The Games Industry thread.

[DrSpike]

Fair, but all the things are true in the context I said them - the whole gaming industry.

[Standup]

Another factor is terms of profits is that some (much ?) of the profits have moved to retailers. When i started playing games many,many years ago on the ZX81 it was mainly mail order and a very few specialists. Now supermarkets like Tesco stock some games and chains like Game and Dixons are everywhere. If the games industry has followed other retail trends then the retailers are the ones dictating terms to the publishers so less profits for them and even less for developers. If Game doesn't stock your product because of pricing do you have reduced sales or reduced profits or both ?

I read somewhere (possibly the Game annual report) that games are cheaper now than they were 10 years ago and that affects margins. Certainly i remember that 15 years ago £39.99 was a standard price for Amiga games nowadays £29.99 is probably starting price for a PC game and often it drops quickly.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Fair, but all the things are true in the context I said them

Agreed.

[child of Thor]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4100452.stm

The money floating around in the GI is definately many times more than 10-15 years ago - more people are gaming now than ever before from what i read, and its true its not seen as a 'geeks' past time. We even have sexy chick gamers these days

Still with the costs involved being in the movie price range, as the article mentions, the challange becomes not to always play it safe and do the movie-tie in stuff. This has rarely produced good games(the new episode3 star wars games! for example).

The hunch i have is the more the GI consolidates itself into a few mega-publishing houses, the more we will get of this play it safe approach.

Partialy the rise of the console and supposed fall of the PC wont help this. A wide gaming base of PC users helps the GI's creativity in the long run. Anyone with some brains for maths and the time to learn can program a PC and experiment. You cant do that on a console.

Still i dont entirely believe all the 'pc is dead/dying' hype. In a way the xbox might actualy help it through the lean times(in that as it uses pc type set up, devs that program for xbox can also easily port to PC or vice-versa).

So no the GI isn't sick if you measure it on how much money it generates compared to yester-year.

[child of Thor]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4624437.stm

while not just GI news - the games division of Lucasarts is getting a nice new shinny home along with all the movie stuff.

Maybe they can get around to making a decent game again?

[DrSpike]

Monkey Island.

[child of Thor]

In 3D with some neon jedi force spells thrown in?.........hmmmm might work to the usual standards

[Urban Ranger]

I think their best stuff is the adventure games with the traditional cartoon characters.

Sam and Max

[DrSpike]

Yes, that will do.

[Felch]

I think that good quality games are still being made, with about the same regularity that they always were. People have a hard time separating their nostalgia for old games, from the realities of games in the past. To be honest, just as many games were clones of each other back then as today. While in the past there were a good games like Zork or Space Invaders or whatever, there were a host of crappy clones of those games. The problem with people's memory is that they quickly forget the crap, and only recall the classics.

For an example (although for forum rules purposes this is hypothetical), look at NES roms. There were the classics, like Zelda, SMB 3, and such, and then there was the crap - just about everything else. The games industry is just like every other industry, it has its innovators and its copycats, and honestly I think the proportions have stayed much the same.

I don't think the trend is towards less innovation. If anything, the advances in technoloy have made innovation easier. It's tough to make much more than a simple text adventure or arcade game without sufficient hardware, so the past is littered with lots of quite similar turds. But now more options are open to game designers than ever before.

Does anybody seriously think that EA only wants to make bland uninspired relics? They want to have the new idea before other people. It's just that the big corporations have trouble sifting through all the good ideas, and good ideas can become disappointments if not done right.

[DrSpike]

Well said.

[child of Thor]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Well said.

That is a valid arguement. I wish it was one i could believe in 100% though

For me, i find myself ignoring many of todays 'great games' in favour of older titles i missed out on the first time around.

Games like Splinter Cell(which i found too scripted and liniar to really enjoy), Fable(not bad but disapointing because of the hype about what it could have been), Halo2(too short, too easy) + about 95% of the rest of my console purchases are gathering dust.

The only recent console games i still play are Morrowind(when its not crashing) and LMA football Manager2005.

Instead i'm mostly playing old games like:
Civ2(+CTP2)
Xcom
Pirates(origonal)
Xwing
Rebellion(Supremacy in uk - its growing on me!)
Daggerfall(when its not crashing!)
And even an atari8bit game 'Alternate Reality' on an emulator.

So i'm not speaking about nostalga value, or from my memmory of these titles - these games are what i'm playing now, in preferance to just about anything that is currently getting released.

These games offer me so much more challange/interest than the 95% of what seems to get released today.

I think these kind of views are very much down to personal preference. Still untill i percieve a growth in the amount of 'good' games that are out there, i finding it very difficult to persuade myself to actualy spend the money i've set aside for a new upto date PC. IMHO i have little reason to make that upgrade at present - and its not looking likely to change anytime soon.

Which is a sad thing for me as i've always been a supporter of games as a medium of entertainment.

Its true bad games have always been made, but maybe in todays more bloated market it just seems we have many more naf movie-tie in games? We always used to have naf movie tie-ins, its just that now they make up over 50% of most game charts top ten.

I find it hard to call this progress?

[child of Thor]

Looks like Sony is going to follow in Microsofts footsteps:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/28/news_6128295.html

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by child of Thor
That is a valid arguement. I wish it was one i could believe in 100% though

Agreed.

Several days ago I walked into a computer game store, looked around, found nothing interesting and left.

In the last n years I have only bought one game, which was Age of Magic II. However I was quite disappointed with it after a day or two, and that's the end of that.

Oh, of course I got Civ 3, but it was quite uninspiring...

[DrSpike]

Maybe you have just got grumpier.