Poll: CNN: Console Gaming is Dying

[ntw3001]

Meh, mainstream journalists still haven't managed to recognise that games aren't one big market. This makes as much sense as 'Cinema dying: Things-you-can-look-at industry now dominated by funny cat clips'.

 

[Frezzato]

Yeah, for anyone wondering why I even bothered to read the article, it's on Google News. Kinda the only game article currently.

It's interesting, I was reading the blog of the author, Blake Snow, and he's got bits with titles like "Teeth beware: Dental diagnodents are shady".

Seriously.


The comment tree at CNN is growing quite large, and here's a good one:

"You know what is dying? CNN.

Consoles (and PC gaming) are strong, the hardware sales are not stellar, but there is not much real hardware out there that is interesting...it is all old. The handheld garbage is not much better than phone and tablet games, which are a joke.

When the next generation of consoles come out they will sell like crazy. Anyone who wanted a PS3 or 360 or Wii bought it years ago...games are still selling just fine.

Next time you have a deadline and have to post something preposterous about technology just spit up another 'Apple is perfect' pile of bile."

welcome to the escapist and all of that, just wondering, you know you can just put the stuff you want to copy from the article in a quote box of their own instead of bolding and quotationing it right?

the command is quote then /quote inside brackets

Yeah, I got that actually. I'm still forming an opinion as to which is best. I actually like simple quotes better but I'm quickly learning that it's utterly and completely wrong. People have mistaken my citations as my own personal opinion. Lesson learned.

And thanks for the welcome.

 

[babinro]

There is less and less of a need to have a stationary gaming setup in the home. Just like there is less of a need to have a dedicated desk for stationary PC gaming. These things will take years/decades to truly fade away, but I'd say it's safe to say it'll be dying come this console generation.

I'm thinking we'll have the PS4 and PS5 generations of consoles before it truly dies off to all but a niche group.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Which is why 60$ games exist.

...???

Adjusting for inflation, video games have only ever gotten cheaper. Even without it...Super Mario 64, Starfox 64, Majora's Mask, and most other AAA N64 games were all $70~ on release and I distinctly remember Turok being $80~. Even as far back as the SNES, Chrono Trigger sent me back a pretty $60.

If you ignore economies of scale and the type of industry it is then yes games have gotten cheaper.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

PC gaming has been dying for 25 years in the eyes of the moronic. Which is why it has the most exclusives of any platform. Oh wait...

You'll learn the live with it console fans

What will kill consoles for us (if it would happen) depends on just how bad the next gen is hardware wise. If it's not good enough, the few remaining studios still focusing on console games that aren't the stupidly over marketed few will go bankrupt under the strain of trying to get the hardware to do anything decent, kind of like what's happening now.

So bad hardware will increase production costs more than good hardware. Counter intuitive, i know, but that's why star citizen will be built on a budget of ~$20m and be ridiculously good looking, extremely physically detailed, and a massive complex game all at the same time. It's also why the Witcher 2 on PC murders any game on console graphically despite being made by a small polish studio with nowhere close to the funding most mediocre AAA console games have. To be honest, any game i've played on PC in the last 2-3 years has looked better than halo 4 has in terms of fidelity just due to the resolution, framerate, and AA. Don't get me wrong, Halo 4 is a good looking console game! but the costs associated with halo 4's graphics on 360 will far outstretch the costs of making a mind blowingly prettier game on better hardware.

That massive overhead in costs for developing for console nowadays, coupled with patch fees, the difficulty of selling anything to console gamers as a whole (retail is still the main factor, so if your game isn't marketed heavily it wont be on shelves long enough or in large enough quantities to sell enough) makes it very difficult for anything but massive companies to partake. It's a horrible situation and WILL destroy consoles if left unchecked.

In the end, say what you want about hardware (adamant fans will always do so because everything is 'good enough' for those guys, ever since the NES), but once phones and tablets outpace consoles in performance (2015 is the rumours for the next gen are correct), it's only a matter of time anyway. Consoles need to have some advantage to be viable, and they're currently being squeezed from below by tablets and TV's (for additional extras to gaming), and from the top by PC Gaming, which has become vastly cheaper and accessible lately, and has been gnawing at the consoles market share year on year for a few years now for many publishers.

I can see why CNN think it's a bleak outlook, because it frankly is. But it's too early to call it until the next gen arrives in full. I can't say i'd be sorry to see Sony & Microsoft to GTFO any position of influence in gaming though, console gaming has taken a massive hit this generation. Sales wise it's 'fine' but then you break it down into what's selling and then it hits you just how creatively bankrupt major console games have become lately. I'm not sure how i feel about the possibility of consoles dying after considering that, when both the major alternatives (mobile and PC) offer a much more creative selection of games (indie gaming on the latter is amazing, it's like the PS2 glory days of console but cheaper and prettier).

Argh, conflicted. A lack of consoles would force the gaming industry to once again discover something other than low risk heavily marketed sludge, but it would also make people who are extremely adamant that it's 'CONSOLE OR NOTHING!' depressed. In the end, i may think they're narrow minded and losing out on so much with that mindset, but they're happy i guess

 

[Pink Gregory]

snipped for efficiency

See, they way I'm seeing it is that ultimately consoles can't win on the front of sheer hardware power, but it's (apparently) too risky business-wise to properly invest in anything else, which is why the WiiU looks to be the most promising; even if it's a little gimmicky, it's at least a little different.

I reckon we're not going to be looking at consoles any more, rather, we're going to be looking largely at 'media centres', and considering that PCs and tablets have the market on convenient 'content' pretty much licked, it's just not playing to the strengths of what a console could have, now that technology and media have progressed.

Now that's not to say that enjoyable and great (not to mention good) games won't be made; but again, the problem seems to be just not playing to strengths because 'shiny HD realistic gritty gritty' has the temerity to keep selling like sufficiently warmed cakes.

It's not dying, rather it's changing.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

snipped for efficiency

See, they way I'm seeing it is that ultimately consoles can't win on the front of sheer hardware power, but it's (apparently) too risky business-wise to properly invest in anything else, which is why the WiiU looks to be the most promising; even if it's a little gimmicky, it's at least a little different.

I reckon we're not going to be looking at consoles any more, rather, we're going to be looking largely at 'media centres', and considering that PCs and tablets have the market on convenient 'content' pretty much licked, it's just not playing to the strengths of what a console could have, now that technology and media have progressed.

Now that's not to say that enjoyable and great (not to mention good) games won't be made; but again, the problem seems to be just not playing to strengths because 'shiny HD realistic gritty gritty' has the temerity to keep selling like sufficiently warmed cakes.

It's not dying, rather it's changing.

Gaming will always survive, but consoles, the things that brought it to the masses, will die eventually as the need for them disappears. It is a matter of 'when', not 'if' in that respect. I'm just interested if the next gen is the 'when'. I doubt the PS6/xbox 1440 will exist, that's for sure. Nintendo probably will because they do mess around with different concepts like the motion controls and touch screen - therefore embracing the strengths of a relatively closed gaming platform like a console is.

The more i think about it, the more it is an eventually that consoles will be gone soon. Gaming wont though. So the people angry about this are probably dangerously attached to a brand as opposed to gaming or a gaming style. Which is a bit worrying. Console gaming (MS or Sony style) isn't fundamentally different from mobile gaming as a structure, the only difference from a gaming perspective is an input device, one that mobile games could use if the need arises. It isn't like PC gaming where you lose an insane amount if it disappeared due to it being a much more user driven experience as opposed to dictatorial like consoles.

Dungeon defenders on my HTC One X is the same as on my 360 if i use a control pad, except the former looks and runs a bit better (seriously).

 

[Norrdicus]

considering you have to sit down, install a game, download patches, etc now days for a console the only differences between consoles and pcs seems to be some exclusive titles, and consoles use controllers by default.

It is funny that I barely need to install games while using GOG or Steam, they just install pretty much automatically after downloading patches and stuff in the background, while I'm doing other things!

"Console gaming dying" is a wrong angle. "PC gaming is becoming healthier" is what the title should be

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Thank you for this post. I see that "adjusted for inflation, games are cheaper hurr durr" thing all the time around here, and it really gets annoying.

