Slashdot Mirror
Gaming Industry Going Down?
Stefan Constantinescu wrote to mention an Inquirer article positing that the gaming industry is due for another crash. From the article: "Sadly, the gaming industry is in a self-imposed death spiral. Everyone is putting on a brave face, touting the latest v6 of a game that came out before most of it's audience was born. What was a fun hobby full of creative geniuses and their mad art has become a grey corporate parking lot. We are about to take that dive again, the industry is desperately trying to speed up the process with each passing day. Rather than take a step back, they are addicted to marketing plans and money men. It will kill them, and in a few years, good will arise from the ashes. It happened with arcades, it happened with the first wave of consoles, and is about to happen again. It is high time someone flushed the toilet that the games industry has become, it will do us all a world of good."
I'm not so sure these days. Games seem to be eating Hollywood's lunch, which is bad for theaters, and small development houses grow merge and die off but that's the norm. There's nothing which would indicate a full blown game crash like the 1983 Atari debacle.
{ - Generic Guy - }
Yeah but I'm going to take a quality over quantity approach. Sure there's a lot of games coming out but how many are original and fun? How many are rehashes and sequals. How many are the same game under a different name? How many are games that were released 20 years ago and are being sold to suckers feeling a little nostalgia?
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
--
Twoflower
From TFA: How many games are not sequels, fight games, drivers, or FPSes? Few. Just like Hollywood (to which the games industry is endlessly compared) the suits control the expenditure and they lack not only the vision but also the cajones to do anything but look backwards and extrapolate from there. If and when there is a correction the next breed/ style of games will come through.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
I guess it's a valid thing to talk about, but look at where we are right now: Video games are actually semi-cool now - they're no longer limited to a nerd's basement, more people are buying games than ever before, and gaming is actually competing with Hollywood. Movies are boilerplate also, and nobody is preaching the impending doom of that industry.
Also the fact that games are becoming cookie-cutter has no bearing on this conversation. If you think that gaming is getting stale now, remember not THAT much has changed since the original Doom.
It seems that the industry is heading for a full on collision with a brick wall. I've noticed that with just about every big movie, there is a game that is being released alongside it. With every big franchise, there will always be a sequal, and sadly they are always better than the first, but never offer anything new. So your left with a happy feeling, but not the same feeling as you would when you play something new.
Take a look at shadow of the collosus or katamari demancy. Should there of been a huge uproar over these games? Yes, because there great games. But its sad how MUCH there adored just because there different.
Even a more sad affair is that the large companies seem to want to bring in more of an audience, to rake in more money, making gaming more mainstream. The mainstream gaming culture is whats bringing gaming to a hault. Sadly its the samething that happened in the 80's, its just a matter of time.
I consider the game industry PC, Consoles, and hand helds. PC games like world of Warcraft have strong Sales. Consoles like the new xbox360 has sold well. Hand helds like the Nintendo DS has sold well. I don't see any signs that things are heading toward a downward spiral. What I will say is it takes large budgets to make most modern games, this may balloon up and explode at some point, but I don't think it will crash the industry, it will just force game developers to be more innovative, and hopefully end the yearly updates and releases of games that arn't much diffferent from the previous years and games (EA sports and MMORPG's as examples).
The decline of the gaming industry is because "big media" has gotten involved. They choose the concept (or sequel, or license), then run it through accounting to see if it fits their return on investment requirements. During development, if they suddenly have a concern over quarterly earnings per share, it may be more attractive for them to cut the game off, toss out the staff, and report minutely better earnings.
It's simply quantity (or eye-candy) over quality, just like television. How many reality shows are there, and how long have most halfway thinking adults been entirely through with that theme?
Good shows are really rare, and as we know, some great shows get cut after one episode if the numbers don't show immediately.
Even pimps run better business than big media.
Two games a few years ago that really stood out (and had huge sales, and even huger income/cost ratios) were Re-volt and Roller Coaster Tycoon. Both games were innovative, fun, and even pretty. But they didn't have million dollar rendered movie cut scenes, any advertizing, or big public rollouts.
The one upside to the downside in the game industry is that it forces some of us to re-enter the real world. There are plenty of fun things to do there.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Crappy games are going to kill the games industry at about the same time that rampant and fervent misuse of the comma kills the Inquirer. And don't get me started about "it's".
Seriously though, I don't think games are any worse (or better) now than they were five years ago. There's still cool, original stuff and there are still sequels. Plenty of games are still fun.
Game Company Database
"How many are rehashes and sequals."
Quite a few. And just as with new properties they vary in quality. I quite enjoyed Call of Duty 2 and think that Civilization 4 packs some truly excellent interface design.
On one hand you could say these are the same old formula, on the other hand they are significant updates.
I think there is a place for updates of older games but we do need more innovation. Katamari was excellent because it was a unique gaming experience and had a unique sense of style and whimsy.
