Is the Gaming Industry Crashing?

Dont think 33 mins is long. You'll get sucked in and finish it before you realize. I thought i would just like to show this.

[video=youtube;XZxXEidtxHk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZxXEidtxHk[/video]

 

it's true for the most part, though I'm not so sure I'd attribute the resurrection of the gaming industry from the first crash solely with Nintendo , Computer gaming is also a huge part of this crash, since almost all the (good) games on the consoles can be played on PC as well today, why bother to buy a dedicated platform to play games when you can just use your existing PC (often with better hardware, though while the hardware may be better I've encountered far to many PC related quirks that you don't generally suffer on a console to ever say PC is the better avenue, it's simply the more versatile one)

 

pretty much, have not touched Cawl of Doodie series since black ops1
and apparently ive been smart to do so. as most sequeals bar a few have been trash.
they are trying to rely on there big IP's in these times, but even there running lack lustre on the most part, doing the new and dangerous is risky, and where there's money involved....

but with crowd funding, there's less risk, your getting money for your work before you, uhhh work?
and F2P is pay as you go, but almost no subscription to be competitive.

my thing is, ive spent over $250 on MWO, more than 3 copies of a publisher developer made titles that would probably hav given me same amount of game time, but with some more and less finished product titles, and MWO is still no where near finished or polished, so am i pay more because others pay nothing? or because less people are paying? i dunno but i relinquish the want to spend more money until some things are set in stone (good or bad) for the future of the game with community warfare.

problem is, piracy can be big. but overall people will buy games if they have the money, it's easier for them to do, especially if you make it easy to get with the purchase, but people want the try before you buy deal cause they have been burned so many times by greedy publishers, either being greedy or trying to make money out of a bad developer etc, when you burn your own bridges who can be surprised by the out comes.... not me

 

I can see f2play has this problem - one every corner, every day you play it, there are huge neon signs all over the place "PAY US MONEYS"
In reality, only 5-35% actually pay, so they have to pick up the tab for the rest, which means they will have to pay for every "should be available" item in the game due to the fact that only a portion are paying.

Piracy on the other hand - I think those who actively piratize games are hard to get to buy games under any circumstances. Many of them have this jaded view that they "don't need to" pay money for "the greedy bastards who dared to make a game". They see it as some twisted "freedom!" thing. They'll always have coders among themselves who will go through the code, reverse engineer stuff etc. and finally be able to break any system, they'll even set up pirate servers if you try to protect the game by making it MP/Online only.

I personally think that it's a waste to spend a lot of resources on DRM and it's atrocious to treat your paying customers as potential criminals! Because, in reality, DRM is only a problem to the paying customers... not to the pirates.

 

Exactly.

If you want better games - support those who make games that you like. There are two ways to support - paying for the games (kickstarter pre-orders, buying releases etc) and advertising them. Things like talking about good games to your friends and so - can go a long way in helping others who might like them too to buy them.

I hope we'll see more of open developer-customer relationship like you said. I want to see a future where a dev team makes a single prototype and shows it to the public, the public will understand that it's just a draft prototype and they will consider if they like the general concept and if they trust the team to be able to deliver - and make a decision about funding the project.
Thus, people got 'shop' on different development project ideas and even small companies could offer 2-3 different ideas from which the paying customers themselves could pick which one goes to development. The customers would also have a say on the development process, so it would be closer to being a 'custom order'.

 

i agree with that, i mean don't make it easy to pirate your game, but don't spend millions on it to no effect other than hurting your image. spend that money to make the game better and therefore more money, there is no better marketing than good word of mouth. ME1-2 i bought and praised, and subsequently other's bought and played them and enjoyed it. i have not recommended any games other than F2P titles in a long time (cuz ppl have no commitment), and the recent bioshock instalment, it actually seems they took time wit that game to polish it a little... and have a decent story line with some immersion...

