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Games Entertainment

What Happens In A Gaming Industry Shakeout 31

Posted by Zonk from the up-against-the-wall dept.
Chris Kohler's Game|Life blog has a post discussing what a real games industry crash looks like. From the article: "But I hate the ridiculous amount of misinformation that gets spread around about what happened to the game industry in 1984. And the fact that the awful years of 1994 and 1995 get totally whitewashed in history articles like the above, as if the games industry has been just peachy ever since Nintendo got here. Well, it hasn't been. And what happened in 1984 isn't what people think." His post is a reaction to previously mentioned Inquirer story.
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What Happens In A Gaming Industry Shakeout More

What Happens In A Gaming Industry Shakeout

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  • I went to a gaming convention and was amazed all the old gear of companies that went bankrupt I had forgotten about. I was alost tempted to buy a 3D0 but I realized that the only game there I liked was Syndicate and Horde.

  • Don't forget GameGear (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Friday December 02, 2005 @05:53PM (#14169910)
    Color display (a fairly good one too) and good games. Columns had a Tetris-like appeal. If it hadn't been for the utterly shitty battery life, it could have taken out the GameBoy. My favorite piece of "could have been" tech.

  • Not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Friday December 02, 2005 @06:26PM (#14170163)
    I don't think the video game industry is capable of a crash at this point, or even much of a shake-down. Even if the next generation of game consoles and the games themselves are seriously underwhelming, the industry is at a point where it could weather the storm for a while.

    First of all, Microsoft has billions of dollars that it makes from other business divisions, even if its games division takes a billion dollar shelling every year. Interestingly enough, this has already happened and they've said they're still staying in the game. The Xbox 360 would have to be a huge failure for them to get out of the game at this point. If the recent buzz about the system and the fact that someone can sell them on ebay for several thousand dollars is any indication, I don't think they've got much to worry about.

    Next up is Sony which has made a lot of money on the PS2 and has the largest install and fan base. It might be slightly eroded this generation, but like Microsoft they have other company divisions that can prop up their games division if they're hit by hard times. However, of the big three, I'd put them in the worst position right now.

    Finally, there's Nintendo. If I've learned anything about Nintendo it's that even if their sales are crap, they still manage to turn a healthy profit. The last few /. articles about the Gamecube have been about falling sales figures, but somehow Nintendo is still in the black. There are a lot of questions about if they'll survive for much longer, but they've been hanging on for a while now and building up a large bankroll. Their conservative attitude suggests that they won't be going under anytime soon.

    The gaming industry is also a lot bigger than it used to be. Sure, companies are still packaging crap in cases that they try to pass for games, but when the user base is so much bigger than it used to be, you can manage to stay afloat with mediocraty. The industry might undergo a slump or slight depression, which I could easily forsee, but the same kind of "crash" or "shake-down" mentioned in the article? Nah...
    • I don't think the video game industry is capable of a crash at this point, or even much of a shake-down. Even if the next generation of game consoles and the games themselves are seriously underwhelming, the industry is at a point where it could weather the storm for a while.

      You're missing several of the points of an article. Mainly that the first "crash" wasn't necessarily a crash and that whetever you choose to call it there has been more than one such event. To paraphrase the article, a crash is when t

      • If you will reread the first few lines of my post you will see that I said, " I don't think the video game industry is capable of a crash at this point, or even much of a shake-down."

        I did read the article, but you really didn't read my post. Whether you want to call what happened a crash or a shakedown is moot, I merely covering both instances as there have been articles in the past year speculating whether or not the video game industry is in for another crash. This /. article was posted just a few da [slashdot.org]
    • You are missing a big point though. Just because the 1st party console companies can ride it out doesn't mean every one can. If there is a big lull in the market for any reason it's the 3rd party developers that are going to have a biggest problems. The big one like EA and Activision can bank roll their companies for a while but what about all the other ones? Do you really think that companies like Lion Head, Raven, or any company other then EA and Activision have too much of a shot at staying in business i

  • I still have mine, with lots of good games for it. I think initially its price and its abysmal battery life killed it (though with today's NiMH rechargables, you can squeeze quite a few hours out of the "Lynx II" redesigned unit), but damn there were some great games on that platform.

    Slime World was spectacular, and it was neat having an in-game help system that actually named an enemy "boogers." Heh.

