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child of Thor
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Well i think the increase in revenue that the games industry is seeing is mostly to do with the current generation of gaming consoles. They have been running a few interesting threads over at 'quartertothree.com', with statistics and all that.
The largest profit margins(bar a few blips like WoW etc) for companies over the last few years has been console releases.
Now i'm not wanting to cast dispertions on console users(as i'm one!), but it does seem the 'average' console user is much less discerning over what games they buy. They probably dont hang around here or at other fan-sites much. They buy a game based on console magazine reviews(and if you've ever looked through those magazines, you know how much they hype everything!), TV adverts(how else to explain EA's 'Fifa street football' game being the uk's top seller for a while?) or if they fall into the target demographic(or wish too) that a game is aimed at.
This type of customer base sees computer gaming as a quick thrill and throw away experience, seemingly happy to spend £40+ a time on games that they will probably never complete once the thrill has worn off or only play once(as many games are once only events).
In a way this type of games industry+customer is a win-win for both parties. The games companies can turn out well manicured but often shallow or short(or both) games that the punters hungrily snap up untill boredom sets in and they move swiftly on to the next.
Its been interesting to see the rise of second-hand gaming in the main high street stores. I think this is a natural result of the type of games industrey set-up i've discussed above.
What the longterm effects of this kind of thing will be is hard to say, but factor the growing ammount i've seen in people saying 'its a rent game not a buy one' , and i can see it more as a problem for developers rather than a positive.
You end up with an industry that will have fewer big hits(but will make mega bucks), and lots of failures. Sort of a boom+bust enviroment. EA has seen this i think and its why its adopted an extremely aggresive buyout policy - if it can churn more market share of product than other people it increases it chances of having one of those hits. of course it will also have many more failures, but getting the hit(s) cover those.
My beef with this whole setup is that it makes finding the quality gaming experiences i've been used to over the years, harder and harder.
Yes rubbish games have been made in the past(before we get onto that line  ), and will continue to be made now.
But i can't deny the fact that for me(a huge games buyer across a variety of platforms), i've seen a downturn in the number of enjoyable quality games.
Graphics have definately improved in leaps and bounds, but i'm left feeling a 'golden age' of gaming may have been missed? And in this curent market i cant see one around the corner, but you do still get the odd unusual gem that appears out of nowhere - so i have to rely on these rare occourances to keep my gaming qouta happy.
Anyway i've gone on more than i wanted, and still haven't really nailed it
Still as PC gamers, are we feeling a little unloved with all the attention paid to the consoles over the last few years?
Apart from some excellent MMORPG's and the odd high-end FPS things seem a little lean?
Still thats why i'm an old game lover There are many games i have yet to play - some very excellent, so i constantly scan for these titles.
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:24
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quote:
Originally posted by DrSpike
Really? Profits, no. Sales, no. Total time spent gaming, no. So in what sense? |
as always depends on definitions.
PC game revenues, as reported, are in slow decline as we discussed before, with the usual caveats about MMPORPG's and online sales. Console game sales IIRC are growing but rather slowly - but thats in the last years of a console cycle.
OTOH there are new areas that have high growth that we dont usually think of : online casual games (sorry, Doc) Cell phone games. And "serious games" (IE games not sold primarily, or at all, at retail, but developed for a business or govt agency as a training/simulation tool.
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Standup
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Another factor is terms of profits is that some (much ?) of the profits have moved to retailers. When i started playing games many,many years ago on the ZX81 it was mainly mail order and a very few specialists. Now supermarkets like Tesco stock some games and chains like Game and Dixons are everywhere. If the games industry has followed other retail trends then the retailers are the ones dictating terms to the publishers so less profits for them and even less for developers. If Game doesn't stock your product because of pricing do you have reduced sales or reduced profits or both ?
I read somewhere (possibly the Game annual report) that games are cheaper now than they were 10 years ago and that affects margins. Certainly i remember that 15 years ago £39.99 was a standard price for Amiga games nowadays £29.99 is probably starting price for a PC game and often it drops quickly.
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Felch
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Germantown, Maryland
Sep 2001
time: 00:24
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I think that good quality games are still being made, with about the same regularity that they always were. People have a hard time separating their nostalgia for old games, from the realities of games in the past. To be honest, just as many games were clones of each other back then as today. While in the past there were a good games like Zork or Space Invaders or whatever, there were a host of crappy clones of those games. The problem with people's memory is that they quickly forget the crap, and only recall the classics.
For an example (although for forum rules purposes this is hypothetical), look at NES roms. There were the classics, like Zelda, SMB 3, and such, and then there was the crap - just about everything else. The games industry is just like every other industry, it has its innovators and its copycats, and honestly I think the proportions have stayed much the same.
I don't think the trend is towards less innovation. If anything, the advances in technoloy have made innovation easier. It's tough to make much more than a simple text adventure or arcade game without sufficient hardware, so the past is littered with lots of quite similar turds. But now more options are open to game designers than ever before.
Does anybody seriously think that EA only wants to make bland uninspired relics? They want to have the new idea before other people. It's just that the big corporations have trouble sifting through all the good ideas, and good ideas can become disappointments if not done right.
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19-06-2005 08:38
now that IS cynical! 
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