The video game industry

[Kagatob]

Perhaps consolification is merely a side effect of the market trends within the industry. PC gaming as the top level medium is going the way that Arcades did in the 80's.

I just miss being able to use games as benchmarks to instantly tell if you've built a good "gaming rig" (Doom 3 with my previous box, Crysis for my most recent rig). I know it's not about graphics but it was still damn nice to see what all of those new fancy engines could do every few years. Now we have Rage, which opened up as a buggy failure that faded away while a few of us left (foolishly) hold out hopes for Doom 4.

[Rhuma7]

The problem with the industry is the companies found out that IP is everything and as long as they dont make an MMO they can produce absolute dogshit and make millions.

MMO companies tried the same formula and went bankrupt because they require people to still play their shit games after a week.

If the industry is going in the right direction why is everyone still playing WoW and Call of Duty?

[Servellious]

Dragon age 2 is a great example of how fucked up shit can get. How does a company fuck up such a bad ass game that badly

[gotrocks]

Gaming as an industry IS most definitely growing, however, it's different from what you may think.

In the past, there was essentially 3 "levels" of games coming out. You had the large AAA games like Halo. Games that had huge development teams, budgets, and production. They had massive marketing campaigns. They still have all of this today, it just costs even MORE money to make because of the technology and where it's at. Then there was a mid-level of games, lets call them 'B' titles, games that were pretty half assedly slapped together, never received critical acclaim, and didn't move a ton of units. These games were still made and were still profitable because the time and money required to make them was small in comparison to what it takes to make a game today. This is why you got barbie whatever adventures and spaceshit: the toilet directive and the paper empire. These games had minimal marketing. Lastly, you still had a small handful of indie developers, we'll call them 'I' titles. These games could range from absolute shit to absolute hit (counterstrike is a good example, even though it was a mod). They had NO marketing budget and were generally put together by small teams with small budgets working a job or two on the side while they developed their game.

So what happened?

'B' Titles started disappearing. People figured out that this 'middleware' bullshit was in fact, bullshit. I call it middleware but industry people have a not so nice term for it. And as game development costs for these middleware titles rose, and sales slumped even more, developers who made these cobbled together shit houses started going out of business, and the big boys in publishing realized it wasn't worth it anymore. You either go big or go home. Suddenly, everything was a AAA title. If you were making a game, it had to have a massive budget, marketing everywhere, and huge development teams. This created a TON of great games, and is the reason we have games like Bioshock. However, these triple a titles soon ran into a problem. Because their development was so outrageously expensive, publishers obviously had to make less titles with more money. This meant that if big triple A game xyz didn't sell 2 million copies in its first 3 months, it was an utter failure and lost money for the company. As a result, publishers started taking less chances with new IP, new talent, new developers. They wanted something they were comfortable with, and if you didn't have the pedigree and a '2, 3, 4, 5 ,6 7, or 8' next to your title, you weren't even looked at once. In retrospect, this was all a terrible turn of events for the industry because gamers really got screwed in the end. Publishers needed ways to monetize games beyond the initial purchase, especially because used game sales were EXPLODING, and in game purchases (read: dlc) popped up everywhere. This DLC wasn't always good, and sometimes it was downright scandalous (Capcom famously released a game that had 'Day one dlc' PROGRAMMED ON THE DISC and when you were paying to 'download the fucking downloadable content' you were in fact just unlocking it. wow). In addition to this, the smaller developers with big ideas didn't get funded, because it just wasn't enough to have universal praise and critical acclaim from the journalism side of things - you had to be a triple platinum seller or more to compete.

A lot of games companies started going under at this point. Good games companies making good fucking games. The reason for this was that true hardcore gaming, which a lot of these companies catered to, was a niche market, and there's only so much of that market that can be grabbed per month before all the consumers money is spent and no more is going to come out of their wallets. Smaller teams of great men and women suddenly needed a new way to pay their pills while still doing what they love. And thus came the Indie explosion.

