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Life After the Videogame Crash
Clark Hall writes "Is it 1983 all over again? E3 is over and millions of gamers are realizing they can't afford a PS3, or an HDTV. Is it time for a steep and painful correction in the gaming market? Pointlesswasteoftime has been tracking what is looking like a Hindenburg voyage for console gaming, with HDTV playing the role of Hydrogen." From the article: "There's going to be a lot of money lost the next few years, a lot of articles written, a lot of panic, a lot of changes. And when gaming comes back, it will hopefully be different and innovative and based on something other than eye candy and the shock value of blood and guts and hookers. Hopefully it will allow for creativity from the players, and room for small, independent game makers to create content. Hopefully it will be something every working person can afford. "
HDTV will become the standard and wont cost as much in the (hopefully) near future. they're just now still overcharging for it. panic is for the impatient.
...all cock-blockery aside...
Seriously, you can buy an HDTV for about $500 now if you look around, it will be $300 by Christmas 2007 or shortly thereafter, and you can even get a 1080p version right now for $500 (check out the NY Times electronic reviews a couple of weeks back, and in the Wall Street Journal two weekends ago in the Saturday issue).
And you can buy a Nintendo Wii by about Presidents Day 2007 for a reasonable price at Costco - maybe even by Christmas 2006.
The world isn't over. Your old TV works fine with a cable box, you don't need a 64 inch screen HDTV, you can settle for a 32 inch or 40 inch one.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What videogame crash? I can certainly afford an under 300usd Wii. Oh wait, you mean sony? They'll just have a wonderful future building cameras, and slapping rootkits on the wrong places
I'm sticking with PC gaming.
I just can't justify spending all that money on a game console, and then on top of that, having to shell out THOUSANDS for an HDTV set just so I can see Solid Snake in Hi-Def? Ummm.. NO.
I'm sticking with my old-fashioned Tube T.V. as long as I possibly can, and I'm not buying any new HD or Blue-ray DVD players until the format war is good and over and prices come down to something reasonable. Which means I won't be getting an HD TV or DVD players for probably 5-10 years.
I'm sure I won't miss it either.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I read this article earlier today, and the author just writes off the Wii completly. What he's not grokking, is that the Japanese game market already crashed a few years back. Microsoft and Sony were able to use the ever growing US market to write that off as an anomoly, but Nintendo took it to heart and came out with the DS and now the Wii in response.
So, yes, it's reasonable to say that Sony and Microsoft (and all their 3rd party developers) are in for a harsh awakening, but Nintendo is already on the other side of the crash and things are looking better than ever.
Otherwise it would be a monster to make any kind of cash on a good bank heist. You would need to hire day laborers just to get all the cash into your rental truck..
Storm
Just relax, pull out that old copy of UT or TA or NFS III or Madden 2001, and ignore all of the gnashing of teeth by the hardware vendors. If it's fun, it's good. Who says it also has to be high tech?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Seriously, I would buy a $1000 game console if it had games worth playing. I might even pay more than that considering a console lifespan is 5+ years (ie. generally longer than the $2000+ computer I am using).
Todays games are just barely even worth a $200 console let alone 3 times that price. As the summary mentions, the current crop of games are lacking that certain something that makes you want to play them because they traded it away for fancy graphics and sound.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Maybe it wasn't the Hydrogen but the coating on the fabric... personally I think that disaster has given Hydrogen an undeserved bad rep when it comes to nextgen fuel options.
(hell, if someone described how dangerous the stuff we fill our cars with now can be to us for a new fuel, it would never get adopted.)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I think most people have the opposite opinion. I gave up on upgrading my PC to play the newest games, and I think many other people also prefer not to have to try and keep up.
With a console, you know that when you buy, you can play all the games for it.
And do you need an HDTV to play these new systems? I don't think any of them require it.
What the fuck kind of shit is this person spouting?! This is ridiculous! Just because the CONSOLE industry is taking a huge hit by no means indicates that the ENTIRE industry will be taking a hit. There are plenty of amazing advents that are being made that will push the PC gaming industry from its slump in the past few years. PPUs are going to push the boundaries of PC games far beyond what we can currently see, and if the response to Half-Life 2's astounding physics are any indication, the result of functioning PPU's is going to be RIDICULOUS. These units are already spreading into the Industry, and when they are available for sale to the general public in a relatively short time, games are going to be made to take full advantage of them.
A great example is a game that was shown at E3 this year (unfortunately I didn't have the time to attend and my last look at the game was several months ago so I have no name for you). This game featured one of the PPU's in a Deathmatch style environment where the player wielded various weapons and psionic abilities. One of the weapons was a grenade that pulled thousands of interactive objects together and then exploded sending each one on it's own independent path. There was NO frame lag during this. The fact that games will be able to support so many interactive objects without slowing down gameplay means that entirely new concepts are going to be creatable. And this is only one chunk of change going on in the industry. Genre's are blending themselves together and becoming more innovative and interesting. Graphical capability is skyrocketing (go look down a bit for the John Carmack explanation of Mega-texturing) and along with that how much more enveloped players are becoming.
It doesn't matter if these major companies take hits based on their technolgy, there are so many things within the industry that are going to keep it flying. And that's just WITHIN the industry! Sony and Microsoft are massive companies with plenty of other sources of income. So what if Microsoft lost 4 billion on the XBox? They're making so much more in the grand scope of things.
So no, the game industry won't crash. The mere thought is ridiculous.
I agree mainly. If I'm going to discuss a crash it would be more along the lines of:
.com era showed us a product has to actually make money eventually.
Microsoft and Sony and engaged in a "winner take all" style war neither can win. They both have the resources to lose money non these systems but the questions remains, how much is too much? Who will flinch first? Who will come in to compete when one falls off forcing the "winner" to still throw money into the pit?
Companies are in business to make money. Any money they have lost and are losing is a calculated risk, but if they find they are only going to lose money and these systems are not the product virus they hope they will be, they will pull out. I mean, the
Then I would move on to discussing how much it is costing to make games and how this has, oddly enough, stifled innovation as companies cannot afford to risk a huge loss. So, they pump out the same game over and over and eventually people are going to recognize it's all the same. He touches on this, but doesn't explore it much.
Much of the videogame market is based on potential growth right so it's really high risk, high reward. If it doesn't grow like expected then a domino effect can start.
All in all he sounds more like a person who just is getting old and doesn't enjoy games as much. I agree, there hasn't been much that's impressed me of late but I still have friends that don't mind playing these same games over and over.
I'm not sure if there will be a crash, but I do see potential change. The industry is in dangerous waters right now, taking a lot of risks and relying on a lot of things.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Cause shelling out $400-500 just for a video card obviously makes a lot more sense.
And, if I read it right, the 1983 crash was coincident with the introduction of a new gaming platform (the home computer) which destabilized the market a bit
I remember the crash in the 80s, and I would argue that this was not the case. In fact, I think the author of TFA is correct.
Then, as now, there were new consoles coming on the market. They were too expensive, there were too many optional add-ons that not many games supported, there was a glut of mediocre games for the previous generation of consoles, and all of the manufacturers were caught up in a bad strategy to try and convince people that consoles were more than just game systems because you could turn them into a crappy toy computer with one of the expensive add-ons.
The main difference this time is that instead of the "it's a computer too!" angle, Sony and MS are trying to market their consoles as "media centers," when they don't even have the features of a cheap alternative like a modded Xbox.
I also think that they are leaning too far towards online gaming and micropayments to jack up the cost of games even more. There is certainly a market for those things, but it isn't the *majority* of gamers, and so it shouldn't be the main focus.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman