Is the game industry crashing ?

Is the game industry crashing ?
A friend of mine linked this very interesting video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZxXEidtxHk

A couple of flaws in the video.

1. R.O.B. was not the reason Nintendo prevailed and revived the gaming industry. It was the quality library of games that came out. R.O.B. only sold one out of fourteen NES packages. In fact I cannot even remember a single friend or classmate that ever had a R.O.B. The thing only worked with two games.

2. Mass Effect 3 wasn't bad because of the complete rush job and only having two writers. It is because they fired the one competent writer they had, Drew Karpyshyn, and let the hack Mac Walters do what he wanted to do, and then to top it off, decided to forgo all the plans they had to actually have the endings generated by the choices made throughout the game and instead give the players a "pick your ending" bullshit. Again blame EA for not accepting delays for a finished product, they wanted their sales to pay off for that marketing blitz.

3. Modern Warfare's backlash is from the lack of innovation or change. It is the same game repackaged over and over. Not because the three hour campaigns weren't great, or the endings.

4. There has been no real backlash at the Assassin's Creed games outside of the fact that Ubisoft tried to use Jade Raymond as a pin-up girl to promote the game. Almost all of the games have universally good and solid ratings.

5. Battlefield's big issue was the forced use of the new(ish) Origin store and DRM. Yeah the single player game is crap but Battlefield has always been about the multiplayer. Origin is a terrible service that was forced on people. That is Battlefield's biggest problem. Another game EA ruined.

6. No mention of SPORE? Another game EA ruined.

7. Dead Space 3's biggest complaint is the turn from horror to just straight up action.

8. The rapid releases are not the deciding factor. The issue is they are boiling all of their games down to the lowest common dominator target audience. Casualizing every game that comes to them just so they can maximize the target audience. In the process making a game that no one really enjoys that much.

The "game industry is crashing" or "PC games are dying" often pop ups once in a while and it's never true. Like every market, it evolves but in fact, with console trying to attract more people (casual games with the wii for example) or the emergence of games on mobile, the gaming market is growing and concerns more people. The question is : will it evolve in a good way.
Big publishers tend to turn bad : Activision with the COD franchise and lots of movies games, EA with lots of good franchises and very bad attitude, Sim City being another recent victim or Ubisoft to a lesser extend with bad decision for DRM on PC. All these is driven by money grabbing attitude but still worked due to marketing, hype, and reputation of some franchises. But more and more people are getting the hint of what those publisher are doing. It doesn't mean all publishers are like that and that only those develop games. More and more games (and big hits) are made by indy devs so it might be the way to go if you're a classic gamer and are not interested in casual gaming.

In the end, the customer has the power to make things change, with his wallet. If nobody buys crappy games made for a quick buck, or DLC that are not justified (first day launch DLC, overpriced DLC or DLC cut from the original product) and take a little time to assess a game from critics and review before buying (don't pre-order games by the way) publishers will stop that shit. Also, rewarding those who tend to have a good attitude will help (indy devs, some smaller publishers).

But I have no worry about the game industry state in general.

Good movie about the game industrie! Tells a lot, and I think the guy is right.. for some of those reason I don't buy as much games anymore... I really hate DLC, hate unfinished feeling of some games, and constant "updates" you need to download.

New good example is the XBOX one... its all about the money... not about the gamers anymore

it's always been about the money. that's how markets work Diz-X. they make a product they hope people will buy, so in that sense its about the gamers, but only to the extent gamers buy their products. xbox one is just the next step in Microsoft's effort to fully integrate all their devices into one OS, misguided though that may be.

Quote:

Originally posted by spacedmonduke

it's always been about the money. that's how markets work Diz-X. they make a product they hope people will buy, so in that sense its about the gamers, but only to the extent gamers buy their products. xbox one is just the next step in Microsoft's effort to fully integrate all their devices into one OS, misguided though that may be.

Yes, a company goal is to make money. But you can make money while respecting the customers and having fun like some indie dev (or old game developpers) do or you can go the opposite way and lie to your customer so that he buys, don't support your games once the money is in the bank, and use cheap tactics to milk customer more than they should do. And that's unacceptable.

But I agree with you that in the end, if gamers don't support shady publishers/devs, day-0 DLC and all that shit, they will stop doing it. Problem is, the wider the audience of the gaming industry gets, the more dumb people there is in it.

