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Razor Blade Games?
Oxygen99 writes "There's a story on the BBC News website regarding the financial impact on game developers of the next generation of consoles. The article states that while the cost of producing games increases exponentially as new technology comes online, consumer prices stay approximately the same, leading to an unsustainable financial environment for many small developers. With many small development teams already hurting from the crippling costs of development for the X-Box, GameCube and PlayStation 2, what happens when the X-Box2 or Playstation 3 arrives? Are the days of small scale game development over? Will we ever see a new Jeff Minter? Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?"
When economic pressures like this get built up, that provides an opportunity for someone to deliver a solution to some of these problems that reduces cost and/or time of development. For example, rather than producing Hollywood-caliber graphics on a custom basis for each game, perhaps that function is better served by standalone companies that create characters and associated animations that game developers can license for use.
Bottom line is that the demand side will determine what happens here - if the market can sustain higher prices for games, the current trend could continue for a while. If a big-budget game flops dramatically, however, you'll see a restructuring of the process that could result in a major shakeout within the industry...
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It's too hard to make Beowulf clusters from old Gillettes.
Smaller shops will likely continue to innovate, especially in new markets like cell phones and PDAs, where compactness of code and short development cycles pay off quickly. You will not likely see Doom XXVIII on your Samsung NPH-3500 phone, but you might just see Bookworm coming soon.
Don't be fooled into thinking that consoles and PC are - forgive the pun - the only game in town.
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Increased maturity of a market => less place for little player.
I see the game industry moving along much the same path as the movie industry did. Today, independent films are still made, movie enthusiasts support them, and they are a great way for individuals or small groups to get noticed and get on large projects that make real money.
I am hoping that moviegoers are getting saturated by the overly formulaic movies they're being given, and will shift the focus back to smaller budget films that are more original. But I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the movie biz right now. For those that crave original, small-budget films, there's no shortage of them.
How much does it take to get started developing on these systems?
There will always be a high demand for the latest and greatest games/consoles from the pre-teen to the post-teen age groups. The thing is, we have gotten a taste, starting with Pong, and will never get enough until you jack us straight in, and get a virtual reality that is more than a messy abortion. Addiction is a word that comes to mind, and people will do anything to pay for their addictions.
"Sheep just follow the easiest path and run from scary noises and intimidating creatures." - Me
The days of the 8-bit micro was the golden era when it came to small developers(otherwise known as geeks in bed-rooms/garages/basements). You'd have the same person doing the coding, graphics and sound and still have something that did n't look amaturish compared to the big guys. You just cant do that these days, and especially so because graphics and sound have much more prominence then playability did back in the day.
:)
I still remember those 1.99 games being available at my local newsagent. Ahh let the nostalgia begin
Just look at printers. You can purchase a new printer for nearly the same cost or sometimes LESS then purchasing new ink cart.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
To me this is good news for gamers. True, it will result in a lot of lowest common denominator crap. But this analogy suggests a lot of positive aspects as well. For one, I personally happen to like blockbuster movies, and I'm glad that the market is such that someone can justify spending $300 mio or so on the LOTR trilogy (to name just one example).
At the same time, there is space for the little guy in the film industry to some extent. Innovative filmmakers can still make a name for themselves on a superlow budget (e.g. Clerks. In my view this applies even more to the gaming world, where a clever idea can be a huge hit without requiring dozens of programmers and designers to implement (consider Tetris).
Anything that makes really stunning high-budget output possible is more than fine by me.
Peer Pressure
Should develop smaller games. For every Grand Theft Auto 3, there's a Tetris.
The Big Hollywood style productions can be handled by the huge companies, while the smaller companies can do innovative things like games that actually have gameplay value as opposed to eyecandy value.
Gameplay value is timeless and largely not driven by technology. If need be, license the high end graphics from someone else rather than reinvent the wheel. But someone should be working on making games playable, re-playable, and fun.
A prime area for small-time, moderate budget development? AI. *Good* AI, that learns and adapts, for example, is something I'd like to see. AI that gets lazy and complacent and forgets sometimes, for that human feel, and to prevent things from getting too difficult.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
things get bigger and more complex and so do the development environments. the big get bigger in this scenerio--for a while. there's almost always a new development--ie *nix--to bring things back to earth. in the end a good idea can overcome the cost of easy development.
