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The Current State of the Games Industry
Joystiq has drawn some interesting tidbits out of an in-depth Forrester report on the current state of the games industry. The report's conclusions? The PC Game market is healthy. For example, "39% of all households use PCs for playing video games - this group makes up the vast majority of the 48% of households that have any sort of video games hardware." The report details what Microsoft and Sony has to do to dominate the U.S. market. The report details tactics for each side of that competition. Finally, the report finds that overall consumer interest in games is falling. "In the mindset of consumers games are still too expensive. According to 48% of gamers games still fail to offer good value for money. The report finds this surprising when considering a comparison to movies (games typically offer 30 hours of gameplay compared to a 3-5 hour movie with extra features) but we suspect the problem is more a matter of quality rather than quantity."
Besides that most sequels generally suck?
Does solitaire count as a video game?
&
Doesn't Miscrosoft already dominate the PC gaming market?
What games are they playing that take up 30 hours to complete? Most games take 10 at most, and lack any sort of replay value. This isn't a real brain teaser, i can spend $15 on a DVD, or $50 on a game.
With due respect to the amount of time, effort, man hours, development tools and cold hard cash that goes into making a modern game, they are still way to expensive.
A modern games costs about $60-70, depending on where you are. DVDs right now are around $10. And yes, I will by 6-7 DVDs before I buy a new video game. Why? Because the movies are cheaper, and my risk of purchasing a lousy one is spread out more.
With a modern video game, especially if you're a causual gamer, there's always a risk when you purchase a new game that you'll end up with a flop, or at leats one you don't like. Spend $60 on a game only to find out it was sub par, and you won't be so eager to purchase another so flippantly. That game for me was GunGrave. Nice game, but far, far to short to be $70 worth.
If they want to sell more games, developers and publishers are going to have to abandon this fixed price regieme. To set the price of a game before the first concept art drawings are even created, is an invitation for a sloppy implementation, as there is no incentive whatsoever to put any polish at all on the game. It won't jazz up the price, and you can sell more units with marketing cheaper than you can go about improving the quality of the end product and customer satisfaction.
End result of fixed price games is mediocrity and customer dissatisfation, and hence, less demand for the product. Sell me something $60 that isn't buffed to a replayable shine and I'll have a sour taste in my mouth. I pick up the same title for $20 in a bargin bin and I'm a satisfied customer. Satisfied customers come back for more.
Burnt fingers are hesitant to fork over dough. Will the game industry listen? No. They take their cue from the music industry. Fixed, artificially high prices, despite the ease of reproduction. Well then; witness hesitent, artificially skeptical consumers. Cry me a river.
May the Maths Be with you!
Games are interactive, movies aren't so much. The whole point of a game is that you are in control of the story, and there should be several ways to affect that story and varying outcomes. There is also an element of skill, where you might replay the same portion a few times until you master it.
I don't compare the fun of a $60 game to the entertainment value of four $15 movies. I compare a $60 game to other games. The latest whiz-bang console release from EA will probably entertain me less overall than a more deeply involved title such as an RPG or well orchestrated FPS. It has nothing to do with play length or how many long boring levels there are. Halo was fun why ? Because it had satisfying moments and the challenge was well balanced, plus I'm a sucker for co-op multiplayer ever since the original Doom. NHL is fun because, well, it's friggin hockey and you get to cram three of your best buddies in front of the TV and shove them when they pull a hat trick on your goalie.
Everyone has their favorites, and those games are worth every penny. It's all the other stuff that falls short, when you buy a game and regret your purchase that same evening. Take for example Mark Ecko's horrible "Getting Up" game, which is like Jet Set Radio minus the skating, plus a bunch of pointless "gangsta shit". It looks like it's 5 years too late, plays worse than a 2 week old tech demo, just a ginormous disappointment.. a modern-day Daikatana. Is it worth the same as Half-Life 2 ? Not to me anyways. So then why do they cost the same ?
That's why I like non-blockbuster games.. look at the Popcap model, or those cheesy $15 titles at Staples like computerized board games and whatnot. Yes, they're cheap, both in price and design, but you don't curse yourself for blowing $15 because you know exactly what to expect from it. When you blow $60 for a game that's less fun than that umpteenth Mahjong clone, you want to punch someone.. HARD.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I have another question: why violence (think FPS) is one of the most popular form of entertainment?
Comparing a 30 hour game and a 3 hour movie as competing for the same entertainment dollars is not fair. It's like comparing Pizza and baseball gloves competing for food dollars. Someone who wants food is not going to buy baseball gloves simply because they are a better value. I don't want to buy movies. I want to buy games. I'm not going to stop buying games because I think they aren't worth it, and somehow try to satiate my appetite for games with a bunch of DVD's. I have money I allocate to spend on games and I will only spend it on games because that's what I'm interested in.
Every time new consoles are on the horizon, people pull back a bit on buying. And every time, some analyst reads it as a game industry decline. Do they report on this at the end of every car year, too?
The crumminess of recent games drove me to a Gamefly subscription. For about $25 a month, I can try as many games as I can ship back and forth in the mail. If I get a stinker, it goes right back, and if a game doesn't have any replay value, it's no big deal to play through it once and forget about it. Haven't bought a new game since Half Life 2 came out for the Xbox.
I really wish people would stop equating entertainment to how much it costs per hour. It really doesn't work that way. It's not like we're filling up the gas tank and shopping around for best miles per gallon. By that logic, nobody should ever do anything except walk outside, because it's free.
Besides, the time of fun from a movie, game, etc., doesn't immediately stop when it's over. I don't see people reminiscing with their friends about Super Mario Bros. 2 (though it does happen) nearly as much as I hear people crying to "Come see the violence inherent in the system!"
Sorry, not quantifiable like that.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Finally, the report finds that overall consumer interest in games is falling.
The overall consumer interest in sequels is falling.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
market crashes because there are tons of bad games. good thing we have the internet this time and can actually see reviews. Imagine buying some of the trash that is put out with no info.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
The overall consumer interest in sequels is falling.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
PC games are dead here because I can't freaking *BUY* any of them...
That's what the industry pretty much says right now.
Aside from Bethesda (who produces ultra fraggin mega hits like The Elder Scrolls, part 4 of which is coming out for the PC and XBox 360 soon), replay value is a joke in the eyes of game makers.
They figure that the audience for this is very small and that they can keep the hard core gaming crowd captive with re runs of Resident Evil or whatever.
Everyone watched as the super bug-ridden Elder Scrolls III skyrocketed to Game of the Year and THEN SOME, but no one saw the writing on the wall: there is a huge market for non linear play and replay value. There are still people buying TES-III and its sequels right now.
Here's an idea, guys... make a game that competes on TES's level, and sell me expansion packs. I'll be at the store every day with my wallet open and my eyes peeled. Just look at all the Neverwinter Nights expansion packs I've bought online and offline... there's another awesome game with awesome replay value.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
All the major game retailers have an online presence, and they generally have a better selection of computer games online than you'll find at the brick-and-mortar stores. Also, a lot of computer retailers (CompUSA, for example) have a pretty wide selection at both their physical locations and their website. Finally, there's always Amazon.com.
Really, it makes sense that the market for computer games is shifting online. A big portion of computer users have Internet access now, so retailers can sell the computer games that way, freeing up store space for the console gamers who are less likely to be able to order online.
A modern games costs about $60-70, depending on where you are. DVDs right now are around $10.
The games going for $60 are the brand new, big name titles. The movies going for $10 have been out for over a year, and even then, it's usually only the independents or the bombs. The big releases come out at $25-30, whether they're good or not. National Treasure has been out for 10 months and it's still selling for $20. So let's not pretend you can get 5 new movies for the price of 1 new game. If you wait a year, the hit game and the hit DVD are about the same price.
On the other hand, after Master of Orion 1 and Master of Orion 2, my friends and I were all desperately waiting for MoO3. As far as I'm concerned, I'm still waiting, and I seriously will be reading reviews and looking for demos before I hand over money for anything else based on the series. Once burned, etc etc etc
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
I can easily think of PC RPGs which took a lot less than 10 hours to finish. For example, take both Vampire titles. In fact, I dare say that that applies to any PC RPG that isn't a console port. (Not to mention that your average PC "RPG" game will actually be either a hack-and-slash action game or a mis-named RTS with some minimal stats thrown in.)
BTW, KOTOR I and II were ports of console games, so don't bother giving those as counter-examples.
But there's one aspect to it that's more important: the games industry itself is giving interviews and PR releases everywhere, saying that games should be shorter, and that somehow they're just doing what the gamers want. See, it's supposedly the gamers that want to pay 50$ for a 5 hour game. Yes, sir. Supposedly we gamers just don't have the attention span for those 30 hour games, and every single game most people didn't finish (because it was crap or became crap by the middle of it) is taken out of context and placed on a pedestal as prime example that gamers just want shorter games.
So even if a lot of RPGs still are longer than 10 hours, their numbers are slowly going downhill. That "short is good" myth is the image that the publishers themselves are aiming for, and they're circularly reinforcing that myth for each other.
