I think Gaming is slowly dying.

[Sunrider]

In regards to "not doing it for the art", take a look at the music industry.
While there are more shit being produced now than ever, it is not in any way dying.
Some great stuff is still being produced, and I feel it's the same with games. There's tons of shovelware, but great titles are still being released, and not that rarely.

 

[Fanta Grape]

Yep. Gaming is doomed.

Doomed, I say.

[HEADING=2]Doomed![/HEADING]

Incedentally, anyone see that new Alice trailer? Lookin' pretty darn good.

Meh. THe art style looks excellent, the gameplay looks painfully generic.

and the topic is stupid. We might have worse games made, but it's a mulit-billion dollar industry. No problems

 

[mjc0961]

1. Pirates and Consolisation

Okay, I stopped right there. Throwing around the term "consolisation" only means that this is another whiny "Waaah, console gamers are getting to play my PC games" rant. Guess what: you're not better than console gamers just because you have a keyboard and mouse. And game publishers and developers want to make money, which means getting their games on as many platforms as possible. Get over it, and especially stop making ludicrous claims like gaming is dying because 360 owners will get to play Witcher 2.

 

[Pegghead]

If a guy in Sweden can become a respected millionaire with a solo pc project, then it kind of puts to bed your argument about AAA companies entirely leading t5he pack with no outside influence (not to mention the whole "PC GAMING R DEAD" argument).

Not to mention your talk of "dumbing down" games due to the popularity of consoles, just because a franchise is on a pc does not make it automatically better (let's face it, if they made a pc port of Limbo with a thousand-and-one shaders as well as ten different movement buttons simply because it's what the pc is capable of it would hardly be an improvement of a console-produced game) and at the end of the day games shouldn't be so complex that the immersion is lost because you have to scroll through fifty different forums and eat the manual in rage because of games with unneccesarily complex mechanisms and menu systems.

And while I whole-heartedly agree that games follow the leader (and that we're seeing sub-par greyish brown shooters galore because of it) that's what all mediums are guilty of, and considering the fact that it looks like most of the gaming community is holding it's breath to see footage of a game set in a turn of the century floating worlds fair run by racists and characterised by crow-fighting and colour (seriously, everything is so freakin' colourful in what I've seen of Infinite so far) I'd say that originality and quality will always be more appreciated than samey goop (look at MOH and the DA2 hatred).

 

[Olikunmissile]

Yawn, sounds like Yahtzee in here, again.

 

[lord canti]

Gaming is not dying. It's more along the lines of wandering off the correct path and we the consumers are the only ones who can get it corrected.

 

[Durananrananrananran]

Gaming? Dying? So you've played all the good games ever made and got bored of them?

People could stop making new games tomorrow and I've still got enough good ones to last me the rest of my life.

Or you could just drink some Syke: daPwRB-4rHg[/youtube]

 

[The SettingSun]

It's got it's challenges like any other industry and I think a lot of these problems will be solved next-gen. If a problem really begins to affect the industry you can bet that the big players (such as Nintendo) will do something about it.

 

[w-Jinksy]

seriously just about every bloody day i see threads about the decline of video games and shit.

get off your high horses video games now a days are massive affairs with stunning visuals, stellar voice acting and usually brilliant writing.

gaming dying slowly my arse.

 

[Zenode]

So a VIDEO GAME had the biggest entertainment launch of all time?

Yeah....totally dying.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Ok lets be honest here I think a lot of the problems with the last two points can be solved after the recession is over. Now as much as I hate shovelware I would rather see as many companies survive this recession with the possible double dip as possible. They are companies you know they do have stock holders that just care about whether the company is turning a profit, has cash inflow, has a 1:1 Quick Ratio, etc.

Number 2 is just a problem with people paying for shit DLC. Stop paying and companies will stop doing it simple as. I do not support any form of DLC bar the Bethesda DLC which is the whole Shivering Isle + Knight of the Nine pack as well as the whole DLC in one pack for FO 3. Aside from that I will never ever buy DLC.

Ok Piracy is not ruining PC gaming. Piracy is just an excuse for devs to move to consoles where they have a larger market thus should have in theory better revenue and since people on average on consoles are less informed(I don't mean to offend anyone but given that the last time a little survey was done on Escapist roughly the community was split down the middle in terms of being console or PC gamer. Given that there are way more console gamers than PC gamers the ratio should have reflected this if they cared as much once again in general terms about gaming news and changes) they will have a higher demand for games if they pull shit like remove features as a lot won't know about it until they buy the game.

