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Games Industry To Double By 2011
GamesDailyBiz is reporting that the games industry will double in market size by 2011. This is according to a study, not some sort of time-scrying device. From the article: "The videogame industry has been growing exponentially in recent years, and a new study from ABI Research has indicated that the growth will continue. According to the study, the videogame market will expand from $32.6 billion in 2005 to $65.9 billion in 2011. Online and mobile gaming will be the primary source of the growth, while the rest of the market will see growth, but to a lesser extent."
Double? Is this like a "Gartner Graph" with the big curve that shows that sales of electronic teddy bears, remote control toothbrushes or whatever else their clients paid them to pitch will double/triple/whatever the number they want to see in five years?
Do you think we'll have to put up with some sort of American Idol game release?
MMO reality shows?
Just shoot me now.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
One minute they say it's declining, the next they say it's gonna double.
no they're going to release twice as many same style first person shooters and twice as many pay for add-ons and twice as many buggy patches.
Am I being cynical again ?
"Do you think we'll have to put up with some sort of American Idol game release?"
too late
I liked being a gamer in high school, because not a lot of people were into it, and because of that games had to be good to sell. Now I'm not the kind of guy that stops liking a band because they've gotten popular - that doesn't make any sense. What I'm complaining about is how previously good genres are being dilluted and ruined to appeal to a new wider audience. What about us loyal customers that have supported Square from the beginning? We didn't deserve Final Fantasy X-2. Now EA can pump out Madden after Madden - actually remove features and charge $10 more for the Xbox 360 version and get away with it.
I'm glad that the industry is robust now, I just don't like the direction it's headed.
Growth may be a less important concept than that of a convergence of music, video, social and educational activities, with online gaming technology as a core.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Until everyone gets tired of playing the same old unimaginative crap over and over.
As the industry gets bigger, fewer companies are going to risk making games that don't fit a norm. Right now we're seeing tons and tons of me-too/same-old games coming out and very few new, refreshing game experiences. One of these days people are going to get tired of playing Unreal Tournament 2600, Madden 80 Hojillion, and Need For Speed: New Cars. Well, maybe not. If people can watch the same damn sports games only with different rosters over and over and over again, then I assume they'll continue to play games of this type as well.
We're in for a shake-up, and I think that Nintendo just might be on to something. Surely, the PS3 and Xbox 360 are very powerful machines, but the cost of producing a 14-20 hour game at or beyond the quality level of all previous offerings can be staggering. I expect that we'll soon begin to see the trouble the movie industry is currently having: multimillion dollar budgets for titles that ultimately flop.
We do still have the occasional rare nugget of gaming goodness that's truly unique and fun, but I don't know how long that'll last.
Despite all this naysaying, I am still hopeful for the future of the hobby I love.
"Apparently so, but suppose you throw a coin enough times. Suppose one day, it lands on its edge."
This is because the population of the earth will double!
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
...the number of major players will continue to shrink.
Thesis: Directed games always loose. You either limit success to almost no one and piss everyone else off, or you make the goal infinitely achievable and everyone wins, making winning loose all sense of distinction. Why not just give everyone a gold metal, they tried really hard right?
Real victory is enguagement. Armored Core is a great example; the quintessential giant mech fighting game. I'd dub Gran Turismo the Armored Core of racing, except you'd have to throw in motorcycle, hovertanks and machine guns. As a mech builder, you have to work with design constraints to build a mech you can work with. F'n Buddha used to be the king of ariel missile batteries. Our lord ChronoXaos had a notorious plad anti-radar ducky mech. Mercutio rocked the could-barely-move turret/tank. Everyone could cook up their own style, their own play, or we could make new ones up on the fly. We spent days doing nothin but ariel sword fighting, or giving one guy a rifle and one guy a flame thrower. It was all about play.
If you're hoping the current genre rehash / sequel mega-series / coder-slave formula is going to produce any kind of dramatic industrial growth in the games market, you are sadly mistaken.
