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Gaming Crash up Ahead
Milktoast writes "Joystick101.org has posted a story predicting an upcoming gaming crash. They claim that a crowded marketplace in conjunction with the large number of ports will lead today's consoles down the same road as the Atari 2600. Will gaming consoles go out the window like before, or will we pull out of this?"
Then came the rise of the PC. A typical entry level PC has always been around 1000 UKP (that's $1500). Prices have stayed stable for a long time. But finally they are starting to creap down and with inflation over the intervening couple of decades, $1500 now is probably not worth much more than $600 was then. PCs have become cheap, real cheap and while the games cost more than the 8 bit ones did, the prices for those are coming down and budget games just put the icing on the cake.
I'm not saying consoles won't make it but they have a struggle ahead and the x-box (though I hate the idea) will probably just make things more complex.
Rich
People have been predicting a game crash for years. Won't happen. Trust me. There is excellent content in the pipe. There are excellent platforms in the pipe. Sales are brisk, even if they aren't uniform.
Even if sales disappeared, you would still find people working on the next epic title. It goes beyond profits. Game developers write games because they're passionate about it and addicted to it. Just as film-making is a dumb idea for turning a buck, so is game-making. It's not a sensible business to be in, but people get hooked even though it is extremely risky.
VC's generally avoid game investments because it falls in the class of "hit-driven" industries. I had a friend who wrote what I consider to be one of the finest business plans I've ever read, but it was for a game company. He shopped it to over 200 VC's. No one bit. He eventually got backed by one of the few game publishers that has managed to stay afloat (surprise, surprise).
This is the way the game industry tends to work. Whoever is winning often ends up being the next big publisher.
So in a sense, you could say the game industry has always been in a slump because no one wants to invest directly in start-ups, but in a way, its own incestuous investments are more stable because the winning game developers end up investing in the other game developers.
Amateur game developers are the angel investors that infuse new money into the industry. They work for months - sometimes even years - without pay, draining their savings because they believe in the title.
It may be the case that many developers continue to suffer the marketing politics, the retailer shelf-space bribes, project cancellations, poor back-end compensation, artificial milestones, moving target libraries, and turnover. However, the consumers will not.
Ask yourself if the film industry or music industry or book industry has ever really "crashed". There are lots of starving, passionate actors, musicians, and writers, but consumers continue to see great selection year after year.
It would take something really major, like the repeal of copyright law or a way for pirates to have access to considerably higher bandwidth media and connections than the developers have access to in order to cause serious damage to the game, movie, music, or book industries.
In 1984 my brother and I were both turned off by the crap being sold for consoles and turned to the commodore 64, which had a very healthy gaming market, and never skipped a beat (plus, you could actually PROGRAM it. What a beautiful assembly language it had!). People shouldn't talk about the video game crash of 1984 but rather about the console crash of 1984, because all my friends at the time were playing tons of games on their commodores and apple IIs and we were all lusting after the AMIGA!
Video games didn't crash in 1984; consoles did. I think the same statement may be applicable in 2002, as the author of the article indicates.
This article ignores one of the factors of the 1983 crash. Cheap home computers. Parents could buy a system that would let kids do their homework (that old salesman's story) and at the time had much better capabilities than the braindead 2600 (which was an ancient system by that time, true, but it was the king). Consoles have always face irrelevancy in terms of price vs. capabilities of computers. The NES came out and for its price it couldn't be beat by computers for years to come (especially since the PC was taking over the market where more game-capable systems were losing relevance). The gap between when a console comes out and it is matched in price vs. capabilities is shrinking rapidly. Because the consoles are getting more expensive, and their capabilities are only slightly better than a PC in the same order of price magnitude. Meanwhile, satisfactory gamers' PCs are getting cheaper by the minute. The X-box and Indrema only make it official. For the same price and capabilities, plus the ability to "do homework on it" makes it the preferred choice. A cheap PC becomes the hot new console. And that, my friends, is the end of the console era.
