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Vanishing Game Genres
turpie writes "CNET's Gamecenter is running a story about dying game genres, their arguments seem valid for some genres like Flight Sims, and but are stretching it a bit for others like RTS (StarCraft) (they may not be too original anymore but I wouldn't say they're dying.) I'm also wondering what this leaves us apart First Person Shooters (ala Dooom & Quake)?" For that matter, since the first person shooter, I don't feel like a new genre has really appeared in awhile.
You all are going to laugh, but, yes, there have been new genres that have gotten very popular. The most notable is dancing games. This started out with such PSX games as PaRappa the Rapper. Now, accessory 'dance mats' for the very popular Dance Dance Revolution are easily available, and gaining in popularity. This falls into the category of 'All the rage in Japan' and actually involves exercise, something most gamers could use. COmpanies are tryign new genre's all of the time. Someone only need to think of the money Tetris brought in, and it should be obvious game companies want BADLY to bust a new genre open. For example, there is a four seat racing game at my local arcade. Sound normal? Not quite. It horse racing. You play jockey on the horse, and the movement of your rocking and the movement of the horse's head determines your speed, not to mention looks really funny to onlookers. WHat about Silent Scope? Maybe you would just call it a 'really, really First Person Shooter', but thats a crock. You could call it 'A Gun Game', but comparing this to Operation Wolf isn't even fair. I feel Konami should be praised for this game, because it was original, well played out, and damn fun. Don't pigeon-hole yourselves. A lot of people don't see the inovations because they stick to what they know they like, such as RTS, RPG's, FPS, etc. Keep your eyes open and see the new stuff, and give it a shot. Besides, if *YOU* can come up with a genre that hasn't been tried, but would be addictive, Let me know and we'll sell it for a ton of cash. Toodles
Toodles D. Clown
there's a form of games that they've not mentioned, which is continuously *gaining* in popularity...
... retro gaming!
It's certainly where I spend all my gaming time these days. Who needs games that require a supercomputer to process, when the gameplay is lacking. With MAME and my ROM collection, I can keep my gaming urges satisfied for years to come:-)
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
What about the graphical MUDS, like everquest (called evercrack here at work for its addictiveness.) there deffinatly gaining popularity. ultima online didn't seem to do as well as everquest. but go on e-bay and you can find players selling there everquest items FOR REAL MONEY. and with upcomeing starwars rendidtion of the game they will get even more popular.
Gentleman, you can't fight in here, this is the war room..
who sez death can't be funny....www.endlesssorrow.com
Innovation drives the gaming industry. The problem with the flight sim genre is that it's been overdone. From A10 Tankkiller to Wing Commander to (gulp) MS Flight, there's only so much you can do. Shoot, turn, shoot, loop, turn, crash into a mountain.
Today's gaming climate blurs the lines of definition between genres. Look at Half Life, Asheron's Call, BattleZone, Metal Gear Solid and Spyro the Dragon. Only games that give us more to explore and kill actually make it.
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Hmm. I don't know if my information is still accurate, but a couple years ago all the studies I read basically stated this:
The casual gamer accounts for 40% of all sales. They want instant gratification & easy gameplay. They basically "walk down the isle and pick out a box" at purchase time. Their sheer numbers are huge. They rarely purchase games (1-5 a year).
The core gamer accounts for 60% of all sales. They are willing to put up with all kinds of nonsense, including obtuse manuals and difficult controls, if the game is worth the time. They research their purchases ahead of time, either online or through word-of-mouth (talking with other core gamers). They number less than 10% of the total market, but purchase very often (15+ year).
I'm not sure if the entire market has suddenly done a turnaround in 2 years but given that these tenets have held true for 10+ years I'd be really, really surprised.
Keep in mind this is just computer gaming. Consoles fall somewhere way outside of this and have all kinds of demographics, many odd (witness Parappa Da Rappa!).
Personally I place the blame on lousy games and deaths of genres on the publishers. This is in large part due to the influx of non-game-playing individuals who jumped into the industry so they could "get in on the action", then proceded to screw up the development process. Of course the fresh-into-the-industry executives who put a high priority on the opinons of their fresh-into-the-industry marketing wonks shoulder a large part of the blame too.
