The Marketplace Recognizes Game Makers 15
Video game ombudsman Kyle Orland has a short post up describing an American Public Media 'Marketplace' piece discussing the increasing clout of the games industry. From his post: "The piece focuses on the increasing respect games are getting as both an artistic and business force. The reporter, Jeff Tyler, provides a good mix of hard numbers, market analysis and trend spotting."
The commercialisation of games (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd hate to see the games genre lurching towards that creative oblivion.
We can see the blackened shoots of this future growing in the annual churn out of moneybox sports titles from big companies like EA. They plough these golden eggs into... creating more surebet moneybox sports titles, not risky creative development. They've started buying up small developers who have rights to creative games, cutting their resources and sending out titles that are "good enough" instead of "the best they can do" - just look at The Sims. I personally hate The Sims, but then I'm not a 14 year old girl, and I recognise it as something (that was) innovative and new at its time, something that, like the catflap, was obvious once someone else thought of it. This is despite my distaste at the innumerable expansions packs that became just a bit too contemptuous and greedy.
We're nearing the end of the consolidation phase of the games industry where a few big developers will come to dominate >75% of the market (fuck, they do already). And the big worry for me is, unlike the film industry where Independent developers can create and release their own work without requiring too much expense, games development of the sort of polished titles that came from nowhere and were a huge success is too expensive to be undertaken by anything other than medium sized risk takers, the same risk takers who after one major success will be gobbled up by the huge EA like conglomerates and creatively spayed, then spat out.
One of the first signs of the end of this golden age of gaming we're hardly aware we're living through, will be the creation of a games festival taking a Sundance festival like attitude to promoting the little guy. If there is hope, it lies in modding communities but these rely far too much on existing game engines which will probably in the future be licensed for increasingly large sums, if successful games based on a big-company-developed engine are developed.
Yeah, so I say, I hope to fuck the big monied folks DON'T realise the capitalisation potential of gaming, because all we'll get from it is a brainless litany of formulaic pigswill. If there's enough of it in the trough, the pigs'll never find the odd juicy carrot among all the shit.
Anyway, this might all be bullshit, I don't pretend to be an expert (unlike the guy in TFA) but it's where I see us going.