Slashdot Mirror
What Happens In A Gaming Industry Shakeout
Chris Kohler's Game|Life blog has a post discussing what a real games industry crash looks like. From the article: "But I hate the ridiculous amount of misinformation that gets spread around about what happened to the game industry in 1984. And the fact that the awful years of 1994 and 1995 get totally whitewashed in history articles like the above, as if the games industry has been just peachy ever since Nintendo got here. Well, it hasn't been. And what happened in 1984 isn't what people think." His post is a reaction to previously mentioned Inquirer story.
I went to a gaming convention and was amazed all the old gear of companies that went bankrupt I had forgotten about. I was alost tempted to buy a 3D0 but I realized that the only game there I liked was Syndicate and Horde.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Color display (a fairly good one too) and good games. Columns had a Tetris-like appeal. If it hadn't been for the utterly shitty battery life, it could have taken out the GameBoy. My favorite piece of "could have been" tech.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I don't think the video game industry is capable of a crash at this point, or even much of a shake-down. Even if the next generation of game consoles and the games themselves are seriously underwhelming, the industry is at a point where it could weather the storm for a while.
/. articles about the Gamecube have been about falling sales figures, but somehow Nintendo is still in the black. There are a lot of questions about if they'll survive for much longer, but they've been hanging on for a while now and building up a large bankroll. Their conservative attitude suggests that they won't be going under anytime soon.
First of all, Microsoft has billions of dollars that it makes from other business divisions, even if its games division takes a billion dollar shelling every year. Interestingly enough, this has already happened and they've said they're still staying in the game. The Xbox 360 would have to be a huge failure for them to get out of the game at this point. If the recent buzz about the system and the fact that someone can sell them on ebay for several thousand dollars is any indication, I don't think they've got much to worry about.
Next up is Sony which has made a lot of money on the PS2 and has the largest install and fan base. It might be slightly eroded this generation, but like Microsoft they have other company divisions that can prop up their games division if they're hit by hard times. However, of the big three, I'd put them in the worst position right now.
Finally, there's Nintendo. If I've learned anything about Nintendo it's that even if their sales are crap, they still manage to turn a healthy profit. The last few
The gaming industry is also a lot bigger than it used to be. Sure, companies are still packaging crap in cases that they try to pass for games, but when the user base is so much bigger than it used to be, you can manage to stay afloat with mediocraty. The industry might undergo a slump or slight depression, which I could easily forsee, but the same kind of "crash" or "shake-down" mentioned in the article? Nah...
I still have mine, with lots of good games for it. I think initially its price and its abysmal battery life killed it (though with today's NiMH rechargables, you can squeeze quite a few hours out of the "Lynx II" redesigned unit), but damn there were some great games on that platform.
Slime World was spectacular, and it was neat having an in-game help system that actually named an enemy "boogers." Heh.
Read my stuff.
You're missing several of the points of an article. Mainly that the first "crash" wasn't necessarily a crash and that whetever you choose to call it there has been more than one such event. To paraphrase the article, a crash is when the bottom of the market falls out, a shake-down/out is when those companies that are ill-prepared take a tumble. Even if the three big companies you list survive with little or no difficulty it has no bearing on whether or not there was a shakeout. In fact the article claims that the reason why no one really noticed the second big shakeout was because the big companies _did_ survive.
Because ten years after The Great Shake-Out, the same damned thing happened again. But this time, the big companies didn't get scared -- they rode it out.
And then there was a shakeout. Just because Nintendo didn't go under doesn't mean there wasn't one.
3D0 fell apart, and there went a lot of money down the drain for Panasonic, Magnavox, and Goldstar, who all quickly exited the console arena.
And note that the companies they specifically mention as having already failed or being at risk for the current/upcoming shakeout only includes one of the big three, and that one they concede may be able to pull through:
But guess what? "Handheld convergence device" is the new "multimedia set-top box"!
And like clockwork they are collapsing. Tapwave? Gone. N-Gage? Gone. Gizmondo? Close to it. And did you read yesterday's post in which (super duper) Gary Cooper pointed out that even the PSP is going to disappoint?
This is not to say that Sony won't do fine with PSP -- after all, theirs was the one "multimedia console" that came out of the wreckage of 1994 to actually succeed (and how)!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
it's funny, he says that there was another crash in 94 -94 and then goes on to mention systems that cost upto $800, not exactly the best thing at the time for a video game system seeing as how the other alternatives were under $200.
Now if all the systems mentioned were relativly the same price then I could see there being another shakeout but when the crash actually happened in 84 no one was playing games, arcades were losing money left and right, the systems weren't selling, games on the systems weren't selling, no one was interested in games and it was considered a fad, thus the industry crashed.
in 94-95 this was no such thing, gaming was right where it was since nintendo brought it back from the dead and made gaming fun 10 years prior, I'm not going to argue that the Genesis and SNES had some weird and crappy titles but look at the budget back then, it cost them what? $40,000 for a major title and something like $2,000 for a budget title, 10 years prior samething, $500 for a major title, $50 for a budget title (these are just exahgerations on my part).
No one noticed a crash in 94-95 because no one wanted to spend $800 on a console with 10 games on it, just like today, Have the 360 launch with it's launch games and not have one more game come out for about a year and everyone knew it, would the system still sell like it is for the price of $400? maybe but let's throw in another factor...The 360 launches with the games it has and has a few more coming out in a couple of months, now it's launch price is $800 from the get go without anything extra, just the system controller and cables that's it (aka the Core system), would it sell like it is right now? Remember there are no games coming out for it for a few more months and they aren't the greatest things and then you won't see anymore for a great deal of time.
when you factor in everything for the 94-95 "shakeout/crash" Nintendo and Sega managed it because they were smart, they weren't trying to make a quick buck, they weren't over doing it with technology the world wasn't ready for, now the story might of been different for each company if they had waited a few more years when everything they used was cheaper.
And like clockwork they are collapsing. Tapwave? Gone. N-Gage? Gone. Gizmondo? Close to it. And did you read yesterday's post in which (super duper) Gary Cooper pointed out that even the PSP is going to disappoint?
This I find funny, Tapwave? Where was the advertisments? where were they located in stores? N-Gage? No one liked it from day 1, it sold something like 150,000 units, no one wanted it, Nokia finnaly got around to realizing this. Gizmondo? samething as the tapwave. He would have a more compelling argument if he used handhelds that were advertised and garnered any intrest. Why no mention of Nintendo having Gameboy, gameboy color, Gameboy pocket all at the sametime? just like now, they have the Gameboy Advance, Gamboy Advance SP & now the Micro.
why does he make no mention of how Sega released the SegaCD that didn't sell? or the 32x that didn't sell? Sega and Nintendo were the ones who survived the second "crash/shakeout" because they had good first party games and good third party support, they weren't selling their systems for $800 a pop or their games for $100 a peice, hell in 94 I was enjoying my super nintendo and reading about the new Ultra64 nintendo was working on, in 95 I was eager to get my hands on the Nintendo 64 coming out the fallowing year, I played the Jaguar once in a Media Play (are those even around still?) and was turned off from it do just to the price, it was $799.99 (this was when it first came out) and the games they had were something like $79.99 I held the controller and found it incredably ackward to play the fighting game they had in there, honestly this thing had so many buttons in the middle I had no clue what did what.
In 96 there wasn't a rebirth cause there wasn't a death, gaming didn't die in 94-95 like it did in 82-3, there were
Doom Doom II Descent Mechwarrior 2 Magic Carpet Syndicate That period of time was the greatest gaming period in my life. It was the era that got me into building my own computer, hauling my "steel beast" of a machine down to my friends house for LAN parties, and downloading tons of shareware and warez off the internet. Hmm, I guess since I didn't pay for most of the software I had back then, that could've caused problems for the companies, but damn if I wasn't having a blast!
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
I loved that console. Too bad the gits running Atari at the time were nimrods.
When the 1984 crash happened I was a 2600 programmer. Everybody I knew working on games lost their jobs regardless of platform.
The fact that playing it for more than a couple of minutes brought on migraine headaches didn't do much to foster its success.
I owned a Neo-Geo, and it was never meant to be and never was a "console" game system. It was an ARCADE in your home. 100% PERFECT Arcade in your home. It cost a ton, yet it was cheaper than buying all the real cabs.
3D0 Was not a complete waste, it was a highly capable system ahead of it's time. There are many still around and they sold well with a decent library.
The Jaguar suffered from a number of blunders, not a "crash" of the industry.
This article was a waste... I lived through the first real crash and this supposed second one didn't even compare. B.S.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
If you will reread the first few lines of my post you will see that I said, " I don't think the video game industry is capable of a crash at this point, or even much of a shake-down."
/. article was posted just a few days ago. You are probably right that people tend to overuse the term crash, but shakedown almost seems like too weak of a word.
I did read the article, but you really didn't read my post. Whether you want to call what happened a crash or a shakedown is moot, I merely covering both instances as there have been articles in the past year speculating whether or not the video game industry is in for another crash. This
You have to realize that companies in the video game industry are failing all the time. However, we're seeing more and more software companies go rather than the hardware makers. Sega is still selling games, Nokia is still making phones. Whoever makes the Gizmondo might drop out of the industry, but that's hardly enough for a shakedown. Over the past decade companies have gone out of business, been swallowed up by a larger company, been sold to another company, broken off into different companies, and just about every other conceivable possibility.
Companies are failing without any particular regard to anything. It doesn't take an off year for the industry for company X that makes crap games to go belly up. A bad year might just be the straw that breaks the camel's back for many companies, but to say that one time period is responsible doesn't quite fit well with me. The industry is always in a shakedown state. Companies that can't survive in it or adapt to the changes in it will always be falling out.