There's a lot of wishful thinking in this industry. There are a lot of pseudo-truths or flawed truisms that publishers throw around, apparently in a hope that they'll become truth if one only repeats them often enough.
E.g., that quality doesn't matter, and gamers actually _want_ to buy a dysfunctional unfinished POS now and maybe get a patch later. (Surely buying a game that crashes at the main menu with a script _syntax_ error (a la the German version of Victoria) is ok, as long as some time in the future you'll get a patch that actually lets you start the game.) E.g., that people only buy for screenshots, ergo gameplay and story don't really matter. E.g., that shameless hype sells, but you don't need to even try actually having a quality product that lives up to that hype.
And one such hand-waved wishful thinking lately is that somehow gamers actually _want_ shorter games, and it's ok to charge 50$ for a 5 hour game. In fact, that it's outright perfect. It's just giving the gamers what they want, right?
And this statistic basically just says: no, it's not perfect and it's not what the gamers want. In fact, we're already at the point where about half the market thinks that what they're getting isn't worth the price.
That, in a nutshell, is the main merit of this statistic. It says it black-on-white that no, that's not what the gamers want. Not that I expect the publishers to get it, though. Being a jaded old cynic, I expect them to just issue even more PR "news" and interviews about how, really, deep in their hearts gamers do want short games. And keep hoping that they just need to repeat the falsehoods even more often to become truth.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The problem with the value per hour of videogames is that the play time is often artificially inflated. Things like copy-and-pasted levels, unskippable cut scenes or placing hard boss fights miles from save points (Spider Guardian in MP2, for example) are all cheap techniques to make the game last longer, while actually making it less fun.
I can give an example with Quake III Arena. I bought the game because it looked interesting. On the lowest possible setting the game is so hard I'm being killed before I even start. The action is so fast, violent and crippling that it's all but impossible to have any serious chance to play the game. These games need to get better design in order to make the game less challenging for people who do not want to have to spend 6,000 hours of time just to possibly get by at the lowest setting.
And let's try having some good games that do not involve killing someone or something for a change.
And if all the entertainment industry can develop is sequels, all they're going to get is a second-rate response from the public. A constant diet of fattening left overs is going to produce "hardening of the arteries" in the checkbooks of customers.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Most games fall dramatically in price in six months. I dont see a point in paying twice as much for a game just to play it a bit earlier. On top of that, the games are already patched and there are plenty of reviews available. I usually pay 10-25$ per game. The cheapest unused game Ive bought cost me under 2$. Take a look at the bargain bins and budget releases. Thats where last years classics live.
That because Diablo 2/1 designed for grinding.The game basically orders you to click away for hours on monsters.
:try to ban them all
quests are thrown in to storyline as "required content" and without them game doesnt seem any different.
Its popular not from grinding but item based economy(do you wonder why d2 items
still sell for cash on ebay?) and charcter customization.(builds,item setups,playstyles and minor tactics)
Still i don't consider it great game after playing for couple of years. dull and repetitive,with gameplay issues
that remain unfixed forever(PK,duping,malicious data packets,char expiration,desync,heavy lag,queues,faulty servers,etc).Playing mods(D2 has large modding community)solves some of
troubles but introduces others:even laggier servers,unbalanced mods with too much GFX content,closed "clique" communities,frequent crashes/bugs,etc
I recall you could modify D2 server stats of your char before 1.10(havent checked 1.10/1.11)like cast/attack speed,run/walk,and maphack like changes from modded text files(which i played with).There isn't a clear boundary in the game whats server-side and what doesnt send packets,or something that changes per-game,or per-level basis.
Blizzard (naturally) doesnt document their code.As for entertainment value Starcraft surpasses Diablo2 in all categories,and people don't get bored from it that fast.
Diablo 2 will remain a mediocre RPG until blizzard shuts down the servers.
Its not unique or something,just because people find nothing better and play D2.
What entertainment per-hour is this when
it so straight-forward most d2 junkies already use bots and scripts to automate their Meph-runs and countless other stuff(d2 is scriptable with hacks).
Blizzard response
=fails,people just invent better scripts.
If a game so dumb and straight-forward that people don't play it but use bots it means the game AT FAULT not the people.(I don't talk about CS bots,
This game suppose to give you "entertainment" which is that dull after yuo make it first time,not worth to repeat(i.e. finishing game on normal mode)) that people don't want to play it again(for entertainmet).
They play for items/level grinding their way to the top.No wonder its goign to be
a better use of time to let a script to Level,read something check it after hour and order the script to "meph run,leave game after" and goto sleep.
That reminds me why i deleted D2 from my harddrive.Progress Quest sounds like a better game compared to diablo...