BBC Ponders Another Games Industry Crash 219
weirdguy writes with a link to a BBC article that poses the same question asked by journalists every couple of years: is the games industry headed for another crash? "Yes, gamers are snapping up the new generation of games consoles — Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, and Sony's Playstation 3 [PS3], but at huge cost to the industry. Hardware makers are losing hundreds of dollars on every console sold, and games publishers face an "increasingly difficult environment, as rising development costs and small user bases [mean] that return on investment in next generation games development is unlikely to be achieved before 2008," according to media analysts Screen Digest. More importantly, though, the video games publishers are facing a revolution of their business model."
eh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nintendo isn't losing money (Score:5, Insightful)
Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:eh... (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case... It's a good time to be a gamer
Re:eh... (Score:1, Insightful)
I suppose I could argue every other sentence which you somehow managed to get wrong, but that would be easier
Lack of Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem stems from the fact that there is just a constant deludge of first person shooters and racing games. The Xbox 360 is by far the worse offender in this regard. There seems to be little else on the platform worth looking at.
The other issue is that the cost of development is becoming so high now that devs are less willing to take risks on new IPs and gameplay styles. Look at Clover Studios - They made Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand, all great games that did nothing but cause the company to fold.
I wouldn't be surprised if as this console generation moves on developers make more money from the smaller downloadable games on Playstation Network, etc. than from the big box retail ones.
Re:eh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, according to NPD the Wii has had 5,758,750 games sold to 2,107,500 systems in North America to the end of February which works out to 2.75 games per system above and beyond Wii sports; this (of course) doesn't include sales of Virtual Console games and (last time any data was reported) Wii points cards were one of the most popular accessories being sold.
Well, the price is $5 to $10 and a lot of the games are considered some of the best games ever created. Personally, I never owned a Turbo Graphics 16 or Sega Genesis so I'm happy to put down $5-$10 for a game I haven't played before which is considered to be amazing.
I think you don't understand the Wii at all
People are tired of the rehashed game idea regardless of whether it is in HD, SD or uses limited Wii functionality; the games people are excited about are the ones which are breaking new ground. There is a reason why Rayman Raving Rabids, Madden and Red Steel are the best selling third party games to date and that is because they offer gameplay that couldn't be done on the PS3 or XBox 360.
This would probably have more meaning if you weren't the same Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll that has been proclaiming the doom of the Wii since TGS 2005. Right now I think you're caught between the denile stage and rage stage on your way towards acceptance.
Re:eh... (Score:3, Insightful)
In short, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
What we are seeing is the end of hardcore dominance of the industry, nothing more or less. The perceived demands of the hardcore are insustainable, driving companies to make consoles that lose them money in order to gain some ill-defined future benefit. Whether it is the companies or the hardcore themselves that are to blame for the previously shrinking industry is uncertain and largely irrelevant.
What we are seeing is the introduction of video games as a true form of mass media. Talk to anyone on the street and you will be hard pressed to find someone in this nation who hasn't read a book, watching a movie, or viewed a painting or photograph. What's more, each of these forms of media has subsections that cater to particular tastes. Video games have not been mass media because they didn't reach everyone, only an elite few who knew what was going on. Now the "casual" gamers and even those who do not game at all have been targeted, and they will be the driving force in the future.
Right we are in transition, and it's confusing people. Depending on the person, some hardcore gamers are afraid that the Wii and DS are the harbingers of the end. Will games like Guilty Gear, Counter-Strike, and Armored Core survive in an industry focused on the majority? Having been catered to for decades, the prospect of losing attention is frightening. However, the fear is unwarranted. Despite the fact that games like the Sims, Bejeweled and all manner of "casual" games have invaded and perhaps dominated the PC, we still see games such as Supreme Commander, Hellgate: London, and the odd MMORPG tax video cards in SLI and quad-core CPUs.
In the future, the majority of games will be like summer blockbuster films. This is not bad, because the volume of games will increase such that we will still see the same number of "hardcore" titles, including AAA ones.