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
Not sure if you were trying to be funny or not, but in (pretending?) to miss the point you've sure made a good one of your own.
The unofficial
Why do video game prices have to go up because the the technology is improving? Computers have consistently become more complex, but their prices have been going down. The number of people playing video games is also going up quite rapidly, resulting in more customers for video game companies. Maybe they have to do more development, but that is the same for all new technologies. If video game companies are losing money, it's because of nothing but a crappy business model.
(I think that the answer to this factoid observation is self-evident, but I'll post it anyway.)
The costs of developing large-scale games only affects the developers of large-scale games. As noted abundantly by others, such games tend to fit certain well-defined genres: RTS, MMORPG, FPS, RPG... indeed, the whole reason we even have and know these acronyms is because the styles of games have become extraordinarily pigeonholed.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Take Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - the game only works because gamers have been trained to go along with the scripting and accept the monolithic linearity of the missions. If you do, however, you get a pretty grand experience.
But the point is this: A few game niches have become so overproduced that independent developers can't hope to compete - but the rest of the market is wide open.
And what a wide-scale market that is! How many genres have barely been tapped, or not yet invented? How do you even classify something like Popcap's Insaniquarium? Or PaRappa the Rapper, or Dance Dance Revolution? Those are pretty easy games to design and develop, and they're fiercely fun. Window dressing is extra - but for these innovative games, window dressing is secondary to gameplay. (What a novel concept!)
Bottom line: Independent developers should not mimic Electronic Arts and try to compete in these highly stylized, overbudgeted affairs. But there's plenty of untapped gaming out there, just waiting for someone with a smidge of vision and a touch of imagination. Go get 'em, guys!
David Stein, Esq.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Oh, who am I kidding? Anything released to the console market without 3D graphics, genuine B-list actors providing the voiceovers, and 16.7 zillion colors is doomed to failure.
DecafJedi
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
There never really was room for small players in the console market. Look at the old Atari days. You had Atari and Activision and them some other big compaines moved in. There where some little guys but not that many and they sort of lived in the cracks that the big boys did not want. Only home computers let little game makers live. Even then if you where a small company starting off you might do better starting with a less popular computer than the Atari, C64, or Apple. Writing for a getting a CoCo game reviewed might have been easier than getting an Apple II game reviewed.
There is room for small game companies. Just not on the Playstation or the X-Box.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Will you people PLEASE stop perpetuating this rumor.
The only consoles to be sold at a loss were the Dreamcast and the XBox. The XBox is no longer sold at a loss.
no
Nintendo has feared that this was coming since they decided to create the Gamecube. They saw that more and more we are only getting sequal's and games with a Disney license since they are a sure fire seller. In response to this the former President of Nintendo (the mighty and wise Hiroshi Yamauchi) started a little project called the QFund. It has multiple purpose's, but one of them is to promote the idea of less expensive development (Nintendo has been doing numerous internal things to drop their production costs). The QFund has a few restrictions on it that help to this point. First of all any project gets money from QFund must finish the game in one year. If they go past that point they can loss funding. They also must use GBA connectivity. Some might claim that is a gimmick to get more people using that for Nintendo, but some of us believe this could actually lead to some real innovations :P
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I would like to see more development for classic platforms. Despite all the graphics and realism, new games are not neccesarily any more or less fun than games were in the early 90s. The development of emulators such as snes9x make it plausible for regular people to develop their own applications for the snes. It would be very interesting to see open source projects based on older gaming systems instead of the bleeding edge.
Let the large developers have their bleeding edge. There's no reason that smaller developers can't continue developing on an older system. Or is the gaming community really so shallow that it will always choose the shiniest graphics, and the most dazzling effects over the content and fun of the game?
Game programers should stop re-inventing the wheel and use common game engines, at least for the graphics. I realize that lots of games have been made by liscensing the Quake 3 engine or Unreal engine, this seems like a potential way for smaller developers to have access to reasonably good looking technology to drive the PS3, xbox 2 or N5.
One of the real problems is that there is little room for games with lower expectations. I'd be really happy to buy a bunch of ten hour games that had less technical wows but much heart, especially if their retail price was reasonable.
How many gamers do you know that buy the latest games at $50? Most games sold at $50 are the blockbusters that sell to the general public rather than the hardcore gamers. But it's the hardcore gamers who buy more than 1 game every few months. I buy a ton of games but I've learned to be patient and buy games a month or two or even 12 later than the release date, simply to get the game for $20 or less. There is a big market for new games at lower prices that is not being tapped.
Not everyone has 40 to 80 hours to sink into the latest rpgs and not every game needs to be Final Fantasy VII. I really love the Ikaruga's of this world. Final Fatasy VII cost $35 million to make and had a staff of over 100 people. On the other hand, 95% of Ikaruga was made by THREE people. (For instance, the music was written by the same guy who did the game's background art!)
I kinda get the feeling that the industry might be heading towards another major evolutionary period, similar to the market crashes of the late atari era... I'm just not sure what it will look like.
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What is needed is for game developers to stop throwing money into the photorealistic hole. Anime is a perfectly acceptable graphic style designed for mass production. By reducing the amount of "detail" using artisitic license you can focus more on game play, scripts, and quality assurance.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
...rather than games with better graphics.
Something that irks me about recent games is that many of them are unoriginal, have worse-than-average gameplay... and a huge graphics budget.
For instance, I find that WarCraft III gameplay is much, much worse than StarCraft (could just be my low-end machine with a crappy graphics card), and the heros and other additions don't make the game much more interesting.
Similarly, Diablo II was probably the most unoriginal RPG I've ever played; the graphics are excellent but the plot is thin and the gameplay is mediocre. (It's damn addictive, tho). Compare the Baldur's Gate series, which has worse graphics and decent gameplay, and a better plot.
Anyone here ever played Liero? An ancient, free 2d Worms-but-realtime shooter? That game was more fun than many of the FPS games I've played. The graphics were shit, but the controls were responsive, the weapons were balanced (and numerous, and MODable), and the modes were fun.
I think this article nicely pinpoints the problem with many games today. The graphics teams soak up all the budget, and the guys that write an actual plot into the game, balance it, and adjust the gameplay don't do anything. They add in an assload of really cool spells/weapons/whatever, but then nobody actually uses most of them because a few of them are overpowered.
Maybe I'm just like those oldtimers ranting for a return to the "good old" days, but I'd like to see creative new FPS, one with nontrivial tactics (haven't seen one since Counterstrike), and for once a well thought-out TBS game. Alpha Centauri was close, but like many games, they put in too many features. The features ended up unbalanced, buggy, and their interactions were poorly thought-out. As a result, play didn't scale well and the AI sucked.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
> send the development to India
"Fight!"
Madhusudan Vishnu vs. Muhammad Amin, round two.
The unofficial
I've been programming for many many years on many different platforms, I'm an expert in C and x86 assembly and I've done a lot of stuff with OpenGL and a good amount with DirectX not to mention being proficient in just about any area of programming you could think of. The problem is that a game engine like DOOM 3 is not a stand-alone work. It is rather the evolution of the first DOOM engine through all the iterations of Quake. I could write the first DOOM engine. I could probably even write something like Quake 2. But as a small developer, I cannot possibly break into this market when I'm competing with people who are evolving and reusing code that they've had for years. They just keep making it a little better. I can't do that because I don't have years and years of succesful 3d projects to draw from and improve upon.
No small developer can jump 6 levels of technology to get to the current state-of-the-art and compete with large developing firms. Programming, like everything, is an iterative process; so as games get larger(code-size) and more complex with more and better technology packed into them, it will be harder and harder for small developers to break in the market. Most of them end up buying a decent 3d engine from someone else. And with faster graphics cards and games like Warcraft 3 and PlanetSide, all games are beginning to rely on evolved technology. A small developer's game (whether its an FPS or an RTS or an MMORPG) can't compete with the beauty and speed of a large company's engine that has been revised and rewritten and composed of a multitude of high speed algorithms and computing tricks that have been drawn from a large code base. Which relegates us all to the realm of shareware...or, on the bright side, perhaps open source community projects.
Snood is a nearly-exact knockoff of Taito's Puzzle Bobble: Bust-A-Move, played only by players who are unwilling to either buy a console or install an emulator to get the Real Thing.
But yes, I get your point that simple games such as Bust-A-Move can be fun without requiring too much of a budget. The problem here is finding that killer game formula, a needle in a haystack.
Will I retire or break 10K?
consoles publishing is very similar to that of mainstream movies, print, and pc gaming. (independent pc gaming is fairly healthy now, but is about as 'popular' as art-house movie theatres)
a console has a barrier for entry - just like getting your film into a loews cineplex, getting your PC game into CompUSA, or getting your book into Barnes and Nobles.
