Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Article: "The rise of costs, the fall of gaming"
http://www.notenoughshaders.com/2012/07/02/the-rise-of-costs-the-fall-of-gaming/
Can't really disagree with the fact that the videogame industry has been volatile. Also not personally excited about this trend of Hollywood blockbuster videogames.
I'm inclined to agree with the point of simplicity, but what do you think? (I've read the beginning and skimmed the rest of this article.)
Comments
At first glance, I would have dismissed the article as nothing but doomsdaying. But there's no ignoring the fact that today's games are really, really cluttered with unnecessaries that have little to no payoff, despite most of these games being best sellers.
I would dispute that, but I have no idea what "unnecessaries" are.
Unless you mean like, achievements or something.
I gotta admit, the article makes a good point.
When you're selling more than a million copies at $60 a copy and still not breaking even, something's up.
But isn't that game about, like
how killing is bad and wrong
and stuff
And now you see the problem.
I never heard of Spec Ops: The Line until a few days ago. What is this game, exactly? Because it sounds suspiciously like one of those hamhanded "this genre will make you eeeeeeeeeeeevil, so we made a game in that genre to trick you into listening about how eeeeeeeeeeeevil you are!" things. Haze is another example.
Either way, as for my thoughts on the article, I think that one of the big issues with how gaming is being approached right now is that there are relatively few trends going on in terms of how game design and marketing is approached. The lack of variety, both in a developer's catalogue and at large, causes it to weaken the market over time.
Still, though the bubble might burst on the industry the way we know it, I think indie and kickstarted games will continue to thrive because of their comparatively low overhead. Kickstarter in particular has the advantage of tailoring its costs precisely to consumer demand, circumventing the need to sell millions of units to make a profit.
I'm more inclined to believe the "AAA games are retarded expensive because of heinous redundancies and dumbfucked management" thesis. While the increased expense of making "HD" assets is ofc going to result in higher budgets, that doesn't explain things like:
-Ubisoft cancelling a Ghost Recon game that was worked on for two and half years (and was apparently quite close to completion) and scrapping the fairly advanced first build of Future Soldier to overhaul the game, a move which apparently resulted in it needing at least 2.5 million sales to break even.
-Epic Mickey 2 having 700 peoples working on it.
-Midway forcing UE3 on every games they had in the pipeline, with no regard on if it benefited the genre of the game or not.
etc.
Yeah, it's a mix of both. An over reliance on super-high fidelity visuals over gameplay is going to be a huge problem, but the industry as a whole self-immolating at a management level is rather more worrying.
The thing about detailed visuals is that the development tools out there right now actually create medium-fidelity visuals about as quickly as lower-level stuff. Most of the added development time on the art end to get to HD level is high-res textures and having to make elaborate displacement/specular maps for everything and its mother.
The way I see it, what hurts the AAA in prices is how ridiculously centered they are in attempt to appeal. No longer are there niche cult games like Haunting Ground or God Hand. Everything needs to be this big thing.
Of course the indie market is picking up the slack there, stuff like Recettear and Cthulhu Saves the World.
But yeah, that's the problem. No games are trying to be The Social Network or Black Swan or Dredd. They're all trying to be Avengers.
And when you're all attempting to be the biggest dick in the room, most of you are going to get fucked.
isn't that a good thing
huh, it's not meant to be a bad movie
go figure
Yeah, it's actually really, really good.
Much like any movie concept can be botched, any movie concept can be done well.
No, I mean that all the reviews I'd seen of it today were critical as all hell of it.
I must have seen like, every critical review of it while missing all the positive reviews.
More importantly, my point is that the film equivalent of gaming would be literally nothing but action thrillers with the occasional fantasy epic thrown in while the indie market does all the heavy lifting.
One of the biggest games out right now is Pokemon though. And that doesn't fit under that description at all.
Nintendo is kind of an exception there.
That was one of the points of the article, I guess.
Not to mention, it's a budget title that's guaranteed to sell, since franchises have a bit of security to them.
Which Resident Fucking Evil should have kept in mind.
Well, it's not only guaranteed to sell, it's also a consistently good series, which is more important here.
Resident Evil could be a consistently good series though if the developers/publisher realized that being part of a famous franchise means a game is likely to sell.
Right, my point was with that safety they could have realized that 'hey since we have a core market that will make this game profitable no matter what let's just the make the best game we can!'
"Madness! When has that worked?"
"Resident Evil 4?"
"Oh right."
The thing about Spec Ops: The Line is that 2K demanded the multiplayer because, without the multiplayer mode, however tacked-on it was, the game would just be a 4-6-hour-long shooter that costs $60 and has next to no replay value, and 2K's marketing department kinda did a crap job at advertising the game.
I will never understand why such games have to cost 60 dollars in the first place.
Then again, I guess all movie theaters charge the same for each movie regardless of budget so...whatever.
Movies are all roughly the same length though.
They vary, from like 90 minutes to 3 hours.
Nowhere near as drastic as game lengths, I guess.