Good graphics and high production values bring something to the table, but they don't make a game fun. Good gameplay can be an elusive thing. Some of the most fun I've had recently has been playing Oasis a clever little puzzle/strategy game. In spite of the rash of high profile holiday releases, I find myself loading it up for a quick game very frequently.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Arcades were a big thing in my city 10 years ago. But, one day, we noticed that all the new "Hot" games that were being released cost 2 quarters to play. Many of us would ponder, is it worth paying more for a game that I know nothing about, only to die in less than 5 minutes? It started to spiral down from there. Now there are no arcades at all in my city, and you'll only find a handful of arcade machines at the big movie theatres. Even there the cheapest game cost 6 quarters (the most expensive needing 16 quarters) to play... i wonder why I never see anyone playing the games.
I could care less what quality an arcade machine has over consoles, i don't care how much it cost for the store / movie theatre / arcade to purchase the machine. Keep arcade games at only one quarter per play, people will play often at such a cheap rate, like they did in the past. You would certainly make alot more money that way than off the odd person that likes to spend 4 bucks for 5 minutes of disappointment.
You'd think it would have dawned on all the arcade owners as to why people just stopped coming to their arcades so many years ago.
If i wanted to hear bullshit, i'd go to church.
"Is the apocalypse nigh? I sure think so. The last one happened at the height of Atari's power, they were invincible, pumping out hit after hit. Pac-Man, ET, Asteroids, movie tie-ins, overflowing arcades and a rabid fan base. They were in the spotlight of the mainstream press, songs making the top 10, and money coming out of their ears. What could go wrong?"
TFA is missing a couple key differences.
(1) Video games are not a nascent market, like they were with the 2600. The biggest market for video games has been playing them their entire life, and have the purchasing power to keep the industry afloat.
(2) PCs and consoles are more ubiquitous in the American home today. The potential market is larger.
I believe that the video game market will not crash. It may not be able to continue in its present form, with tons of high-stakes gambling on low-risk ventures, but the money will be there for the taking... but the terms of competition may change.
If I were a big-time game dev CEO (Ryan, you listening?), I'd be looking at creating an engine that could be used to create many games of different genres & styles... then I'd save on dev costs and be able to focus on content & gameplay. And, be able to license the engine for a long tail.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Of course, who cares what this guy thinks? That's probably why he's so bitter... it's bad enough he's been working his whole life to become a writer, now suddenly his opinion is worth about as much as some dude on blog*.com...
I'll pay attention when more articles like this start originating from developers, project managers, and game industry execs. Oh, and when whole-dollar-sales of video games start to dip. Call me when all of that happens. Until then, can we ignore crackpots ? That'd be nice. Thanks.
If only we could all rip on the games industry as well as this guy does. There was a time when i would have agreed with him, and so would penny arcade (those were good days, good days...) But anyway, I've come to see the games industry the same way i see every creative industry. It's gotten to be large, and innovative. There are many differnt people trying to differnt things differnt ways. Of course, there will be better years, and worse years, knock-offs, blockbusters, trend games, and endless merchandising. But, in the end, these things are natural for this type of industry.
As I see it, if the gaming industry became filled with moneymen and fewer creative geniuses...
Film, TV, Music... its all the same.
There are only about 1, maybe 2 good films in a year also... but we don't use the
scarcity of quality to predict the downfall of cinema.
The gaming industry is doing fine. On a revenue basis, it grows every year. End of story.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
But if you break everything down and look at it in a different light, you'll see we're actually doing WORSE off than back in the NES days.
Back when the NES was the only console around, it had about a 1/3 household penetration. While sales of consoles and games today are WAY higher than back then, you'll find that in the end, the gaming households percentage actually comes to a little bit UNDER 33%. The reason comes mostly from many people owning multiple consoles. Gamers are buying more games, but there aren't relatively many more gamers. Most of the gamer population increase has come purely from the fact theres just plain more people alive now than 20 years ago.
The market itself is shrinking. People are starting to lose interest in gaming as more and more games just do the same things over and over. On top of that, the population actually appears to be ready to head downwards in gaming's target market: teenage boys. In addition, the evergoing battles between developers and publishers is creating a huge lack of innovation. With all of that, it's easy to see that gaming is actually going downhill.
Nintendo is one of the few companies trying to dodge all of these issues, by taking an amazingly ingenious blue ocean strategy to help demolish the market boundaries. I don't think the Revolution is going to save the industry or anything, but it's a damn good start.
So, don't be so quick to judge the state of the industry based simply off the numbers and public media: the issues go much, much deeper than most people realize.
I know that they aren't near as popular as they once were but isn't it because the consoles can do things just as well as arcade games now? Arcades keep trying to adapt too. They've moved onto more specialized games that you can't recreate as well using a home console. I'm not an industry person, that's just how I see it.
Having worked at an arcade for a number of years and played in quite a few tournaments, I can tell you what killed the fighting game craze. Broadband internet connections. Every gamer I knew that was at the arcade all the time in the early to mid 90's plays some type of FPS, MMO, etc online. I don't think the consoles killed the arcades, look at how long the two co-existed. I think the ability to play with other people online is what killed competitive arcade gaming which is what the arcade industry was running on in the mid 90's.
Games like DDR with complex input devices that a casual fan won't build/order at home will always have their place in the arcades, but there is no reason to go and play street fighter in the arcades, when you can play it on your xbox, or kaillara (pc) at home.