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General: Video Game Industry: Time for a Reality Check
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Game Theory with Scott Steinberg has kicked off its second episode titled "Video Game Industry: Time for a Reality Check". The episode is part of a continuing series about Game Theory and the official site features some wonderfully informative articles like "Dear Gamers, Stop Acting Like Stuck Up Jerks".
[I]n episode two of Game Theory, we instead decided to ask the question: If it’s so darned obvious which way the wind is blowing, why is everyone still acting as if last year’s monumental sales drop-off was just a fluke, or worse – as if nothing whatsoever was wrong with the business? As a litany of gaming’s top names explain, the sky is indeed falling: Unfortunately, too many remain clueless or simply content to stick their head in the sand and pretend such historical changes aren’t happening, right up until the point that they get crushed. Take it from Gaikai CEO David Perry, who sums things up quite succinctly. “Overall, the industry is on the same general path,” he says. “We are still today in a world of retail. That’s the way it will be for the short-term. Long-term, this industry is going digital, and it’s going digital very quickly. To some extent, as the retailers come up with policies like used games, they’re actually putting their foot on the gas pedal to oblivion. And that ultimately is going to make the game industry digital about as fast as it could possibly be.”
Check out the Game Theory site in general and the "Reality Check" video here.
Comments
Wow, way to really not get the point, or listen to your customer base. As if we needed any more reason to be mad about the direction of gaming.
Download only games are awful. I have capped bandwidth AND capped downloads, so when I buy anything larger than a flash game digitally you are counting me out.
DRM-based gaming meant that every game I *did* purchase for XBox Live Arcade pretty much died when my XBox did. The whole gamer tag recovery thing means that I can play it, as long as I happen to be able to connect to the internet at that exact moment. Unfortunately, that's not always the case and proves to me that in 10 years my N64 will still have 100% of its games, my PS2 will have 100% of its games, but my XBox any XBox games that I don't have media for will be dead.
You'd think they would have learned after the PSP Go did so amazingly well. People won't pay full retail prices for nothing.
At least, I won't - and considering how awful the majority of games are, there is no way I'd pay full retail for *any* of them, let alone full retail plus DLC and add-ons.
/edit - BTW, they need to get a better camera or something. That video with the weird black and white fades, static, etc - I thought at first I just had a bad connection! They need to clean that up.
Interesting, but these developers don't seem to be quite "there" yet. If they think I'm just going to start playing crappy facebook games, then I guess the industry is just going to "outgrow" me and the hundreds of dollars I spend every year on games and subscriptions.
What developers should be taking out of this market upheaval is finding new business models that do NOT require tens or hundreds of millions of up-front development costs. There is a market for specialized games that , like any other business, START SMALL, then expand as the customer-base expands.
Start with small free games that give players optoins to pay for better experiences, and expand according to your success. Don't just say "give players crap", because the industry was not built on crap.
Based on what these guys are saying, I'm not really hopeful that any of the "big" gaming companies will be around for the long term. I'm sure some companies will survive, but it doesn't sound like many of them will be.
All I have to say that hasn't been said yet is....
If they plan on taking everything to digital distribution....they'd better wake the hell up and start throwing some of their money in the direction of fighting Comcast and Verizon and paying attention to the net neutrality issues.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
It's an extinction lvl event, and they are so far along (and behind) that they cannot change course. It reminds me of that movie with that bunch of vikings in the boat being attacked by the sea monster. Everyone could see it, but the priest who said such things do not exist... all the way up unto he landed in the water!
The gaming industry as a whole is the priest.
With MSN / Comcast merger happening, with Verizon getting a way with stuff here in the states that the EU would lay in a multi-Mills lawsuit on them for....The gaming biz wants to do what?! Ok, it offical I'm going back to pen and paper D&D and Magic The Gathering, long live Wizards of the Coast.
BTW, black/Art decks are about to become the decks to beat in MTG.
Erik the viking. Great movie, good reference.
If this video seemed to imply anything it was nothing more than the idea that there appears to be a huge shift in gaming in general, from generating ideas to getting the product to the gamer. Big companies can't shift their focus fast enough and worse yet . . . they don't know if they should. There wouldn't be a shift unless there was a large influx of gamers or a major shift in the loyalty and preferences of the current gaming crowd (likely both).
No one can say for sure what this "shake-up" is going to mean in the end, but as things change we can be sure that some things we loved will become hated and those that we hated . . . well, they might not seem so bad after all. The worst part of the shift for me has been all geared towards making games more simple to play, progress, understand, read, get started on and so forth. Where once I relished in the complexities I've had to overcome to be successful, I just don't have that same sense of accomplishment or personal involvement with games anymore; and, consequently, I can sell them, drop them, place them on the shelf or buy them anew without a concern, one way or the other, about who made the game and why. It's sort of an epic disheartening of the gaming industry. It may go nowhere . . . just nowhere at all, and the industry will lay flat until someone out there decides they don't care about numbers and statistics this way or that, and they make a totally original title without regards for who likes what,where and they continue to support, update, upgrade and otherwise care for the game and its patrons through-and-through.
I guess it's not that I don't like any one developer or game in general . . . it's just that I don't care; and I want to. I really do.
"the sky is indeed falling: Unfortunately, too many remain clueless or simply content to stick their head in the sand and pretend such historical changes aren’t happening, right up until the point that they get crushed."
I guess after the "war" when everything is destroyed, we can start to build new things (or working games/ new concepts, heck maybe even a new genre of games).
TBH i think we need more Co-op shooters, and more are coming up