-developers- can remain small - but small publishers evaporate.
this is not a new twist in gaming, it's an emergent trend from the last 10 years. certainly, it's a market that costs money to break into. you either have it independently, or you pitch for it.
what does it mean for the industry?
well it nearly guarantees that games will continue to be as derivative as hollywood, and the ny times fiction list.
Anything remotely 'new' will get beaten into the ground in long-running strings of sequels (gta, doom, die hard, and Tom Clancy novels are not so different)
Innumerable 'knockoffs' will get published to try to ride the wake of what is 'new', and maybe once every 4 years something really cool and different from the norm comes out.
but it will quickly be emulated, immitated, and desecrated.
will it go the razor blade sales model?
no. that's ridiculous. the razor-blade sales model relies on producing inexpensive pieces, and packaging them as an expensive whole. (even with 4 blades in a refill, gilette is making money hand over fist - even on the cute handle)
Nintendo has shown that using your console as a loss-leader is not necessary (they make money on each console as well as each game) their lack of market share in the US and Europe is more directly due to nintendo's tight control over game developers, and their resultant small selection of games. microsoft and sony resorted to dumping, to try to capture large chunks of the market. with the new consoles becoming more and more complex, and incorporating more and more general functions - they most certainly will -not- be 'given' away. (xbox2 and ps3 almost certainly will carry pvr functionality)
they may be sold at a marginal loss, so long as there is healthy competition in the market, but it would never come down to handing someone a console. primarily because there would then be no 'attachment' to the title. everyone would own every console in short order. What xbox/ps2 owner would pass up wind waker or sunshine if they didn't have to pay for the GC? likewise with ps2 owners buying halo, and xbox owners buying gta:vice city. and if there's no brand loyalty - well then who's to say that MS will -ever- get their money back from game sales to support eating the cost of the console? particularly from the 'casual' gaming market - who would buy maybe a half dozen games. (and most likely, the 2 best from each main system). 2 games does not cover MS loss on the xbox, or Sony's on the ps2.
so what -does- this mean?
it does mean the end of originality on the store shelf - but that's been not-so-slowly happening since the early 90s.
perhaps if electronic distribution catches on, then this trend can be avoided - but i'm not holding my breath.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
That's not what he means.
Let's say company A makes characters. Company B can either buy them or sub-contract them to create new characters for their games.
Therefore, letting the game company worry about the game itself. This is commonly done with sound effects and music. (outsourcing, more than licensing though)
XBoxes are still sold at a loss (remember that retailers do make a profit on those units figure MS gets less than $150 per X-box). I'd guess that the cost of a unit is around $200, it was $300+ when introduced. The whole program, including games sales (which are quite profitable) generated almost $1 billion in losses for MS this year (ending in June). Many consoles are sold at a loss initially, since the manufacturer knows that eating a few months of losses might give them a year of profits on the back end, when a better console might still be sold, so they tend to pack the best stuff they think they can resonably get away with at the time.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
My biggest problem with this change is that games are getting too short. If I don't finish a story-oriented game, the real reason is that the game has suddenly become extremely difficult for no good reason and frustrating, not because I lack the patience to finish it.
Solutions will arrive automatically. Thankfully we've already seen the start of this via Middleware - software by a third party which is hired/loaned and used for development. PS2 and Xbox have successfully helped build an entire middleware community and a new source of revenue. Now small bedroom programmers can either be responsible for middleware or the "end game" software.
Let us not lament- Sony is the current market leader and also happens to be the only manufacterer who opened up their console for easy programming (anyone remember the Sony Yazoo (or whatever it was called) for the PSX - a home development system) and is also selling Linux kits without a free cease and desist letter to anyone who uses linux on their PSX.
There's still space out there for bedroom developers, it's just that bedroom developers are changing!
Frogmanalien
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency (Eugene McCarthy)
Development costs aren't growing 'exponentially'.
Tools are improving. Efficiency is improving. Developers can now farm out music, art creation, testing, etc. to contractors. They can buy in engines and middleware.
Furthermore there is no hard-and-fast rule stating that just because a game can eat up $10 million budget, that that is the minimum that has to be spent to make a technically sound, playable and marketable game.
Further-furthermore, each hardware generation has a larger user base, offsetting the increased costs.
