GameDaily: The Video Game Business Is Broken

[psyop63b]

Excellent article. There are more like it on there as well.

http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=13128

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[Jhonus]

i'm sure you'll be able to find hundreds of semi-doomsday and doomsday articles for the last generation aswell.

[dulmoments]

thanks for this link, this was a great read.

[Artbot]

Blah blah blah...broader base....Blah blah blah...more women gamers....Blah blah blah....industry is doomed...Blah blah blah.....

I can't believe "writers' get paid to recycle the same old crap year after year.

[sheppyboy2000]

For an industry that's supposedly broken, it does seem to be breaking records every year. And without the killer apps of the previous year.

Anyone who claims doom and gloom is just wanting attention. The industry is always growing, always accepting of both new and hardcore gamers, and NOT repeating the mistakes Atari did that lead to the industry shaking crash. And for those who didn't pay attention, Nintendo's success was more a matter of releasing in time for an expected industry rebound.

Even if the industry dies (unlikely as all hell but I digress), in a couple years, people will want video games again and as such, maybe we'll be playing the Apple Gamebrick or Samsung Dreamstation instead of PS4, Xbox 1080, and Nintendo BadnameBox.

[dulmoments]

I dont think the game industry is going to roll over and die, just because next gen cost to much. But I do see alot of things changing in the next couple of years after all three consoles have been released. You wont see as many innovative ideas from the smaller developer, and you will see more repeats or sequels. I personally think that xbox will be able to survive without a halo, nintendo will do great because they will be the most innovative on the market, and I finally see sony fall as the king. Its good and bad for the casual and hard core gamer.

[Samo]

Consoles are utterly expensive for the most of the people. They are becoming a luxury gadget.

I love good videogames, but I would feel ashamed of myself if I spend 400$ in a console.

Gamming platforms have to compete against more necessary expenses and other healthier and more creative forms of spending your free time.

[sheppyboy2000]

You wont see as many innovative ideas from the smaller developer, and you will see more repeats or sequels.

Actually, the industry as it stands right now has a fairly large barrier for garage development in breaking into the mainstream. However, I see Xbox 360 and PS3 as excellent new frontiers for small time developers to enter the field. As full releases? No. But as Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation World downloads respectfully. These quick, gameplay centric casual titles does stand a chance to spark a new industry within the console games. And with Sony's Yaroze program, you can bet some enthuisiasts will be dropping concept they believe are awesome games. I know I'll be shopping my demo to Sony once it's up and running, that's for sure.

Consoles are utterly expensive for the most of the people. They are becoming a luxury gadget.

Excellant point except for one massive flaw. We already know, outside of christmas time, the casual gamers usually wait for price drops. Hell, a vast majority of the time, PS2 is the best selling console in the world. I expect it to remain that way for at least another two years. The price point which has the most amount of adopters is the "sweet spot" of $200. Until then, most of your sales are going strictly to the hardcore. And us hardcore, we got money to burn. Let's just put it this way, have you priced a dual processor computer with quad SLI?

[psyop63b]

I discussed the high cost of the next generation to my friend, who made an interesting point about it. My point was that the money just doesn't justify the amount of pleasure I would expect to get out of the console.

Knowing I am into the dating scene, he remarks that the costs of a typical date (dinner, movie, etc.) at a regular interval (say one date per week) can quickly exceed the price of an Xbox 360 or PS3... and posed a question that I was unable to answer: Compared to the potentially limitless sum of money you will spend on dating, would the one-time cost of a videogame console net you more pleasure per dollar over the long term?

Hmmmmm...

Maybe this is why the gamer stereotype doesn't include mention of a girlfriend :D

.

[Buexe]

I always buy and sell my console stuff on ebay and spend hardly anything on it,
because the money it costs to get the "luxury" gadget is what you almost get when
selling it a few weeks/months later.

[Kid Dynomite]

I discussed the high cost of the next generation to my friend, who made an interesting point about it. My point was that the money just doesn't justify the amount of pleasure I would expect to get out of the console.

Knowing I am into the dating scene, he remarks that the costs of a typical date (dinner, movie, etc.) at a regular interval (say one date per week) can quickly exceed the price of an Xbox 360 or PS3... and posed a question that I was unable to answer: Compared to the potentially limitless sum of money you will spend on dating, would the one-time cost of a videogame console net you more pleasure per dollar over the long term?

Hmmmmm...

Maybe this is why the gamer stereotype doesn't include mention of a girlfriend :D

.

Your friend spends $400.00 on one date a week?

