Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Overwatch: ie PC gaming is dead.
That's what this announcement tells me. PC gaming as an all-encompassing playground for fun, depth, and creativity, is dead. How do I get here?
For a couple years, more and more focus of the game industry has been competition between players. Many franchises without multiplayer traditionally, were forced to add it in by publishers like Activision and EA. On that note, let me go off on a tangeant, one I think is relevant. Mass Effect 3 had really awesome fun multiplayer. It was coop though. Coop will never win in a 'ratings' sense (because that's where we are going folks) over PvP.
From streaming now to widespread watching, from ad deals, to ratings centered game development. Is this good for gaming? If a game is not fun, and generally bad, you will always have enough people to play it in front of an audience. There will always be a top ten. Probably easy to get a top 1000 on any game, if for no other reason then because enough gamers want to be watched even if they are playing a crap game.
But, if a game can't get viewers, can't sell tickets, can't bring in ad revenue, then outside of microtransactions, item shops, MMO subs, and other income streams, the revenue curve and longterm income will no longer support development for that game. How many independant studios are truly left? Is Zenimax run by benevolent idealists that believe in the product that made their Bethesda studio so well-known? Maybe. Maybe not. Is EA run by anyone not utterly motivated by profit alone (even if it doesn't come from players themselves!), unlikely.
I believe that console gaming, where developers can actually make some money without massive profit losses due to piracy, has been keeping real gaming afloat for about 5 years (honestly PC gamers are lucky to get releases this gen), but this is likely the last gen where streaming isn't a perfectly implemented and feature rich part of most gaming experiences. Right now what PS4 has done with sharing is rather crude compared to what can be done to maximize new revenue streams for both publishers and console makers, and I fear game streams as a source of entertainment will be a centerpiece next gen.
I will say this, and it's not relevant. I don't understand game watching. I find it about as exciting as a 12 round boxing match full of ass-grabbing, or baseball, or golf. Or fishing. So add it to the list of things I think are horribly boring. The difference here being that my main hobby is gaming, yet I would never sit around watching someone else's game screen and/or mug while they play. It's not relevant, because the amount of people that seem to be entertained by this is growing exponentially. Amazon bought twitch for what, 2 bil?
How does this relate to Titan? Well look at it. It's practically custom made to be streamed and be primarily and e-sport. Perhaps I'm being hasty, jumping to conclusions, etc. But this is what I see when I watch the footage. Gamers will play it because they want a shot at getting fans, even if it's not particularly fun. It's the new money train in gaming, and it's also it's death knell.
Perhaps it's only my death knell. I've felt like my version of real gaming has been assaulted on all fronts with crappy ipad games, facebook apps, the Wii, MOBAs, Madden, and the persistence of such stale and repetitive FPS shooters. Now, there's yet another front opened. One that may well engulf many of the other problems with gaming today (gaming as an artform, fun experience, vs gaming as an esport, gaming as a means to glory). It's a meta assault. The money that e-sports can potentially generate threatens to corrupt the entire market further and further away from games that are rich, long, and artistic (good dialogue, story, acting etc).
Why so serious? Many of us have been waiting for an MMO savior for a decade. Some for much longer. With the demise of an expected MMO from Blizzard, after so many WoW clone failures, it sort of feels like it's never going to happen. A turn away from the MMORPG, is a turn away from one of the few financially viable PC markets, perhaps the only one with artistic potential. To see that Overwatch is their new IP, it's sort of like "goodbye old Blizzard". The end of an era perhaps.
It's not that I and others haven't been feeling this way lately, but the Overwatch announcement really brings it home, and shows that this gaming dystopia may be approaching faster than expected. Consider how much money went into Dragon Age 3 and ME3, and Fallout games and Skyrim, and Assassin's creeds. There will probably be devs and passionate designers trying to bring these ideas to life, but when their budgets for doing so get cut in half to make way for gaming as spectator entertainment, will they be as long, as well made, as cutting edge? Will they be released as frequently? Will they get DLC treatment?
TLDR: Get off my lawn, e-sports.
Comments
Why do folks insist on equating all of PC gaming with MMO's?
MMO's are 1 piece of PC gaming, and , while you and I may not like the way MMo's are going, there are still tons of them compared to a few years ago.
And again, that's just MMO's . Single player games for PC still do fine. Mostly better than MMO"s. And while you do not like or see any value in places like face book or that type place.. millions use it and game on it on PC's. Not your type gaming maybe but still gaming.
Guess my TLDR: Open your mind a bit ,or as they say get out of that rut your thinking is stuck in. Pc gaming is just changing, not dying .