I do appreciate that it is an expensive business though, and consolidation is probably the wisest course of action for many smaller companies around today.
'The new consoles could have up to 1,000 times more processing power than current models' is not even worth responding to...
Oh, and *Jez San* is saying development is too expensive? Then don't pour millions into endlessly protracted projects that then get canned, dumbass!
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For example, there's a huge boom in Symbian and J2ME devices with the new mobile phones at present. Could code for that - that can't produce the effects which take up all the time on a big-hardware gmae, but it can sill be extremely playable. Sort of back to the late 8-bit/early 16-bit stages.
The Gameboy Advance can use homebrew cartridges - why not have a crack at writing something for that? It's about up to the standards of the old SNES (I think it's identical except for sound channels, though I'm prepared to be corrected on that), and the old SNES had some truly brilliant games.
I'd suggest that if the cost of developing for one platform starts heading for the stratosphere, then look around for platforms that don't have that problem.
Cheers,
Ian
The problem here is not the characters, but the fact that the games were not willing to explore any new ground story-wise.
I mean, I remember playing "The Lion King"; all you did was play the storyline of the movie! I already knew exactly everything that was going to happen. Big whoop.
Now, if they had made it more of an RPG, with an action component, and extended the universe with a new story, THEN it might have been interesting. Combining likeable characters you already know with NEW adventures might have made for quite an improvement!
But no.. they followed formula, formula, formula. Though I must admit, the ability to throw the other player around in a two player "Chip and Dale" game made it worth every penny at the time. };)
One thing I am noticing is that games today are, getting way too complex with regards to graphics, geometry, lighting, etc. It takes a TON of time and money to design, build, texture, test, and finalize these worlds. "What's your point you ask?" - Its this: That the gameplay isn't THAT much different today than it was say 5 years ago (exept with AI development), and quite frankly I don't play the game for the eye candy (although that enhances my experience while playing).
Game enjoyment is all about challenge, goal accomplishment, and interaction with AI in the computer. These are paramount elements, and these costs can be normalized to fairly predictable levels. The eye candy is on the list but not that near the top for me, and yet game developers sink huge dollars into this.
I really don't "enjoy" Quake III or UnrealTournament2003 any more than Quake II or UnrealTournament1999 except where BOT AI is concerned. This is because the GAMEPLAY has improved because of AI development, not because a building is made of 3000 objects instead of 500.
Does anyone else feel this way??
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Will we ever see a new Jeff Minter?
Why would we need to see a new Jeff Minter when the current one is single-handedly (well, with some financial support from Lionhead Studios) making a GameCube game right now: Unity.
Somehow, I doubt that Unity will cost $30 million. Smaller scale game dev is still possible -- so long as you don't want $29 million worth of theatrics, and $1 worth of a game.
Ok, so I'm having a large reaction to what I feel is a change in the balance of power.
1. It started with small unknown developers writing games for the PC.
2. The small unknown developers become giants.
3. The consoles allow the giants to sell more games to people who don't understand computers.
4. The giant can no longer afford to develop PC games because they need to put all their development into consoles.
5. Nobody buys anything but consoles and console games because that is the only thing the developers program for.
The end...PC gaming DOA.
What I generally dislike about consoles...
1. Doesn't allow mouse control.
2. Doesn't have high-resolution > 1024x768. And even if it did, that doesn't mean much to people who don't have HDTV.
3. You are locked into the game...no modding.
4. You can't always freely connect with other large groups over the net without using a system that was developed to monitor your gameplay...like Microsoft's.
5. How about setting up a 32 player server with a console?
6. Ever try to backup your console game CD?
7. Can you upgrade you console system without throwing out the entire box?
8. Why do you say consoles are easier? PC game interfaces are exactly the same (on screen configuration and controls)?
9. Consoles are sold separately from PCs. An investment in a console is not an investment in my PC. Why would I do that?
The end.
++more.
These software folks are just beginning to feel the disaster which hit pinball years ago. As pins went electronic (CPU-based operation vs solenoids and cam wheels), the development and production costs went up and up. And just like vids, the perception was that people wanted ever more features and fancy doo-dads in their pinball game. But for some strange reason, humans can't deal with the fact that a quarter is not worth what it was in 1960 :-( . So even tho' an inflation-adjusted game of pinball should cost at least a couple bucks, operators are limited to charging 50 or 75 cents per game. This is one of the main reasons pins are disappearing from the scene. In fact, there's only one company still making them -- and it ain't Bally, Williams, or Gottlieb (or Chicago Coin for you cognoscenti out there :-) ).
