For anyone who missed it on slashdot, there is an interesting article here discussing why the games industry will crash after 2005. He does have a point, especially if things don’t really change over the next year or two.
Gah. Typical /. moronic tripe by someone who likes the sound of their own voice too much. This is half of why I don’t read it (the other half being the equally moronic 1000+ comments on each news article).
[quote]Compare Madden NFL 2001 to Madden 2004. You have to squint to tell the difference. Do you think innovations for Madden 2007 will be startling by comparison?"
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Could the author be any more stupid? Perhaps he should go and learn “Business 101” before making such comments. Perhaps he would realise the differences between different marketing strategies, different audiences, different customer profiles…and finally understand that even if Madden NFL were first brought out in 1987 it wouldn’t have made sense for it to be any different in 1994.
…is a bit like saying “as far as I can see, there are two types of religion in the world: the good ones and the bad ones”. It’s a gross over-simplification that may make some sense to an ignorant or foolish person, but is clearly a useless position to base any analysis on.
He has an interesting definition of “failed” (which, incidentally, he doesn’t bother to define; probably because it would involve too much thinking, which would make his head hurt).
If he meant “failed to unseat an extremel well-funded global corporation built on being the best producer of consumerised technology goods from a position of market dominance”, then yes - they both failed. That’s not very surprising though is it?
If he meant “failed to make a shedload of money” he’s obviously wrong.
If he meant “failed to gain huge expertise in the market” he’s again obviously wrong, and moreover has no idea how Microsoft works. MS didn’t (really) care about unseating Sony. That’s not their business model; they build to throw away. They never intended to beat Sony until Xbox 2 or 3…that’s how they work.
…
and it goes on. I’m not going to bother reading the rest of it. I got to the bit about online gaming and just got fed up.
Well, he has some valid points… however the way he sums it up doesnt really do the trick for me :>
One problem is the number of gamers… they won’t increase much. Yet the dev costs for games get higher and higher and the price tag is basically the same for the last 20 years.
Right now you often need to sell more than one million copies to break even… but the games get bigger and bigger… more code, more sound, more models, more levels… just much much more.
How should that work? 5 million copies at 200$ to break even?
But then again… I think all those problems will solve themselfes. Every aspect will continue getting more high level. I guess that in 5 years a “generic” AAA title will have about 80% generated content (eg procedural textures and/or displacement maps).
I thought his fundamental point, which was that game innovation over the last 5 years or so has been limited mostly to increasing the number of triangles on screen, was a good one. It is all well and good to pick up on small details but you are basically avoiding the central question- what will make the next generation of games worth buying once we run out ways to noticeably improve the graphics?
The games industry has lots of parallels with loads of other youth culture industries.
One of its saving graces is that there is an endless supply of kids who have never seen anything before, and it all looks fantastic to them. This is why you can keep selling the same old console game over and over with nicer graphics. The nicer graphics are often just the lure which attracts the eye - the video game equivalent of the shiny hardback book cover.
Many programmers lament the good old days when gameplay ruled etc. etc. but the reality is the good old days never left - gameplay still rules but nowadays you actually have competition to deal with. Few games with no gameplay actually sell - amazing graphics or not. However, games with “derivative” gameplay often sell acceptably, though they are much derided by the old hacks, who completely miss the point - a whole bunch of newcomers have never seen the game or gameplay before. If Max Payne 2 is basically just Quake with different guns and fancier graphics - who cares if you’ve never seen Quake? Quake came out, ooh, 6 years ago - long enough for an 8 yr old to become a 14 yr old. Think how many millions of extra customers who have never seen Quake will appear in the next year.
What is currently shafting the games market, IMO, is that games are ludicrously poor value for money from an investors’ point of view. Why spend $5m on developing a product to get a 10% chance of making $100m when you can spend $50k and have a 50% chance of making $500k? Most of the customers barely care for the difference between a game that cost $50k and $5m when it comes to parting with their cash. If the game’s fun, they’ll pay for it. Extreme examples are Dweep Gold, Alchemy, Diamond Mine, Zuma’s Revenge, and Swap. (Swap took just 10 days to write and made back its development budget in just 2 weeks).
So unless game developers take step back from trying to produce multimillion dollar epics and just get on with focusing on smaller, more fun games, they are probably going to be left high and dry without any investors sooner or later.
That’s my 2p.
Cas 
[quote]I thought his fundamental point, which was that game innovation over the last 5 years or so has been limited mostly to
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I’ve seen this all before.
We were saying the same thing back in 92.
We were saying it again in 97.
To a certain extent, it’s always true, and in fact there has been no innovation at all in the last 15 years. But, erm, no-one really believes it when you put it that way, do they (or if they do, what the heck do they think deathmatch was)? And therein lies my criticism: these statements are true only for a certain blinkered view of the industry. The lack-of-innovation issue isn’t false, but you have to recognize it is a narrow view, and that you can’t generalize it to encompass the whole industry, nor to encompass the industry’s future.
!!! That’s BS, I’m afraid. You still only need to sell about 300k-500k copies (*) to break even on a AAA+ title unless you were expecting something like 5m sales and designed your budget accordingly, so that only 1m+ sales would be profitable.
And as Cas pointed out, the breakeven point on a less flashy game is considerably lower.