Is he using an escort service?:)

[havokzprodigy]

Compared to the potentially limitless sum of money you will spend on dating, would the one-time cost of a videogame console net you more pleasure per dollar over the long term?



.

If all your scoring is a kiss on the cheek then you may get more pleasure from a console.
However if the date ends as well as I aim for, no console on earth could amount to it.

I think he plays too much Playwithyourself Station 2 if you ask me.:eek: j/k

[Dennik]

I never owned a console, so i couldn't care less. Bring some cinematic quality, interesting storyline, and believable animation into games, and then we'll talk about it. And for that to happen, the'd need to reduce the number of crappy titles, coming out each year, and focus to a few quality ones, which of course is never going to happen.
Greed and crap always go together. :rolleyes:

[psyop63b]

Kid Dynomite: No, but over the course of several weeks/months those things can add up to more than the cost of a 3rd gen console.


havokzprodigy: If my dates turn out well, I would say it delivers more pleasure than a console too... and slightly cheaper than an escort service :D

[Hugh-Jass]

If my dates turn out well, I would say it delivers more pleasure than a console too...

Plus trying to @#$% a console voids the warranty.

The article makes some good points about what's out there competing for your leisure time...stuff that wasn't out there just a few years back.

[hellgatemedia]

The game industry is going nowhere, and in fact is expanding.
Doomsayers can say all they want, I work on the front lines, while I'm trying to get
my film projects going, selling video games pays the bills.
Now, I probably sell about 40 to 50 Xbox 360's a week.
I can't keep the Nintendo DS in, nor any of the games, and that Brain Age I probably sell close to 50 to 60 copies a week.
I sell minimum 30 PSP's a week as well.
I have over 1 thousand people who want the PS3 at launch, even though I think it's assenine to spend that kind of money on the PS3, they don't care, and with the shortages, i will be turning a lot of people away.
Most of my repeat customers own every system, so I am ready with facts to prove anyone who thinks the gaming industry is going down, to prove them wrong.

[Peddy]

while id like to see more innovation that is currently out there, its starting to seep through with episodic gaming, and online distribution, allowing developers to create niche games and take more risks.
even so, without that, the gaming industry is making a metric-arseload of money every year.

i think articles such as ive linked are really doomsday messages from those developers who want to get the same respect in popular culture and media as Film and TV does.

[Atrokkus]

The game industry as one of the most powerful and quickly-developing business entities in the world is THRIVING, not dying -- that's obvious enough.

However, the creative side of this industry... well, it's on a decline.

And while genres like 3D-actions and simulators and the like are getting only better with every installment, more "intellectual" genres like CRPG are gradually collapsing into their dark ages.

Why? Simple: publishers want their franchises to comply with the desires of a braoder audience. In the age of amazingly-realistic engines like Unreal 3, guess what the average Joe wants out of just about any game? Exactly: flashy graphics. Also, such an average gamer doesn't raelly want to bother with a complex combat system or, even more so, with large amounts of ingame text (dialogs, et al). That's why we have the utterly retarded real-time-with-pause bastardation and no non-linearity in gameplay; in fact, you are pretty much railroaded all the time, with combat being the only and ultimate option in almost every situation.

Only about a decade ago (actually, even less than a decade), technologies were not yet advanced enough to produce striking visuals, so developers had to concentrate on the raw gameplay and roleplaying to make the game really interesting to the player. Writers could produce much better graphics than any engine can right now -- the power of an apt word could make us use our imagination and actually immerse into the gameworld. At the same time, even when graphic engines became sophisticated enough to allow for better graphics, some games were not yet dumbf**ked (pardon my french, couldn't find a better term) by the publishers -- a striking example is Fallout, truly one of the best CRPGs in existence, which combined gritty and very stylish visuals ('50 Nuclear rush vibe anyone?) with an outstanding gameplay and roleplaying (that's one of the few games where you could talk your way through the whole game, even in the end, and where your actions and inactions had very remarkable consequences). But Fallout had truly become the Jesus of the RPG industry as of late -- it was publicly crucified (Black Isle Studios' and their project Van Buren's death) and now is burning in the Hell that is named "Bethesda softworks" [the Fallout franchise has been purchased by said developer/publisher] which was once a noble company producing interesting titles, but now they're spitting out lousy adventury Sims-like clickfests like Morrowind and Oblivion and are audacious enough to put the "RPG" label on them! ANd while their games *are* fun and interesting at times, they are no longer CRPGs, really. The story and roleplaying have become the dim backdrops behind the "fun" gameplay and graphics (btw, if anyone wants to read a very thorough review of Oblivion, check this one (http://www.rpgcodex.com/content.php?id=129) out). They have been stripped of the core aspects of the genre: choice and consequence.

The sad thing is, developers have little say on this. What even more sad is that developers are extremely talented people, who are capable of doing the best RPGs out there. Take the late Troika for example: they did the absolutely fantastic Arcanum, again one of the cornerstones of the genre, but in the year it was produced, did it sell well? No, because at that time (about 2001) there were much more visually-sophisticated titles around, which featured more user-friendly gameplay, less text, which appealed to a much greater audience. And though Arcanum still sold pretty good back then, it wouldn't sell at all had it been released today, this is pretty obvious. Just imagine the media outrage - "The Ugly Duckling" would flash the headlines of various gamespots and gamespies. And though they made a more graphically-intensive title, VtM: Bloodlines, and yet even here the publishers ruined the whole thing: the much earlier, premature version of HL2 engine was given to the developers, and then the publisher set the strict deadlines which didn't leave Troika a single chance to actually implement *all* that they originally conceptualized. Thus, we were given a terribly buggy and raher game-play-deficient game, as if the second half ot eh gameplot was being developed in fast-forward mode.

You see, publishers produce games and seek profit. they know what sells, they know what doesn't. Thus, they make a priority list -- graphics first, everything else is basically an auxiliary element. Also, publishers need money fast, they can't give the developers too much development time, and they can't prolong the development period for too long, because they might have already made deals with the DVD-factories, hired PR staff, etc, etc. "The story's not non-linear enough yet? Bah, forget it, fix it fast and give me the master disk already". "Pixel shaders 4.0 not working properly yet?! What are you, nuts?! MAKE EM WORK GOOD, WE NEED SHINY WATER GODDAMNIT!!"


Call me what you want - an obnoxious elitist, some kind of a crazy prophet... And yet, I'm a game journalist and always have a watchful eye on the industry, and I've talked to the developers, but more importantly, I've played the games, so I know what i'm talking about. I know what *I* want, and what I don't get nowadays.

Not all is lost, however. I still have high hopes for titles like Dragon Age, and will eagerly cover its development on the site im working at.

edit: oops, forgot the linkie - fixed.

[JeroenDStout]

Graphics aren't the only hot item, these days physics are rapidly becoming a mainstream hot-thing too.

I'm not really doomsday about the creative side of the game industry. The same happened to film. What in the end happens is that the majority of everything is made for lower demands. Books, films, games, everything. At times I'm convinced the high-level demanders are a bit arrogant in thinking that high-level products are better. For the low-level demanders, they are not. It's like different tastes, only in an intellectual way. High level demanders are just in a tight spot because most of the world has far lower demands. Yet they often think they have the moral high ground because, surely, 'high' is better than 'low'.

The whole cry of developers that it is unfair that gamers look at graphics is a bit pathetic in the same way that it is pathetic that some less-than-pretty girls started this whole cry of 'looks don't matter'. Or that people who aren't fun to be with start saying 'you should respect everybody'. It's not unfair, it's just not the way they want it to be.
Sure, I don't like the commercial industry either and I've made very harsh comments on it, but in the end it's quite simple; I'm a very, very hard person to please, because you have to be damn witty to impress with your media. And it's logical that people would rather please en masse than please me. So it's not really unfair as much as it's not how I want it to be.

But there are plenty of games left which are creative, it's just harder to find them. Which is why I would think that there is need for a 'network' for high-level demanders, rather than turning the entire industry high-level; that would make it collapse. It thrives on not being elitist and not being geeky.
So it needs a network that tells people; hey, here's Darwinia. There is Gish. Did you hear Portal was based on Nebacular Drop? I have no clue how such a network would work, though, even if I have thought of starting it often enough. But that is what could save the creative side. Right now it's just hard to get a game to sell if it's too different. The best example was Darwinia. Nobody noticed it, untill it appeared on Steam. Then suddently it sold enough to let them make another game.

Perhaps it's a bit edgy, but I prefer living alongside the larger commercial plane than to force my way through and pretend everybody will like me for making things that please just the people I want to please rather than everybody.

Call me what you want - an obnoxious elitist, some kind of a crazy prophet...
Being elitist is easy and fun. It's harder to get a system that works based on elitism.

[sheppyboy2000]

Atrokkus (http://forums.cgsociety.org/member.php?u=203440), I hate to say it but you do seem like a bit of an elitists jerk. Your entire post reeks of "this is what I like and anyone who disagrees is wrong."