$60 in 1997 represents a higher sum than $60 in 2012.
Salaries were also lower on average in 1997 than 2012 so the $60 represented a greater portion of one's expendable income.

That's basic economics and not at all "hurr durr derp" as you claim.

Actually, I think you're the one who doesn't understand basic economics. Wages haven't kept up with inflation. That is a fact. It doesn't matter if they've gone up since the 90's if they haven't gone up enough to counterbalance the effects of inflation, which they haven't. I'd give you the full PPP adjusted chart if I could find it, but hopefully <link=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/13/inflation-adjusted-income_n_960588.html>this article from a year ago talking about how the median income was lower than at any point since 1968 should be enough. If you'll notice, 1997 is between 2011 and 1968, meaning 2011 wages were lower in real terms than 1997 wages. I think you'll find there hasn't been a massive nation wide pay raise in the last year.

Especially because the old games people list as being expensive are not only cartridge games, which had a huge premium on the unit price over disc based games thanks to manufacturing costs, but usually special cartridge based games that had either larger than usual ROM chips (think SNES RPGs) or special onboard processors (like the Super FX chip). Not to mention, the market was much smaller back in those days, so they didn't have the economy of scale going like we do today.

I've been gaming for far longer than you've even been alive, so I think I know that cartridges (chips) cost more than disks, as well as a smaller market caused those games to be more expensive.

And what of it?
Does this change the fact that games are cheaper today than they were then? (No)
Does this change the fact that even without inflation adjustment $60 is less than $70 - $100 we used to pay? (No)

So what was the point of your post again, cause I don't see one.

The point was, we've got the economy of scale going, we've got significantly cheaper storage media (tens of pennies instead of tens of dollars per), and we're still paying pretty much what we did back then. And your range is off, it was more like $35-120, with the $70-$100 range being almost entirely taken up by those exceptionally expensive to manufacture cartridges I mentioned, with the rest being games that were guaranteed hits that would sell no matter what the publisher charged for it.

False. If you want to see huge budgets in entertainment, go look at what it costs to make a blockbuster movie. AAA games tend to cost about $50 million to make. Blockbuster movies start at around $100 million. Yet they make their profit back charging no more than $20 (the cost of a DVD; movie tickets are much cheaper) a pop.

Really? This is your argument? Really!? (rolls eyes)

I'm just going to use your quote from above:
"Not to mention, the market" is "much smaller"

Honestly, your entire argument is childish.
The $60 price tag that has been stable since the days of the PS1 (lowered from the 16 bit era) is a fair price.

Okay, two things here: one, the market for games is smaller than the market for movies because the cost to entry is so much higher. It's not that that many fewer people want to game, it's that the publishers have priced a significant portion of the market out. Or did you think pirates were nothing but greedy yet wealthy individuals?

Two, The $60 price tag has only been stable since the start of this gen. The PS1 era had your average game running somewhere in the $30-$50 range, and they weren't really standardized. The PS2 era saw standardization (some might say price fixing) on the $50 point. $60 was a premium for the new gen, caused by the console manufacturers hiking the certification fee by a full $10 a copy.

If you don't like it, that's fine. I don't often buy newly released games. Older games have price drops. Wait 6 months and most games will see their cost slashed in half. If that still doesn't do it for you, I hear iPhone games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja are inexpensive...

I actually buy most of my games for between $1.49 and $10 on Steam, but thank you for the sarcasm.

Edit: I will agree on one point (I assume you agree). DLC is overpriced garbage that should be provided at no extra cost. Most DLC bullshit this gen was unlockable content in previous gens (extra characters, colours, stages, etc). You unlocked it by playing well, or by completing the game, or through a code.

Now it's "gimme $5 and you can unlock this extra costume!"
Fuck that noise.