There will be no crash, but there will be a paradigm shift/revolution.
Are we headed for another "game crash" article? (Score:3, Insightful)
The answer, of course, is no. The "game crash" of '83 marked the end of the game fad. Electronic games had become a novelty, and virtually anything would sell...and then the novelty wore off. And like the end of any fad, what was once cool became decidedly uncool for a time.
But something is only a fad once. Videogames are now just one more form of entertainment, competing with movies, TV, music, etc. The industry is transforming. Improved technology has driven up the cost of development, so that game production is more and more characterized by the same hit-driven economics that is typical of the entertainment industry as a whole, posing new challenges for the industry.
But at least we don't have to worry that everybody is going to simultaneously lose interest in videogames.
Actually, the article says "revolution" (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't the worlds most accurate article about the state of costs and revenue sources in gaming, but it's a good overview of how things probably look from within a large publisher.
Re:eh... (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean...
Personally I see:
Entire Collection of Wii Games
Entire Collection of GameCube Games
Entire Collection of Virtual Console Releases
Even if it were only Wii games, it couldn't be a "one-trick pony" unless that one trick is playing a library of different games?
Source Examination? (Score:4, Insightful)
Heres something which really caught my eye:
Step 2. Publisher claims it as there own IP
Step 3. Profit
This really annoys me. They can go **** themselves if they think I'm going to spend 40 hours programming something interesting for a game I enjoy just to have them take it and make money out of it to subsidise the inadequacies of their retarded business model.
Re:eh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Guitar Hero is a good game. It's fun. What else is it supposed to be? Do you want it to make you breakfast too? Change your oil maybe? What exactly is it that you're expecting from a game?
Re:In short, no. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm somewhat skeptical about it, because the chart at the end is based of a analyst report from approximately one month after the launches of the PS3 and Wii. While the report itself is not suspect, you'd think there'd be a similarly credible and more up to date analysis and projection after 6 months.
It also seems to be weird citing a report that places a large emphasis on success for Microsoft and Sony's systems in an article alluding to an industry crash.
Re:Losing Money? (Score:2, Insightful)
They spent roughly 4 billion on creating a console empire.
Biuying a console empire would have cost a lot more than that.
Re:Bias against the smallest studios (Score:3, Insightful)
Once you are making some money from it get an office and then a Wii Developers kit.
Sort like what the creators of Bejeweled did.
The really big question is will Nintendo offer something like the XBox Marketplace for cheap downloadable content?
Once you start producing software for a living the cost of tools is really a pretty small expense. The real savings that the Wii offers over the PS3 and 360 is the cost of artwork and developer time. The Wii is just a super GC so if you have developed for the Gamecube the Wii will seem pretty much like the same old same old. The PS3 is nothing like the PS2 and the 360 is very different from the XBox.
Re:In short, no. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're not understanding the market nor the nature of the beast that is gaming and game devleopment, the market is more complicated then your post will admit.
Right now there is major economic upheavel in North america. While you made one valid point: that theres tension and shift between hardcore and casual... the core of gaming is still built around the so-called "hardcore". The best games in existence are hardcore, don't tell me Will-wright got to where he was by making "casual" games, or Peter Molyneux, or John carmack, or Mark Rein of epic games... all these guys are "hardcore". While profitability has suffered, its because of factors beyond the so-called "market" the truth is it's due to technological power and the technolust of game developers / publishers. Many games could be profitable if they didn't spend so much on graphics devleopment and were not forced by wal-mart publishers into ridiculous development catch-22's.
MMO's and games like God of War, are -- hardcore. WoW makes casual accessability to "hardcore" (read: interesting, deep) play mechanics easy for everyone by simplifying the interface. WoW deeply borrowed lots of hardcore elements from diablo, the only thing missing was more twitch real-time control over your character in WoW.