(*) - 20% of sales revenue seems to be a good rule-of-thumb on studio income. This makes for approx $3m to $5m. From memory, the majority of AAA titles still come in on a $4m-$6m budget, barring the exceptionals (like when a company chooses to “bet the farm” on something, like you might sensibly do with Doom3 etc).
An excellent point; this the kind of thing I meant when I said that the innovation view only looks at a narrow slice of the market - people peddling predictions based upon it tend to completely ignore the scenario you describe.
And of course this has manifested partially in the rise and fall and rise again and fall again of the big studios and publishers; gama has an interesting article up at the moment looking at reasons why indie game studios sell the company to people like EA, THQ, GTi, etc. The most common reason seemed to be “the bigger the games we develop, the bigger the risks, the harder it is to overcome bad luck (temporary personal loans etc stop being big enough to be able to save the company), and we just wanted to get out before it got too big to handle or we had a catastrophe and all the staff lost their jobs”.
It’s all very exciting to watch (who will go bankrupt/lose their stock-market listing/fire 75% of their staff this week?), but the people involved are surely going to get seasick eventually? :).
thought MMORPG wasn’t here in the 90’s …
UO?
Kev
A little, some what, related side note. I read an article a month ago or something that stated that EA Games didn’t release a single game in 2003 that wasn’t a followup or contained characters from a strong franchise (like harry potter and lord of the rings). Pretty scary ;D
[quote]A little, some what, related side note. I read an article a month ago or something that stated that EA Games didn’t release a single game in 2003 that wasn’t a followup or contained characters from a strong franchise (like harry potter and lord of the rings). Pretty scary ;D
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And did it mention what they’d done in 02, 01, 00, and even 99? I can’t remember off the top of my head what games they’ve published each year, but I was under the impression that EA’s business plan has long been to publish followups and franchises in preference to anything else - they are more profitable and less risky. So, this is nothing new for 03.
Recall too the horror of Ultima fans when EA bought Origin and the expensive sexy ultima packaging (cloth maps in the box, little pendants and trinkets, heavy boxes and manuals) was replaced by flimsy (lighter => cheaper to transport; less material => cheaper to make) EA packaging and the “extras” were pruned away to increased profit.
This has been EA’s hallmark: cut costs. Go with whatever’s most profitable. I really wouldn’t worry that anything’s changing there :).
We have a lot of ex-bullfrog folk around our way who were all there until EA bought them out and turned the company into a sequel factory. I do wonder what the management thought process is that takes a bunch of the best games programmers around and drives them all to resign in a matter of months. Of course, it did wonders in terms of getting a lot of new games companies starting up in the area and landed lionhead a lot of good people but I cannot see the benefits to ea.
[quote] And did it mention what they’d done in 02, 01, 00, and even 99? I can’t remember off the top of my head what games they’ve published each year, but I was under the impression that EA’s business plan has long been to publish followups and franchises in preference to anything else - they are more profitable and less risky. So, this is nothing new for 03.
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hehe true, but the last risky game they published that comes to my mind is The Sims, which turned out to be the most profitable game in history. Just making games for teen boys and game playing grown up men won’t let you tap into the potential huge market The Sims gave a hint on. And since EA Games is noted on the stockmarket they’ll probably eventually have to start attract new popultationgroups to be able to keep up the growth, and by that keep shareholders interested in the company.
[quote]thought MMORPG wasn’t here in the 90’s …
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Know thine history :):
http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/mudtimeline.html
…graphical MUD’s / small MMOG’s appeared around 1992
…MMOG’s proper (FPS style) appeared in 1996
Personally I think that most of today’s video games suck. Well, I really like a few of them, but I tend to stick with one and play it for year(s).
I regularly try demos of new games but usually within a few minutes they bore me (I think Breakfast hit the nail on the head.)
Braben’s “Dog’s Life” I found to be a very good and innovative idea and if I owned a PS2 I would play it.
In total I spend 3/4 of my “playing time” with old emulated games: oldies but goldies.
If the games market crashes or not, I really don’t care. I just need UAE, MAME, SNES9X, Jedi-Outcast and some of those nice independent games.
I gotta disagree with that. Not only do you have younger gamers turning up constantly, but the current media image is growing more friendly towards gaming in general, which means lots of people aren’t going to be ‘growing out of it’ as much as before.
That and the fact that lots of companies are trying to widen their market and attract people who are traditionally non-gamers. With cheaper hardware that becomes easier and easier.
And I could rattle off a whole list of innovative games that have come out in the last year, you’re just looking in the wrong places 
[quote] I could rattle off a whole list of innovative games that have come out in the last year, you’re just looking in the wrong places.
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I only tend to read a few gaming related sites and get one games based print magazine on subscription, so I probably don’t know where to look, but how far out of my way should I have to go? What is the point of innovation if no-one ever finds out about it?
Interesting question, though- what were the most innovative games of the last year, and in what way did they innovate?
Who cares about the current media image?
Everyone who stopped or reduced playing games did that, because they lost interest or just don’t have enough time for playing.
Ofcorse there is a fresh stream of people, who never played any games before… but people stop playing one day or simply die. The total number of players just can’t grow forever.
If you mean ‘forever’ like in ‘time of universe’, then certainly not. But if you mean our lifespan, why not ? There is more and more people on the earth each day. New, VERY big markets are opening (China, India) - in first case politically, in second economically.
I would be more worried that we all will have to learn Chinese and only then localize some games to English…