    • I still have mine, with lots of good games for it. I think initially its price and its abysmal battery life killed it

      That and a few other reasons:

      • Atari couldn't market its way out of a paper bag.
      • The Lynx's blitter based graphics programming model wasn't familiar to console game developers the way the tilemap-and-sprites based model of the Game Boy and Game Gear were. (The Jaguar, PS1, and N64 would go on to elaborate the blitter model more successfully.)
      • The Lynx's resolution was 160x100 pixels. Com
  • it's funny, he says that there was another crash in 94 -94 and then goes on to mention systems that cost upto $800, not exactly the best thing at the time for a video game system seeing as how the other alternatives were under $200.

    Now if all the systems mentioned were relativly the same price then I could see there being another shakeout but when the crash actually happened in 84 no one was playing games, arcades were losing money left and right, the systems weren't selling, games on the systems weren't
    • I agree that the two "shake outs" are not completely comparable. Gaming didn't die in 1984, but console gaming (which had become mainstream) pretty much did. Every console collapsed regardless of popularity and the followup consoles bombed. Atari 2600 and 5200, Intellivision, Colecovision etc.
      Cutting edge gaming moved from the console platform over to computers, with a great number of early classics for Atari, Apple and Commodore computers being produced in the years of 83-86. Electronic Arts was incorporat

      • Re:It's funny (Score:4, Insightful)

        by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Friday December 02, 2005 @11:56PM (#14171911)
        I agree that the two "shake outs" are not completely comparable.

        Well, they're not at all comparable. Either this guy didn't actually live through the crash of 84 as he says he did, or he's just completely forgot about it.

        Christmas of 1983 was a disaster, and that was after a huge drop in the stock market price of all of the major game manufacturers (which constricted their investment). The losses incurred in 1983 and 1984 were staggering. It's pretty disingenuous to say both Atari and the Intellivision lived on after that - Mattel practically went out of business (the electronics division in fact did; INTV Corp came in and picked up the scraps), Coleco exited the business after only 2 years, and even the mighty Atari, owned by Warner, was forced to cut their losses.

        Console gaming died in 1984. I mean that literally. 1984 was the only time in the past 40 that no major home console was on the market in the United States. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine today walking into a Toys R Us and seeing not a single video game system on display? Can you imagine GameStop switching back to selling business software? Can you imagine Microsoft/SubLogic Flight Simulator II being the #1 game?

        That's what happened in 1984. I'm 34, and I was there. It was a crash.

        You can't say that because INTV later took over Mattel's stock and started selling the scraps mail order-only that that means nothing really happened. Or that the fact that a gutted and reorganized Atari released a new console three years after exiting the market, that that also means there was no crash. And what of Coleco? He doesn't even mention them. Where's the Coleco Vision in 1985?

        After 1984, the entire center of gravity for the industry shifted to Japan. Prior to 1984, most Americans were not even aware that people played games outside of the United States. All game consoles (as we knew them) were American. That's just the way it was. By 1985, every console on the market would be Japanese. (The Atari 7800 was not officially on the market until 1987 and was never a serious contender. The later Jaguar was not really a factor at all and finally put the company under.)

        There was nothing remotely comparable in 1994-1995. Nintendo continued making money hand over fist. Sony was just beginning their initial investment. Sega was the only major manufacturer experiencing hard times, but nobody thought that was anything but a momentary blip at that time... and in fact it was not clear who would ultimately win the 32 bit race for several years. Atari was still around, but by this time they were playing a bit part. They never recovered from the crash.

        This guy brings up all the minor players - which historically have never done well in the console industry - and selectively uses them to prove a non-existent point about 94-95. Why doesn't he mention Magnavox in 1980? Or Vectrex in 1983? What about all the other 3DO's and Amigas over the years? There have been plenty. These sorts of companies and systems do not indicate industry trends - it would be like talking about the "crash of 2004" because the Tapwave Zodiac was a flop. Isn't it obvious that it's the major players in the industry that matter, not these circus sideshows?

        I'm probably a little more annoyed at this "article" than I should be, but it's completely revisionist history. He cites one article full of wishful thinking that he probably read in an Electronic Games magazine he just bought off of Ebay and uses that as a basis for his whole entry. Some of us actually remember what it was like back then, walking into TRU and seeing a bunch of Cabbage Patch Kids where the video games used to be.
    • Tapwave? Where was the advertisments? where were they located in stores? N-Gage? No one liked it from day 1, it sold something like 150,000 units, no one wanted it, Nokia finnaly got around to realizing this. Gizmondo? samething as the tapwave.

