Poll: What is holding gaming back, as an industry?

[Shoggoth2588]

The Vault. Remember a while ago when Movie-Bob (under the guise of The Game Overthinker) did his video entitled Open the Vault? If not here it is;

Spoiler: there's a short intro before the meat of the video

Obviously there's a far bigger market for the next big thing, the next big console, the next installment of the big franchise etc. That being said, even the worst of movies are still available on some format or another whereas something like Predator on the NES can't legally be played unless you have the original cart, a working NES and the ability to play it on your TV or monitor. Bob's example (Dragon Warrior) is probably the better one since I didn't see it on the virtal console a couple hours ago and it's quickly becoming my favorite NES game and a JRPG I really wish I had to grow up with.

It's hopeful and foolishly optimistic to hope that I'll be able to buy and play Ninja Batman Baseball, Superman (arcade) and, Simpson's (arcade) before the year is out without hitting the lottery. Emulators can be a good idea but I don't want to break the law if I want to play these games that are no longer available.

Right now, I can go to Wal*Mart and buy TMNT 3. It's a piece of shit, even with the nostalgia glasses fogging my vision. I can buy every season of The Simpson's on DVD as well but I can't play their arcade games unless I either find a Chuck-E-Cheese that has them both or, find a privet owner who's willing to let me buy, rent or, use them. I think that's pretty messed up.

I would say, in no particular order, Publishers, Gamestop, and gamers themselves.

This too. I don't object to Gamestop being around but I do object to Gamestop gutting and, assimilating all of its rivals except Play-N-Trade and any other mom-n-pop stores. Gamestop needs some competition dammit! Haven't shopped there in about a year myself and strongly advice other people to buy their games elsewhere if/when possible.

 

[TorqueConverter]

I'm working on some research for an article on the future of gaming, and I would like some numbers from you guys, as this is a gaming forum. What I would like to ask you is, what do you think is holding the gaming industry back the most? Community uproars like what has happened with the Mass Effect 3 endings, bigger corporations like EA who either spit out sequels every year, don't listen to the community unless there is large scale feedback, or other reasons, mobile gaming, gaming critics, the large scale media, or something else. I would like some insight besides just voting if that is at all possible. I would like to know what actual people think about this kind of thing.

Where is the option for "it's not"? Treating the consumer like shit or simply ignoring feedback is not holding the industry back. Consumers may become angry at the industry but until we speak with our wallets then nothing is going to keep the industry in check, let alone hold it back.

 

[arnoldthebird]

I smell a 'Game's as art' thread...
For gaming to be accepted as a 'mature past time' then I am going to say the community, because game's are only getting better. But from the outside looking in, the ME3 ordeal is a little pathetic

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

Consoles. 'Nuff said.

You mean the biggest reason why videogames are so popular and why dev companies have such huge budgets?

Yeah, consoles are definately holding gaming back.

Yeah and that has totally helped games get better...oh wait. Now everything is a dumbed down action game for the masses because it has to sell a billion copies to retake its absurd budget and thus must play it 100% safe and not try anything new. All while massive oversized publishers continue to try and justify their own existence by churning out blockbuster title after blockbuster title. Yup...that is totally the direction I am glad gaming took.

 

[IBlackKiteI]

It's not really being held back, it's just being held up a little in it's progression, mainly because of the big ass publishers generally screwing things and people over and unpleaseable fanbases preventing devs from taking risks.

 

[Random Fella]

A lot of people are going to say big industries because hating on big industry is the 'cool thing' to do
When really, the best games being made and the ones that are advancing gaming (Yeah I wouldn't say it's being held back) are the ones being made by large corporate companies.
Think of the giant media hype and amount spent around games like ME3, BF3, MW3, Skyrim, games like these have a huge impact on the gaming industry advancement in almost every way, they go toward making people spend more for games and get maximum enjoyment from them.
But, if anything is holding gaming back, it would have to be the lack of range you get in games.
Again, think of games like Modern Warfare or Skyrim, they are pretty much just repeats of the same thing, we need to be looking at more genres, more different kinds of game, making the sequel Different to the original, otherwise eventually people will just get bored of the same thing over and over. (Although the success of the Call of Duty series would probably prove this hypothesis wrong -.-)

 

[Active Schizophrenic]

Nothing. Gaming has never thrived so much (also anyone who said "mobile gaming" is a few sandwiches short of a picnic)

 

[suitepee7]

large corporations. not because "hurr durr they're evil and only want moneyz", but because of a fear of failure. game devs should be given absolute reign over their product without corporations butting in to make things 'safer' so it sells better. they are constricting creativity is what i'm getting at really...

 

[SpAc3man]

Stagnation caused by large publishers pressuring developers to stick to recreating what they have already done but making it bigger and "better". Indie games are where all the innovation is happening.

EDIT: I must point out that as a whole gaming is progressing hugely. Its just the big mainstream games that are not moving fast enough.

 

[dumbseizure]

It's not "holding back" in a monetary sense, it's holding back in an artistic sense.

Yeah...I haven't bought into that premise ever since I became aware of Duchamp's Fountain, the existence of which serves as a rather effective criticism of how meaningless the term 'art' actually is (Effectively, anything can be art if we simply claim that it is). Honestly, I think that if anything is holding games back from being art it is the insistance that they be treated as such as if it were a badge of honor, and even then that has little to do with the actual status of any given game.

