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Sequel Fatigue Cause of Slow Sales?
The NYT has a piece which argues that the new console iteration is not the cause for slow sales at the end of the year. Rather, gamers are tired of all the damn sequels. From the article: "... In an industry that has a reputation for growth, the decline certainly clashes with expectations. And there is also evidence that gamers may no longer be as enticed by the type of games that publishers have been putting on store shelves. For the first time in several years, the industry did not have a breakout hit in 2005. Two releases from 2004's holiday season, Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, generated enough anticipation among hard-core gamers that they lined up to buy copies. 'Last season you had some events that drove people into stores,' said Josh Larson, director of industry products for GameSpot, which tracks interest in new games; he was referring to the last two months of 2004. 'There wasn't anything that filled that void,' in the 2005 holiday season, he added." Update: 02/08 18:07 GMT by Z : As much as I like the letter 'q', fixed title.
That name sounds hot.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
The summary says sales sucked because we are all tired of sequels...but the reason 2004 was such a hit was because of...sequels? Did I miss something here?
In reality, there's little difference between the 413th First Person Shooter and the 414th*. Whether or not First Person Shooter 414 is "ScaryMonsterKiller" or "Son of ScaryMonsterKiller" is something of a moot point.
*Apart from the requirement that you buy a new graphics card at around 45% the cost of your whole system, for the arguable advantage of having another few hundred thousand triangles or this seasons must-have anti-aliasing algorithm.
This is a problem that I think is plaguing the entertainment industry in general. They are not putting out new stuff. If game X did well well then why not try Game X 2.0. Or my personal favorite is making movies out of video games. Some have been good, some have not.
But to be honest the real reason sales are down, is no one wants to spend tons of money for games on a system that is going to be obsolete in a couple of months.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
It seems to me that the game industry doesn't have the diversity that the movie industry does. Movies come in all shapes and sizes and feature a variety of subject matters.
90% of these big budget games are sci-fi or fantasy or something with loads of automatic weapons. Think how boring movies would get if that ratio was the same. Where are the games that could be compared to indie films? The game industry will never develop if they don't try and broaden their scope.
Sorry, did I sound like a Nintendo rep there? I'm not I swear.
They'd call it a "typo" if the Q key was on a different planet from the G key. See, nowadays, typing like a retarded bonobo on crack is considered normal, and daring to point out repeated mistakes (most of which are obviously due to a failure to absorb basic lessons in grade school) is moderated (-1, Flamebait) and (-1, Troll).
I've had people tell me that using "it's" instead of "its" (e.g. "that's not one of it's better qualities") is a typo. Yeah. my finger just randomly slipped all the way to the other side of the keyboard between "t" and "s" to smack the apostrophe... And if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Cue standard rant (stdrant.h?) about how the Slashdot "editors" don't.
Sad but true: Just like how students are vilified for "tattling" on bullies, but not for bullying, people nowadays are vilified for being "language nazis", but not for repeatedly making mistakes any third grader should be able to avoid. The problem is ignored, while pointing out the problem is practically heresy.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
It's not just all the sequels... there's also the fact that even the 'different' games are always the same! Half-Life, Halo, Doom, Battlefield, Call of Duty, GUN, KillTheGermans, ShootTheGermans, TortureTheGermansWithGuns, Unreal, Quake, FPS, war, FPS, war! Is anyone else BORED of FPS / war games, or am i the only one?
There needs to be something completely new and original, something nobody has thought of yet. It will sell millions.
Peace, Love, Unity, Respect
When I was playing Evercrak and WoW, I pretty much stopped buying other videogames, there was no motivation to play other games. I only bought KotOR and Galactic Civilizations over a long period of time (3+ years). I suspect the 5.5 million WoW customers might no longer be buying, or buying significantly less, single player titles.
Sorry, but with online gaming the updated team details, players, stats, etc, could easily be accessed by a game and used to update the relevant details.
People know this, and they aren't going to pay $50 for an update which is basically only that.
When they have a next generation console, they will buy the game however, because it will have better graphics. Again, they'll do this only once. That's if they bother with the next generation console.
Sports games are the worst offenders here, but it is hard to get excited about any sequel unless it brings something new to the scene. And this type of originality is what is lacking. It is hard to get excited by TheSameGame... 3!!! Think back to Tomb Raider. Each game was better than the previous one, adding features, until pretty much all the modern 3D platformer features were added. You can't get much further. There's only so many ways to jump/climb/etc. The current consoles don't have the power to get to the next level of immersiveness.
Again, Nintendo will bring out a whole ramp of '$Sequel Revolution' games, and they'll all have new controller features as well as new graphics, and they'll be bought by the boat load.
So you're telling me that gamers want original, new, and fun gameplay? The shock!
