at this point, would this industry benefit from a crash?

[veloper]

I wonder how obnoxious this industry will get before people stop feeding it.

Most of that just comes from the internet, not the gaming.

I was talking about obnoxious practices like day one DLC, invasive DRM and overpriced unfinished games. That comes from the industry.

The problem comes from gamers. Most of us are far too impatient and that's the root of the problem.

Nobody is forcing us to purchase crap at gun point. We buy shit and we come back for more, again and again. When people come back for more for non-essentials, there is no problem at the serving end.

The only thing you can do is help yourself and that means being smarter than the majority of dumbfucks and wait. Wait for patches, price drops, complete editions, versions that don't require GFWL, etc. Even smarter than that is to take a very free approach to information sharing.
There is of course a big downside and that is when everybody with a shred of sense does that, only the idiots will ever get catered to.
In between is the compromise of fools: pick the best or least bad of the bunch and support those companies, even if that still means buying full-priced buggy games that will be patched later. Everything that's still good about games rests on the fools.

In any case, all those gamers who are slamming other kinds of gamers actually have the right general idea, even when they aren't discriminating properly.

 

[Alterego-X]

The industry? No. Less money means less people working in the industry, less products made, with less production values.

Would Gaming benefit from it as a culture? Maybe.

If you are the kind of person who is outraged by the "greed" putting mods behind a paywall, then you would probably like post-collapse gaming, that would be a lot more like traditional modding is, with lots of indies, patreons, casual copyright infringements, hobbyist "for the love of the art" efforts, and so on.

Personally, I hope that we can get there without a crash too.

 

[Lilani]

i think by this point we are all aware of valve's BRILLIANT idea of giving modders the chance to charge people for their mods (valve and the publisher of the game, naturally, get 75% out of every sale)

for many people this is the straw that broke the camel's back, one of the last nice and uncorrupted things in gaming, might now be ruined forever

i cant be the only one who is tired of all this, how paying for 60 bucks doesnt guarantee you a full game or even a working game on launch these days, how devs hide content away in day one DLC and pre-order bonuses, how tons of DLC get constantly added to a game instead of free updates or even mere patches, how even microtransactions have made their way into full priced games

im sick of devs and publishers trying every trick under the sun to squeeze every last cent out of me, instead of actually making good games that make want to buy

could another video game crash actually get rid of all of this? drive all these terrible companies to bankruptcy or lead them away from the game industry once and for all? a video game crash that would make a an example, a record, to never take your customer support for granted?

Complaining about modders being able to charge for their mods is like complaining about YouTubers being able to get money from ads which run before or during their videos. Yeah, some do it for free, but there's a point where if you're turning out so much content of a certain quality, you need something to offset the time it took to make it. It's impossible to complete a project which takes hundreds of hours to complete in a reasonable amount of time while holding down a full-time job. But if that project can earn you money, it might just become your job instead.

Some mods out there are incredibly in-depth, completely changing not only models and graphics but the in-game mechanics themselves, as well as sometimes adding new stories and content. Even simple mods take an incredible amount of time to make, and the more complicated ones take not only a lot of time but a lot of people or knowledge of different disciplines. If someone can take their knowledge of these disciplines and turn out incredible work that people are willing to pay for, I say let them do it. If I spent 300 hours making an in-depth mod for Skyrim I wouldn't mind getting a little more than a bunch of high ratings on Steamworks from it.

And no, a crash would not benefit the industry right now. Even back in the days of the Atari and NES there were stupid things game publishers would do. Lots of games had DRM which required you to have a physical copy of the game's user manual or terms and conditions. The game would randomly ask something like "What's the first word on page 12 of the user manual?" and you literally wouldn't be able to make it through that part of the game without having a physical copy of the user manual. Because remember this was in the pre-Internet days so you couldn't just Google to find the answer. And a lot of games would hide special codes and secrets in subscription magazines like Nintendo Power, stuff you could never know about without a subscription. And fairness in game reviews? Forget it--they could write whatever they want about whatever they wanted, as there was literally no way to cross-reference their review. A lot of shitty anti-drug games got conspicuously high scores in gaming magazines, and I WONDER how...

The games industry has not changed, only our ability to analyze and talk about it. Not to mention it's very diversified, which makes a crash even less likely to happen.

 

[Tilly]

I was talking about obnoxious practices like day one DLC, invasive DRM and overpriced unfinished games. That comes from the industry.

