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

FP!

[dosius]

I think it's more a matter of every game genre can be cloned to death and the GTA-clone genre has reached that point.

-uso.

New Ideas

[mrxak]

Gee, are they saying that they're actually going to try a new game genre? Here's an idea for a new one, WWII shooters!

Re:New Ideas

[Fallingcow]

Flintlocks take too long to reload.

As far as reality-based shooters go, you're never going to see much set in the pre-repeating-rifle world (I'm aware that there are some mods for this, but it's not exactly common), and WWI is out because no one wants to play "sit in a trench and get gangrene", and any war between the US Civil War and that one isn't well-known enough to be made in to a game.

As for the post-depression wars, no one cares about Korea (sad but true, I bet most people aren't even sure of which decade that was in), Vietnam's confusing and hard to make a game about ('You are in a very dark forest. You are likely to step on a landmine.' -]go west 'You step on a landmine and die. Game over. [l]oad, [q]uit, [n]ew game')

For everything after Vietnam, the tech is just too advanced for it to be much fun. For most wars, the game would consist of lots of missions with objectives like, "secure the area around the already-bombed target. Don't worry, everyone's probably dead, we just want you to check", and, "accept the surrender of some surviving tank crewmen. We blew up all their tanks from 50 miles away, and they're waving white flags, just go put 'em in zip ties and get 'em back to the POW camp". Anyway, as with Korea, no one really gives a damn about most of those wars. Grenada? Panama? Hell, lots of people probably don't even realize that we've invaded those countries within the last half-century. The only one with enough recognition to sell games would be the first war in Iraq, and that'd lose too many sales due to the tastelessness factor brought on by making a game like that while we're over there fighting again.

Plus, where's the danger of losing in these games? Sure, you might fail and die, but it's not like there's a real chance of the "good guys" losing. And if they did, so what? What are the stakes in most of these wars? So, your side loses face and its reputation suffers? One small, inconsequential country remains Communist or at least "too far" left? Oooh, so scary!

WWII just happens to have the perfect balance of tech, action, plot, characters, and participants. It lends itself to games that are, if not great (most aren't), then at least decent, and they're certainly easy (and relatively cheap) to write and design.

Let me be the first to say:

[Cadallin]

Thank fucking god! "Urban Culture" is pathetic bullshit to begin with. Games based on it are just sad beyond belief. They're blatant attempts to cash in on "hip." Let's get back to the proper business of killing orcs and zombies.

Urban-themed?

[Dolly_Llama]

This is a bit of a pet peeve, but "urban"? Are they talking about SimCity, or GTA?

It's a BS marketing term that dances around race.

also, FTFA

"We've spent almost a million bucks testing concepts. We're only making games that are in the upper core tile."

Quartile maybe?

Re:Urban-themed?

[Kadin2048]

"Urban" means "urban culture". I don't know where you're getting the whole race thing. That's your thing. Last I checked, "urban culture" doesn't have anything to do with race... it has to do with social and economic class.

Right -- because there aren't a disproportionate number of ethnic minorities living in urban areas, leading to a strong correlation between "urban" culture and their ethnic culture.

The only thing worse than racism is denial.

Um...

[p0tat03]

How about the notion that they're just out of touch with their demographic? Every time I see an "urban" game (Need for Speed: Most Wanted, I'm looking at yoooooou~) it's always come off as being poser and totally fake. What can you expect? You're getting a bunch of 35 year-old, predominantly-white, middle-class geeks to develop your "hip" urban game!

And NFS:MW wasn't even the worst offender... I can think of many worse...

Maybe as a gimmick

[brassmoknets]

I'm sure 'Urban' as a sell-any-old-crap gimmick may be nearing its demise, but there is no such thing as a dead genre. A well-made innovative game can be in any genre at all and will sell well. Who'd have thought 'puppies' was a genre that would effectively carry a market launch of a handheld?

grumpy old man

[acvh]

I remember way back when, thinking that when the technology arrived to make games look "real" it would be pretty cool. WRONG. When games look "real" and are modeling real physics, they are limited in what they can do. All we get in the way of innovation is new environments for running around shooting stuff.

Sprite based 2D games could violate physical laws and we didn't care. Better yet, games didn't have to exist in an analog of the known universe at all.

We got what we asked for, and damn it, it's boring.

Re:The next big theme should be

[bunions]

I'm still amazed there's not a Pirates v Ninjas v Zombies v Robots MMOG.

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?"

Aren't we talking about tailfins here?

[hey!]

"Urban theme" doesn't tell me anything meaningful about a game's mechanics or strategy.

So, what we're talking about is superficial stuff -- decoration. And if it's decoration, it's subjection to fashion. And if it's fashion, it's subject to going-out-of-fashion.

It's like cars. In the immediate post WW2 years, there was a melted, "jelly bean" look to car body styles. Shortly thereafter, in the era of the nuclear strategic bomber, cars started to get taller and taller tail fins, culminating in a Caddie my father in law had which I swear must have had tail fins 18 inches (45cm) high. Since this was well beyond the ridiculous, the styles swiftly changed so that the tail fins were cut off, leaving a vestigal ridge about an inch high and several inches wide. The result was angular and gave cars a massive and muscular look. My father in law had one of these too (do a google image search on 1972 Plymouth Fury. Then the energy crisis came, and cars got smaller, and aerodynamics started to chip away a the broad shouldered look, and finally we had the original Ford Taurus, which was back to the "jelly bean" look.

So, maybe "gangsta" is out until we've churned over a couple generations of gamers.

Publishers Don't Understand GTA

[ArmyOfFun]

Sure, part of the appeal of GTA is being an urban sociopath. The real draw of the GTA series though is its open world. GTA 3 was one of the most open 3D games that had come out in a while. You can get fares in a taxi-cab, drive sick people to the hospital in an ambulance, or totally ignore the missions and just cause mayhem.

Instead of publishers trying to copy GTA by focusing on its gameplay, they instead focused on the hip hop vibe. What they don't seem to realize is that GTA was popular despite its urban flavor, not becaues of it. GTA is more similar to Oblivion than it is to Def Jam: Fight for NY. You want to have a GTA or Oblivion style hit? Create an unquie world and make it open and give the player a lot of different stuff to do. It's a little puzzling that the open world genre is really lacking in quantity right now despite the huge success of the few games that have done it right.

Remember all the side scrollers that came out after Super Mario Bros? What if instead of side scrollers, publishers figured Mario was popular because it featured a fat plumber and all games of the NES era all featured plumbers or fat blue collar workers, but totally ignored the side-scrolling action that made Mario fun. That's exactly what's happening with the companies that tried to ape GTA by putting focusing on MTV style hip hop rather than on open gameplay.

Duh! GTA was taking the piss!

[payndz]

What all the wannabes apparently failed to spot was that the GTA series mocked first the mobster, and then the gangsta genres. Anyone who listened to the radio stations (never mind playing some of the missions) in Vice City and thought the game was in any way taking itself seriously needed their head examining. The same applied to San Andreas once CJ escaped from the oddly humourless Los Santos missions in the first part of the game. As soon as he met up with The Truth, all bets were off.

Part of the fun of the GTA series is seeing how a bunch of weirdoes in Scotland will take the piss out of American pop-trash culture in the next mission - but the (US-developed) imitators all missed the point and played the whole thing straight. No wonder people got bored very quickly - if you're not taking the piss, there's literally nothing to hold your attention.