The solution is not ot make more "casual" games, the solution is to find a way to make "hardcore" (read: deep interacitivity and choices, and other fun stuff) accessable to people beyond the hardcore while still retaining "hardcore" elements, basically, deep and engaging interactivity, and an emphasis on not going into passive gamer la-la land like many games today (MMO's I'm looking at you). Personally I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the gaming industry who makes games who is not *hardcore* about games, real game developers are to some extent hardcore gamers or else they wouldn't put in the blood sweat and tears to develop games. I think you underestimate the power and influence of the "hardcore" gamers... without the hardcore gaming would not have been nourished and fed the money it needed to get to this point. Gears of War, Halo, and other 'hardcore' games prove theres still lots of money to be made from hardcore gamers if you provide *an experience worth paying for*, the FPS is one of the games thats near universally accessable or at least looks so interesting casual players will spend the time to pick up and play an FPS. A good looking game that plays like crap is still a shit game, despite its sales, and at the core of every game you have to have something fun, or else your profitability will eventually suffer.
I think "causal" games for most people will be more of a passing fad, since most true gamers associate 'casual' games with games that are not in the vein of most games. Just because more casual people have picked up video gaming doesn't mean that *they will buy games*. In my opinion the people least likely to buy games are casual players.
Gears of War and Halo are by definition *hardcore games*, which sold millions of units. Anyone who says FPS is "casual" is an understatement.
-1, Offtopic (Score:4, Insightful)
Quoth your sig:
It's never been proper typography to put two spaces after sentences in any type that doesn't use a monospaced font. Double-spaces are an unfortunate carryover from typewriter (i.e. monospaced) days, and the HTML folks were doing the right thing in abolishing them.
You should check out The PC is Not a Typewriter [amazon.com] or The Mac is Not a Typewriter [amazon.com] for more bad computer habits that make designers cringe.
Re:Source Examination? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people with both an X360 and a PC chose to buy the PC version of Oblivion because they could get a ton of free mods to upgrade the PC version whereas Microsoft insisted the publisher charge a couple of bucks for every "upgrade" that really should have been a patch?
How many people bought the original Half Life so they could play the free mods that came out for it?
A publisher doesn't have to charge for mods in order to make money. They can make an easily modable game, let people download the mods for free, then rake in the extra sales of the original product.
It's a shame that Microsoft seems hellbent on forcing "microtransactions" that aren't that micro, demanding 500 XBL points for things that should really be free and closing the doors on things that normally would be.
Hopefully, the quote was about making extra revenues in original media sales that are spurred by free mod content.
Sadly, after reading previews of the forthcoming Tiger Woods game, I don't trust EA with that for one moment.
Their model is apparently to let users share their best games, etc. in order for others to try beating various aspects of the game like number of spectators hit, fewest shots to the green, etc. This content that enhances the game and thus, hopefully, drives EA sales is only free for three uploads. After that, you have to start paying to make their game more valuable to others.
This follows Battlefield 2 where they figured out how to charge people for the most interesting servers and make people feel grateful for it and Test Drive Unlimited where Microsoft made people fork out for Gold XBL service in order to share user created challenges.
So... User created content is a great way to make more money by selling more copies of the original media. Sadly, much as that's a viable model on its own, it really is becomming yet another area to try charging people more for something the publisher simply enabled but certainly never created.
Funny how free mods in Doom, Half Life, Morrowind and Oblivion has turned them in to beloved games that kept selling WAY past their shelf life while screwing every last penny out of their users turns games like X360's Morrowind, Test Drive Unlimited and the upcoming Tiger Woods in to resented money sinks with short shelf lives.
The sad thing is, I actually started this post to protest there was a more innocent interpretation but then, realizing the sad state of consoles where you're locked in - plus Microsoft's plans for XBL's port to Vista - and I kind of lost faith. It'd be great if they showed a little forethought and built valuable franchizes rather than raping every last dollar - sadly I don't believe that of them anymore.