Sequel Fatigue Cause of Slow Sales?

The NYT has a piece which argues that the new console iteration is not the cause for slow sales at the end of the year. Rather, gamers are tired of all the damn sequels. From the article: "... In an industry that has a reputation for growth, the decline certainly clashes with expectations. And there is also evidence that gamers may no longer be as enticed by the type of games that publishers have been putting on store shelves. For the first time in several years, the industry did not have a breakout hit in 2005. Two releases from 2004's holiday season, Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, generated enough anticipation among hard-core gamers that they lined up to buy copies. 'Last season you had some events that drove people into stores,' said Josh Larson, director of industry products for GameSpot, which tracks interest in new games; he was referring to the last two months of 2004. 'There wasn't anything that filled that void,' in the 2005 holiday season, he added." Update: 02/08 18:07 GMT by Z : As much as I like the letter 'q', fixed title.

I doubt it.

[Threni]

In reality, there's little difference between the 413th First Person Shooter and the 414th*. Whether or not First Person Shooter 414 is "ScaryMonsterKiller" or "Son of ScaryMonsterKiller" is something of a moot point.

*Apart from the requirement that you buy a new graphics card at around 45% the cost of your whole system, for the arguable advantage of having another few hundred thousand triangles or this seasons must-have anti-aliasing algorithm.

No Diversity

[laxcat]

It seems to me that the game industry doesn't have the diversity that the movie industry does. Movies come in all shapes and sizes and feature a variety of subject matters.

90% of these big budget games are sci-fi or fantasy or something with loads of automatic weapons. Think how boring movies would get if that ratio was the same. Where are the games that could be compared to indie films? The game industry will never develop if they don't try and broaden their scope.

Sorry, did I sound like a Nintendo rep there? I'm not I swear.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

We Need Innovation!

[Ryz0r]

It's not just all the sequels... there's also the fact that even the 'different' games are always the same! Half-Life, Halo, Doom, Battlefield, Call of Duty, GUN, KillTheGermans, ShootTheGermans, TortureTheGermansWithGuns, Unreal, Quake, FPS, war, FPS, war! Is anyone else BORED of FPS / war games, or am i the only one?

There needs to be something completely new and original, something nobody has thought of yet. It will sell millions.

Maybe MMOGs are to blame a bit.

[dc29A]

When I was playing Evercrak and WoW, I pretty much stopped buying other videogames, there was no motivation to play other games. I only bought KotOR and Galactic Civilizations over a long period of time (3+ years). I suspect the 5.5 million WoW customers might no longer be buying, or buying significantly less, single player titles.

There is nothing new under the sun

[AKAImBatman]

So you're telling me that gamers want original, new, and fun gameplay? The shock!

I mean, really. I was just bemoaning yesterday how much the market has moved to nothing but sex and violence. When every commercial for the XBox 360 ends with "Rated M for Mature", you know that they've stopped selling games. The market is instead trying to sell you an "Entertainment Product" targetted at "the adult market". Which is a nice way of saying, "We want to separate fools from their money by giving them gratuitous sexual and violent content." The actualy *game* is nowhere to be found.

As of late, I find myself missing the days of adventure games (e.g. Space Quest), space simulators (e.g. Wing Commander), puzzle adventures (e.g. Bioforge, System Shock), Real Time Strategy Games (e.g. C&C), and other innovative genres invented in the golden age of computer gaming. Not to mention some of the cool arcade genres like Fighters (e.g. Killer Instinct, SFII) and Drivers (e.g. SF: Rush, Hydrothunder).

Today we just see Another First Person Shooter, but With A New Twist!(TM) Which really is nothing more than a vehicle for the aformentioned sex and violence. When are we going to see all this technology put to good use in making innovative new games? Hell, imagine the cool 2D (or 2.5D) platformers that could be done on modern hardware! Do we see anything like these? Nope. It's all just games with the names of old games reused on new First Person Shooters. When will the industry rape of our beloved gaming stop?

Here's hoping for the Nintendo Revolution. If they can pull it off at least as well as the DS, we may get back some of what we've lost.

Over priced, under innovative

[NickFortune]

The games industry charges a lot for what frequently turns out to be very little. Everything is being hyped as being the ultimate experience, but very little seems to justify the price tag.

There is still the occasional gem, but no reliable way to tell the gems from the dross. No one wants to slag the games off in a pre-release review in case the company stops giving them demo releases, innovation seems to be extinct, and the latest painful lesson is that even a sequel to a fondly remembered classic is no guarantee of quality.

In other words, they are charging premium rates for low quality tripe and trying fix it in marketing. And they wonder why people are stopping buying games?

Gosh. I had no idea I was that annoyed about it...

