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Death to the Games Industry
Greg Costikyan has an article up on The Escapist railing against the current state of the industry. Bigger budgets, obese publishers, and creatively dead franchises that continue to see publishing are snuffing out the opportunity for innovation in an increasingly mainstream market. From the article: "For the sake of the industry, for the sake of gamers who want to experience something new and cool, for the sake of developers who want to do more than the same-old same-old, for the sake of our souls, we have to get out of this trap. If we don't, as developers, all we will be doing for the rest of eternity is making nicer road textures and better-lit car models for games with the same basic gameplay as Pole Position. Spector is right. We must blow up this business model, or we are all doomed. What do we want? What would be ideal? A market that serves creative vision instead of suppressing it. An audience that prizes gameplay over glitz. A business that allows niche product to be commercially successful - not necessarily or even ideally on the same scale as the conventional market, but on a much more modest one: profitability with sales of a few tens of thousands of units, not millions. And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work."
With such gripping, original, and sure-to-be-great games as "50 Cent: Bulletproof" coming up, I find this forecast completely unrealistic.
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
pretty graphics ..pick two...
good gameplay
small budget
If they truly want to "challenge everything", they can start by bringing wing commander back and putting an end to the failure they call Ultima.
In many ways, the gaming industry has become a victim of their own success. When a certain business model brings in lots of cash, it's very tough to give up that model, even if it obviously won't work forever. Successful companies become very fat and happy and will resist change as much as possible. Smaller game makers can eat EA's lunch, since they will be able to effectively innovate as opposed to just tweaking last year's release a little bit. When another company offers gamers something that EA doesn't, the switch will take place. Like in any other industry, the giants will have to reinvent themselves or die off. It's just a matter of how long it takes them to see the changing marketplace.
This doom and gloom stuff from game industry people is becoming officially tiresome. So the game industry is becoming like other mass media industries. Whatever. Just because Hollywood spits out Fantastic Four or War of the Worlds doesn't mean someone still isn't making lots of smaller perfectly good independent films. And it doesn't even mean that the big budget hollywood films are always bad. (Though IMO they generally are.)
I could really give a crap about the latest Madden release or Final Fantasy XXXIV or most of the big gaming franchises. I still find lots of games coming out that I want to play, more than I even have time to play.
So yes, shocked, shocked I am to discover marketing and profiteering going on in this establishment. But so the fuck what? If you're in the game industry and you don't like games with billion dollar budgets and bleeding edge graphics, then make your own damn game on the cheap and publish it yourself. What's that? It's hard to get reliable income that way? Oops! Welcome to the entertainment industry. Where independent filmmakers have for decades been living on ketchup soup and maxed out credit cards to try and get their films in front of people.
When is the last time a solid freeware game caught the imagination of millions? About 15 years.
That's because with today's hardware and the expectation of modern day gamers, it is not economically feasible for a couple guys in their garage to make a massively popular game.
Game development costs are huge. It takes as much or more money to make a AAA title as it does to make a Hollywood movie. And when an innovative and original title comes out and is met in the market with a yawn and no sales (Ico, Res, Katamari Damacy, Animal Crossing - great reviews, no sales), it makes it that much more unlikely that publishers will finance another one.
It's not that there are original ideas are rare, it's that those ideas don't sell a million copies, and that's what you need to finance a game today.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Like what happened when other companies started to outdo EA in their football games?
There's a fool born every minute.
Gaming's not dead. It's not dying, either. It just seems that way to people who've been through a few decades of iterative improvments yielding diminishing returns. People get old, they grow up, and they realize that the games they're buying today don't offer anything new. Well, so what?
There are new suckers being born every minute, and Doom 3 is NEW to them. The industry can just keep selling the same old crap to young new gamers who don't know any better, and a few years later they'll come out the other end of the process, just like the author of this article has now, jaded and thinking that everything's the same old recycled ideas and crappy invocations that have lost sight of the fact that games were supposed to be fun. They're right, of course, but as long as there's enough fools being born every minute, the industry can sustain a business model of cranking out unimaginative crap updated with the latest graphics engine.
That might not mean that the industry has much to offer YOU, the veteran gamer, but you can still enjoy a game of PacMan, of Pitfall!, of Super Mario Bros., of any game that you've ever enjoyed. New games may suck to you, but you're on to the old tricks. If the games were truly better then, why ever leave that era?
Why must you always buy something new in order to have fun? Rejoice in the fact that you'll never have to buy another video game and revel in the library of great console and PC games you've enjoyed for years. Free up that entertainment budget and put it towards your retirement.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Dofus
I played some of it in open beta and it's a little like FF-tactics with a pretty bad French to English translation. However, it's still playable and I would have enjoyed it more if the battles weren't so slow due to players forgetting to "complete" their turns.