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Now, if they had made it more of an RPG, with an action component
Hmmm... possibly like the Mana engine... smells good.
and extended the universe with a new story, THEN it might have been interesting.
For one thing, Disney might have dictated terms to Virgin that prohibited writing new story lines because any new story lines might conflict with the direction Disney wanted to take the characters in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride.
Better would have been to do like Rare did in Goldeneye for N64: missions inspired by the movie, with more depth in each mission than was explored in the movie, and a couple extra missions that might as well have been "deleted scenes" in the movie. Completely linear levels where the player dies instantly if he leaves the track, such as if he jumps off the ostrich in the "Can't Wait to Be King" mission of The Lion King for Super NES, are a Bad Thing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you are looking for a handheld console that has a free SDK, can be used with any development environment on Linux, Mac or Windows then have a look at the GamePark 32 which is available in Korea and soon into Europe.
:)
I recommend looking at the GP32 site though as it has better descriptions, reviews, news and gives you a great overview of what is possible. It is the first 'Open' console that's been produced and already has quite a 'bedroom' community that has sprung up around it.
Not only it is open, it just happens to be the most powerful handheld console out there and there's ports of Doom, Heretic on it already as well as Atari ST, Gameboy, SMS, PC Engine and Megadrive emulators. It has a built in MP3 player and you can also plays DivX movies if you pay a small fee (3.50/$6) for the player. All the commerical games for it are very cheap too - most in the 7/$12 bracket.
In short it is superb and runs on standard Smart Media Cards so once you've bought the console you aren't tied to buying proprietry hardware like the Gameboy.
So, you have no excuses now - buy one, start developing and make money!
There is little doubt that we are coming closer and closer to a "market correction" (and not just in the US, see the "What's Wrong with the Japanese Gaming Industry" series at tokyopia.com). The hows, whens, and whats of the issue, however, are really rather hard to predict. There are a few developments I predict for the future of the "gaming industry", which may or may not directly result from said market correction:
1) Shorter games at cheaper prices - This has already been brought up several times, but I think this will be one of the major themes in the future. If gamers truly are searching for "cinematic experiences", then why do many modern games promising to deliver on this account run 40 hours, when the average movie runs around 2? Shorter games will be the perfect forum for testing the new ways of telling stories that have yet to be developed (and which will most likely be pioneered from smaller and/or open-source independent development houses).
2) A resurgence of older games - Say a big industry powerhouse suddenly finds itself publishing games for a market that is no longer investing in the big-budget rehashes that said powerhouse has been investing, well, big-budgets in. It won't take too many $20 million dollar investments to flop before the company starts hemmorhaging. The answer? Tapping into the incredible backlogs of intellectual property that the company has at its fingertips, possibly stretching all the way back to the 8th bit generation. What better way to recoup on failed development investments than by re-releasing older products with little development investment required? This would mean that we finally see legal emulators released on new-generation consoles (what a major coup for Nintendo, if they were to suddenly to gain a huge chunk of Sony's marketshare simply by releasing an official SNES emulator and working with developers to ensure quality re-releases!)
3) Gaming will find its Voice - Maybe not directly related to the Crash, one development that is certain will be a rising interest in looking at video games from an "academic" perspective. Institutions such as the IGDA and publications such as Game Studies are heralding a new age of vdeo gaming discussion, criticism, and theory. And as we well know there have been several calls-to-arms among the video game journalism crowd (which the quality members of will also help to fuel the desire among gamers to get their hands on some of the older games through their nostalgic advocacy of previous classics). It is only a matter of time before a common language for game theory is developed. After that, the sky won't even be a limit!
4. Innovation based on older technologies - If you were thinking this category is just an excuse to throw out some links to Tenebrae screenshots, well, you were right (and stop reading my mind already!). Do yourself a favor and feast your eyes on some of these (Tenebrae) and these (Tenebrae2). These engines are based off the GPL'ed Quake 1 source, people! I mean, OMFG! T2 could be on par with Doom3 (in terms of capability, if not performance...yet), and it is _open-source_! Under the _GPL_! Which means it can only keep getting better! Alright, I better stop here or else I'll exceed my quota of exclamation points...
