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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'."
It's all well and good to say the industry is in great shape, tools are getting easier and so on. Funding, however, gets harder to find every day, and sequelitis is turning into a religion regarding how not to lose money in gaming.
The status quo is becoming established, at best.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
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, 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.
Kent Simon Multitheft Auto
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.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Or am I missing something?
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).
In John Cleese's How To Irritate People, the final sketch (one of pure brilliance) involves two bored airline pilots trying to entertain themselves. It begins with the co-pilot turning on the intercom and saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about."
The joke is, of course, that the only time someone feels the need to say, "Don't worry; everything's okay!" is when there really is something to worry about. Or, when someone is trying to pull your leg.
Shortly after Wal-Mart's RFID trials were aborted, scrapped, and otherwise sent to the wastebin, I began receiving RFID e-zine articles all with titles similar to this: "Problem? What problem! Why, RFID is as big as it ever was!" Sure enough, the big RFID revolution is dead before it even got started.
The signs have been there for a while that history is repeating itself. The big studios of gaming are reliving what the big studios of cinema lived in the 1960s: "The people say that they want more from the moviegoing experience? Oh my, we need a bigger budget! Ten times the cast! Bigger sets! And a costume change for Liz Taylor in every scene!" Of course, the people didn't want more sets. They wanted more variety, more stories, new ways of telling stories -- not just the same thing with more baubles. Oh, you had some new ideas like Easy Rider which were nifty, until the studios churned out 10,000 Easy Rider knock-offs. It wasn't until the 1970s when upstarts Lucas, Spielberg, Coppolla and Scorsese came to town and the old guard died off that the studios' fortunes changed.
What's gonna happen? Things are gonna get worse before they get better. Some of the old guard will get so decrepit that they'll have to take risks. And that's where we'll end up with the next Godfather, Jaws or Star Wars for video gaming.