only problem with Free to play, is after the first weeks of playing, they can get pretty stale (ie constant content needed, but some companies don't understand the real content gamers want it seems), only League of Legends Moba had me coming back for more (extremely competitive and can get the emotions running) and MWO, WoT lost me in the grind late tiers and how pointless late tier was, you don't play late tier, late tier tanks crush you, if you play them, you will have to vs late tier tanks with gold rounds of wallet warriors. GG, they recently implemented credit bought gold rounds tho, so not like it was when i left (and my wallet hurt them, YAY! it worked!) which means what the OP video guy said is true, keep your money, you will like your money more that way im sure, and you may actually see bad companies die and ones who can or will make decent products do so.... hooray i guess

friends asked me about ME3, and whether they should get it, i told them gameplay wise was "ok" but the ending will kill you if you played the other 2, hell you don't even have to play the other two, that ending would leave new comers to the series confused as well...

 

When I had more time on my hands and was able to play more games, I would compare the investment to other activities. For example going to movies or bar. So with that comparison I would justify the monthly fee etc. on a game if skipped one movie (or 6 months if I skipped a bar night).

Nowadays the situation is turned around: I have income but no time, so currently the thing is revolving more around quality of the experience. I am willing to spend my money on game that provides something in return. I'm not willing to pay for "passive" content such as paints etc. as I don't get to enjoy these as much. But I'm willing to pay for premium time etc. because this will help me acquire "active" content within the game faster, so my the quality of my time in game increases.

The problem in this is that if the threshold to pay 2 win is crossed, then the people who have more time to invest will disappear from the game as people like me will be on the bar with them by using resources. And if this happens the quality of my experience will decrease and I won't pay for the game also anymore.

So in that light I think it might be better to have quality product that has initial purchase to obtain the product. The development costs could be covered that way or some monthly fee. Free to Play concept is really difficult as things can go easily wrong with income models.


Post post thoughts: I lost my self in this and most likely the post didn't make any sense or has been covered already or managed to derail

 

Edit: Submit double fire.

 

Personally, I have lost all the money I ever had and I'm in debt. I'm sort of hoping that I could cover my basic living costs with what we are going to release..

That said, I don't worry too much about piracy. I recall the time when piracy was almost too easy - the internet was filled with sites from which you could download full games as .zip or .rar , yet - even then, I remember that when I talked about that with my friends, many of those who pirated a game at first would end up buying the game just to support the company.

How I see it - you'll never get the hardcore pirates to buy anything. There's a bunch who will insist on trying out the full game and if they like it, they will buy it.

But, at the end of the day, how much people like your game directly translates to how many of them buy it. So, I don't really worry about piracy. I worry about whether people will have fun while playing the game. So, some people will not pay for it and all, well, I'm not going to post a link to the full game on the company's website, but I won't go all paranoid about it either. I will just ignore it and hope that people will have a conscience. I know most people will do the right thing, so there's nothing to worry about. Just have to give them something they want, that's all - and that's enough of a challenge in itself without any distractions.

 

I think this was a really good post. I've come to think this way myself, after the initial hype and feel that everyone was going f2play all the way.

Now I think that it's better to just give everything to everyone when they buy the game. And a shame on those who pirate it!

 

Isn't this essentially what happened with Tribes: Ascend? It came out as a grindy F2P title, but after just 6 months they released a package on Steam where you could buy an unlock for everything in the game for $40.

Thinking about it in MWO terms, I would happily fork over up to $100 to have everything unlocked. As it is right now, PGI is doing such a crappy job of addressing things like private lobbies, balance issues, performance issues, ECM, etc that I doubt they'll ever see more of my money than my original founders pack. They will certainly never see another cent if they actually go through with the shitastic idea that community warfare will only be open to those with premium accounts.

 

I kinda feel I lose money every time I'd make a purchase in MWO. Just imagine what it would cost to get 50% of content?
I don't know. I hate buying 0.1% 'shares' for 15$ a piece. "200 more purchases and you will own 50% of the game!... except - you just ran out of premium time, so cough it up. Cough it up."

That said - if I made 3000+ a month, I'd have no trouble paying for anything they ask money for. But I don't, I barely have 20-40€ a month to spend freely. I'm not going to spend it on "premium time" or a _single mech_. But that's just me and my situation. I think that small rivers can make mighty rivers, if you only reduce the cost. Right now, I think a small percentage are

 

I don't think the Industry is crashing. We're just seeing a shift away from big publishers, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vid...hymedown-spectacular/7140-A-Tale-of-Two-Poets


ahh escapist gota love these two

 

I actually disagree with many of you on a few points and agree with most of what's being said!

Let me start with what I feel is my most disagreeable point: "Shift away from big publishers".

We are NOT shifting away from big publishers. Diablo III set records for the most amount of sales ever (6.3 Million in the First Week, and remember they gave away hundreds of thousands of copies to World of Warcraft Players), Skyrim sold 7 Million Copies in the first week, Both Starcraft II's sold over 1M Copies on their first Day (and both about 1.5M by day 2). The list goes on: Assassin's Creed 3: 12M Copies, Far Cry 3: 4.5M Copies...etc.

What's the Mark Twain Quote? "Reports of my Death have been Greatly Exaggerated."

This is the thing though "Stop paying for games that are cookie cutter copies of last year, and only put money to devs and publishers that you know make quality games."

The statement above is an impossibility. You cannot "only put money to devs and publishers that you know make quality games" because the only known publishers that make quality games make "cookie cutter copies of last year". The only "known quality" game producers are companies like Origin, EA, and Blizzard that have been around long enough to have a track record. There's nothing wrong with Diablo III or Assassin's Creed 3...they're GOOD GAMES...and you KNEW they were going to be good games the moment they were announced.

The problem isn't the game companies, it's the industry, and it's the same problem the Music and Movie industries have gone through in the last 10 years.

Production of a "hit" game is SO EXPENSIVE these days that a SINGLE failure can put a game producer out of business overnight, no matter how large they are. The big game companies which produce the big games you and I all know, MUST cookie cutter their releases. Look at it this way, can Blizzard put out a no name game at this point? Won't you expect that game to be huge, glorious and mega wonderful? After all, it's coming from Blizzard right? What happens when blizzard releases "Canine Capers: A Dog Mystery" and it's just as bad as the title makes it sound? You know 5 million people are going to be lining up at the doors of GameStop to get it, because, after all it IS a Blizzard game it must be good right? And then it turns out horrible (as the title would make it sound)?

The larger you are, the more you have to lose. You know too big to fail? In the gaming industry (just like in the movie industry) that takes on a different tone...Too big to fail means that you're so big with so much reputation behind you that a single failure can take your knees out from under you.

The problem with the game industry pre-three or 4 years ago is that it was stagnating. No one had the money to start up a new gaming publishing company, no one could compete with the current Origins, EAs and Blizzards of the industry, and there were no other options to get your games to market. The problem was there were no new games being produced...just like there were (are?) no NEW movies produced. The gaming industry was worse off...at least in the movie industry you have the secondary producers holding things like the Sundance Film Festival to get recognition of GOOD and NEW movies and plots. Hell it was so bad in the music industry for a time they had to invent "American Idol" to bring new talent into the pool.

Flash forward to a few years ago and some genius came up with the concept of crowd-funding. The "more with less" mentality did one thing right: It put a lot of good game developers out of a job who decided that they could do it as well as the big name publishers.

Now adays, if you want good NEW content, you go to a crowd-funded game producer and see what looks cool. If you want a good known "off the shelf" you stick with one of the well known big guys.

There's more than enough money in the industry and in people's pocket books to support BOTH the top rank A-list cookie cutter Diablo IV or Black Ops 238, and the no name crowd-funded shadow runs and MechWarrior Onlines of the industry.

This isn't new. The old concept of Shareware never died...developers just realized that you get more money out of people if you ask for it up front than ask for it as a donation after the fact.