Agreed on this point.

snip

I'm not claiming to be a genius, but at least I can read a demand curve. I have to question from your post if you even know what that is, or why it would be relevant to a discussion about how many units of something need to be sold to make a profit at a given price.

dude you need to realise ultrawinkle has all this figured out. He has worked in the industry and knows how the pricing works. Game companies SHOULD NOT be making money for their investors because really they're different when you think about it. When they charge $60 a game, well those developers are just plain evil and are in bed with the devil. That is why everyone is taking a stance on those games and no one buys them anymore. Over the next few years games will drop in price BUT the production value will go up and we shall enter a golden age of gaming and everyone shall rejoice. This will of course be on advice from ultrawinkle because he already knows all the sums. So yeah don't try arguing with him, it's no use, he has already won

Dude, you realize you have no idea what you're talking about, and that nobody here is claiming that game companies should "NOT be making money for their investors" or anything of the sort? We're saying that they can easily do that at a lower price point, because the demand is there. Call back when you've taken high school economics.

 

[Lunar Templar]

no, CNN should not cover gaming. least not until they actually know what the hell they're talking about

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

The point was, we've got the economy of scale going, we've got significantly cheaper storage media (tens of pennies instead of tens of dollars per),

Go and replay an old game (say Street Fighter 2 as an example) and notice the end credits.
Now play Street Fighter 4 and notice the end credits. A lot longer aren't they?
And they need to pay those names as they don't work for free...

Now head over to the gas station. Look at the price of gas. ($1.30/litre in Ottawa). Do you remember what the price of gas was in 1994? (I do since I had my licence then. About $0.40 per litre in Ottawa).
Shipping costs money. More money than it did in the past.

But that shouldn't count because it's not storage media and that is of course, the only determining factor for game prices... [/sarcasm]

The $60 price tag has only been stable since the start of this gen. The PS1 era had your average game running somewhere in the $30-$50 range, and they weren't really standardized.

Nope. They've been around $60 since the PS1 era. Maybe in YOUR area they weren't, but I can't speak to that. Canada tends to have slightly elevated prices compared to the USA (which, is fucking Canadian retailers right now due to the strong Canadian dollar, but I digress...)

Yes, exceptions do exist (even today). I can still buy many games (like say Agarest War 2 or most NIS titles) brand new for less than $50 (AW2 was $45 at release).

But in general, the price is only about $60. A reasonable price to pay.

Okay, you're arguing Canada, I'm arguing the US. Different economies, different wages, different costs of living, different everything when you get down to it. The storage media cost is important because the hardware was very much the price bottleneck back in the cartridge days. People tend to underestimate that stuff by an order of magnitude. As for the cost of gas, wages, all that? Have you read a single thing I've posted? Do you know what the phrase "economy of scale" means in this context? And do you understand how $35-50 million, which is what most AAA games cost, really isn't that big of a cost to recoup on a mass media product in this day and age? $60 isn't a reasonable cost for a piece of media. It's a reasonable cost for a piece of hardware to play it with, like a DVD player or a relatively expensive game controller.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Is that what people really want? A Nintendo only future?

We've been there before, we'll likely go there again.

So far Nintendo can count Fairchild, Magnavox (Philips), Atari, Mattel, Coleco, 3DO (Panasonic), NEC, SNK and Sega as rivals it's outlasted.

Should the next Xbox and Playstation cause the same financial stresses as the current ones you can bet they'll be adding Microsoft and Sony to that list too. Leaving... Ouya?

It might no be what anyone wants as such, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Also, aside from the odd blip (Hello Virtual Boy) they've managed to either turn profit or flat out win every generation so far, so they must be doing something right.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Oh, if only they were right...

Then the Glorious PC Master Race wouldn't constantly be overrun with mediocre console ports, god-awful graphics and dumbed down games.

Those have always been present, ten years from now we'll be holding up Natural Selection and Planetside as greats (maybe?) and you'll have forgotten all about Dragon Age.

 

[BernardoOne]

Meanwhile, millions of peoples buy Black Ops 2 for consoles. Sure its a bad game, but i dont think you can call consoles dead when there lots of games selling millions.

 

[Moderated]

I personally am going full PC, because it is so much better than consoles. With people becoming more tech savvy, maybe more people are going PC gaming. However, little phone games aren't killing consoles. They are, however, killing handhelds.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I personally am going full PC, because it is so much better than consoles. With people becoming more tech savvy, maybe more people are going PC gaming. However, little phone games aren't killing consoles. They are, however, killing handhelds.