I just wish the industry would shake all these idiots out of the tree, send them off to blow big wads of cash on the console arena (which will implode sooner or later like it did in the 80s due to a very similar phenomenon), and let everyone who genuinely gives a rats ass about this industry get back to making fun, immersive, excellent bang-for-the-buck computer games.
By the way, Myst, Deer Hunter, blah, blah, blah - they were/are considered "breakthrough" games, since they sold in large numbers of casual gamers. (Core gamers ignored them because, after all, they're crap) A couple years ago every marketing weenie I dealt with was psyched out about these types of games and felt that every game currently in development could "learn" from Myst. As I said, shake them out of the tree and let's get back to work...
Moof!
As a coder on a very old text-based role playing game, I've seen this happen firsthand. There is no way that we can compete with the blood splatter of Unreal Tournament, or the graphical experience of Everquest. So instead we've tried to focus on the strengths of our dying genre.
People cannot play Everquest from work, while sitting in a programming lab, or other such locations where they find themselves with free time and a firewall that lets them telnet out. Most of our players are people who play these newer games like UT or Icewind Dale, but they don't always have access to that computer. Or people who don't have the computing power and budget to support buying the latest big name game. These people are our target audience at this point, but it is an audience that is slowly shrinking. When we used to use mobs of people in our game's various hangouts and bars, we now consider it great to see a mere dozen.
Many of us are oldschool pencil and paper role players, and chose to play on the text based online game because it allows for a greater level of role playing then EverQuest or Ultima Online. I've tried most of the MMRPG's, and found them to be either giant deathmatches or painful affairs of watching a blue bar grow while staring at a spellbook. I can stare at a spellbook screenshot if I want to get the EverQuest experience. I, for one, would rather spend my time role playing where imagination and text are your only tools.
As much as the genre is dying, there is one benefit from the other games seducing the players away. The only people left on the text based role playing games are those that really want to role play. Otherwise, they'd be booting up Quake 3.
Shameless plug: If you are looking for a great text based online role playing game, check out CyberSphere.
The only truly original computer games I can remember were Lemmings and Wolfenstein 3D (the precursor to Doom). Both were truly original (at the time). Even a game like Tombraider is basically a platform game in 3D: jump from platform to platform, collect stuff, open doors...exactly the same as all those games on my Acorn Electron 10 years ago. Except looking a lot better.
Which is obviously the problem at the moment: all games seem to focus on looks and not on gameplay.
While I don't think the PC is dead as a games platform - it does need some more imagination.
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Ignore reality - there's nothing you can do about it.
I'd contend that being innovative has absoultely positively NOTHING to do with fun. Look at Trespasser. Look at Quake 3. (actually I dislike both but I'm going on majority 'opinion').
I loved War2, I loved C&C and I still love Starcraft. Being a sheep dyed in many colors isn't a bad thing as long as you still enjoy the game. I mean we play games in real life with balls all day long! Football, soccer, baseball, basketball, foosball, ping pong, etc. These are getting tiresome? No. They only get boring for people who live on quick fixes.
I suspect RTS's are more prone to 'get old' more quickly to these non-die hard players because of their repetitive nature. Instead of reveling in the intricacies of the gameplay and variety of offense and defense they merely see a battle to control resources and kill the other guy.
The Gamecenter editors are clearly playing favorites and trying to create controversy with their mentioning of the RTS and subsequent omission of FPSs. Playing 'god' editor is a pretty quick way to lose ALL respect from anyone who is a hardcore gamer at heart.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
A few years I was working on a nice 2d Platform game. The project was dropped in favor of a First Person Shooter with the same name. The publishers wern't interested in a 2d platformer. It's been said before in this thread and it's certainly the case.
Publishers are only interested in clones of already sucessful games
It is a very rare event to see a game get published without being in the 'in' genre. Abes oddysee was one brilliant example. I'm not sure how they sold the idea but if you told most publishers that you were maging a paged screen 2d platform game they would be absolutely positive that the game would be a dud.
The stupid thing is that most games lose money which just makes the publishers more conservitive. 'We lost money on our last game, it obviously wasn't enough like that best seller.'