I'm not actually certain what the OP's point it.
Overwatch is an FPS game.
Traditionally FPS games have always been streamable and obviously easily made into an e-sport, but to suggest people only play them to find money and fame seems a bit far-fetched.
I'm not certain how Blizzard entering the FPS genre (and from the looks of it releasing it on PC) relates to the death of PC Gaming. Can you elaborate more specifically on this OP?
edit: nvm re-read it and realised the OP is equating the choice of an FPS game over an MMO to be the proof the PC platform is dying. Which is a weird assertion tbh, since FPS games have long been developed and housed on PC's with their higher graphical capabilities and superior control peripherals.
Op im not sure how your post shows the death of PC gaming.
Multiplayer and esports games started on the PC, and have always had a home on the PC.
Blizzard releasing a PC only FPS somehow shows the decline of the platform a whole ?!?.
Blizzard made the game which esports were based around Starcraft, another PC title.
I don't get setting around and watching other people play games either. Especially with how many annoying asshats there are doing their commentary which mostly devolves into them yelling the same thing over and over and over again.
However, PC gaming is far from dead, just because you don't like the direction the games have taken doesn't signify the demise, it simply means evolution.
Help support an artist and gamer who has lost his tools to create and play: http://www.gofundme.com/u63nzcgk
The connection to sports and competition is exactly what my wife and I have been thinking all day with the entire Blizzcon event! Seriously, Hearthstone, SC2, HoTS, WoW Arena, and now this. It's all about competition. E-sports. I can't stand it.
I like a little competition every now and then. But when your entire game is pretty much centered around just that one basic concept, then you're just trying to cash in on the whole "sport fanatic" craze that has ruined this country.
The game looks like it could be fun - for a while. But honestly, that's about it. Like Call of Duty, which I enjoy for a very short period of time, and other games like that. Unless you are playing it strictly for competitive attention, it begins to get stale pretty quickly.
Guess it's a good thing, the people that make up this world/country only care about one thing. Their team winning. Should be a huge success for Blizzard. Freaking lazy ass company. Nothing but copycats.
Nice rant, but I'm a bit confused.
You're mad because Blizzard, a popular gaming studio that has NEVER been known for innovation / creativity, has yet again released a game that's neither innovative or creative; and that somehow spells 'doom' for the rest of the industry? I'm confused.
And the tangent about piracy, that is an excuse used by publishers / execs who want to impose flawed business models. Is there more piracy on PC? Absolutely, but it's not nearly as large (compared to sales) as certain people would have you believe. Furthermore there are costs involved in making games for a console as well. The primary benefit for consoles being that everyone is using the same hardware, so you tend to have less bugs. That said, it still happens, and consoles are becoming more and more like PCs anyway.
You dislike competing with other players? That's fine, don't play those games. There are plenty of games that don't revolve around player - competition, they just aren't MMOs. It's basically impossible to have a real MMO without such competition. No matter how friendly the game is, you are always competing with others. Over loot, over experience, over quests, over crafting mats, over plots of land, over gathering nodes, over who 'looks' cooler. And that's not even getting into the more PvP oriented ones.
Ironically enough, it is console games that are in-trouble, and are trying to keep up w/ what PCs already offer.
Name one Blizzard game that's been made that hasn't been a blatant knock-off of another game. You have to go VERY far back to do so. I.E. back when they were making stuff for SEGA. What Blizzard has been known for is polish. Something I don't doubt will continue on into future games (overwatch included). The more troubling trend w/ them is their recent push to make all their games 'more accessible' (aka. dumbed down) for a wider audience. It's a trend that's been getting worse ever since they merged w/ activision.
The e-sports trend is indeed tacky. Agreed. But (similar to Free-to-Play) It's something that most studios don't really understand yet. They see the dollar signs and they want in. The problem is, e-sports is all about developing a community around your games, and supporting THEM enough to make it worth the time and effort it takes to get competitively 'good'. Especially for team based games, which are the pinnacle of e-sports, as they are more exciting to watch. You also need to spent a lot of time and resources organizing events, getting good casters, etc.
And as we're starting to see (look at Strife, for example), most studios don't have the time, resources, or desire to go through all that work. Just for the chance of having a potential e-sports scene. Furthermore, in a lot of ways that market is mostly cornered. You have 2 huge MOBA scenes (LoL, DOTA2) with a growing SMITE scene. You have CS:GO for your shooters, starcraft 2, and world of tanks. There's also smaller communities around the staple fighting games, but most studios are staying out of that genre, and favoring MOBAs atm.