Case in point, the number one item on my Christmas list this year is a no-contract smart phone. I don't intend to activate it[footnote]well, not for six months to a year until I've graduated college and moved out of my parents place; once I've done that, I'll have enough money that what ammounts to an extra $15 a month (which doubles the cost) over what I'm already paying for a basic feature phone won't be such a pointless luxury[/footnote], it's just that there's no Android equivalent to an iPod touch that isn't significantly more expensive than the kind of lower-mid range phones I'm looking at. Anyway, I've always been a fan of open systems, and it doesn't get much more open than android. I got a little $50 android phone (absolute bottom end of the market here) earlier this year that I intended to replace a dead mp3 player for about what I'd be paying for a mid-range dedicated mp3 player, and the darned thing replaced my DS while I was at it. Not that it can run anything more complicated than a Gameboy Color emulator at full speed (for Android specific games it can run a port of Nethack and that's about it) but between the e-reader, the comic book reader, the music player, and the web browser (which works on wi-fi even though the phone hasn't been activated) I feel no need to carry around my DS anymore. Upgrading to a more powerful phone just adds portable gaming to the list of things I've condensed to a single device.

And by the way, if you think everything on the android market is stuff along the lines of Angry Birds, you're not too knowledgeable about what's available. I was thinking the best thing would likely be a PS1 emulator, but looking up videos of people reviewing phones showed a surprising number of core games. Things like a port/spinoff (not sure which) of Deadspace, and a couple different first and third person shooters. Those are just the ones that were turning up in videos, too, so I'm sure there's more where those came from.

 

[barbzilla]

Which is why 60$ games exist.

...???

Adjusting for inflation, video games have only ever gotten cheaper. Even without it...Super Mario 64, Starfox 64, Majora's Mask, and most other AAA N64 games were all $70~ on release and I distinctly remember Turok being $80~. Even as far back as the SNES, Chrono Trigger sent me back a pretty $60.

That's the reason you have ridiculous situations like where Dead Space 3 would have to sell more copies than the other two games in the series combined just to break even. Part of it is that they're putting too much money into graphics and voice actors, but the rest of it is that games are outstandingly cheap, considering it's probably the only form of media that has gotten cheaper while production values went up as time went on.

I have no idea why people are suddenly complaining about the price of games so much. A brand new AAA title will cost me about as much as a tank of gas. It's practically nothing.

You know, I hear this argument a lot. It isn't correct. Well, in a way it is, but not to the extent people make it out to be. Yes, accounting for inflation shows that console games are technically the cheapest they have been in quite some time for individual consumers. No, this is not why developers are failing.

Even though console games are the cheapest they have ever been, they are also selling considerably more than they have ever been (if you exclude the used game market). I don't know if you noticed this or not, but every year or two there is a new "best selling release ever" game to come out. This isn't because X game is better than ever, or more valuable than ever, it is because gaming as an entertainment medium is now larger than ever.

So please don't blame failing developers on the low costs of games (this statement isn't actually pointed at you, as I didn't see you saying that). If developers wanted to, they could easily hold back from increasing the ever growing army of workers it takes to develop a AAA title. In the short term we would have very slight increases in graphics and advancement (actually not much change in how its been the past 5 years) and the costs of development would steadily decrease, yielding a greater profit from the seemingly cheap 60$ game.

On top of that, the 60$ price tag is a well researched number and it has absolutely nothing to do with development costs (I can prove that just by pointing you to the digital download medium, you can't tell me that it costs the same amount to skip all the physical development costs and let the player download the game), and it has everything to do with the estimated "magic number". This magic number is the price that the developers think they can get the greatest gain on by estimating the number of people able to afford it, vs how much it costs.

OT: The article has a minor point, but they are way off on the fact that it is killing gaming. The gaming industry is losing casual players to the cell phone market. Many of the people who would use their console to load up some casual game to pass a few minutes here or there are buying more cell phone games due to the costs. Why pay 60$ for a game when I can get this game for 5$. Hell I have Dead Space and Mass Effect on my Droid, and they are not bad games at all.

I don't think that the core gamers are going anywhere though. If I'm sitting at home, there is no way I'm playing a game on my cell phone. I have my PC and my consoles for a more engaging experience.