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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 cant remember a time that I've had MORE games on my system than today. The industry seems to be doing fine, although I will admit the signal to noise ratio does seem to be going up..
I work in the industry, and I can tell you that this article hits the nail on the head. You see so much more marketting now than every before because the corporate money men want to get their cash and run, and let the developers take the fall when it all comes down. I love capitalism!
Well, your "yearly update" is part of the problem. If you have "Power Nose-Ball 2005," will you pay $60 for "Power Nose-Ball 2006" which is the exact same game, just with a different roster of players, and perhaps slightly improved textures?
But one point of the article that I agree with is a lack of creativity. Look at the following genres:
1) FPS
2) Strategy
3) RPG
4) Sports
5) Platform
6) Car Race
7) Flight/space sim.
How many games do not fit neatly into one of those categories? Very few. A few years ago, I would have listed "Adventure" as a genre. But that genre is a niche market for PCs, and dead for consoles.
Some companies can make games that fit neatly into a genre, and still be well-done and fun to play, but this is sort of like making a new copy of your favorite well-worn sneakers. It is nice and comfortable, but you don't get that "new" feeling.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
As a consumer nestled well within the target demographic for the industry, I have to say I've bought less games this year than ever before.
Admittedly, it's due in part to the glut of games out there. There's a LOT of games coming out weekly, and scant few are worth spending the money on. The last games I've bought myself are Shadow of the Colossus (my god, what a GREAT game), Burnout Legends (basically BO3 on the PSP), Burnout Revenge (mediocre improvements on 3), and that last Incredible Hulk game (lots of destruction, but who's still playing it?). There have been a huge swath of first person shooters out on the PC, action/adventure games on the console, as well as platformers (what are they up to now, Ratchet & Clank XIII?). But most make small improvements (at best) on existing games.
I'm also a fan of MMOs, and as such am more inclined to play ONE game for a much longer period of time than a game I can finish in a weekend.
I've been watching the next gen consoles with great interest, but to be honest none of the launch titles for the 360 really do much for me. I'm not a fan of sports games, which are the very embodiment of what is wrong with the gaming industry, and I can get Call of Duty 2 on the PC for CHEAPER than the 360. Project Gotham Racing 3 looks nice, but I have like three Gran Turismo games kicking around on my PS2. So what's the incentive?
Graphics? Ok things are looking much nicer, but there's no innovative gameplay out there anymore. The last really impressive console game was Colossus, and that's an "old generation" game.
It might be too early to tell. First batches of games for new console generations usually are the suck, until developers start getting ballsy with the hardware. But I'm hoping the industry doesn't bottom out before then.
Just my opinion.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
There's not a shadow of doubt that 8-figure-and-rising development costs per game are utterly unsustainable. The question is, what can be done about it?
The market volume is there, the demand for games is unquenchable, the platforms are in very good shape and gettting better, so the only problem is actually MAKING the products without spending gazillions. And that problem boils down to one (and ONLY one) issue: manpower.
People will immediately object that game assets and development infrastructure cost a lot more than manpower, but my point here is that those things are only *symptoms* of the current problem and not central. You see, game assets only have astronomic price tags when you're licensing a blockbuster title from its blood-sucking owner (and we don't need any more of those), otherwise the cost of assets is simply that of the manpower and computer time needed to create them.
So, here's the most obvious and straightforward solution to the malaise in the gaming industry: knock down the cathedrals of the current games producers, and put game component and game asset development out to tender in the bazaar of the worldwide development community.
Manpower costs would then fall drastically owing to the huge supply of computing skills in the world, and even the machinery costs would plummet since much of it would be personally owned by the distributed developers. Furthermore, this addresses the other two contributory issues that I didn't mention above, lack of reuse in the industry and very little standing on the shoulders of giants. FOSS has a proven track record in that area.
Of course, this doesn't tackle the whole problem, but it certainly rips out its rotting heart. And freed from the shackles of megabuck production costs and the time-to-market issues that they create, I have no doubt that novelty in games will start to flourish again. There is no shortage of amazing ideas in the world.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
And I'm not saying that I wouldn't like some new kinds of game to play, but I think that the reason that the current games-types are popular and sell so well is because they are GOOD. They may be derivative, but that doesn't prevent something from being fun.
If your definition of "diving in the crapper" is being more popular and widespread than ever before, then you need to realize that games are a business to make money. I'm not saying that the article is incorrect, but I'm saying that it seems odd to me to label the industry as "doomed" when we are in the golden age. There is no doubt that the games we are making now are better than ever before. Maybe not as 'innovative', but definitely better. Nostalgia goes a long way towards masking this, but it is true.
Also I have a DS and I'll buy a Revolution, and I paid for Gish so don't give me that "you don't get it" BS.
Mostly curmudgeony grousing on the article's part, but obviously there's a fair amount of truth in there: the games industry mostly sucks. Or, as a wise fellow once said, 90% of anything is crud.
I don't think a crash is imminent, because we have a different pricing model than we had in the 80s.
Back then, a 2600 game would typically cost $30, unless it was a "hot" title from Atari themselves, in which case it was $40 or $50. Most of the Atari titles did not disappoint, but zillions of third party developers jumped in with horrendous garbage that made the buyer want to shed tears for having been forced to view such a pitiful excuse for gameplay on his television. I think if I'd paid $30 for Mythicon's "Sorcerer" I'd be very unlikely to ever buy another game. Trying out games at kiosks is something only kids have time for.
Nowadays, games (and all technology) come down in price pretty predictably. After a year, a game is $20. ($30 if it's really popular.) After two years, it's $15 or less. After three years, it's in bargain bins, unless it's been sent back to the distributor's warehouse.
I routinely wait two years before getting most games. Maybe that's because I play a lot of single-player and not much multiplayer, so I don't have to worry about whether I'll be able to find a server. For a long time I knew hardly anyone who did the same thing, but I'm starting to encounter increasing numbers of people who practice the same buying strategy.
This is the market in action. Most games suck, and they're not worth $50. I know it. Others have been stung enough that they're starting to notice it. I don't think the gaming industry is in for a crash; I think it's in for a fall. I think starting sometime in the next few years, most games will be $20 or less when they hit the shelves. If that doesn't pay the bills for the extravagant graphics and movie licensing... too bad, guess they should have spent more of that money on gameplay. If "Tetris" didn't teach the lesson that a great game doesn't need great graphics, I don't know what will.
Which brings up another point: true occasional revitalization of the industry comes from true innovations like Tetris. A game concept that's completely unlike anything else. A genre unto itself. Those things are very hard to come up with, obviously, but they do still happen. I think the gaming industry would have fallen a long time ago if Tetris hadn't injected a whole new genre into it. In the 80s, most developers were trying to come up with a new genre; now it's rare but it does still happen once in a while.
Oh, and Charlie... it's the Atari 7800, not the Atari 7200.
The Internet is full. Go away.
Thank you. Finally someone agrees with me on this.
People say, "Oh, well it was home consoles that killed arcades." Bullshit. That may have been a contributer, but it was mainly the fact that it now costs you a 75 cents a play for a game to kill you in under 2 minutes often times. Some arcades like Dave and Busters in st. louis are even worse.
When I look at the arcade today, I see two types of games. Games like tekken, where it costs 50 cents to play, and if you play against someone else, you will get about 1 minute 30 seconds enjoyment out of it. Then on the other side I see soul calibre. In one player mode, it is very common to see people play upwards of 10 or 15 minutes. Guess which one gets played?
They basically got greedy. Really greedy, and now it is a dead business.
The game industry coming to a crash may be true. But it won't be because people dislike having so many sequels or licensed products. Having so many sequels is more of a symptom then a cause. The cause that I see could cause the game industry to fall a bit is money and time.
Games are getting more and more expensive to make. More technologies are required. More people are needed, development times are increasing and now the people making games are even demanding to be treated like people and get time off. Marketing for games is getting exponentially more expensive to reach the larger target audiences. Security for game is increasing to combat against piracy. Also games are requiring additional continuing costs for server maintenance and patch work. That is a lot of money necessary to make a game work in today's market.
To combat these increasing costs game companies have been trying quite a few things. Prices of games are rising, adding advertisements to games brings in some revenue, and sequels and licensed products guarantee a certain amount of return revenue. But everything the game industry does to increase the return of a game just is not keeping up with the pace of the cost increase to create a game.
Eventually game companies just won't be able to keep up and will have to close down. When enough of the companies shut down a lot of the previously mentioned costs will drop. Games will get simpler again, there will be less competition for marketing, technologies will get cheaper, and hopefully piracy will drop down when games get more affordable. When that happens small companies will be able to compete in the industry again and the industry will enter into another climb.
I really do hope it happens actually.
"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."
The same Pac-Man that Atari was left with 5 million unsold cartridges for? The same E.T. that was so lamented that most of the copies of the cartridge came back and are now occupying landfill space in New Mexico? These aren't prime examples.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
i work in the industry, and i have taken to putting more passion into my homebrew projects than in the processes that occur at the office. there is a tangible lack of creativity, and people are here to grab stock before we go public, rather than to work on fun games. my skills as a programmer have been effectively neutralized.