The game I'm working on has had trouble finding a publisher, mostly because it doesn't look like current bestsellers. I can't help noticing that my friends sit down for hours and play the thing though. I now have a likely publishing deal, Ironically it's part because my game is similar to one of their current games that is selling well.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
The great days of Sierra's Space and Kings and Hero quests had some great games, and you don't see anything like those coming out today. I think the games seem less sexy and exciting to people who don't remember the gameplay from before - there's few explosions, and the action is mostly in the mind. It takes time to get some sort of payoff from the game... unlike most games today which offer almost instant gratification as soon as you start.
Course, the travisty of the last 2 KQ games couldn't have helped the genre (one mouse command? ONE?)... poor poor Sierra.
dinosaur comics
Remember when the gameplay was what really mattered in games? Remember walking through dungeons, which pretty much lacked animation? It was the gameplay that mattered. Nowadays, companies try to make their product as graphically impressive as possible and compromise gameplay. Another problem is development time - since the companies focus so much on graphical content, their development time is vastly increased, and by the time the product ships, it is no longer graphically pleasing [cuz technology has moved on] and the gameplay is unsatisfactory. All this does is make for horrible games.
Many gamers out there still enjoy non graphical MUDs, since all that matters is the quest and the emotional involvement in a created world. Graphical MUD type games are the thing of the future, and games in general are completely becoming online based. The new era of gaming includes other real people, and this all started with the emotional involvement in games that was created by Doom. I'll never forget those first times I got to chase my friends around and kill them...hehehe...you know what I mean.
So lets move gaming technology forward not simply in graphical content, but game companies need to do more psychological studies on what gamers need and what they desire in their gaming environments. This is where the true advances can take place.
-=MeMpHiStO=-Did these guys actually look at the sales figures for Starcraft? It was in the top 10 continously for *two* years for crying out loud! Saying its in trouble is a stretch to say the least.
Of course then you have crap like Tiberian Sun, but saying the whole genre is dying is rediculous, unless it happened very recently. Starcraft should prove just how popular it can be among the people who find FPS games boring.
Gamecenter seems to want insane amounts of innovation, but thats not how things work. The best way to do it is to add a few new things, but to stick with what works to make a fun game. Its more important that the game be fun and playable then cutting edge.
(besides, by the standard of innovation, the FPS genre is more then dead, fancier graphics are not innovation)
Most of the other ones seem to actually be in trouble, but I'm not worried about RTS games. Well, I *am* worried about Warcraft 3 sucking, but thats more of a problem with Blizzard lately (Diablo 2 is nowhere near as good as it should be, and with the constant change in directions Warcraft 3 is taking, I'm not even sure if they know what they're making anymore).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I read the RTS analysis, and skimmed 1/2 the posts, and was surprised to not see the comments I'm about to make :)
The basic argument of the article, which you reiterate, is, "most of these are clones of games which have been around for years."
If recycling ideas lead to the death of a genre, then the entire entertainment industry should be radically different than it is now. The past 50 years alone in the U.S. show that cloning ideas is the way to *make profits*, not die out.
Another aspect to consider: those of you who have been gaming for years (decades) and are tired of same-old same-old may very well give up gaming. But it doesn't matter, because there is a whole new generation of young-in's who have never seen these ideas/concepts before, and to whom they are fresh and innovative. And they will buy these games.
It's the same for movies. I'm tired of "Arnie" flicks. I go now for more 'intelligent' movies. I'm also about 30, and have been watching action movies for 15 yrs (at least). But there's a whole new group of teens & college students that are not yet tired of mindless action flicks.
And so the trend continues.
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http://movies.shoutingman.com
ShoutingMan.com
If you haven't seen it already (or if it hasn't been posted here) check out GarageGames.com They are a group, founded by many Dynamix game designers, who are looking to cultivate the untapped masses of Independant Game Studios. Being an "indy" myself, I'm very pleased to see this.
.sig is a Porsche.
I don't think gaming is dead because the people aren't buying, I think gaming is dead because the publishers are killing it. Game publishers are notorious for "sticking" with safe concepts and ultimately flogging them to death. As a result they don't give many game shops a chance with genre-creating games, thus stagnating the market and making people tired of playing "just another Doom Clone on graphics crack."
Think about it. Would "The Sims" have been published if Will Wright hadn't already had a name for himself? (and the money and contacts to make it happen?) No. His ideas would have been discarded because they don't contain the words "Frag" or "300 giga-polygons a nanosecond".