One of the great hidden secrets of the video game industry is that 50% of all products lose money, 40% break even, and 10% make a profit. Of those 10%, only a handful make what could be considered a spectacular profit.
I think the author is off base about what would cause another video game crash (something that comes up every couple of years, going back to at least 1990). This time around the issue that development is hugely expensive, takes two to three years, and games have to do exceptionally well just to make up development costs. The next time you read a poor or mediocre review of a game, consider that a team of 20 was slaving away on that game, day in and day out, since 1998. This is in a different class than a band spending two months to write and record a weak album. Daikatana is a high profile example of a failed game, but the sad truth is that most games follow the same path; it's just that they don't have a well-known figure managing the team.
I'm going to elucidate here what I think is the fundamental advantage of PC gaming over console gaming as they each stand today.
;)
;) But other than that, I don't expect to end up with many games unless I find some reliable journalists or a friend who rents the things like crazy.
The list of console games I've bought since I started seriously gaming on my PC (circa Quake) is very short.
I played Einhander (PSX) at a friend's (who rented it) house, loved it, and bought it.
I borrowed Final Fantasy Tactics (PSX) from that same friend, loved it, and bought it.
I bought Viewpoint (PSX) cuz it was $8 and I remembered playing it on a NeoGeo arcade machine. It sucks
I've also bought a number of NES and SNES games, like Super Metroid, Star Fox, Wizards & Warriors, and Power Blade, that I had played before and picked up because they were relatively cheap.
What do all these have in common? I'd played them before. I'm most likely to buy a console game if I have the opportunity to play it for a significant amount of time before purchase time. And while it's true that many used game stores like our local BuyBack Games chain will let you play used games for a minute on their in-store systems, that's not the same thing. I'm talking about the kind of sample experience you get from - here it comes - a PC game demo.
I haven't bought a single PC game in recent memory that I didn't download a demo or or borrow from a friend first (well there was Half-Life, but that was a gift. And come on, it's Half-Life!) There are hundreds of PSX titles out there, but I only own 7 of them, because I have no reasonable way of finding out which ones I'd like. Gaming journalism is largely a joke, the writers tend to have $5000 PC's and every console in history, have played more games than I've ever even seen or heard of, and have editors that won't let them come out and say a game sucks balls. And renting games based solely on the box-back propaganda (and maybe some of the aforementioned BS journalism) for $5 doesn't float my boat.
So I think that once broadband internet becomes really pervasive, the best thing the console industry could do for itself would be to create a system for downloadable game demos. Gamers could log on to a central repository of demos, and browse them by (BS journalistic) rating, genre, number of downloads, or whatever. This would give us a reasonable way to thresh the wheat from the chaff.
I plan to buy a Playstation2 (eventually) mainly because it plays DVD's, and because it's Squaresoft's main platform. If there ends up being a Final Fantasy Tactics 2, that'll be worth the whole $300+$50 right there
MoNsTeR
What? have you ever heard of the stock market? C'mon, speculation on Games/Game companies is huge! While I don't agree that a "Crash" is coming, console manufacturers are on shakey ground. Especially as PC prices drop. How many parents will spend $450+ on a PS2 for their kids, when a decent PC with a good video card will display better graphics, surf the web, do word processing, and play DVD's? I had enough touble getting a Sega Master System out of my Parents.
Consoles are (in their current form) on the way out. That being said, manufacturers need to bring the console closer to the PC in terms of functionality, thus merging the two into one unit.
For now, companies that pump out crappy 3D shooters, Lame, over-done racing games, or RTS Games that are a genneration behind, are certainly in danger. But for the most part, companies designing cutting edge 3D or MMP games, are going to continue to fare well. One thing the tech sector has proven in the last year is that like the rest of the corporate world, sales mean everything. Sell your game, make money, don't sell your game... you get turfed.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads