Video Game Industry crash...

I agree, its exactly what happened in 83. Companies, not just gaming in general don't give a shit about their customers. They put out crap just to cash in on little jimmies allowance.

Sadly, its all about the bottom dollar and how little effort they can put into a product for the maximum amount of profit. I realize that companies aren't created to break even, they are there to make money, but at some point you have take some pride in what you do. You have to have standards. You just have to.
 
rudy said:
I am not looking at it the wrong way, you know what a large entry point for people is? 10 games for 10 bucks which you ONLY see in the PC game market. Humble bundles where you can get a ton of games for 1-10$, steam sales with 4 packs and gifting. All of these things provide PC gamers with brand new games cheaper than I have ever seen used games in the console market in any volume. And the best part is you don't have to trade in your game to take advantage of this. You can always go back and play it. I owned many consoles and the used game market was never anywhere as cheap as the current new games in the PC market, I never amassed a collection of games on any console so large in such a short time I couldn't even play them all for this cheap. For the price of one console game I can buy 4 packs of games and give separate copies to each kid or friends.

Developers do not think that people who buy used games do not ever buy new games, but they know that every used game sale nets them no profit not a single dime. That is a FACT, where as if they can get rid of used games they are free to drop the price of any game until it eventually is sold to that person who would have bought the used game. Then the money goes to the real players involved including the console maker, distributor, publisher, and studio.

People made all these same silly arguments when steam started taking off but it didn't pan out that way did it? Why because basic laws of economics and business apply, the basic laws that someone is not going to spend $60 if they cant afford it and the basic law that it cost a set amount to develop a game. So eventually you can just make more money by lowering the price and moving more units. Low priced games will exist no matter what, the problem is console people are too blind to see that it is perfectly reasonable and possible for low priced games to come directly from publishers.
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There is one major problem with your argument

PC gaming has no licensing fees
Console gaming does...
 
That's not a problem, and that's part of the point you are all missing. everyone involved in a game makes money on it and has a vested interest in the platform including the console maker and their license fees. You pay a fee to distribute on steam too. Its not like the license fee is set in stone the model evolves to make the most money the current system is in place because there is a ton of money in used game sales that never feeds back to any of them. You are all acting like getting rid of used games will mean absolutely no change to contracts, liscense fees, and business models. Maybe in the first year it wont change but after that they will quickly adjust. Maybe MS will even give you a discount on liscense fees if your game adheres to some anti used game system.
 
huxley said:
The reality of the situation is something more like this

People buy used system and used games. Sometimes they buy new games, sometimes they buy used games. Said individual may have never bought a system if the had to pay full price for a new one. If the used market goes away, you lose this customer entirely.
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I agree with Rudy on this one. Those people will eventually suck it and buy new. It will not be as fast as when they were buying used games but they will eventually buy something. There is too much pure pressure from friends or family or it will just be the fact that they can't wait any longer to play their game of choice. A small majority will ever hold a grudge indefinitely.
 
Ski said:
Add more fuel to the fire.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/03/square-enix-president-resigns/
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They lost $138M but took a $106M charge under "restructuring". Still lost a boatload of money but it's not all because of lack of sales.

Let me ask this question - are the expectations for today's games so high that the production costs are not inline with what revenues from sales are? The production in the "AAA" games must be astronomical compared to just 5 or 6 years ago.
 
tys90 said:
They lost $138M but took a $106M charge under "restructuring". Still lost a boatload of money but it's not all because of lack of sales.

Let me ask this question - are the expectations for today's games so high that the production costs are not inline with what revenues from sales are? The production in the "AAA" games must be astronomical compared to just 5 or 6 years ago.
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Bout to go for a jog so keeping this brief as possible because I could go on about this topic for 10 paragraphs.

In short, GREED.

Like all the problems plaguing manufacturing, banking, hollywood, and the video game industry, it's all corporate greed. When you're held accountable to stock holders all they care about is profit and quarterly reports. And a direct result of this is the pressure video game developers have to rush out titles every year. Argue my point all you want, but this is something that's affecting every facet of the socio economic system. We're no longer gamers creating games for gamers, we're simply commodities; there is no longer originality or passion in creating games because it is impossible to do so with the way the industry is structured now.

As long as people continue to buy shitty games, developers will keep putting out shitty titles because they're constantly under time tables and profit margins . We need another crash soon or something better for the inudstry evolve into because I see nothing to indicate that the industry is listening nor willing to make the change for the better.

Now time to run my fat ass....
 
Ski said:
Bout to go for a jog so keeping this brief as possible because I could go on about this topic for 10 paragraphs.

In short, GREED.

Like all the problems plaguing manufacturing, banking, hollywood, and the video game industry, it's all corporate greed. When you're held accountable to stock holders all they care about is profit and quarterly reports. And a direct result of this is the pressure video game developers have to rush out titles every year. Argue my point all you want, but this is something that's affecting every facet of the socio economic system. We're no longer gamers creating games for gamers, we're simply commodities; there is no longer originality or passion in creating games because it is impossible to do so with the way the industry is structured now.

As long as people continue to buy shitty games, developers will keep putting out shitty titles because they're constantly under time tables and profit margins . We need another crash soon or something better for the inudstry evolve into because I see nothing to indicate that the industry is listening nor willing to make the change for the better.

Now time to run my fat ass....
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Good post. It is the same exact thing that happened to the TV, music, and movie industries. They keep rehashing to higher and higher budgets.

Take TV for example, the reality tv boom led to massive profits because they could crank out low cost crappovision. Everybody and their mother got a reality TV show.

Same for movies - we're seeing more remakes now than ever before. Heck, I watched a movie the other day that by the end of it, I had realized they literally ripped off the plot to another film. Both were large budget titles releases close to eachother. It wasn't like the writer shopped the script to two places. It was more like some software took a few keywords from the scriptwriter and printed out a working plot based on a formulatic template. Wish I could remember the film title ...
 
Quoted from the article.
Traditional publishers like Activision are hustling to adapt, slapping elements from free-to-play and social games into traditional console titles. But are microtransactions in Call of Duty really the solution?
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Why do these people feel the need to throw social game crap into our games nowadays? Leave that crap to the facebooks and twitters, just give us good games and we will be happy.
 
CleverNoob's game industry crash video just got "smahed" yesterday by an hour long counter-analysis in a smudboy video response. It completely demolished all the logic and "facts" CN was attempting to stand on with his argument. CN got really angry at a few comments smudboy posted in response to the crash-video and started insulting smudboy and his videos, and then proceeded to claim, among other things, that smudboy was not relying on adequate facts and research, which prompted smudboy to make a thorough video analysis / response. CN is now deleting all comments that reference smudboy and his video in a positive light. CN has also successfully initiated a copyright takedown against smudboy's video response (on the basis that he showed short clips of the CN video to show exactly what he was referencing) in an attempt to silence all criticism, constructive or otherwise.

The situation can be followed here (and on smudboy's blog):
https://www.youtube.com/user/smudboy/discussion

Edit:
Someone re-uploaded smudboy's video outside of YouTube temporarily:
http://vimeo.com/62905793
 
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That video was awesome, thanks for supplying the vimeo link. I especially liked it right around 30mins in. The rant mode was worth it.
 
Holy shit this video is a goddamn hour long. Gonna try to watch it, though.

After even watching 10 minutes, though, Clever Noob sounds like a massive tool. 5 seconds of Google would have saved him from embarrassment.

EDIT: Gotta say, smudboy brings up some good points but it bugs me when he equates "consumer anger" to "buyer's remorse". Sure, some of it is that, but if you see a lot of shitty products coming out, you can still be angry at the industry without ever having bought any of the games. For instance, a lot of people nowadays are angry at EA for their anti-consumer practices, but (hopefully) many of them don't go out and buy all EA's games anyway.
 
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Just about done with the hour long video (about 50 minutes in), and to be totally honest, both of these guys sound like douchebags. On the one hand, you have Clever Noob with his extreme bias against what seems to be gaming in general (except Nintendo lolol) and then you have smudboy who almost comes off as an industry apologist (Any DLC is fine with you? Okay...), and barely offers any insight of his own other than ripping down Clever Noob's video with Wikipedia entries. Which is fine, and it's good to see facts being corrected, but at the same time most of his video is "Clever Noob says something -> smudboy says "uhhh...okay...what?" -> repeat ad nauseum".

Both have good commentary, and both have useless bullshit commentary as well. *shrug* Worth watching both to try to understand what is really going on in the industry, but I think both these guys have egos the size of the Goodyear blimp and it shows.

EDIT: smudboy says "the modding industry is larger than ever"....Lol, what? Barely any game support mods anymore...because of your beloved DEE EL SEE.
 
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Bdonedge said:
I sincerely hope the video game industry crashes so there isn't anyone left to exploit it and only the people that truly want to make games will be left. Same thing with the music industry...and the movie industry
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+ 1 to that
 
Just because a game doesn't support it, doesn't mean it isn't being modded.
 
Bdonedge said:
I sincerely hope the video game industry crashes so there isn't anyone left to exploit it and only the people that truly want to make games will be left. Same thing with the music industry...and the movie industry
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Agreed, let it crash.
 
I think you're going to see a rise in Indie games becoming more popular, at least I hope. I find myself enjoying the simpler games developed by a few developers and a low budget. They seem to put more care into gameplay over bleeding edge graphics. These are video games we play, with the emphasis on "game" . You can make a game look pretty all you want but if the game play sucks, nobody is going to play it.
 
HardwareSearcher said:
Edit:
Someone re-uploaded smudboy's video outside of YouTube temporarily:
http://vimeo.com/62905793
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And the vid is down. Damn. Now, smudboy is quite ass at the times and nitpicks a lot, but he does have good eye for spotting and analyzing details.

I believe that game crash is going on right NOW and big companies are falling one by one and Clevernoobs vid reinforced that idea but I am really curious what counter arguments smudboy has.
 
MaZa said:
And the vid is down. Damn. Now, smudboy is quite ass at the times and nitpicks a lot, but he does have good eye for spotting and analyzing details.

I believe that game crash is going on right NOW and big companies are falling one by one and Clevernoobs vid reinforced that idea but I am really curious what counter arguments smudboy has.
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You can read my mini-review above, but basically he just goes through Clever Noob's video point by point and either uses Wikipedia to disprove it or says "Uhh...okay..." condescendingly. Not that he's not right sometimes, but both of them come off as douchebags to me.
 
huxley said:
Doubtful...the initial video game crash came about due to a lack of quality titles and a flooding of the market. We have the exact opposite problem now, too few games and many of the releases are triple A titles. I could imagine FPS games dying out a bit since people are sick of buying new Call of Duty games all of the time. However, I just don't see a crash coming...
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Indeed. The conditions that made the video game industry crash of the early 80's were entirely conditional to that time period.

Atari was hemorrhaging awful games like it had a major artery cut wide open. All the other developers of note during the time were turning games out of development at a rate of 3-4 weeks.

I remember ads on TV (yes I'm that old..) where you could get an Atari console and like 20 games for practically nothing. There were even ads for the lesser systems where you could get 50+ games with it for a few hundred dollars. It was pretty insane.

The market today is so different that there can't be a "single" crash that would nose dive all markets of gaming. Gaming exists across so many platforms that even if one part of it tanked another would likely continue to grow.

So in conclusion , I think this guy is wrong.
 
MaZa said:
And the vid is down. Damn. Now, smudboy is quite ass at the times and nitpicks a lot, but he does have good eye for spotting and analyzing details.

I believe that game crash is going on right NOW and big companies are falling one by one and Clevernoobs vid reinforced that idea but I am really curious what counter arguments smudboy has.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6p5KqciXQM

Smudboy uploaded the 10-second Smudboy Smash intro as a standalone video (so CleverNoob could not claim copyright) and then linked to the actual full video off-site in the description, uploaded by a fan. As you said, CleverNoob is STILL going after Smudboy's videos and got the vimeo one taken down. However, the fan re-uploaded it to yet another site and smudboy updated the description with the second new link.
 
Why doesn't smud boy just remove the offending scenes from the video and add text only? Also if clever noob is really abusing DCMA I believe there is up to a 100k fine for doing that (this is what groove shark says anyway) and smudboy should act on that.
 
rudy said:
Why doesn't smud boy just remove the offending scenes from the video and add text only? Also if clever noob is really abusing DCMA I believe there is up to a 100k fine for doing that (this is what groove shark says anyway) and smudboy should act on that.
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He's not really abusing it, smudboy basically split up Clever Noob's entire video and interspersed his own commentary between splits. It works well to get the point across, but I can see how it could be viewed as a DCMA violation since I'm damn sure Clever Noob didn't give him permission to re-post his video.

He could just as well have written a script out for it and used that, but I'm guessing he was too lazy. Again, I feel like both of these guys are douche nozzles and it's a clash between titans of douchery.
 
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