64 has: 0 vocal music tracks and around 20 instrumental. Now I have 2 questions for you. First, why didn't Sonic Team create 30 vocal and 7 instrumental, why was it the other way around? Second, what do you estimate to have been the most demanding soundtrack to create: the one from Sonic Adventure or the one from Mario 64? I guess you already know what my conclusions are. To conclude, what is my point (on the OP) with all of this? Simple, just to deliver some indicators about the effort Nintendo puts into its games (compared to the competition). Then people decide what conclusions can be taken. Some may easily perceive that vocal music demands a different kind of commitment while others may twist any logic that that exposes Nintendo's fragilities until the end of the world. |
You start off with a metric that is objective (however completey useless, but I'll get to that), and then start estimating numbers to prove a point. You get lost on the way, between the objective measure itself and the estimated measurement, still believing that you are being objective. I can pull numbers out of the air as well and say that they are reasonable, but it doesn't make it so.
As for the usefulness of comparing man-hours as an objective way to 'filter good games', you completely ignore skill and quality of work. Man-hours don't prove anything without knowing whose man-hours they are. You can complain that it would become a subjective debate then, but it is inherently subjective, trying to disassociate the quantitative aspect of man-hours from the qualitative is a lost cause.
As an example, Game A uses several thousand interns who spend a year learning and backtracking to ultimately produce their first game. Game B uses a small team of experienced developers for a year. Game A would undoubtedly mop the floor with Game B in man-hours, but is this 'quality/effort filter' actually proving anything?
