Cheer Up! Video Games Are In Great Shape

simoniker writes "Tired of doom and gloom from pundits predicting the sky falling on the video game industry? Long-time Gamasutra design columnist Ernest Adams offers up a contrary view in his new column, commenting: 'The industry may be as conservative as Pat Buchanan, and it may be going through a rocky transition between consoles right now, but video games are doing very well, thank you very much.' He goes on to make points such as 'The mass market is here', 'Games are getting easier to make thanks to inexpensive tools', and 'Game development education has arrived'."

Comments

Nothing has changed

[Feminist-Mom]

Original, fun games have nothing to do with technology. It just requires creative people to make them. Snood and Tetris are classic examples.

At the risk of sounding like a fanboy

[Kent Simon]

At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I think Nintendo could do a lot here to help the current situation. As the article says, the market is finally here, and its in some ways easier to develop.

Nintendo is trying to force development costs down, while encouraging innovation, thats 2 things necessary to grow from this status-quo we are in right now.

Oh please, the joke here are the game pundits

[TheNoxx]

The video game industry hasn't been in trouble since the NES came out. There was that short lapse when people got tired of Pong, Atari, and Coleco-whatever, but past Nintendo... sorry. The chances of the video games industry going into a deep recession are absolutely zero. No, the millions of people playing MMORPG's, shockwave games, console games, and FPS games are not just going to up and vanish, nor will their numbers recede. Far from it; as great games with really good graphics become cheaper, and more available with more online content, we haven't even begun to see the limit of the industry. Not to mention the blinding speed at which gaming is growing in developing nations (remember all that Chinese legislation meant to keep people from playing long hours of online games, or the fanatacism of young koreans with MMORPGS and real time strategy?).

The only people that are facing real trouble are game pundits themselves, as the gaming journalism business is more or less a big farce. Yes, some of them do a good job and take themselves seriously, but a large majority are more than willing to take a little kick-back to give a game a good rating and decieve their readers.

Re:Oh please, the joke here are the game pundits

[Shadarr]

Couldn't agree more. If you want to argue that there isn't enough innovation in gaming, you might have a case. However, the people who complain about "sequelitis" are not representetive of the majority of gamers. Halo 2, Kingdom Hearts 2, the Final Fantasy's and Grand Theft Auto's and EA's sports franchises all sell huge numbers. The best games of last year in my opinion were Resident Evil 4 and Civ IV, both "franchise" games. It didn't make them any less fun. And the DS, Revolution and Guitar Hero all serve as counter-examples even to the idea that there is a lack of innovation.

As far as the industry, the market, the sales figures... there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of it, for the industry as a whole. Certain devs and publishers may be in trouble, but that's an indictment of their businesses and products, not the industry. This console generation sold more than any previous one. The PS2 sold more consoles than every console Nintendo has ever made, put together. Hardcore gamers may fondly remember the 8- and 16-bit days, but the reality is that this is gaming's golden age.

Falling prices? Huh?

[JonTurner]

Not really. When all the producers are fighting over the same customers, we consumers enjoy better product and lower prices.

As evidenced by such dirt-cheap titles as Half-Life2, Quake#, and World of Warcraft for the PC ($50+$10/month), not to mention the abundance of $60 titles for $400 consoles.

Or am I missing something?

"Easier to make"

[caffeination]

Games are getting easier to make thanks to inexpensive tools

This doens't take into account the ever-increasing cost of game production. How can it be getting both easier and more expensive to produce games?

Surely if this were the case, we'd be seeing an exponential increase in quality? If we are, it's going right over my head (with a beautifully rendered motion blur, I might add).

Re:"Easier to make"

[edremy]

How can it be getting both easier and more expensive to produce games?

You're missing the point. To make an AAA list super title is getting more expensive. Much more expensive- you need teams of 100 people for four years to write something like Oblivion.

But not all games are AAA list super titles. You can make fun, enjoyable games much more easily than you used to. Flash gets crapped on all the time here, but it's a wonderful tool for writing games- it handles audio and video easily, can animate hundreds of sprites at a time and has a simple but powerful OO scripting language underneath. Stuff that required really hardcore programming ten years ago is now built into these tools, or there are easy to use libraries which do it all. Games like Half-Life, NWN and Oblivion ship with serious content creation tools, so powerful that you can rewrite virtually the entire scenario. You may hate Steam or XBox Live, but online delivery is getting much more available to the "little guys"- check out Darwinia or Geometry Wars.

For a gag recently I needs a Pong clone. Using Flash I did it in about an hour. (If I had used Flash in the previous six months it would have taken about 30 minutes.) I managed a Space War clone in a day. Yeah, they're old and very simple, but there's no way I could have done either twenty years ago. Ten years ago I took a course in interactive game development at USC. The class managed some really nice stuff in Director, but it was still damn clunky, as I found out when trying to handle the physics of ~100 sprites. Trivial today.