Report - Video Games At Risk For Another Crash

[Kirito-kun]

PC Master Race reporting in.

Honestly, it'll be a good thing if consoles fall. They're the biggest thing holding back game developers forcing them to cater to obsolete hardware and reducing the ability of indie devs to publish due to the high price of SDKs. They use closed-ecosystems, allowing corporations to charge as much as they want without competition. Unlike on PC where you have Steam, Origin, GOG.com, Gamer's Gate, as well as physical distribution all competing with each other. Consoles are solely designed for publishers to make money. The very concept of a dedicated console doesn't make sense anymore. PC hardware is getting cheaper and console hardware is lagging further behind even with the next-get. I await all the console gamers who will likely jump boat if a crash was to actually occur.

Praise Lord GabeN!

 

[ßleck]

Ha! A video game crash at this day and age? I don't see any MAJOR reason for that to happen. Go back to your caves you PC sadists and video game haters!

 

[FAST6191]

just feel duty bound to a degree to comply with the current trends

That is not just these days

just feel duty bound to a degree to comply with the current trends

Really? [insert when I were a lad]

PC Master Race reporting in.

Honestly, it'll be a good thing if consoles fall. They're the biggest thing holding back game developers forcing them to cater to obsolete hardware and reducing the ability of indie devs to publish due to the high price of SDKs. They use closed-ecosystems, allowing corporations to charge as much as they want without competition. Unlike on PC where you have Steam, Origin, GOG.com, Gamer's Gate, as well as physical distribution all competing with each other. Consoles are solely designed for publishers to make money. The very concept of a dedicated console doesn't make sense anymore. PC hardware is getting cheaper and console hardware is lagging further behind even with the next-get. I await all the console gamers who will likely jump boat if a crash was to actually occur.

Praise Lord GabeN!

What OS do you typically run this on?

 

[pwsincd]

That is not just these days


Really? [insert when I were a lad]

Not sure what your referring to , quoting my comment twice , i was referring to my sons thoughts and not mine (to clarify) .

 

[Kirito-kun]

What OS do you typically run this on?

Windows, OS X, or a distro of Linux (including Steam OS).

Windows obviously has the widest selection of games. However, all the source engine games as well as most indie games are available for Linux. Once Steam OS takes off, more games will be made available for Linux. OS X also runs a sizeable portion of PC games.

 

[ShadowSoldier]

PC Master Race reporting in.

Honestly, it'll be a good thing if consoles fall. They're the biggest thing holding back game developers forcing them to cater to obsolete hardware and reducing the ability of indie devs to publish due to the high price of SDKs. They use closed-ecosystems, allowing corporations to charge as much as they want without competition. Unlike on PC where you have Steam, Origin, GOG.com, Gamer's Gate, as well as physical distribution all competing with each other. Consoles are solely designed for publishers to make money. The very concept of a dedicated console doesn't make sense anymore. PC hardware is getting cheaper and console hardware is lagging further behind even with the next-get. I await all the console gamers who will likely jump boat if a crash was to actually occur.

Praise Lord GabeN!

No it isn't. A lot of people will be out of jobs, and the game industry won't make as much money as it does now.

 

[FluffyLunamoth]

I look forward to it. Can pull game companies heads out of their asses, indie developers can still do their thing, and I can make my backlog shrink as much as inventory does at work.

 

[Guild McCommunist]

First off I don't see what PCs or consoles has to do with this. The crash is most likely from a lack of diversity.

I mean companies like Activision which start floating most of their business on singular franchises. Like Call of Duty sells well... but the franchise has been seeing diminishing returns. And eventually that creek will run dry and the company will collapse.

Happens with a lot of publishers, they usually bet all their money on a few franchises and end up doing bad investments in the rest.

That's not to say everyone will be affected, I think the big three console makers will do fine. Microsoft aside (which has never been as huge on development as Sony/Nintendo), they usually have a pretty diverse range of franchises, all of which do reasonably well, and plenty of third parties will survive.

