Urban-Themed Video Games 'Basically Dead'?

simoniker writes "Midway CMO Steve Allison has been talking about why he thinks the urban game genre isn't worth entering, suggesting of the cancelled Snoop Dogg/John Singleton collaboration Fear & Respect, which was in development at Midway: 'We killed Fear and Respect... because we have enough data-points to know the hood thing is basically dead. It would be dead before it came out. And you don't want to come out on a dead vibe.' Do people really not care about GTA-style urban shooters any more?"

Comments

Meh.

[Rob T Firefly]

Do people really not care about GTA-style urban shooters any more?

Like most gamers, I care about most styles and genres of games if they're done right. The problem is when a genre or even a particular game (especially something like GTA which nobody had seen before) is popular, everyone wants to cash in with their own "me-too" knockoff. These of course aren't as impressive as the original, the market gets flooded with low-quality xeroxes, and the genre loses momentum. It's happened many times before with countless games. In the 8-bit era everyone wanted to make a Mario-esque platformer or a Zelda-like fantasy game. On PS1 there was the glut of forgettable 3D platformers and vectorized fighters, among others. How many Tetris clones can you name for game boy or cell phone?

Also, sorry Snoop, but gamers are savvy these days. Not since "Cool Spot" or "Yo, Noid!" for NES has a catchy license ever been enough to sell a game. In fact, it tends to raise a red flag for most gamers nowadays. "Why do they need to CGI-scan Joe Blow Rapper into the game, or have Billy Bob Actor do a voiceover? What crappy gameplay are they trying to distract us from? Is this another "Bruce Willis in Apocalypse?"

who would of guessed this?

[Traiklin]

With games like

50 cent: Bulletproof
True Crime: Streets of New York (or as it SHOULD of been called, True Crime: Glitches of new york)
True Crime: Streets of LA
Driv3r
Shadow the hedgehog (come on, you can't deny that's what they were going for with this one)

the only ones that were even remotly worth playing in the "urban genre" were Def Jam: Fight for New York, GTA San Andreas that's all I can think of actually.

Maybe if they had gotten people who wanted to make a GOOD game instead of making a Cash grab game the genre wouldn't be a sinking ship with endless clones of two games.

Not that entertaining

[thepacketmaster]

Can I please play a game built on an overused template to make some rapper a bit mo' money?

I think for most, playing video games is a brief escape from everyday life. Why both escaping into an environment that's identical to real life? I'd rather be slaying epic dragons or bugs, etc. (Is there such a thing as an epic hoodie?)

It's not the genre

[Nijika]

It's not the genre that's dead, if it can even be classified as a genre, it's the lame knock-offs that are very dead dead dead. Thus far, frankly, every time I've heard a game industry insider declare a genre "dead" it's because they can't figure out how to release a game that isn't completely ripped off from a more popular version. True Crime: New York City was a great example of this. A wonderfully rendered New York, like, stellar. But... bad cars, a fake CJ is the protagonist, "big star" voice acting that is uninspired, and some of the degrading hoops you have to jump through to get through the story give me a headache just thinking about them. Contrast this with San Andreas, which is BIG, but by no means an amazing rendering of any city (although it's still very cool). The storyline is all over the place, but that adds to the charm. The voice acting is really fun, even CJ is a blast to listen to, the missions are batass crazy and the replay value is endless. By all technical merits, True Crime New York City is the better game, but it's really not at all, because the "play" part of the game isn't all there.