I mean, really. I was just bemoaning yesterday how much the market has moved to nothing but sex and violence. When every commercial for the XBox 360 ends with "Rated M for Mature", you know that they've stopped selling games. The market is instead trying to sell you an "Entertainment Product" targetted at "the adult market". Which is a nice way of saying, "We want to separate fools from their money by giving them gratuitous sexual and violent content." The actualy *game* is nowhere to be found.
As of late, I find myself missing the days of adventure games (e.g. Space Quest), space simulators (e.g. Wing Commander), puzzle adventures (e.g. Bioforge, System Shock), Real Time Strategy Games (e.g. C&C), and other innovative genres invented in the golden age of computer gaming. Not to mention some of the cool arcade genres like Fighters (e.g. Killer Instinct, SFII) and Drivers (e.g. SF: Rush, Hydrothunder).
Today we just see Another First Person Shooter, but With A New Twist!(TM) Which really is nothing more than a vehicle for the aformentioned sex and violence. When are we going to see all this technology put to good use in making innovative new games? Hell, imagine the cool 2D (or 2.5D) platformers that could be done on modern hardware! Do we see anything like these? Nope. It's all just games with the names of old games reused on new First Person Shooters. When will the industry rape of our beloved gaming stop?
Here's hoping for the Nintendo Revolution. If they can pull it off at least as well as the DS, we may get back some of what we've lost.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
There is still the occasional gem, but no reliable way to tell the gems from the dross. No one wants to slag the games off in a pre-release review in case the company stops giving them demo releases, innovation seems to be extinct, and the latest painful lesson is that even a sequel to a fondly remembered classic is no guarantee of quality.
In other words, they are charging premium rates for low quality tripe and trying fix it in marketing. And they wonder why people are stopping buying games?
Gosh. I had no idea I was that annoyed about it...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Sequels have and always will be a part of gaming, movies, books, and just about any media. It is seen as easy money and folks fall for it every time. Even though we all damn well know we will be getting a rushed, less thought out, money making product piggybacking on the success of its predecessor... people still buy them.
The bigger issue is that most games out right now are not being created to FILL A NEED/NICHE. They are trying to force genre's that are quick, easy, and cheap to produce on gamers. (Sports/FPS/RTS/MMO/Sequels) Gamers are at a saturation point. Innovation can never be supressed for long. Gamers are demanding new and unique experiences. Katamari Damacy was the first shot that made companies stop and take notice. Nintendogs was another. A whole shift is approaching gaming, and it is not the more powerful, more expensive, more complex, bullshit being forced down our throats now. Look how much press and play Geometry Wars has been getting, more than any other 360 launch title.
2D gaming needs to come back, it is natural for some games. 3D needs to be refined besides just more/better/faster. Emphasis needs to be placed back on creativity and innovation, not greed and hype.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Of course, we have to attribute every phenomena to a single cause. It can't reasonably be a combination of economic factors, a change of interests in the consumer-base, next-gen hype AND the lack of original content in the industry.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
...we're all spending every free hour playing World Of Warcraft and don't have time to play anything else.
G.
In my opinion the real cause of smaller sales is not because of people not caring about sequels, but because the consoles are reaching the end of their lifespan and a new one was released. the $400+ dollars one would spend to get an Xbox 360 could have usually been spent on 8 or so games. Of course, there weren't that many good games to purchase anyway because producers are winding down current gen support and evaluating whether or not they should port their game to new systems or just move it entirely over to the new system. So there's less games out, a new moneyhole just opened, and sales are down. Doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Call me if this happens 2 years from now when companies are back in the swing of things and then I'll believe the retards who buy Madden XX for every console they own and the people who when you mention "Halo 3" simultaneously orgasm and start to drool have suddenly dissappeared from the earth.
Someone needs to take more reading classes.
He said: 'I've had people tell me that using "it's" instead of "its" (e.g. "that's not one of it's better qualities") is a typo'
Maybe it's the parentheses that are confusing you. 'I've had people tell me that using "it's" instead of "its" is a typo.' Is that more legible?
He was absolutely right. His point was that people are using "it's" incorrectly, as in the example. When called on it, they say "it's just a typo, lemme alone."
I don't know about you, but my typos don't usually include pressing extra keys with the wrong finger on the wrong hand and in the wrong row. It's not a typo, it's bad grammar. You can't chalk everything up to being a typo.
From Russia with Love is a great example of what I'm talking about. Sequels should build on what worked from previous games, not implement something worse. Case in point: the camera in the game From Russia with Love. You had to constantly manually maneuver the camera to keep it behind you. And when you died, who knows what position the camera would be in when you rezzed. I'm sorry, but under no circumstances should the camera ever start in second-person mode when I'm playing a deathmatch (happened to me once; in the few seconds it took to spin the camera around, I was shot to death. Wheeee!). Worst camera behavior in an FPS *ever*.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Game industry, I hear your cries begging me personally for advice on what you should do about this problem. Fear not, for here is my wisdom:
We're sick of sequels, but we're not receptive to things that feel too new. You need to create hybrid games that use popular elements from existing related games. For example, most people don't play Grand Theft Auto $number because of a love of all things criminal. What keeps us coming back to those games is the overwhelming freedom they give you. We're not playing MMORPGs out of our love of Tolkienesque fantasy, but because MMORPG coop gameplay is fun.
We need network-capable, non-linear gameplay that puts trust in players, instead of making us choose "DEATHMATCH MODE", or "RACE MODE" before entering the world. Games need to evolve so that players can hang out and decide for themselves how they want to use the engine. Your job as game programmers should to provide us with tools to enjoy ourselves, not to write us a rigid schedule which inevitably leads to an "end point" when apparently at the whim of some game designer we are to stop playing.
Most of the greatest games ever are series
Megaman, Castlevania, Final Fantasy, Ultima, Mario, PacMan, sequels are nothing new.
It seems like the increased capabilities of game systems these days has caused the cost of making a game to grow exponentially, while only giving us linear improvements in the quality of the games themselves. Investors are much more likely to fund a game based on a known property (a sequel, a sports game, a movie knockoff...) than something totally original from out of the blue. It's much more difficult to recoup the costs of making a game than it used to be, so gambling on an unknown quantity has far worse consequences than it did back in the day.
I have a feeling that a lot of the future growth and innovation in the market is going to come from handheld systems (due to lower development costs), and from companies like Nintendo who aren't so concerned with milking every last polygon from the hardware, but are more focused on innovations in gameplay.
There are a lot of factors at play here. One of the biggies is that the audience for games is getting older. When you're married/attached, and have responsibilites (job, house to keep up, kids to raise, etc.) the amount of disposable income you have to spend on video games goes WAY down. Also, the amount of playtime you have decreases.
I tend to buy a very small number of games and play them through over a very long period of time (I'm still working on GTA San Andreas and I bought it when it came out...) 15-year-olds, on the other hand, bug their parents to buy them every new $50 game on the market, and the $300 video card-of-the-year to go with it. I made the decision a while back to not keep up with the PC game platform wars and bought a PS2. At least I know that games written for it are going to be playable on it next year.
Feeding into the problem, parents are getting sick of buying every $50 game and new gaming hardware for their kids every year. This is especially true when parents are game-savvy enough to see that Madden '06 is Madden '05 with prettier graphics and an updated team roster. Or that this year's FPS hit is the same FPS engine as last year with new characters.
I honestly can't blame the game studios for catering to the audience that will make them the most money, but I have a feeling the demographic shift will get them.
God dammit, there's a difference between languages EVOLVING and language DEVOLVING. Seeing as how we're rapidly being flung into a brave new world where "its" and "it's" are synonyms and "to" means the same thing as "too", I think it's obvious what is happening here. We are witnessing nothing less than the slow syntactic collapse of the English language into muddied pidgin jabber. In 50 years, people won't even be bothering with definite articles, and people will just talk (or write) like "How u? Me fine." This isn't the normal evolution of language, it's a giant leap backwards. "It's" and "its" are punctuated differently for a reason: THEY MEAN DIFFERENT THINGS. "To", "too" and "two" are not synonyms, no matter how much the apathetic youngsters your weasel words appease would argue otherwise. And apostrophes are utterly useless if they're used as random decorations. The new generations are taking useful linguistic constructs (homophones, punctuation, etc.) and destroying their usefulness, while adding nothing to replace them.
In the future, if this keeps up, we will be left to deduce half the meaning of any given "English" sentence purely from context. It will be worse than Hebrew, with its lack of vowels-- we'll be missing whole WORDS. Once they realize how useless they are rendering whole swaths of basic English vocabulary, they'll simply stop using those words. Once people realize that they're using "to", "too" and "two" interchangeably, they'll simply stop using the words altogether. ("I'm going store.") Actually, I must amend that: the apostrophe will disappear entirely when its use becomes so inconsistent as to make it a nuisance, so that would be "Im going store". And most AOL kiddies can't be bothered to capitalize things either, so I suppose it'd be "im going store".
THAT is the future of English if appeasers like you get your way. I will be GOD DAMNED if I stand idly by while whining little weasels like you spew apologetics for the literary vandals who are presently gutting the expressiveness and lyrical beauty of the English language.
Or perhaps I should translate into your soon-to-be-native tongue, the English of 2050 or 2100: "i b dising on u g". With no period, no capitalization, no comma, and no doubled consonant before the "-ing".
That sort of urban caveman-speak is what people like you will be babbling in 50 years if "language Nazis" like myself don't speak up, and LOUDLY.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?