A little off topic, Fountain? This is the first time I have seen it and.....what the hell?

And those interpretations, hahahaha. I am sorry, but to me, those interpretations listed seem to be extensively stretching this whole thing.

On Topic, I would honestly say it is the community, because effectively, it is the community that make or break the game. They are the ones who decide whether it be a work of art or not. However, I don't like this whole art discussion as one can not be objective while analysing art. I prefer to declare or categorize something based on fact, rather than interpretation, but that is just me.

However, I would be interested to hear why people think the big companies are to blame.

 

[LilithSlave]

Go play only pong and nothing else for a few days/weeks/months/years until you cant stand it anymore.

Then come back and tell us why we dont need better tech.

Just about everyone would get tired of playing the same simple game over and over.

On the other hand, I've played most of the SNES library multiple times. I don't really ever get tired of the SNES library no matter how many hours I put into them.

Also, Tale of Symphonia isn't old school, but it's also not super graphics intensive by today's standards. And I've played it over 600 hours.

And to be honest, I like my retro-graphics. It looks nifty.

Better tech allows better AI

I guess better AI would be okay. But wouldn't better AI be just as well achieved by spending more time making better AI instead of better graphics? You'd have plenty of processing power for AI if you just dropped the graphics. And few groups are really using most of that new computing power for AI. Tell me how many modern games use their computing power for AI rather than graphics.

better tech allows for larger worlds and more in depth gameplay.

That doesn't seem to be the case typically. Gameplay doesn't seem to have gotten better at all with better graphics.

With more space and more detail developers can make better stories

I haven't seen anything like that. Today's stories honestly don't seem really any better.

more relatable characters (As you start to climb out of the uncanny valley the characters become more relatable)

Only if you want photo realistic faces. Which I don't. And seems like a ridiculous waste of time. They should spend the time working on good gameplay, not realistic graphics. If I wanted realism, I'd go outside. Give me some good old 2D sprites and I'm good to go.

 

[Starik20X6]

Next person to whinge about consoles having old guts gets curbstomped. Consoles have below cutting edge tech because filling them with the latest and greatest would put their price point well above what people will realistically pay for (see the PS3's launch for a good example of this). Consoles are about affordability and being easy to use. Also, not everyone wants to fiddle around inside their machine, some of us just want to boot it up and start playing.

OT: I don't think there's really anything holding gaming back, but there are definitely a few things that it would be good if they changed. The higher budgets meaning less new ideas and more safe bets is a bit annoying, but the indie devs seem to be more than picking up the slack there.

 

[Pegghead]

I gotta say, I'm finding it tough to think of anything really holding the industry back. I think right now we're living in a grand time for the medium (let's face it, we're basically the dominant medium of every great new frontier in media and technology for this decade. The internet, social media, smartphones, fucking Kickstarter and the list goes on, and it's doing wonders for profits, size and reputation), but if there's one thing I think we could do more of it's establishing a standard development procedure and development team make-up. Not only would it make things a little clearer, but it would do wonders for people like me who've had to scrounge it off docos, dev-diaries, blogs and things like Extra Credits to get a very fractured understanding of how a game goes from concept to release.

 

[Starglider]

Biggest problem right now is the escalating cost of content. It makes AAA games expensive, makes publishers very reluctant to take risks, and makes single player campaigns shorter and more linear as art directors can't bear the thought of users skipping content. We need much more use of procedural generation for models, textures, levels, NPCs, everything. I voted for 'corporations' because this stuff is technically possible, it's anti-innovation executives and entrenched 'traditional content pipeline' types that are holding us back.

Second biggest problem is legacy console tech; the worst bit is not the low-fi graphics, it's the limited physics, AI and procedural that you can do within current console CPU & RAM limits.

 

[Jon Shannow]

The only thing I can really think of and this is hardly a huge major thing is that Devs are repeatedly releasing games with a huge amount of bugs in them, like not small ones who might not notice if you're doing a quick runthrough but ones that ruin the game or cause it to crash every single time and that either make the game impossible to play or just bloody frustrating.

 

[Apollo45]

EA.

Not necessarily large companies as a whole (despite what could be considered bad about them, ZeniMax/Bethesda are quite excellent at pushing the industry forward in a good way), and there's more to it than just EA, but they've been leading the charge in crappy everything for years now. They nickel-and-dime customers, ruin developers, have horrible customer service, and in general only seem to care about the bottom line. And then they have the gall to hide behind an "artistic integrity" argument when what they put out is some of the worst "art" ever to be called "art".

 

[Rawne1980]

Money.

Publishers want to see large returns on games so we're on a tight leash as to what we get.

Examples being the MMO market. We're still doing the same things and following the same kind of paths as we did in Ultima Online. All thats happened is MMO's have been polished up and improved in some ways but it's nothing different.

As much as I want to like GW2 it still doesn't look like anything we haven't seen a hundred times before.

We rarely see anything truly "new".

That isn't because developers can't make the games it's because people want to see a return on them. They want to make money and the easiest way to do that is to polish ideas that are already there and make them shiny again.

We won't "move forward" in leaps and bounds until we stop paying them for mediocre.