Fair enough. Very true. Although I'd also say you get the kind of business practices you tolerate. People are too bad at voting with their money and need to buy things based on principle, not just what's popular.

 

[GrumbleGrump]

Don't think so. If the industry were to crash now, it would need that every big publisher and every rather large indie studio stopped making their money in a rather short period of time. That is, you would need Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, EA, Valve, Konami, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft to stop earning money in about a few years or so. THAT'S what you need for a crash nowadays. Considering the massive sequelization of videogames and the presence of big fandoms of various franchises, you would need the Chernobyl of videogames for it to all go to shit. As in, everything that can go wrong WILL go wrong.

I don't know.

You have to remember the 'Gaming crash' was in fact only a crash of the US games market.
The reason it was possible to recover from it as quickly as seems to have been the case was because it was mostly US companies that collapsed, and foreign ones filled the void this left.

There was no crash in Japan, there was no crash in Europe. If anything, the UK reached a peak of it's own native home computer/games industry around the same time as the 'crash' happened.

In this day and age, any crash is likely going to be a global one, and that is going to be much more difficult to recover from...

Exactly. I find the probability of say, PC gaming or Console gaming to crash to be more likely. Something only a part of gaming culture enjoys. If gaming were to crash today like it did in the '80 you would stop seeing everything from Candy Crush to Battlefield and everything from DS's to PS4's, dissapear.

 

[Doom972]

I wonder how obnoxious this industry will get before people stop feeding it.

Most of that just comes from the internet, not the gaming.

I was talking about obnoxious practices like day one DLC, invasive DRM and overpriced unfinished games. That comes from the industry.

The problem comes from gamers. Most of us are far too impatient and that's the root of the problem.

Nobody is forcing us to purchase crap at gun point. We buy shit and we come back for more, again and again. When people come back for more for non-essentials, there is no problem at the serving end.

The only thing you can do is help yourself and that means being smarter than the majority of dumbfucks and wait. Wait for patches, price drops, complete editions, versions that don't require GFWL, etc. Even smarter than that is to take a very free approach to information sharing.
There is of course a big downside and that is when everybody with a shred of sense does that, only the idiots will ever get catered to.
In between is the compromise of fools: pick the best or least bad of the bunch and support those companies, even if that still means buying full-priced buggy games that will be patched later. Everything that's still good about games rests on the fools.

In any case, all those gamers who are slamming other kinds of gamers actually have the right general idea, even when they aren't discriminating properly.

That is what I do: I don't buy games until they're cheap or on a bundle and I never buy cosmetic DLC or microtransactions. I just hate the fact that we're getting out games sold to us in pieces and with restricted access. People actually supporting this by throwing money at publishers is a part of the problem. I don't agree that piracy is an acceptable solution.

 

[Doom972]

I was talking about obnoxious practices like day one DLC, invasive DRM and overpriced unfinished games. That comes from the industry.

Fair enough. Very true. Although I'd also say you get the kind of business practices you tolerate. People are too bad at voting with their money and need to buy things based on principle, not just what's popular.

I agree. More people should vote with their wallet. Unfortunately, most gamers are of the overhyped "shut up and take my money" type.

 

[Tilly]

I agree. More people should vote with their wallet. Unfortunately, most gamers are of the overhyped "shut up and take my money" type.

Well unfortunately so much of the gaming media has sizable financial links to the publishers that they aren't gonna suggest any improvements. But it is good that people like TB make videos arguing against pre-orders for example. I think if we could start by removing those, the industry would overall improve.

 

[WeepingAngels]

You know, people always say how they're ready to tear things down. They never say how they're ready to build them back up again.

If the industry crashes then what? What's the plan after that? I know the idea of the destruction establishments you don't like FEELS satisfying, but usually building it back up means starting at square one, which usually means any and all progress that we've made is lost.

Also I feel like corruption is joining the long long LONG list of words that we use too freely on the internet. You don't have to like their decision (I frankly am kinda iffy on it) but it does fall to the decision of the modder and I'm pretty sure if you don't like it you can always go get free mods elsewhere. It's hardly corruption.

Really, you think we would be back to 8 Bit (or Atari 2600) graphics? BS! Stop fear mongering.

The truth is that this industry is getting more greedy all the time. The anti-consumer tactics will eventually result in some chaos.

You know what's interesting. When people hated ET 2600 as much as they did, they returned it to stores. We can't even do that anymore.