Mobile games burst onto the scene, and this really kickstarted (no pun intended) the entire indie movement. Suddenly anyone (almost) could slap together a game and put it in front of millions of people via the app store or android market. Likewise, social media allowed these smaller developers to get their PC games out to mass markets by simple word of mouth and sell a million copies with a comparatively tiny budget when looked at next to the big AaA titles. Xbox live started allowing developers to create console games WITHOUT huge multi-million dollar budgets, and this gave us a ton of amazing games. Steam was also a huge player in this drive for indie development. The triple A title was certainly still there, but it had new competition in both the casual market, and the hardcore market. Everything seemed to be in chaos, when in reality it was just a transition.

We are just now starting to pull out of this transition. When the dust settles, gaming is going to be in a good place, in my opinion. We are going to have us, the gamers, funding the projects we want (this is already happening via kickstarter) while also getting amazing big budget experiences like Bioshock infinite to blow us away like a summer blockbuster never could. The next 3 years of gaming is FILLED with brand new experiences that look fantastic at both ends of the spectrum. Both sony and microsoft are embracing indie developers in a way those little companies could only dream about 5 years ago, and wasn't even a thought 10 years ago. Personally, i dont think gaming was ever in a decline in the last 5 or so years. There were definitely some stumbling points, without a doubt, but we have consistently had great gaming experiences month to month for years now and it doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Whether you're some 40 year old mother who just likes to relax with some angry birds after the kids go to bed, or a 20 something year old fresh out of college and blasting away at CoD in the middle of the night when you have to work early in the morning, gaming has exploded and the new games coming out are going to be better than ever. I am extremely happy this transition occurred, because without it, there would be so many titles we never would have gotten. And all the crap middleware is gone. Now we just have a sprinkling of crap at the high end and a dumptruck load of (usually easy to spot, and certainly easy to read about to find its crap) utter shit at the bottom mixed with a literal treasure trove of golden gaming goodness to find all over. It's like a candy bar, with the triple AAA titles being the aeshetically pleasing and also richly rewarding outer shell of gaming, always drawing you back for more, with the sweet, rich nougat in the center being indie titles, also drawing you back for more but for a different reason, a lighter reason, a different kind of fun (ok so that analogy wasn't perfect, but fuckit this thesis has gone on long enough =P)

In conclusion, Kagatob, I think you are very wrong, and I think there are lots and lots of 'industry' experts who would agree with me. we are about to enter a beautiful time in gaming, transitioning from a relatively mediocre time in gaming (early 2000's) to a still gorgeous yet flawed, still hammering out the rough edges time in gaming (mid 2k's to the present), and finally entering the golden age, where pixels of amazingness will literally rain from the sky, and angels will sing the original halo theme. Gaming hasn't been 'bad' in a very long time. And it isn't going to be bad for a very long time (and yes, i say this with the clusterfuck that is always online drm for everything looming just around the corner). So relax, realize everythings going great, and thank me for the analysis, because I just took you to gaming school in 5 minutes or less (depending on your reading speed. Also, I am sure I left out a section or two that was important to this but I'm EXTREMELY tired right now and need to go to bed, i just had to get this out before any more of this silly discussion went on).

TL;DR? Well here you go:

Essentially,
Present and future:
- two ends of the spectrum
-indie developers making small budget, tons of good games, tons of bad games, bad games are easy to spot.
-big developers making big budget, lots of good games, a few bad ones.

Early 2000's:
-Again, two ends of the spectrum, with maybe a very tiny third end
-medium sized shit games 'middleware', 'trashware', mediocre budget games churned out in sweatshops by dispassioned overworked devlopment teams with the goal of not selling many copies because the game is shit, but also not giving a damn because it didnt cost much to make in the first place. no longer exist because games got too expensive to make and thankfully with the help of the internet and social networks, when a game is shit we know its shit before it even hits the shelves. they stopped making money (thank god!)
-AAA games, still big budget, still big teams, still high expected sales (though not nearly as high as the expectations nowadays). Publihers took more chances because development was less expensive. Niche genres and experiences got a fair amount of attention. Tons of amazing AAA games made in this period, but also a fair amount of mediocre ones, and plenty of bad ones as well!
-Indie games! these were still around but due to a lack of a solid distribution platform, and no backing from consoles, meant that PC only indie experiences were all that could be created, and social marketing (word of mouth advertising) had to literally be done by word of mouth. There were still successes, just not nearly as many. A few gems came out of this (I used counterstrike in my example, even though it was a mod first), and lots and lots of garbage, some of them blatant cash grabs.