But yes an industry crash will affect PC and console gamers since this is publishers crashing and possibly console developers, so if you have a huge amount of publishers crash then don't expect your PC to be full of games.

Also if a bunch of the games industry starts to crash from investors abandoning ship, you'd think other investors in other companies will jump ship as well. If you see Activision go down, Sony go down, Nintendo go down, Microsoft go down, and EA go down, I don't think you're gonna think "Nah Valve is an EXTRA GREAT company and they'll be fine!" You'll realize video games are dying and we should fucking bolt out of it and start investing in the Betamax or Laserdisc or something.

 

[thebsharp]

Much like the movie industry, video game publishers are taking less and less risks, relying on proven franchises. Why should they? Great games that aren't a Madden, FIFA, CoD, Mario, etc often flop commercially. Like Guild said, this won't last in the long run.

Then there's the value aspect. Mobile gaming is changing what people think of as the value of a game. Say what you want about mobile gaming, but it's picking up steam. Most titles are throw-away time-sinks, and all to many of them rely on in-app purchases, but there are some worth-while games. More importantly, though, even these good games are at value prices. The main reasons the "core" gamer rejects mobile gaming are two-fold: a flood of low-quality, in-app purchase heavy games, and poor controls. Somebody, somewhere must notice this... Another Xperia type phone or device that actually catches on would be catastrophic for the handheld market. On the otherside of value (or lack thereof), are companies like Capcom. Capcom is not doing so well right now . As of late, they have a reputation of being very greedy and out of touch with their fanbase. The debacle with all the on disc DLC on Street Fighter X Tekken (20 or so characters), didnt help this image at all. On top of that, their major franchises haven't been doing so well either. Both Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Street Fighter X Tekken performed poorly. Similarly, RE6's were on the disappointing side. Capcom plans to load more and more of their games with DLC and plans on publish more FTP games. Capcom is slowly starting to sink. If a major publisher like Capcom is in trouble, everyone should be watching out.

I don't think another video game crash is going to happen anytime soon, but the landscape is changing fast. There will be casualties this gen. More than just THQ, Midway, and a spattering of others from last gen.

 

[shakirmoledina]

this thought has just come out
1.) US govt shutting down so the analyst takes the advantage that everything shuts down
2.) Assuming that ppl buy consoles to a certain limit but do sell it off or pass it on
3.) Games are developing at the same degree as previous consoles at that time were hence a console leap isnt a big thing
4.) People's interest in having newer consoles and things is less than their ability to own them

All the above is hogwash
1.) Don't push it, the market is much greater and the companies at that time and later have a wider experience than before
2.) Its never a bad thing to own more consoles for ppl. If you ask me, I had a ps1,2, and now 3 AND also a wii. Sold my ps1 and ps2 and went with the 3. The wii is kinda lying around. DS broke. Dont say ppl dont want or cant buy new consoles
3.) If u have games like ac4, battlefield, ghosts, fifa, watchdogs etc at launch, i dont see a reason u SHOULDN"T go for the newer console when ur old console obviously shows its pushing itself (FC3 stuttering and crysis 3 lower graphics)
4.) Trust me living in Tanzania where the knowledge about gaming and availability of games is much lower than in the us, canada, uk etc. We are never tired of having a newer console as soon as the prev one gets boring.

 

[Metoroid0]

All true gamers know that Mobiles are not for gaming, consoles are and PC's ...I love consoles, they have their own souls and PC is whell..a PC, sure you can play games on it, but its distracting at imes..consoles are symbol of simplicity..at least they where.. and also Prices of consoles are unreal. I mean they are real but not all of us can afford 400 euros console i mean cmon if nintendo Wii or Xbox 360 are 200 euros than ok, why not, i can do something about that but whe i see 400 euros i start to think "i will wait couple of years to buy used or new if price drops"

 

[Foxi4]

I think being "weaker" helped the Wii a lot, because it was able to reduce its pricing much more aggressively. The PS2 and PS1 won in part because they were "out of the gate" before their serious competitors, and as a result, had weaker hardware. So, there is some causation there, even though it is indirect. But, as you said, it is hardly a guarantee of victory.

My point was that most consumers do not actually understand nor care about specific specs like processor cores, CPU architecture, polygon fill rate, RAM architecture, et cetera.

This was never something I implied. What I said was that insufficient specs or a convoluted development environments may (and usually does, as seen with the N64 or the Sega Saturn examples) hinder development. The N64 has 380-odd games not because it's weak but because developing for it is a chore and reaching peak performance is nigh-impossible. This shifts the focus from "making a video game" to "optimizing a video game to actually work on the intended hardware" and that's hardly acceptable.

"Stronger" doesn't mean "better" - there's a number of variables that come into play when it comes to whether a system is good or not - specs, price point, features, built quality and so on. There is such a term as "over-engineered" which can be applied to systems which are "too beefy for their own good" and as such their price was inflated beyond the reach of the consumer, for example the Neo Geo AES ($650? In 1991? You jest.), I think this is the phenomenon you're referring to. The specs don't have to be "the best", they have to be "appropriate for the generation they correspond to" - I hope that clarifies what I had to say.

 

[Malik Hajid]

Honestly, if the video game industry died, it'd be the greatest thing. Finally, greedy business men that don't play or know what a video game is will stop molesting and ruining the idea of what a game should be, and then indie developers will reign supreme and set everything right. Kickstarter will help them make their money, Steam will put their game out there, and from there, businesses run by people aspiring to make good games will start to spring up.

 

[Foxi4]

Honestly, if the video game industry died, it'd be the greatest thing. Finally, greedy business men that don't play or know what a video game is will stop molesting and ruining the idea of what a game should be, and then indie developers will reign supreme and set everything right. Kickstarter will help them make their money, Steam will put their game out there, and from there, businesses run by people aspiring to make good games will start to spring up.

...just so you know what a market crash is, a Video Game Industry crash would mean that the consumers lose interest in video games and platforms altogether. Nobody would make games because nobody would give a damn. Zero demand effectively leads to zero supply.

...I can't believe that I'm actually explaining that.

 

[Malik Hajid]

...just so you know what a market crash is, a Video Game Industry crash would mean that the consumers lose interest in video games and platforms altogether. Nobody would make games because nobody would give a damn. Zero demand effectively leads to zero supply.

...I can't believe that I'm actually explaining that.

What I was getting at is, I don't think all those people that own 2.6 consoles would suddenly wake up and say "I'm not going to pump any more money into Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo!" There will never not be demand for video games at this point, but maybe, I dunno, a large percent won't be as willing to pay 60 bucks a game anymore, and companies won't realize they need to make better games to stay afloat, and will be focused on dumping 90% of the budget into cutscenes, one major company will go under and others will close up without thinking, and everything will just snowball from there.

Kind of an unlikely scenario, but much more likely then all gamers suddenly moving on to outdoor sports.

 

[Blaze163]

As I understand it the reason for the '83 crash was the market being flooded with mediocre games with no real quality work to balance it out. While it may be true that there's as much dreck in the modern gaming scene, maybe even more than before, we still have amazing games to balance it out. For every piece of shovelware crap, there's an incredible game like The Last Of Us. Like them or hate them, games that many consider to be 'paint by numbers' like FIFA, Mario and CoD still rake in a buttload of money. Hell, I do get tired of the repetition in the FPS scene, but I'm still playing the Battlefield 4 beta.

I don't think the gaming industry is in any real danger. It has something for every taste these days. Every now and then a big release will come along that I have absolutely no interest in and people ask me 'why are you not playing such and such?' and I can happily respond that I have a huge backlog of amazing titles to work through. GTA Online was disabled for a few days, some of my friends panicked like it was the end of the world. I just cracked on with Valkyria Chronicles and my Uncharted trilogy run.

With the huge library of great games, even if the industry does go through a crash, we'll all have plenty to do while we wait for it to recover, so either way we don't need to worry.

