The game industry is dying

Greg Costikyan, who is a game designer and consultant in the industry, has written a piece right here in which he mentions the increasing stagnation, and developer unrest, of the game industry. He brings up many good points, including:

01. No winner (or nominee) of the Independent Game Festival awards at the GDC has ever had a game packaged and put on the shelf. I tried but one of the games, a MMORPG by the name of Shattered Galaxy. It was indeed a fine title, however, how many people here have heard of it or any other IGF festival winners? I know thats the only one I can think of. Oh, there was one that let you run your own college, too, but I forget the name. I guess you can see the point. Some of them are pretty brilliant titles though.

02. The industry is going to be making a lot of money on shit like Realarcade in the future, because that type of stuff is a real safe bet. Just go on Microsoft's Zone, the most popular game there is not Age or Jedi Knight, its like Hearts or Bejeweled.

And so forth...

What do you guys think?

I personally find a lot of validity in his statements.

I say it has flaws, but I doubt that it is dying...

But... Box Drink... will those flaws be remedied, or are they simply becoming more and more embedded into the collective conscious of the industry?

In other words... if these are some flaws in the industry:

01. so few publishers are out there
02. less and less risky games are coming out
03. development costs are spiraling out of control
04. games are all starting to look the same
05. small label games have no chance getting in an EB or GameSpot, let alone moving copies

Are these flaws on their way to becoming rectified, or are they just becoming worse and worse as time goes on?

Id definitely say the latter, and that is the very problem Greg C. is talking about.

edit: I got this from Slashdot, there's a discussion on it. Slashdot people dont know too much about the game industry in general, but their comments are more from the technology side applied to games, so its a somewhat different, albeit interesting, viewpoint than you would get say... on this message board.

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Originally posted by diffusionx
Shattered Galaxy.

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*waits for Rich to show up*

Nice article. I think he's dead on about sequels. And about less risky and innovative games not getting published.

But like he said, gaming is young, and it's still evolving. I see the gaming industry as a younger cousin of the movie industry, and I believe many of the things that made the movie industry what it is today (increased focus on indie films, for example) will happen with games too.

In short: yes, there are flaws, but I have faith. Just give it time.

Yeah, I have more faith in the industry as of the last few months.

You'll only find a solution to the problem when someone with some business sense and money gets involved.

The IGF doesn't seem to have a corporate sugar daddy. It looks like just a bunch of indie developers getting together -- which isn't a bad thing -- but they need a corporate tie-in to a publisher to get their games out there. Since publishers have their own agendas and development houses (or contracts with outside developers), they likely aren't going to pay attention to the indie developers who won't let go of the old way of doing things -- it could be profitable, as movie companies like Miramax and Sony's Classics division know, but control is a big issue here, and the publishers don't have that when they sign on to distribute the little guys' product.

The solution here is to find a business model that works. It won't necessarily work as well as the model used by the big companies, but that's because they have marketing dollars the small companies don't.

Remember when shareware first hit? People would find out about a new program when it hit some of the big bulletin boards, and then it spread through file networks and users uploading and downloading. Shareware tapered off after Doom and its clones hit it big, but I think that was primarily due to the model pioneers (id, Apogee, Epic, etc.) signing on with big publishers (or, as with Apogee, just not finishing the promised sequel to a huge hit...). It's still a valid model, it just needs an avenue for marketing.

One technique that I don't think has been tried much (if at all) is a number of companies aligning with each other and going the shareware route, but also contributing to a collective marketing fund in order to maximize their exposure. This has potential problems, but I think it's worth a try.

This all comes back to the industries idiotic refusal to abandon the first party structure.

Multiple proprietary hardware standards means:

1. Competition lowers system prices. Problem is, this isn't really a good thing, since it doesn't lower production costs. What this means is that companies have to sell systems at brutal losses. This means they have to take it out on the developers, who have to pay higher liscensing fees. This means that they not only have to pass some of this cost on to the consumer, but also that it puts them in the position of potentially losing alot of money, and thus they are afraid to take risks for fear of being unprofitable. It's very possible to sell 300,000 copies of a game and lose money.

2. Fractured user base. Companies are forced to eat the additional development costs of porting to other platforms or suffer having their product availible to fewer people. This again, puts strain on developers, and discoruarages risks.

3. Market can't sustain the number of standards availible. As the industry grows, stores are running out of shelf space. Game stores have to have games for 6 or 7 systems now, and when the next generation hits, this will only get worse. There's more product than stores can stock or move. This means that smaller titles might not even get shelved, shutting out opportunuties for would-be niche developers.

It's not going to get better until everyone decides to make a 3rd party standard with low, regualted liscensing fees, like DVD players, and sell their systems at or above cost. (Yes, I know this is what was attempted with the 3DO, but it needs to be tried with actual developer backing and decent technology, and with support from the industry in general).

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02. The industry is going to be making a lot of money on shit like Realarcade in the future, because that type of stuff is a real safe bet. Just go on Microsoft's Zone, the most popular game there is not Age or Jedi Knight, its like Hearts or Bejeweled.

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You know why Hearts and Bejeweled are so popular? Because my mom can play Hearts and Bejeweled.

Maybe instead of figuring out how to utilize the dozen or so buttons on a controller these days developers should instead focus on making games that anyone can play.

I'm all for complex games and all, but I think that too many developers are making games too complex for their own good.

No one is going to pay any significant amount of money for Hearts and Bejeweled.

Great article.

There will eventually be a gaming underground (and I don't mean an illegal one), just like there's a music underground and a film underground. You know, tons of nebulous content that never breaks the Billboard and Variety charts. I view the increased crowds at the IDC's Experimental Games booth as the beginning.

There is definitely going to be a major splintering of the gaming community, sooner rather than later, I think. Gamers who started with the PSX are already getting tired of the same old stuff. There's already a largely untapped market for innovative product, and as gaming gets more mainstream and more vanilla, it's only going to grow.