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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.
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?
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.