The way I think of it is not too in depth thinking.. the more people in this world born, the more gamers born. It'll probably never die considering it's so vast and so much people in some way, form and/or shape are involved with it. Or know people involved with it. Consoles, handhelds, laptops, computers, movies based off games, trailers, a huge part of youtube and social media, game stores, events, etc. etc.

For whatever it's worth, I was once employed by one of the big four game companies. I did media and public relations for them. I'm not saying this makes me a magic seer of all things to come in the industry, but it does give me some perspective since I worked with marketing, advertising and human behavior in this specific field. I could still be wrong, but this is my take on it:

I agree with much of what's been posted here.

I'd add that with the proliferation of browser games, apps for smartphones, and so on, that it's becoming easier and easier for people to create their own games and market them on the cheap. In other words, anyone with a decent idea and some basic tools can now produce their game.

That means the world isn't forced to play a bunch of broke-dick games any more, and pay out the ass for them. I can get just as many broke-dick games for free from my smart phone as I can from the major game companies.

Madden comes to mind (yes, let's pick on EA some more). That game has been broken pretty much since the day it was created, and despite knowing full well what the flaws in that game were, EA intentionally - let me emphasize this, intentionally - left bugs in the game knowing that people would buy the game next year hoping the bug was fixed. There's a bug with some punts in the game that has been present since it was a Super Nintendo game where if the punting team gets down field fast enough and catches the punt, it's considered a turnover and the punting team gets the ball. This bug was present in the first Madden for Super Nintendo. It was in the XBox version. It was in the Playstation version. It was in the PS2. It was in the PS3 and the XBox 360. It's present now in the PS4. All of these consoles had different programming requirements, so clearly the game has been reprogrammed for each of them - yet that bug, mysteriously, remains present and consistent in every version of the game ever made, and EA has known about it since day one.

That's probably not a bug at this point. The only way that happens is if the bug and code that created it are found, clearly identified, and then reprogrammed with the bug still present on purpose. That's the only way you get the same bug to appear in so many different iterations of a game - especially since the source code had to change over the years as well.

EA and Madden did that.

But they survived, because to make a game cost a lot of money and they could simply outspend the competition (Front Page sports had a football sim that was at least twice as good, but EA managed to crowd them out of the market by throwing giant money at the NFL).

That's how that industry operated for the last 20 years.

But now...

I can find broken games for free pretty much anywhere, and they're just as entertaining as the big dollar games, but without the sense of feeling fucked over for paying for stupid shit once I get bored and decide that it is in fact, utter shit.

I have a game on my smart phone called Pocket Frogs. This game is stupid. You get a baby frog and you raise it, take it to the pond to catch flies, mate it with other frogs at the pond, race it, and sell any offspring you want. Along the way you collect certain sets of frogs.

It's pretty retarded.

But I've had it on my phone for 2+ years now, and I play it as much or more as I ever played Madden, and it's always current, and sometimes they add new features - and they do it for free.

There are several other stupid games out there I can think of that match the feelings I get from Pocket Frogs as well. I have a trading card game, an arcade Coin Dozer game, a Prize Claw, let's not even mention Candy Crush. I also have a settlers game where you try to settle the old west - sort of a Sim City, but more fun - yes, I said more fun. And free. We could probably all go on and on with decent games that are at least of comparable quality to what the console games are.

So since the world can now get other games without paying for them, and since these other games are just as good, the gaming industry has only one resource left to work with: Quality. Game design, customer interaction, depth of story, quality of game.

But companies like EA have been ignoring (or moving contrary to) that part of the gaming industry for so long, they not only don't know how to do it but they've gotten it burnt into their psyches that it's actually counter-productive.

As long as that remains the case, expect for worse and worse console games to be produced. They cost a lot to make and they're not getting as strong of a return on investment as they used to. That should tell the industry to improve their product, but that's not what the industry will do. Instead of improving their product they'll keep churning out cookie cutter games hoping to get those people that still want that particular game and want to continue the series, and they'll churn these suckers out with less and less funding put into their development. Less trouble-shooting, less money spent on writers, less money spent on game testing, and so on.

In other words, what the industry ought to do (and could do easily if it wanted) is focus on quality.

What they will do instead is continue to try to get the most out of their customers while spending less and less on game development. And in the end, the consoles will go away.

Games themselves won't die. I'm not saying that. But the end of the current console structure of gaming is coming to an end. One way or another.