This is a real threat to the gaming industry, and a hotly debated topic in the development circles. Hopefully with GarageGames and their ilk, we'll start seeing a lot more new concepts, some good, some bad, from the teeming masses of under appreciated indy studios.
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Vulgrin the MAD
I sig, therefore I am.
Casual gamers killed adventure gaming, and Myst made them do it.
OK, their argument is that text adventures are somehow more immersive (I guess?) than Myst was. Umm, where do these guys get off? I know there are some people who don't like Myst and Riven, but how in the world did it make users kill adventure games?
Myst's idea of interactivity involved sparse clicks followed by hours of skull scratching.
And text adventure involved vast amounts of typing followed by hours of skull scratching.
Maybe they should go back to the drawing board for this article, and fire the present author before starting again.
Basically, Myst took the adventure game and wrapped it up in a pretty cool environment. I for one think that environment was very immersive. I mean, compare it to any other games from that time period. And after all, the puzzles in Myst were no different from any others anywhere, they just happened to be done in very pretty graphics.
I think if adventure gaming was killed just because Myst was so pretty, that must mean there are just a bunch of really lazy adventure game designers. I mean, Myst sparked at least three books, and there's still a webring on D'ni sites that actually get updated. Now that's an adventure game.
One thing which must be taken into account is the change that has happened in the profile of the "average player"... Computer games haven't been a "popular" thing for too many years yet. Computer game players used to be a much smaller group, and were much more likely to be programmers, etc, who LIKE complex games. Today's average player is someone who's barely computer literate (if even that) and who likes his games simple and straightforward. The kind of people who actually want to spend days learning how to, for example, fly a realistically simulated airplane, have not become more scarce, they are just vastly outnumbered by the 5-second attention span players... Absolute numbers may have even grown, but their relative amount (of all players), which is of course what the game companies look at, has decreased drastically...
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. Dies nox et omnia michi sunt contraria
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. Dies nox et omnia michi sunt contraria
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When it comes to new genres, I'd have to say that Tribes is the beginning of a new style of 1st person shooter. In previous games like Quake, Halflife, etc... there really wasn't a strong amount of strategy involved. Then came Tribes. This was a game that required strategy to suceed. You have to spend hours figuring out the best spots for turrets. Hours on defensive strategy and hours on finding the fastest and best paths to enemy flags. Sure it was still CTF, but you couldn't just leave 2 guys back to guard the flag and take the rest of your team out to get the enemy flag. You need to have a plan.
:)
To me, that seems to bring a whole new demension to the 1st person shooter. We no longer can play online games without Roger Wilco. We need to communicate to every member what is going on at all times. With Tribes2 on the way, we will find that teamwork is even more important. Then there is the promise of Halo. If you haven't seen the game, go to this site. Graphically, it is the most impressive game I have ever seen. (Good enough reason to buy the Nvida GTS Ultra
http://halo.bungie.org
I suggest watching the E3 trailer. Keep in mind that the trailer was done completely in-game using the Halo engine.
There are more of them now, MANY more potential players, all having faster network access, and yet the number of players per mud have dropped.
Well, I code on a MUD, so I feel I should stick up for the Old School. :) There may be many more MUDs now, but most of them suck. Some k1dd13 downloads a mud base, manages to get it compiled and running, and suddenly he is 1337 with his own MUD. Except that there's 1000 copies of the same game running elsewhere.
The MUDs that have been around for a while and have a good theme are doing OK. I don't want to name names in case they get Slashdotted, but the MUD I play on has a 24-hour average of about 120-125 players, peaking at over 200, and there a some MUDS that get a lot more.
Also, a good MUD is not a static thing that you can 'master' and then move on. New areas are always being added, new commands, new quests, new guilds, etc. We have had people playing for 6+ years. Yes, they have very high skill levels and can kill just about everything, but they still play because there is almost always something to look forward to.
Another reason they stay is for the social aspect that you don't get on other games. I have more friends thanks to the MUD than I ever would have otherwise, and I have met a lot of them in real life.
Another nice feature is the fact that you don't have to shell out $30-50 to be able to play a MUD. :)
So, I don't think MUDs will die soon. Oh sure, they might get pushed into some little corner of the Net, but that's where they were anyway. :)