 

Interesting video, though I have some issues with it. First, a minor complaint: pretty much all the reasons he listed for why the Mass Effect 3 ending was terrible were unsubstantiated rumors. Second: apparently the narrator of that video only considers consoles to be part of "the gaming industry," since he blames PCs and the mobile market for killing the industry. Maybe I'm just crazy, but that seems pretty stupid. It's kind of like saying people who only play PC or mobile games aren't even gamers. As to whether or not the gaming industry is dying, I do think the now-standard way of doing things (big publishers, AAA titles with multi-million dollar budgets) is suffering a slow and painful death, and I say let it burn. When a game can sell 3.5 million copies in a month and be a critical success (Tomb Raider), yet be declared a failure by its publisher (Square Enix) for not selling enough copies, something seriously needs to change. And something is changing, and it's changing in the PC gaming market. PC is the most open platform (with any kind of market saturation, sorry Linux), and consumers and developers are working together to take advantage of that openness and actually tapping into markets which have existed for decades, but have remained untapped for some time as large publishers have been unwilling to risk any capital on anything that wasn't a guaranteed success.

 

If we're talking console games as the "gaming market" I still think the Video producer is full of crap, but I can see it being tougher. Why? Because you can't simply slipstream a low cost game to the public or use a crowdfunding methodology to produce or re-produce a hit game. Why? Because consoles are still 1990's technology. With all of their advancements and connectivity and spiffy hardware and wonder, the console manufacturers are still living in the 80's and 90's of the game industry.

You can't crowdfund a Baulder's Gate because you have no way to get that game to the console. All of the major manufacturers have downloadable content but the content is all locked to "approved" developers (normally themselves). If I crowd-fund Baulder's Gate and write a piece of code for the Nintendo Wii U, how do I get it there?

* I can't produce a CD for Distribution...who do I distribute it to without the license agreements and business deals with the Game Stops an Best Buy's of the world. No Best Buy is going to look at a guy developing a piece of software with his two friends in his garage and say "yea, we'll let you put your game on our store shelves."

* I can't produce a downloadable package. Nintendo or Sony didn't produce it and they're not going to be willing to either pay me for it or allow me to put it out there for $20 download through their marketplace...they're not mature enough for this.

Hell most of the console manufacturers right now are still living in the dark ages of trying to force consumers to stop cracking their consoles so they can do other things with them. The entire concept is obsolete.

Does this signal the downfall and obsolessence of the Console Gaming Industry? I don't think so. I don't own a 360 or an XBox, so I'll take the Wii U for instance: Take a look at the Lego Games and the Mario games out there. Yes, the new ones are carbon copies of the old ones, but I guarantee to you that a new lego game comes out and my kids are going to be all over me to buy it...they're fun and enjoyable, if the same gameplay as you have before.

Diablo 3 was the same gameplay as diablo 2 which was the same gameplay as diablo 1. Starcraft II is the same as Starcraft 1 which was the same as Warcraft 3, 2 and 1, as well as Age of Empires 1 and 2 and a whole host of others. Every first person shooter ever made has been a clone of Doom. Does this make these games terrible? Does this herald the end of the computer industry?

There will ALWAYS be mega hits coming down the pike. Blizzard isn't going anywhere, neither is EA Games., nor is Nintendo for that matter. Suggesting the gaming industry is collapsing because the ending of Mass Effect 3 was bad is, in a word, uninformed.

And I still fail to appreciate the masses opinion of how horrible ME3's ending was. The DLC "Corrected" ending wasn't double or tripple the length. They didn't cut out the previous ending and completely re-write it. It was just a few extra scenes thrown in to bring the story to a bit more complete of closure. I completely fail to see either how EA should have been taken out into the street and shot over it, or how that heralds the complete and total breakdown of the computer gaming industry.

I would argue that the fact that EA games, one of the largest game manufacturers in the world, and WELL KNOWN for not giving a shit about their customers, DID correct and produce additional content for the ending of ME3 based upon customer outcry signals the EXACT OPPOSITE of a complete collapse of the gaming industry.

When one of the top 5 producers of games listens to their customers and modifies their game to provide it's customers what they want, I'd call that a harbinger (see what I did there?) of a better relationship and stronger gaming industry than in the past.