That's it! The TL;DR section really only tells a fraction of the tale. For the whole story please read above it [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] hope you enjoyed! Feel free to disagree with me and tons of industry vets who know about these things, but you're probably wrong [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]. regardless, healthy discussion of any topic is almost always a good thing.

[Kagatob]

gotrocks I did actually read the whole thing and on a lot of your points I do agree with you. You speak of the future and it's potential and I do have high hope that you're right, back to my arcade crash of the 80's example before, what happened right after that? The age of NES and SNES/Sega and the earlier years of the PS/N64, the golden age of console gaming if you would. It could happen again, and while I hope it does the eternal pessimist in me won't let me get those hopes too high.

You call it a transitional phase that we're in right now and we may very well be in one, but at the moment is it so wrong to call it the shit that it is? I still think the biggest issue is the consolification and no solution to that seems to be on the horizon, I don't think it was addressed in your thesis there. In large part because of the consoles even the so-called AAA titles are garbage 9 out of 10 times, I think back to when the PS3 first released and Unreal Tournament 3 was the first of many many multiplatform letdowns, Skyrim and Rage were so unfinished when they released that neither game was playable in the first week, the former being merely passable after a plethora of patches and the latter single handedly turning ID who were THE (and later one of the top) premier FPS engine company into a laughingstock. Those are the three examples I can think of off of the top of my head.

Then there's Blizzard who produced Starcraft 2 with a boring campaign with a shitty story that amounted to training to shove you in multiplayer and yet at the same time the game had DRM that never even allowed basic network support! Diablo 3 I don't even need to get into detail about as the joke of a game speaks for itself (oh look that's going on consoles as well).

I wouldn't be so pissed if I didn't spend money on each and every one of those games expecting them to be any amount of quality because of how hard the developers claimed to be working on them. It's been so long since I bought a title worth buying I don't even remember what it was (It likely was a Mario Kart game or something Halo Reach was ok I guess?).

TL;DR version: I hope you're right man but I think this transition period sucks and I'm not afraid to show it, bitching about it is my primary coping mechanism. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[gotrocks]

To raniron:
and august, i already said that in this post =P

Originally Posted by gotrocks [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Gaming as an industry IS most definitely growing, however, it's different from what you may think.

In the past, there was essentially 3 "levels" of games coming out. You had the large AAA games like Halo. Games that had huge development teams, budgets, and production. They had massive marketing campaigns. They still have all of this today, it just costs even MORE money to make because of the technology and where it's at. Then there was a mid-level of games, lets call them 'B' titles, games that were pretty half assedly slapped together, never received critical acclaim, and didn't move a ton of units. These games were still made and were still profitable because the time and money required to make them was small in comparison to what it takes to make a game today. This is why you got barbie whatever adventures and spaceshit: the toilet directive and the paper empire. These games had minimal marketing. Lastly, you still had a small handful of indie developers, we'll call them 'I' titles. These games could range from absolute shit to absolute hit (counterstrike is a good example, even though it was a mod). They had NO marketing budget and were generally put together by small teams with small budgets working a job or two on the side while they developed their game.

So what happened?

'B' Titles started disappearing. People figured out that this 'middleware' bullshit was in fact, bullshit. I call it middleware but industry people have a not so nice term for it. And as game development costs for these middleware titles rose, and sales slumped even more, developers who made these cobbled together shit houses started going out of business, and the big boys in publishing realized it wasn't worth it anymore. You either go big or go home. Suddenly, everything was a AAA title. If you were making a game, it had to have a massive budget, marketing everywhere, and huge development teams. This created a TON of great games, and is the reason we have games like Bioshock. However, these triple a titles soon ran into a problem. Because their development was so outrageously expensive, publishers obviously had to make less titles with more money. This meant that if big triple A game xyz didn't sell 2 million copies in its first 3 months, it was an utter failure and lost money for the company. As a result, publishers started taking less chances with new IP, new talent, new developers. They wanted something they were comfortable with, and if you didn't have the pedigree and a '2, 3, 4, 5 ,6 7, or 8' next to your title, you weren't even looked at once. In retrospect, this was all a terrible turn of events for the industry because gamers really got screwed in the end. Publishers needed ways to monetize games beyond the initial purchase, especially because used game sales were EXPLODING, and in game purchases (read: dlc) popped up everywhere. This DLC wasn't always good, and sometimes it was downright scandalous (Capcom famously released a game that had 'Day one dlc' PROGRAMMED ON THE DISC and when you were paying to 'download the fucking downloadable content' you were in fact just unlocking it. wow). In addition to this, the smaller developers with big ideas didn't get funded, because it just wasn't enough to have universal praise and critical acclaim from the journalism side of things - you had to be a triple platinum seller or more to compete.