      3DO, NEC's stuff, Neo Geo, and the Philips CD-i were all very poorly advertised and poorly received at the time. Most people didn't know anything about them, and you'd be hard pressed to actually find a Neo Geo at a store shortly after they were released.

      Same deal now
      • Honestly, the parallels to the current situation in gaming are rather frightening. The past few years have seen a ridiculous amount of complete bellyflops by companies. If you want systems that people have heard about, there's the "Phantom" console, and also the "Indrema" console that were planned, but never even made it out of development. Again, you've got people dumping money into essentially poorly planned get-rich-quick schemes, and that's what makes markets crash.

        Exactly, the phantom is now what?
        • No, Nintendo lost money on the Virtual Boy.

          chances are like you said if there is a crash again it will be by people no one has heard of or ones that were trying to get rich quick from a gaming boom but failed misserably at.

          But that's kinda the point - this hurts even the big boys, because it makes investors less willing to spend money.
      • The fact that playing it for more than a couple of minutes brought on migraine headaches didn't do much to foster its success.
      • 3DO, NEC's stuff, Neo Geo, and the Philips CD-i were all very poorly advertised and poorly received at the time.

        As I recall, they all had somewhat severe problems too:
        • the 3DO was "3D" but all the games I saw for it were pretty klunky, the technology for good 3D just doesn't seem to have been there.
        • NEC's stuff (or at least what I saw) seemed way over-focused on "play a video and have a few sprites moving around on top of it". Yawn.
        • The Neo-Geo was very, very expensive, and games were insanely expensive. It
        • NEC's stuff was the TurboGrafx-16/TurboDuo/TurboExpress. I hesitated to include the TG-16 because it was released earlier, with a fair bit of support, and did pretty well initially. It also really doesn't fall into the "get rich quick" category because they actually did release good games, and put effort into the TG-16. But the TurboDuo and TurboExpress kinda were - they were primarily efforts to try to leverage the existing software base of the TG-16, so they fall into the "let's put out a product with no
          • ohhh ok, I never knew NEC was the ones that did the Turbografx system, I hear people say it had some pretty good games on it but didn't have a huge ammount of support.
    • ...and Sega managed it because they were smart, they weren't trying to make a quick buck, they weren't over doing it with technology the world wasn't ready for,...

      Sega Cd? Sega 32x? Sega Saturn?
      • they weren't trying to make a quick buck per-sa, they were trying to improve gaming and make it more like arcades, the only problem were there weren't a lot of games (in the US) for the Sega CD or 32x and they didn't improve the vast ammounts sega said it would.

        The Saturn was their next gen system (at the time of course) just as the Nintendo 64 was Nintendo's, it's the natural progression, the only problem with it was it was a major pain in the ass to make games for it for the piss poor job of structurin
  • Doom Doom II Descent Mechwarrior 2 Magic Carpet Syndicate That period of time was the greatest gaming period in my life. It was the era that got me into building my own computer, hauling my "steel beast" of a machine down to my friends house for LAN parties, and downloading tons of shareware and warez off the internet. Hmm, I guess since I didn't pay for most of the software I had back then, that could've caused problems for the companies, but damn if I wasn't having a blast!
    • Yes, but you're talking from the perspective of a PC gamer, and the author is talking about it from a console perspective. Sure, 94-95 were great for PC gamers, but really frustrating for console gamers.
      • I don't remember 1994-95 being frustrating as a console player. I went to gamefaqs.com to check release dates to see if my memory is faulty, but some of the best games of the 16-bit generation were released then, including:

        Final Fantasy III
        Donkey Kong Country II
        Yoshi's island
        Sonic & Knuckles
        Illusion of Gaia
        Lufia II
        Super Metroid
        Chrono Trigger

        I didn't remember it being frustrating, and I can't imagine any console player being frustrated, looking at what was released those years.
  • I loved that console. Too bad the gits running Atari at the time were nimrods.
  • I owned a Neo-Geo, and it was never meant to be and never was a "console" game system. It was an ARCADE in your home. 100% PERFECT Arcade in your home. It cost a ton, yet it was cheaper than buying all the real cabs.

    3D0 Was not a complete waste, it was a highly capable system ahead of it's time. There are many still around and they sold well with a decent library.

    The Jaguar suffered from a number of blunders, not a "crash" of the industry.

    This article was a waste... I lived through the first real crash and

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