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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.
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.
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.
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
I think that the reason that so many of us love classic games (other than nostalgia) is precisely the lack of hardware. Developers in earlier times were forced to be innovative, or "work with what you've got." These days photorealism is hyped up so much that it's become more important to just make pretty games, rather than anything creative or well-designed. Besides that, let's face it: alot of the good ideas have already been done. What else is left, writing on the screen with a stylus? Replacing the joysticks with a remote?
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!
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.
Damn you mods, hot chicks are NEVER off topic.
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.
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?