A lot of games companies started going under at this point. Good games companies making good fucking games. The reason for this was that true hardcore gaming, which a lot of these companies catered to, was a niche market, and there's only so much of that market that can be grabbed per month before all the consumers money is spent and no more is going to come out of their wallets. Smaller teams of great men and women suddenly needed a new way to pay their pills while still doing what they love. And thus came the Indie explosion.

Mobile games burst onto the scene, and this really kickstarted (no pun intended) the entire indie movement. Suddenly anyone (almost) could slap together a game and put it in front of millions of people via the app store or android market. Likewise, social media allowed these smaller developers to get their PC games out to mass markets by simple word of mouth and sell a million copies with a comparatively tiny budget when looked at next to the big AaA titles. Xbox live started allowing developers to create console games WITHOUT huge multi-million dollar budgets, and this gave us a ton of amazing games. Steam was also a huge player in this drive for indie development. The triple A title was certainly still there, but it had new competition in both the casual market, and the hardcore market. Everything seemed to be in chaos, when in reality it was just a transition.

We are just now starting to pull out of this transition. When the dust settles, gaming is going to be in a good place, in my opinion. We are going to have us, the gamers, funding the projects we want (this is already happening via kickstarter) while also getting amazing big budget experiences like Bioshock infinite to blow us away like a summer blockbuster never could. The next 3 years of gaming is FILLED with brand new experiences that look fantastic at both ends of the spectrum. Both sony and microsoft are embracing indie developers in a way those little companies could only dream about 5 years ago, and wasn't even a thought 10 years ago. Personally, i dont think gaming was ever in a decline in the last 5 or so years. There were definitely some stumbling points, without a doubt, but we have consistently had great gaming experiences month to month for years now and it doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Whether you're some 40 year old mother who just likes to relax with some angry birds after the kids go to bed, or a 20 something year old fresh out of college and blasting away at CoD in the middle of the night when you have to work early in the morning, gaming has exploded and the new games coming out are going to be better than ever. I am extremely happy this transition occurred, because without it, there would be so many titles we never would have gotten. And all the crap middleware is gone. Now we just have a sprinkling of crap at the high end and a dumptruck load of (usually easy to spot, and certainly easy to read about to find its crap) utter shit at the bottom mixed with a literal treasure trove of golden gaming goodness to find all over. It's like a candy bar, with the triple AAA titles being the aeshetically pleasing and also richly rewarding outer shell of gaming, always drawing you back for more, with the sweet, rich nougat in the center being indie titles, also drawing you back for more but for a different reason, a lighter reason, a different kind of fun (ok so that analogy wasn't perfect, but fuckit this thesis has gone on long enough =P)

In conclusion, Kagatob, I think you are very wrong, and I think there are lots and lots of 'industry' experts who would agree with me. we are about to enter a beautiful time in gaming, transitioning from a relatively mediocre time in gaming (early 2000's) to a still gorgeous yet flawed, still hammering out the rough edges time in gaming (mid 2k's to the present), and finally entering the golden age, where pixels of amazingness will literally rain from the sky, and angels will sing the original halo theme. Gaming hasn't been 'bad' in a very long time. And it isn't going to be bad for a very long time (and yes, i say this with the clusterfuck that is always online drm for everything looming just around the corner). So relax, realize everythings going great, and thank me for the analysis, because I just took you to gaming school in 5 minutes or less (depending on your reading speed. Also, I am sure I left out a section or two that was important to this but I'm EXTREMELY tired right now and need to go to bed, i just had to get this out before any more of this silly discussion went on).