The gaming industry is in a period of change. There are actually quite a few good games that have been released in recent years. Problem is, most gamers overlook / ignore these games because they aren't made by companies like Blizzard. I'm sure Overwatch will be fun, just like hearthstone is fun. But Blizzard is not the company to go to if you want something 'new'. It's the company if you want simple fun, with lots of polish.
flooding the gaming industry with esports wont kill gaming regardless of platform. Esports games will kill themselves when they start failing en masse and only the few best remain. Same with mmos, same with coop games, same with everything.
Now, what will definitely kill PC gaming slowly and painfully will the ridiculous amount (and growing) of digital distribution DRM crap that every publisher wants to lock their game behind (origin, glyph, etc etc etc). That kills the convenience of having all digital games in one place (steam is at the top). As soon as i am forced to install 5+ DRM programs to play each publishers games respectively. I will stop purchasing PC games and happily stick to my console. Playing only DRM free PC games from that point on. Yes, that includes mmorpgs. I should not need to install 10 different digital platforms to play 10 mmorpgs.
Giant Bomb does a mail bag feature where they show things that their fans mail them.
Yesterday (Nov 6, 2014) a console gamer mailed them a $1000 PC he just bought because he hated PC gaming and none of his friends play PC games and he didn't want to spend the time selling it...
Dead? Alive? Regardless of that argument, the above is strong testimony.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
My gaming blog
Just like rock and roll, you can't kill PC gaming and it will be around for a long time to come. (at least until they find a way to wire these games directly into our skulls.)
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
well spoken
+1
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Online multiplayer gaming started on PC. Overwatch is an online multiplayer game on PC. ?????
Also I don't know if you saw the article but Dawngate (moba in beta that was being published by EA) is being shut down. So if anything companies see making these types of games as a huge risk.
And Blizzard by itself is not PC gaming. PC gaming is whoever wants to be PC gaming. It can be a small indie dev or a big company. There are so many people out there wanting to make and making games, of course there will be many types and some games more popular over others. But as long as there are people with passion to make them, there will always being rich single player narrative based games.
Disagree that PC gaming is dead.
I do agree that MMOs are dead.
Every new MMO that has released in the last 5 years has completely flopped. Every MMO on the horizon that has potential is kickstarter funded. This alone proves that the executives at big game developers already don't find MMOs profitable to create and support. Blizzard canceling their "next-gen-MMO" and replacing it with a FPS/MOBA co-op game pretty much confirms this notion. The developer of the world's most successful MMO no longer believes in MMOs.
I think your argument that e-sports and the monetization of streams is the driving force behind this is utter nonsense. The reason that the MMO space is a dying sector of gaming is because of three factors:
1. Astronomical development costs to create the worlds and features that MMO gamers now expect to be standard in any new game. This means either the developer or investor needs to take a massive up-front risk. As many of us know, the "status quo" for MMO development cost these days is over $100 million. Forking up that kind of money with no guarantee of a return on the investment is not a risk many executives, venture capitalists, or banks will take.
The only way for an MMO to be profitable is to be successful, which no new MMO has been in the last decade besides WoW and EVE. There are many other sectors of business where these people can invest $100 million in a less risky way. Game devs have learned how to cushion the blow by offering paid early access, paid alphas, paid betas, paid founders packs, etc. This has led to MMOs becoming monetization schemes, rather than enjoyable products.
2. Unreasonable expectations of MMO gamers. MMO gamers now expect limitless, bug-less, and perfect content from day 1. Why? Because they've played WoW for the last 5-10 years, so they expect anything new to be WoW plus more. Like another poster mentioned, Blizzard doesn't sell original games. They sell polish. Because most MMO gamers have played WoW, they expect every MMO to have the polish of WoW. Since no new game can reach this expectation, upon launch the gamers are left dissatisfied. Then they leave the game.
The large majority of human beings (my personal belief is about 98%) are incapable of achieving original thought. Meaning, they cannot create thoughts or ideas which are entirely their own. With that in mind:
The perceived failure of an MMO is a self fulfilling prophecy generated by its playerbase. A new MMO launches, it doesn't meet unrealistic expectations, players leave in droves. More players leave in droves because of the perception that the game is failing (due to a completely expected and predictable drop in playerbase post launch). More players leave because other players leave...and so on.
This pattern is widely known among executives and investors within the game industry. This pattern is not one which will make you money.
3. Anything that can be done in an MMO, has already been done. There is absolutely nothing original left to do. Any new MMO on the horizon is either a betterment of an old idea or a mash-up of systems and ideas that have existed in games for some time. There is no MMO that could possibly be developed where a gamer could say, "holy shit I've never seen that before!" Humans hate change. Why would they stick with a new game, when it's mostly the same as a game they have years of experience in? Here's the answer...they don't.