 

Illydth has it right. Just being big, you can hype and market a game beyond belief - which means that people who are more 'casual' will only know that game, in a simplified example.
Now, the second benefit of having tons of cash is, you just hire a bunch of people and make some of them work in QA and .. you eventually get a game that is basically good on all meters. It won't be a game that will make people think 10 years back "Hey, that was a good game, I want to play it today"... But they can A) get it sold in large quantity B) get acceptable level of user satisfaction.

There's even a thing called 'brand pumping' or 'brand lactating', either way, it means that you take a good concept, you simplify it enough for masses to enjoy and come up with a 'relatively new' game, something that at least has a feel of freshness about it. If it sells well, you make 3 sequels over 2 years and ... end up killing the brand with the "...and the last survivor had a cousin and it all started anew". Once you're done with a brand, you have to find a new brand. For certain companies this seems to be generally working - as long as they can afford to have 5 or so different lines simultaneously, so even if 2-3 fail, 1-2 of them making it will allow them to pump up enough cash to keep going that way.


What I see in the industry right now is a golden opportunity for startups - for new people who think differently.

The old thinking is "I want to make a game, I'll get 5 million from investors", then you either succeed and make a game that satisfies the investors (most of whom don't play any games at all) or you fail and you don't make a game. If you end up making a game and someone finishes it - the end credits are every bit as long and tedious as with any Hollywood Feature Film.
And you get this "We sold only 1 million copies of this game, what an epic failure" - which is in a way saying "a niche group of gamers with a pitiful size of 1 million are meaningless".

New thinking?
My experience, the more programmers I would hire, the lower their average quality is. As the CTO, I have to orchestrate the programming efforts - but I am the most senior programmer and the person with most experience and acquired skill, so I among the most efficient programmers in the team (let's assume this way anyway just for the example sake). What happens when you have a team of programmers is, the programmer with most skill and experience has to lead the other programmers.. So, in practice, the best programmer in the team is essentially wasted to the increasing bureaucracy needed to run the team. At the same time, the less experienced programmers have more responsibility in the actual execution, which leads to a ton of errors and unusable solutions that take time away from the rest of the programming team as they have to be solved.

I know it isn't always 'that bad', but it tends to go that way - and the more programmers you have the more subteams you have and all the more experienced programmers get caught leading these teams and teams of teams instead of making amazing code.

So - why don't you just get rid of anyone who isn't useful? Useful people are such that they don't only make a project go forwar - their direct inputs will lead to increased innovativity and quality of the end product. This is only possible when they are allowed to do what they are best at, the thing they love, instead of making them baby sit a bunch of half assed newbies and "I hear game industry pays well, lol".

So, what we're seeing is, tiny teams making actually better and more innovative games than the big 50+ teams, sometimes these tiny teams don't have the following departments:
-Quality Assurance
-Personnel Management
-Administration
-Financial Administration

.... There must be others too, like PR, etc. The radical thinking is, does a game company really need half dozen different departments - or the other way round, does the amount of departments translate to better games?

I think that for any game, you shouldn't use more resources than you need to. Sure, there is a call for games that have in excess of 30 minutes of Hollywood level animated cutscenes and Hollywood names as voice actors.. But, I think that there are a lot of different kinds of people who like different kinds of games. In my view, a crowd of 200.000 gamers may be a niche, but it's not an insignificant niche - it is possible to make games for that sized crowd, make the games good and make a profit so you can make more games .. and pay your bills.

1) Get rid of the investors. What do those asshats know anyway? Old 50+ steel industry veterans who have never played a game more advanced than Minehunt and Solitaire, trying to pull strings as to what would be a good game. Yawn.
2) Don't hire people that you don't need to make a game
3) Keep the team size small, obviously you need to achieve your goals in a timely manner but it is usually better to do so efficiently instead of inefficiently
4) Be a gamer of the genre you are developing for! This way you don't need a Marketing Department to tell you what people like - you can tell it yourself
5) Make the game good, really good, and you don't have to spend 2 million in marketing - you still have to market it, but the difference is that the game will sell itself if it's good, you don't need to spend money to sell it
6) Use a good quality inexpensive engine