Fatigue is just one part of it...

[rAiNsT0rm]

Sequels have and always will be a part of gaming, movies, books, and just about any media. It is seen as easy money and folks fall for it every time. Even though we all damn well know we will be getting a rushed, less thought out, money making product piggybacking on the success of its predecessor... people still buy them.

The bigger issue is that most games out right now are not being created to FILL A NEED/NICHE. They are trying to force genre's that are quick, easy, and cheap to produce on gamers. (Sports/FPS/RTS/MMO/Sequels) Gamers are at a saturation point. Innovation can never be supressed for long. Gamers are demanding new and unique experiences. Katamari Damacy was the first shot that made companies stop and take notice. Nintendogs was another. A whole shift is approaching gaming, and it is not the more powerful, more expensive, more complex, bullshit being forced down our throats now. Look how much press and play Geometry Wars has been getting, more than any other 360 launch title.

2D gaming needs to come back, it is natural for some games. 3D needs to be refined besides just more/better/faster. Emphasis needs to be placed back on creativity and innovation, not greed and hype.

Only one cause

[ameoba]

Of course, we have to attribute every phenomena to a single cause. It can't reasonably be a combination of economic factors, a change of interests in the consumer-base, next-gen hype AND the lack of original content in the industry.

No, actually the slump is because...

[Gavin Scott]

...we're all spending every free hour playing World Of Warcraft and don't have time to play anything else.

G.

Not Just Sequels, but BAD Sequels

[Digital Vomit]

"Sales also seem to indicate a marked decrease in enthusiasm for certain genres as well as for the endless sequels that have become common in the industry. For example, Bond: From Russia With Love has sold 277,000 copies since its release in November 2005, while the previous James Bond game from Electronic Arts sold 430,000 copies in a similar period in 2004."

From Russia with Love is a great example of what I'm talking about. Sequels should build on what worked from previous games, not implement something worse. Case in point: the camera in the game From Russia with Love. You had to constantly manually maneuver the camera to keep it behind you. And when you died, who knows what position the camera would be in when you rezzed. I'm sorry, but under no circumstances should the camera ever start in second-person mode when I'm playing a deathmatch (happened to me once; in the few seconds it took to spin the camera around, I was shot to death. Wheeee!). Worst camera behavior in an FPS *ever*.

Dev costs make investors risk-averse

[mwfunk]

I agree with the premise that people are buying fewer games because of sequelitis and the general lack of originality, but what's more interesting to me is, why has the industry in general gotten less innovative? I think a big part of it is because of the skyrocketing costs of making a game. In the 80s, one or two guys could make a game in a matter of months. Now you need teams of dozens (if not hundreds) of professionals, not to mention higher costs for marketing, development and content creation tools, etc.

It seems like the increased capabilities of game systems these days has caused the cost of making a game to grow exponentially, while only giving us linear improvements in the quality of the games themselves. Investors are much more likely to fund a game based on a known property (a sequel, a sports game, a movie knockoff...) than something totally original from out of the blue. It's much more difficult to recoup the costs of making a game than it used to be, so gambling on an unknown quantity has far worse consequences than it did back in the day.

I have a feeling that a lot of the future growth and innovation in the market is going to come from handheld systems (due to lower development costs), and from companies like Nintendo who aren't so concerned with milking every last polygon from the hardware, but are more focused on innovations in gameplay.

Re:Wait wait pick one...

[IpalindromeI]

Where is the contradiction? The summary claims that gamers are tired of sequels, which implies that they were not tired of them in the past. In 2004, sequels did well, but now gamers are tired of them. What you missed is that situations can change with time.

Gamers are getting older too!

[ErichTheRed]

There are a lot of factors at play here. One of the biggies is that the audience for games is getting older. When you're married/attached, and have responsibilites (job, house to keep up, kids to raise, etc.) the amount of disposable income you have to spend on video games goes WAY down. Also, the amount of playtime you have decreases.

I tend to buy a very small number of games and play them through over a very long period of time (I'm still working on GTA San Andreas and I bought it when it came out...) 15-year-olds, on the other hand, bug their parents to buy them every new $50 game on the market, and the $300 video card-of-the-year to go with it. I made the decision a while back to not keep up with the PC game platform wars and bought a PS2. At least I know that games written for it are going to be playable on it next year.

Feeding into the problem, parents are getting sick of buying every $50 game and new gaming hardware for their kids every year. This is especially true when parents are game-savvy enough to see that Madden '06 is Madden '05 with prettier graphics and an updated team roster. Or that this year's FPS hit is the same FPS engine as last year with new characters.

I honestly can't blame the game studios for catering to the audience that will make them the most money, but I have a feeling the demographic shift will get them.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion