I'm getting rather worried for publishers at this point.
They're trying to phase out used games, herd gamers into an easy-to-regulate online environment, and refuse to give up the useless war on piracy. Now they're raising game prices.
Before, it was easy enough to say "Bleh, greedy bastards". But then I finally sat up and took notice that something was VERY amiss when Squeenix came out and said "Tomb Raider has sold five million copies, and has underperformed."
No. I refuse to believe that publishers are "just greedy" at this point. That's like saying a kid who won't run in gym class is "just lazy" when there's bone sticking out of his leg.
There's something deeply wrong with AAA gaming nowadays, and we've been positively blind to it before. It's pretty difficult to remain blind to it nowadays if you actually examine the state of gaming now, with its insane development budgets, insaner marketing budgets, and the ludicrous costs it takes to put increasingly few new things in new games.
Want proof that games cost too much to make? There's five million underperforming copies of Tomb Raider there for you to look at.
We're stretching ourselves too thin. We want more, newer, better, flashier, and we want it all at the same price. Reading that sentence twice should reveal the problem. Gamers want more and more stuff in their games, but don't want to pay extra for all the more that they're getting.
I propose that we drop back to the year of Crysis. It looked very good, and stagnating for a year right around there would force developers to stop constantly overwriting their engines and actually start optimizing the damn things. Optimization would substantially reduce the costs associated with high-budget gaming, yet result in impressive technical advancements at a very reduced cost, keep the current audience, and maybe we'd get publishers who are willing to take a damn creative risk for once when a flop game is no longer almost a death sentence.
Gamer demands have put us in this mess, so I think it's fair that we're saddled with the responsibility of getting us out of it. Fortunately, that's easy to do: If nothing else, at least support RESPONSIBLE development, rather than the cutting-edge stuff. Remember how American McGee said that gamers need to realize that games cost a lot of money to make? He's right.
We've got to drive market forces towards a sustainable direction, or we WILL have a crash. Devs are spending exponentially more on logarithmic decreasing returns because that's what we want. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where that leads.
They're trying to phase out used games, herd gamers into an easy-to-regulate online environment, and refuse to give up the useless war on piracy. Now they're raising game prices.
Before, it was easy enough to say "Bleh, greedy bastards". But then I finally sat up and took notice that something was VERY amiss when Squeenix came out and said "Tomb Raider has sold five million copies, and has underperformed."
No. I refuse to believe that publishers are "just greedy" at this point. That's like saying a kid who won't run in gym class is "just lazy" when there's bone sticking out of his leg.
There's something deeply wrong with AAA gaming nowadays, and we've been positively blind to it before. It's pretty difficult to remain blind to it nowadays if you actually examine the state of gaming now, with its insane development budgets, insaner marketing budgets, and the ludicrous costs it takes to put increasingly few new things in new games.
Want proof that games cost too much to make? There's five million underperforming copies of Tomb Raider there for you to look at.
We're stretching ourselves too thin. We want more, newer, better, flashier, and we want it all at the same price. Reading that sentence twice should reveal the problem. Gamers want more and more stuff in their games, but don't want to pay extra for all the more that they're getting.
I propose that we drop back to the year of Crysis. It looked very good, and stagnating for a year right around there would force developers to stop constantly overwriting their engines and actually start optimizing the damn things. Optimization would substantially reduce the costs associated with high-budget gaming, yet result in impressive technical advancements at a very reduced cost, keep the current audience, and maybe we'd get publishers who are willing to take a damn creative risk for once when a flop game is no longer almost a death sentence.
Gamer demands have put us in this mess, so I think it's fair that we're saddled with the responsibility of getting us out of it. Fortunately, that's easy to do: If nothing else, at least support RESPONSIBLE development, rather than the cutting-edge stuff. Remember how American McGee said that gamers need to realize that games cost a lot of money to make? He's right.
We've got to drive market forces towards a sustainable direction, or we WILL have a crash. Devs are spending exponentially more on logarithmic decreasing returns because that's what we want. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where that leads.