Hate to say it but if the RPGs of old were economically viable, they would still be making them. If you want these things to keep dropping, buy the damn things instead of waiting for their eventual appearance on the $9.99 rack. Most of the people I talk to about these kinds of games have the same basic idea. "It's a good game but I wouldn't pay $50 for it." Well, damnit, you NEED to pay $50 for it to get the message of "keep em coming" out. Because if the publishers cannot move additional copies ot stores, it is a failure. But if the copies they DO move to stores stay on the racks to the eventual clearance price, yeah, you did finally buy it and support the project but what good were you in the long run? The publisher lost money. The retailer lost money. But you picked up a game in a genre you supposedly like.

Proof is in the pudding, you say? Take a look at Vertical Shooters. They are dead in the states and when they do drop, the common response is "not worth $50." In Japan? Alive and thriving, baby. So much to the point that several vertical shooters even dropped on Dreamcast long after it's supposed "death." In fact, the last one came out a couple months ago (Under Defeat).

Now, I do find I miss the old RPGs but I prefered the Eastern method more anyway. And yes, I do put my money where my mouth is. When the RPGs drop that I'm interested in, I buy at full price. And apparently my support does go somewhere because Nippon Ichi America keeps adding more and more games to their release dates. vbmenu_register("postmenu_3739568", true);

[Atrokkus]

Atrokkus, I hate to say it but you do seem like a bit of an elitists jerk. Your entire post reeks of "this is what I like and anyone who disagrees is wrong."
"This is what I like" - yes, exactly my words.
"anyone who disagrees is wrong" - now that's your fantasy, mister.
Refrain from putting those slimy words in my mouth, please.

Hate to say it but if the RPGs of old were economically viable, they would still be making them.
You don't need to say that, because I already stated that in my post. That's the whole point, really.

If you want these things to keep dropping, buy the damn things instead of waiting for their eventual appearance on the $9.99 rack. Most of the people I talk to about these kinds of games have the same basic idea. "It's a good game but I wouldn't pay $50 for it." Well, damnit, you NEED to pay $50 for it to get the message of "keep em coming" out.
Okay, you either don't really see my point or try to turn this into a nonsensical offtopical flamefest. Sorry, but the problem you are illustrating has completly NOTHING to do with the problem that I illustrated earlier. In the "old" times RPGs *SOLD* well, otherwise we wouldn't have the modern industry in the first place. They wouldn't sell now because the current expectations of the crowd are way differetn, beacuse of the new techonologies and "hot" stuff. You say "buy the damn thing" -- WELL WHAT IS THERE TO BUY, HUH? Do you see an abundance of quality RPGs like Fallout these days? HUH? You're just raving about your own stuff (and i agree that it might be the case with your example of vertical shooters), and yet call me a "jerk" because I apparently talk about something you have little idea of.


Again, no offense intended, and no offense taken (even if I should have).

[sheppyboy2000]

I say "buy the damn things" because the lack of sales on Grim Fadago was what lead to the lacking support from one of the founding fathers in the adventure genre. I saw many of the RPGs you mentioned magically end up on clearance racks because, in the "grand old days," RPGs of that nature were a dime a dozen. And only one of twelve was worth more than a dime. There was a golden age of RPGs but that didn't mean every game coming out during that era was golden. In fact, quite the opposite. There was even a period where I, as a consumer, felt ashamed to be a PC gamer because of the constant flood of crap with corny lines that made even "Are you a bad enough dude to save the president" look like the script to Xenosaga. I think the "final straw" for me was a box cover that clearly stated, "It's not Midevil, it's FULL EVIL." After that, I had to step away from PC gaming for a while. And I don't think it's a matter of the market no longer being there but mainly a market that refuses to shift focus.

It is a simple matter of shifting market attention rather than giving up on the genre altogether. You have two VERY viable markets for the RPGs of old. The first is a matter of online, episodic content. People don't look at graphics so much when a title is only $10 a chapter. You can get a large number of copies out there which can continue to support the studio while they finish up their saga. The second is the handheld markets. Seriously. Why is only Sony devs giving a damn about RPGs? The market begs for new titles and even Fallout could make a resurgance much in the same way Valkyrie Profile did.

The market remains, it's just changed. And the excuse of "now we need action and blood and guts to sell games" is a rather lame one. After all, how many copies of Geometry Wars sold? And you can bring the new art style with the old gameplay. It just requires a tad bit more patience since 2D can be churned out so quickly and 3D can become a multiyear project. The ability to adapt to a changing market is how companies survive and the refusal to change and complaining when you fail strikes me as nothing more than an excuse. And if I sound a tad harsh, let's just say I'm tired of people crying on my shoulder about Working Designs (love the games) dying when my copy of Lunar 1 & 2 are filled with Austin Powers quotes.

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