5) Convergence of Media - Check out this excellent article from gamesindustry.biz that contains speculations about Sony's long-term plans. Better believe the PSP will be my "Walkman" once it's released!
Okay, I think that is all I have to say for the moment. I am very excited fo
I think garage developers are far from finished.
There's a gigantic mass of untapped territory out there. All it takes is creativity. As John Carmack himself mentioned, big companies have trouble breaking away from molds. They produce "lock-in" conditions for themselves, being forced to run the same old games and formulae time and time again.
Games, like anything else, exist on a fitness landscape. Games like the shooters are searching for pinnacles, ever higher, in one very narrow area.
If id software broke away from their formula and tried something new, they'd then be duking it out with smaller developers, or houses with some money but without a huge popular name, like CDV/Fireglow (Divine Divinity, Sudden Strike)
Much of the bottleneck for small developers is art. Textures and models. These are hard to do, even for talented and skilled specialist artists.
I think a solution here is one that's fallen almost totally by the wayside in the last few years, and that's proceduralism. In other words, draw textures and models, as much as possible, procedurally-- as the insightful guy above said, parametric models are starting, and I think that's a way of coding that's going to revolutionize the way things are done.
Also, buildings, dungeons, plants, city maps... all these things can be done as L-systems or as other types of grammars. It's not impossible, it just takes a little bit "more work" right up front, and the things get tons easier. Like so many other programming tasks. And then you have almost endless replay, until you see to the bottom of what the system can do.
Id and Blizzard may not be around forever. They may be the SirTechs and the Broderbunds and the Beagle Brothers of today, to be supplanted tomorrow by hungrier smaller companies.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
They can't afford to produce for the console? Well, earn your stripes in the world of pc games. Once you can make money there, you can license the stuff for the consoles and move on.
This really doesn't seem like the end of the world.
Someone mentioned this above, but almost no "code" is reused in the sequels you listed above besides Doom 1-2 (almost the same game) and Quake 1-2. What is reused in the 'big' jumps is the experience of the developers and their understanding of 3D in a computer world.
Take Starcraft, for instance (I know it's not an id game, but I know beyond doubt that what I say about Starcraft below is true). The very first build of Starcraft was made by adding onto and editing the Warcraft II engine Blizzard already had. After about three complete start-from-scratch redesigns, the game was released. What is used are the ideas and concepts, but the physical Warcraft II code was not carried over. Quake III was made in a similar fashion, with start-from-scratch code.
I just finished reading Masters of Doom, and I'm fairly confident in saying that Carmack and his team could all walk away from id Software and make a new FPS called 'Mountain Dew Menace' or something with Doom 3 caliber graphics because they have the skills and the knowledge.
Just thought of something, too. I'm fairly certain Quake 2 was a complete redesign due to a part of Masters of Doom where Romero gets the code from Carmack and has trouble porting Daikatana from Quake 1 to Quake 2 because Quake 2's codebase was so radically different than Quake 1's.
So, in short, Doom 3's code has nothing to do with Doom 1's code. Only the concepts have evolved, not the actual if-thens.
Many of us would like to see a return to gameplay over graphics. That's essentially the problem here. Games didn't cost as much to make when the focus was on gameplay and not on making the game as realistic as humanly possible. That's why some of us have flocked to the Gameboy Advance and dropped consoles altogether. Because we want to play fun games, not crappy games that look REALLY realistic. I know this will never happen, but how about a return to that type of gaming? Maybe a solution for some companies. There's definitely a market there. Now back to Advance Wars (which is infinitely more fun than any game I ever played on a modern console save GTA: Vice City).
Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?
Hate to break it to you, but manufacturers have been selling consoles at a loss for a long time now. Their business models rely on profits in software sales to recoup their hardware development and manufacturing costs.
Besides the initial financial risk to the console manufacturer, this model causes tremendous stress to the software development companies as the manufacturer negotiates harsher deals to allow themselves a greater profit margin. With the costs of development systems going up with each new platform release, not to mention contractual obligations, console software development is not an easy market to get into. This isn't likely to improve either.
The only possibility of this situation improving is manufacturers driving-up the retail prices of consoles far enough to recover costs on inital sale - but then they price themselves out of the market. This isn't likely to happen.
With games coming into new devices, such as mobile phones, at least there's opportunity for development companies to grow into areas other than the console market.