The MMO genre is 100% absolutely dead in the water. WoW and EVE will ride the genre off into the sunset for the next 10+ years while nothing new is developed.
Think of it like hard drives versus solid state drives. Hard drives will be around for at least the next 30-50 years because we need the ability to store, eventually, 10^50 or more bytes of data for as cheap as possible. However, hard drives are not the future, SSDs and flash are the future. There will be one or two companies that ride hard drives off into the sunset for the next 50 years making astronomical amounts of money with little to no research and development. WoW and EVE are the hard drives of the MMO world. I personally believe the "SSD" in the gaming space is VR (virtual reality).
Hopefully someone enjoyed reading this.
I tried following the OP's line of reasoning to support the assertion in the title, and my head just exploded.
It's like I'm reading a Glen Beck post. I'm sure it makes sense to the OP, but I can't follow.
I was skimming this post, I didn't read it all - so maybe it's answered in there.
But ever, in all of MMO-history, has an MMO actually released that actually met point #2? Especially WoW, which when it released, was a buggy train wreck for a good long while.
Those may be the expectations, but obviously, games have overcome not living up to them and survived, and even thrived. So does that make this second example a valid point as to why MMOs are dying?
Those expectations didn't exist 10 years ago when WoW released. The expectations have only gotten completely out of hand in the last 5 years or so.
10 years ago MMO gamers expected the games to be a buggy unstable mess. The difference was that they didn't care because the idea of running around in a massive virtual world was relatively new and exciting. The three items I listed in my post are very intertwined. They are not mutually exclusive.
Can this be true? No other MMO in the last 10 years has been successful apart from WoW and Eve?
First off - it matters how you define success. You imply that this is a financial metric, since your speaking in terms of profitability and investments. So let's just continue with your assumption.
Going with that, let's look at this post on Joystiq:
http://www.joystiq.com/2014/10/23/league-of-legends-tops-mmo-revenue-list-hearthstone-no-10/
Now it claims all of these are MMOs, some people here will take issue with games like Hearthstone and LoL being lumped in there. Ok, so let's just go ahead and ignore those.
Maplestory was released in 2003, so that doesn't meet your 10 year criteria.
Lineage 1 was released in 1998, that definitely doesn't fit.
So I guess if we just look at this post, and say - you know, no other MMO is on that list, so they all must be failures - then you'd be right.
Let's look at a similar post. Again this time on Gamespot, but from the same original source. This lists MMOs specifically, but only covers through 2013.
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/wow-was-the-top-subscription-mmo-in-2013-star-wars/1100-6421191/
Yup, WoW is on top there, and Eve clocks in at #6.
So what about numbers 2 through 5? Are they failures? They beat Eve in revenue, and that was one of your benchmarks. Three of them were released in the last decade, so it would appear, at least on the surface, we've found 3 games apart from WoW and Eve that are "Successful". I didn't differentiate between revenue and profit. So maybe you have some insider information, and you can gotchya me on that one.
But I would say there are more metrics than just revenue/profit to consider. Just because a game doesn't beat WoW in subscribers, players, or revenue, doesn't mean it's a failure. And just because indef doesn't like the game doesn't mean it's a failure.
Oh come on, give the OP a break. What? It's been about 3-5 days since the last, " (insert genre) is dieing" post on these forums. Maybe he doesn't want us to get spoiled?
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
Just going to put this here...
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/analyst-pc-gaming-now-brings-in-more-money-than-console-gaming/
Hmm you missed my point, let me clarify.
Major game developers and investors care about one thing. Return on investment (ROI). If they don't think they can make a decent return on their money, they don't invest. Simple as that.
My measure of success I'm referring to in my post is from an investor standpoint. In the last 10 years, two MMOs have produced a good ROI...WoW and EVE. Bioware is still in the red for upwards of 50 million dollars worth of debt from SWTOR. SWTOR might be a great game, I don't know if it is or isn't, but we aren't discussing that. We are discussing the fact that MMOs cost more money to make than what they return...except for two exceptions in the last decade. There were many more successful MMOs before WoW and EVE, but these games are well outside the 10 year range I'm referring to.
What games I like is irrelevant to the conversation. The only MMO I've played since 2009 was the original Darkfall (not the new one). This game was considered to be a huge piece of shit by most gamers. The company that developed it is bankrupt with upwards of 10 million in debt. It was my favorite game of the last 5 years. But it was a massive disaster from s business standpoint.
MMOs don't make money. Plain and simple.