Anyway I am sick of saying this but Piracy for games is just as rampant on consoles as on PC. With PC piracy you have a much more accurate view of the scale of piracy due to basically all PC pirates not being lazy and torrent it themselves. While console pirates are a bit lazier and not technically able to chip their consoles. Once again I don't mean this as an insult but PC gaming does require people to be more technically literate with building your own PC and using Google for troubleshooting etc. So how do console people pirate well most go to some guy/gal and get them to chip their console them buy games off them. So for each downloaded console pirated game it does have more spin off piracy as PC don't usually give out the file to that degree AFTER DOWNLOADING(that needs to be in caps and bold as in other thread some guy/gal didn't understand that spin off piracy in terms of what I am talking about means after they download the file).

 

[thefleeger]

OP:http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2821-Ludus-Florentis

That pretty much covers it. We may be in a AAA grind of sorts, but that video explains it very well.

--The way I see it-- There will be indie games to arise, and fill in some AAA spots. Don't forget all AAA publishers and studios started as ideas and indie devs trying to find a way to show their work. It's a process. We see Activision and EA today. In 5 years, we might be talking about some side-scrolling retro publisher from the original Sonic Team, or a complete new game genre. 5 years ago, no body had forseen a string of crappy super hero movies to make a big one. It's an industry. It'll rock and it'll roll. It's rolling a bit now, but when the next tide of innovation comes to the industry, when all of the "Console Age Kids" get out of school and start becoming devs, there will be a change in the tides of the industry. We are consumers, not devs. We ride the roller coasters they develop, and the only thing in a dev's mind is..."I hope they love this after all of the work we put into it."

 

[rapidoud]

It's dying because of the Deus Ex fanbase and what they're trying to do to human revolution.

It's also dying because gamers are so moronic they don't even know what consolisation means and then somehow think they're being oppressed like the OP. Sigh.

Dumbed down =! consolisation =! porting =! console game =! casual console game people.

 

[Pakkie]

Yea gaming is dying, thats why their is thousands of more players on every platform each day. Makes Sense.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Not to mention your talk of "dumbing down" games due to the popularity of consoles, just because a franchise is on a pc does not make it automatically better (let's face it, if they made a pc port of Limbo with a thousand-and-one shaders as well as ten different movement buttons simply because it's what the pc is capable of it would hardly be an improvement of a console-produced game) and at the end of the day games shouldn't be so complex that the immersion is lost because you have to scroll through fifty different forums and eat the manual in rage because of games with unneccesarily complex mechanisms and menu systems.

I just want to say something here on the dumbing down of games for consoles. Games should be optimised for the platform they are on. I wouldn't expect them to take out vibration for consoles since we can't have it on PC. So I would expect we should be able to split commands that would be one button for console game as they need it because of lower input options. I can't tell you how many scrims I lost in CoD 2 because pick up weapons and defuse bomb were the same button. When one second can make the difference in a match like that it is a problem.

Then there are other games that cry out for a keyboard because they need the extra commands. A game like that for me was ME. Now you might feel differently and that is fine but I found that the ability wheel completely and utterly ruined the combat. I would have much preferred a load of hotkeys so I didn't pause combat when I went to use a skill.

I have also never had any problems with complex controls on PC. You can make them as simple as you like. The only time something like that gets too complex is in a flight sim and if you go into those thinking the controls will be simple you have been grossly mislead. Although I will admit people on the PC can take the "dumbing" down process too far.

 

[GraveeKing]

No. It's not, it's done what a lot of things in the past have - look at books, just like gaming - it splits off into branches, series, auto biography's etc. Then someone decides to ruin it and write something stupid not mentioning any names to avoid offending people >.>.
But gaming is just doing that - someone saw opportunity and abused it, making terrible casual games, pay per month games etc.

Terrible things will come from anything that becomes popular but it's true games, which continue - even if they are few nowadays. Things like Skyrim (sorry to have to mention it) etc hold lots of promise.

 

[TheEndlessSleep]

Games are not dying as a medium, they're just dying for you because you're getting older and noticing all of the retarded things that the games industry does these days.