TL;DR? Well here you go:

Essentially,
Present and future:
- two ends of the spectrum
-indie developers making small budget, tons of good games, tons of bad games, bad games are easy to spot.
-big developers making big budget, lots of good games, a few bad ones.

Early 2000's:
-Again, two ends of the spectrum, with maybe a very tiny third end
-medium sized shit games 'middleware', 'trashware', mediocre budget games churned out in sweatshops by dispassioned overworked devlopment teams with the goal of not selling many copies because the game is shit, but also not giving a damn because it didnt cost much to make in the first place. no longer exist because games got too expensive to make and thankfully with the help of the internet and social networks, when a game is shit we know its shit before it even hits the shelves. they stopped making money (thank god!)
-AAA games, still big budget, still big teams, still high expected sales (though not nearly as high as the expectations nowadays). Publihers took more chances because development was less expensive. Niche genres and experiences got a fair amount of attention. Tons of amazing AAA games made in this period, but also a fair amount of mediocre ones, and plenty of bad ones as well!
-Indie games! these were still around but due to a lack of a solid distribution platform, and no backing from consoles, meant that PC only indie experiences were all that could be created, and social marketing (word of mouth advertising) had to literally be done by word of mouth. There were still successes, just not nearly as many. A few gems came out of this (I used counterstrike in my example, even though it was a mod first), and lots and lots of garbage, some of them blatant cash grabs.

That's it! The TL;DR section really only tells a fraction of the tale. For the whole story please read above it [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] hope you enjoyed! Feel free to disagree with me and tons of industry vets who know about these things, but you're probably wrong [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]. regardless, healthy discussion of any topic is almost always a good thing.

[August]

Yeah i skip over everything to just post my opinion. That's how I treat rants and flames. I can't be reading the half-witted slobber that comes out of most people's mout...err hands/fingers?

That's cool tho. It's definitely the case.

[Ranlron swiftsong]

I agree with gotroks.

Suikoden 4 for an example:Sucks and FFXIII is the biggest disgrace in FF history.
FFXIII shows that se are in it for the money only, and don't care about making the rpg gamers happy.

I also voted console games, because i'd rather have a full screen console or pc game, than a hand held game.I prefer console over hand held games any day, and pc games as well.

I played both american rpgs, and jrpgs.I played real time and strategy rpgs, and turn based rpgs, and even action rpgs.

I played zelda, paper mario, which is a platform rpg, ultima series, which is turn based rpg and in times real time rpg, wizardry, which is a dungeon crawler real time rpg.I also played daggerfall, oblivion, diablo, dragon age origins, bioshock 2, fable2, fallout 3, wasteland, etc etc.

I played in jrpg types like:Fire emblem, pokemon type games, final fantasy 1-13,suikoden, tales of symphonia, phantasy star on the xbox 360, ff tactics, legend of legaia, secret of mana, legend of mana, etc etc.

What i want:

A gaming console system which doesn't exploit dlc as a way to make an extra buck to fuck us over.In Dragon age origins, i felt ripped off to having to pay extra to use shale.I also noticed very small changes for for dlc and paid out the ass.

A game that doesn't concentrate only on pretty cutscenes, and to have an original story:FF games have been fucked since the dawn of time.Since ff7, square has been fucking up more and more left and right.From FF7's cliche characters and questionable confusing story that was at best decent, to FFXIII's linear passages and shitty characters that make me cringe.Hope i think, is one of the whiniest characters of all rpg history, and i swear:vanille is a rip off of selphie.I also can't stand snow being a dumbass he is.The crystagen system sucks, because you are forced to grind in specific spots, and you can't level up through most of the game because you are limited on how strong you can get.No more power leveling to breeze through bosses.

[Kagatob]

Originally Posted by Ranlron swiftsong [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I hate the most critically acclaimed game since Pong!

My favorite part was when you said 1996 was "the dawn of time." [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Kagatobs]

What I Want:

A porn console.