 

[ForteGospel]

Probably because you buy a console for it's games...

I mean shit, going by that logic, there was no need for me to buy a PS3 if I had a PS2. I mean, eventually The Last of Us will come to the PS2....right? Guys? Right?!

yes, because thats exactly what i said right? i said that companies will still release ps3 games in 7 years from now right? right? right?

now read up again what you actually quoted and see that i said that 2 years from now, we will still be getting the same releases for both old gen and new gen, unlike the jump from ps2 to ps3, we are still getting the same releases for both ps3 and ps4 from third parties for atleast 2 years.

that is why both new gen consoles are heading towards the same route as the wii u, that is why there wont be many early adopters, thats why sells are going to be slow for all of the three consoles

i cant even see how did you understood that i meant that people should wait for The Last of Us for the ps2

 

[Foxi4]

yes, because thats exactly what i said right? i said that companies will still release ps3 games in 7 years from now right? right? right?

Not literally, but that's what was implied.

now read up again what you actually quoted and see that i said that 2 years from now, we will still be getting the same releases for both old gen and new gen, unlike the jump from ps2 to ps3, we are still getting the same releases for both ps3 and ps4 from third parties for atleast 2 years.

The previous and current generation systems were subjected to the exact same transition period when games were released for both systems simultaneously. There's a large number of such titles, "Sonic Unleashed" or "LoZ: Twilight Princess" for example.

The PS3 and the 360 certainly aren't getting "all of the next gen titles" anyways - what about "KillZone: Shadowfall"? What about "Ryse: Son of Rome" or "InFamous: Second Son"? Those aren't getting current gen releases, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

that is why both new gen consoles are heading towards the same route as the wii u, that is why there wont be many early adopters, thats why sells are going to be slow for all of the three consoles

Except the PS4 and the XBox One already have a substantial amout of early adopters despite the fact that they're not even released yet - pre-orders for the first batches of the systems are completely sold out in most stores I've been to, these days people are actually pre-ordering them a couple months in advance so that they can get one fron the n-th batch.

i cant even see how did you understood that i meant that people should wait for The Last of Us for the ps2

You said that games are often released on both the current and next generation systems, which is true, but hardly a rule. What he meant was that "The Last of Us" is a PS3 exclusive for a reason - the PS2 could never push it and no amount of "waiting" would change that.

 

[DSGamer64]

The video game industry is bigger now than 1983.

That doesn't mean it is immune to another crash. A lot of what is going to determine how well the gaming industry does is price structuring on next generation games. PC games have held their prices steady over the last several years but the closer games come to the 100 dollar price point the harder it is going to be to justify for people to buy a console when PC games are cheaper and building a system isn't much more expensive then buying a console plus all the fixings to use it. Next generation games need to start innovating and provide gamer's with new experiences and less shooter rehashes, otherwise the market will suffer badly..

 

[ForteGospel]

Not literally, but that's what was implied.

it was implied that there is no reason to get a new gen for atleast 2 years, not 7

The PS3 and the 360 certainly aren't getting "all of the next gen titles" anyways - what about "KillZone: Shadowfall"? What about "Ryse: Son of Rome" or "InFamous: Second Son"? Those aren't getting current gen releases, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

thank you for not reading my whole comment again! atleast twice i wrote third party companies, also thank you for giving only first party games as an example, its like saying that you wont be able to play pikmin 3 in any other console except for the wii u, who would have guessed that?

Except the PS4 and the XBox One already have a substantial amout of early adopters despite the fact that they're not even released yet - pre-orders for the first batches of the systems are completely sold out in most stores I've been to, these days people are actually pre-ordering them a couple months in advance so that they can get one fron the n-th batch.

time will tell and numbers will be released, so right now i am not going to base my own opinion on the stores you been to.

You said that games are often released on both the current and next generation systems, which is true, but hardly a rule. What he meant was that "The Last of Us" is a PS3 exclusive for a reason - the PS2 could never push it and no amount of "waiting" would change that.

and when did i said that the ps2 could play the last of us any time soon?