We've got one more next gen leap after the new consoles before "something has to change". Companies have two generations left to retread the same games with prettier graphics before the difference is impercievable, before they're forced to go back to gameplay to make something better.
Games are growing because they're taking over conventional media; adults come home and play Xbox360 now, not the kids. Instead of watching TV, instead of reading, instead of movies, instead of dicking off on the net, people come home and play PS2. Retreading the same constrained zero sum purpose-driven games is only going to last so long. Its formulaic, too formulaic. Games biggest challengers are movies and TV, and games win every time because they're interactive. But the current level of interactivity is extremely shallow. Even the mmogs are skin deep, WoW is treasure hunting + slaughterfest, with friends. If you forget for a moment its a mmog, it would otherwise be unimaginably repetitive. The winning games are ones like GTA, where you just run around and do shit for fun; they exemplify the deeper meaning of reality itself, the exestential "the purpose of life is but life only".
If games want to grow, they need to cover new territory. Reality hack games and alternative reality games are the future; they're the kind of infinite games that people play in real life. Games need to encourage play and experimentation, need to be interactive enough to get the player doing their own thing, not just playing to win. Cross Planetside with Second Life, throw in some safe non-combat zones and I think you might have a winner.
Our game worlds are too directed to "the game". Part of the real game, part of life, is finding your own play, making your own games up.
I didn't watch the Spike TV Video Game Awards, and I never plan to. I never took it seriously because, I mean, come on: it's Spike TV. What did you expect?
I'd have to say that EA is one of the causes of this new-version bloat we're seeing now, but it's mostly regulated to sports games and racing, things that ultimately lend themselves to iterative releases. Sports games can only do so much: new roster, improved graphics/sound. That's it. There's not much room for improvement on such a simple game concept. It seems the same because it _is_ the same. There's no story or plot to a football game; just plays and teams.
One problem is that we're in this current state of sequel after sequel. However, "sequel" does not automatically mean "bad" or "trying to cash in on an established franchise". There is still room for growth and innovation in almost every genre and even in sequels within said genres. Good examples (sequels or not) are Metroid Prime, Half-Life, System Shock 2, Thief, Ikaruga, Gradius V, and Lumines.
In addition, I do like it when games are made that try to take an existing franchise in its original genre and move it to a new genre, but only when it's done thoughtfully. Metroid Prime is an excellent example of this, as is Ocarina of Time. Both games had lots of people (including myself!) saying that it couldn't be done without losing the very soul of what made these games special. Both titles proved me wrong.
I also think it's the constant production of Quake 9/Unreal 14/Battlefield 20/Ghost Recon 8 that tends to give us another problem: genre fatigue. All the gaming genres have been set. Where are the new ones? The Revolution just might give way to new genres, but only because of that funky controller. I have a feeling, though, that any "new" genres it creates will just be rehashes of old ones with a different control mechanism.
"Apparently so, but suppose you throw a coin enough times. Suppose one day, it lands on its edge."
Twice as many of the crappy, formulaic excuses for games that we have today, with fewer of the true rare gems.
Joy
Technoli
currently a 17 year old. i will miss those days when i was the only annoying little kid online. now all the 10 year olds are playing counterstrike and bf2. i used to be unique (atleast thats what my parents told me) in that i was the only one of my friends that played these games...
As an american High School student, I'd like to officially apologize for my generation.
Maybe by that time I will forgive someone for the end of KotOR II.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
And I for one will find it hard to keep my hand-cranked game console running without Arabian crude!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
By 2010, EA will have bought out all its rivals and have enough power to destroy a small country. Small games makers can't survive. I look back in the days of Westwood and Command and Conquer, Maxis with the Sims all good games before EA engulfed them.
wow this is just like in America when they thought that the stock market would grow exponentially and everyone would become a millionaire, i cant remember exactly how it turned out but im pretty sure nothing crashed.
It's about time.
The game industry is expected to double yet again in 2022.