mos6507's Blog

Good article, thanks for the link.

 

I can't disagree with it, but I'm a fairly agreeable person so, I'll leave it to my more critical brethren to play devil's advocate.

 

I seem to remember Atari 2600 games (Asteroids in particular) costing $60 about the time of the crash. That's just too much. Ditto for the controllers. Here's a scenario: After the PS3 comes out, the industry crashes like a beached whale. Nintendo holds back the Revolution, and revitalizes the industry again by releasing it in 2009.

 

We need a crash. I want a crash? *sigh* Yeah. I think I really do.

There has been a mental shift in the consumer towards looking at videogames as throwaway entertainment. Replay value and retail cost means little if you do most of your gaming through a Blockbuster rental.

 

I think there are enough consumers out there who are content with this to sustain the industry in some form, although I think there is a big problem in ever rising game development costs.

That was an interesting article, but I think he wildly overstates his case.

 

First of all, I remember saving my allowance for months to afford $50 NES games in 1989, so the fact that an Xbox360 game costs $60, 17 years later, doesn't tell me much other than the author of that article has a short memory. Hasn't anyone ever heard of inflation? As far as I can tell, video games and consoles have always been about the same price.

 

Second, he compares videogames to the movie industry but...it isn't like the movie industry is doing that badly, financially. They cry poverty, but if you look at the numbers, most of the big studios are doing pretty well, thank you very much. I mean, as the videogame industry looks more and more like the movie industry (mostly derivative, big-bucks, bland crap) I become more and more disappointed, but it isn't like you can't make money doing that.

 

And third, people always like to talk about how derivative and bland everything is (look, I did it in the paragraph just above ) - but it isn't like that's anything new. Ever heard of Ms. Pac-Man? How about Jr. Pac-Man? River Raid II? Pitfall II?

I'm willing to believe that the ratio of bad games to good games is worse now than it was 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago - but I'd like some evidence first. It shouldn't be that hard. Get a list of all games released in, say, 1980, 1990, and last year and compare.

The current portion of the article jibes with what I've seen elsewhere. Creating a X360-gen game can cost megabucks so the money-men want low-risk thus they stick with established genres and sequels. (As vdub_bobby says, much like the movie industry.)

 

But will this crash the videogame industry? Maybe. It really comes down to whether people are willing to spend their entertainment dollars on console games. To me, the price of the console is a little steep (even with MS/Sony probably selling it at a loss), and the same goes for the games. Plus, once I buy the game there's the time required to play it. So, I've decided to spend my limitted discretionary income & time elsewhere. The question is whether there are enough people who make the opposite choice.

 

Now, I was just reading a review of the Xbox 360 on ars technica. On the plus side it looks like many games will have free demos available via the Xbox Live Marketplace. Plus some smaller games (including arcade classics like Joust and an Xbox Live enabled version of Gauntlet) available as inexpensive downloads. Hopefully, this will encourage better games (who needs a review when you can try before you buy?), while also enticing people to buy games they may not have previously considered.

 

On the downside, it sounds like you need a HDTV+5.1 home theater system & broadband Internet in addition to the harddrive to get the full benefit of the Xbox 360. Again, big bucks which I can find other things to spend on.

 

One other point I'd like to mention is whether X360-gen consoles might supplant PC gaming. From a developer's standpoint, I'd much rather develop for three console platforms than the PC with it's wide range of CPUs, GPUs, OSs, and other variables. The Ars article says Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 in HDTV is just like playing it on a PC, except with a much larger screen & stable frame rate. And, you know, that Xbox 360 + HDTV isn't too much more expensive that a tricked-out gaming PC.

The game industry won't crash like the in the 80's, it's not essentially a monopoly like was back then. It's easy to write an article like this with a big prediction, not much riding on being wrong. The industry may change in response to consumer reaction. I don't think that we are going to have a mass extinction, an asteroid hitting the market. It's like we can see them coming now a lot better then back then. The market is much more diversified with a lot of different stakeholders, and even if something big does happen it may just kill off a few dinosaurs but you'll see that as just a blip in the gaming market. I don't think it's going to cause a mass die-off.

 

Thinking back to the 'crash' of the eighties, I personally never really felt it, I kept gaming on my Apple and in the arcade and then there was the NES and a succession of consoles right up to where we are now.

 

Currently there are independant games being made, games with originality. When people stop buying games with big licenses and huge marketing budgets then maybe they will discover these gems that have existed all along. I don't see that happening in Hollywood, and I really don't see that happening on the consoles.

 

It might happen that people just suddenly stop buying Madden, and that's going to hurt EA's bottom line, but there's a lot sitting in the wings, crushed under the life suffocating jugernauts of sports games and sequels. People are not going to believe that the game market is a flash in the pan and pull out their money like they did (incorrectly) back in the eighties, we are lot more savvy now. Now we'll realize that the games themselves need to adapt.

 

- David Galloway -