"Can we please have another industry crash?"
Pretty sure this is coming. But, it will be related to casual/mobile gaming most specifically.
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I actually hope that happens, and suddenly casual games begin to, just like normal games, add more depth to the experience and less monetisation. Instant gratification is having a negative effect on the way people interact with each other and the environment.
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At some point the average casual gaming populace will realize that these "Games" are just a psychological money making scam.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/194933/The_Top_F2P_Monetization_Tricks.php
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Agreed on topic.
AAA titles are boring remakes of the same concepts, and Indie games are (nearly) always uninspired 2d-flash-games.
What happened to guys with original ideas like Sid Meier or Peter Molyneux who created games like Black&White, Mount&Blade, or Pirates? The only games i can think of, with originality like those, are minecraft and magicka.
Oh right, they're racing to create the first bland game on XboxOne.
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I don't mind that the of AAA industry would crash, as long as we have the indie industry.
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Wow you needed to get something off your chest didn't you?
But I agree with you. The industry really needs a big shake up game, something to change the way we view games. Maybe the new consoles will give the developers the power to release such a game. But I'm not holding much hope...
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It helped that my frustrations with my procrastination, my inability to find a job, my current assessments and how I'm nowhere near the top of the class in terms of skill meaning I won't be able to achieve the highest marks (I try to make myself justify that I don't need high marks and I just need to learn and refine my skills, but it doesn't work), and the fact I have so many "good ideas" that I'll never be able to bring to fruition simply because there's no possible way to execute my GDD as a real game reached a critical point today.
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Its nice to live in a wonderland were every game is a good game, every publisher is a saint and every gamer doesn't know your mother.
Its a long road till there.
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I know, and the same thing if you want world peace, for politicians that actually care about what the majority of the people want or if you want to win a game on Steamgifts. But hey, a man can dream.
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Please keep in mind that all kinds of crises make those who are strong enough to strive. After all who will get hurt in the process - small ones, as it always was. Big players will have enough money, IPs to milk and branches to shut down to keep afloat, while at the same time those who are more or less independent will fall flat one after another. And guess how it will end? Yup, I still miss Bullfrog (even with Peter Trollyneux misleading promises :P)
Sure enough, EA last years financial reports were... interesting, still they are not the only corporation to blame, so even if they fall... Nature abhors a vacuum?
Oh well, the crash will come this way or another / sooner or later. Fluctuations (though politicians would like us to believe different) are kinda natural occurrence and getting bigger and bigger means getting less flexible and thus vulnerable, so there's always hope.
PS
I'm jobless too atm - something like 2 weeks ago my very own corporate overlord just overdid it. Cheers mate :)
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It's a sad, sad world. I just hope that those who lost out found somewhere else to support them. It reminds me of Team Bondi, who almost lost out completely on their paycheck and their names in the credits in L.A. Noir. A sad ending to an Australian studio with actual promise.
Daymn...sorry to hear that. Here's to both of us hopefully finding new work soon ;P
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Sometimes it's your fault that you can't understand games. For example, have you ever played Assassin's Creed? Tell me, do you get the MEANING the games show you? You want games to be of a good quality... Then tell me, what's the meaning of AC? I've only seen a couple of guys who get it... The devs try to copy-paste the world, the place we are living in... Abstergo is a copy paste of the countable-in-one-hand who own the 99% of the world's companies. They want to find ways to make people buy buy buy without ANYTHING stopping them. They want to make people their slaves (look at Africa and all the mine slavers, do you know to whom they belong? they belong to the owner of Coca Cola, or Fanta, of Mitsubishi, and other thousands of major and minor companies)... Look at the multiplayer's videos, look at how well it fits to out world (especially AC3's), but no... Everyone's whining about the story, which is very good... Story ISN'T the best thing on games, the MEANINGS are. FC3 was better than both FC1 and FC2 together, because it gave a meaning. It showed a remote island in which slavery rules... It shows to YOU that there are people who are getting born in slavery camps, where they have nothing to do but being mine slavers for all their life. Do you think of it? Do you try to think of the meaning of the game? NO! YOU WHINE ABOUT THE QUALITY, BUT THAT QUALITY YOU ARE REFERRING TO IS USELESS... We need people to get brains, to become clever. Educations doesn't make you clever, it only gives you knowledge. Ubisoft is a GREAT gaming company because of what they show throughout their games. Not all games are CoD and CS or DotA or LOL or anything else without a meaning. Also, we don't need gaming industry to crash, We need to solve our worlds PROBLEMS. Our corrupt politicians, the slavers on our planet, the hunger problem, the water problem... WE NEED TO FIGHT TERRORISM, WE NEED TO TAKE DEMOCRACY INTO A NEW LEVEL, SO WE CAN IMPROVE OUR WORLD. GAMES ARE NOT OUR LIFE, THEY ARE MERELY TOOLS TO GIVE US PLEASURE. WTF IS GOING ON WITH PEOPLE NOWADAYS? YOU THINK OUR WORLD IS AT PEACE? I DOUBT SO, YET YOU CRY OVER THE GAMING INDUSTRY... GOOD JOB!
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So, you took a moment on the frontlines of justice to tap this out on your smartphone? By all means, don't let us take you away from the fight.
Seriously, of all places to have pointless postulation, an internet forum for videogames is more than appropriate. If you want to save the planet, what the fuck are you doing on steamgifts?
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Your argument is inconsistent with itself, and I can barely understand most of it.
Games are a way of life. Unlike books or movies, we live through games. We have to actually perform the actions in games to make the game progress, and the best games can make us feel as though out interactions really count towards something.
Ubisoft is a terrible company because they don't value quality, and you're almost completely wrong over the idea about them showing "meaning". What was the "meaning" in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Las Vegas? Terrorists are bad? Yes, Ubisoft have occasional released a game or two, such as Assassin's Creed II, where the writer was able to create an immersive world and build some kind of deep-seated message. But Assassin's Creed II is the only game in that franchise which demonstrates it properly; all games from that point forward ceased to be original in favour of being a cash-cow franchise.
Your obsession with these Assassin's Creed 3 videos is genuinely worrying me, because I have no idea why you only seem to be realising these problems now. The world is on fire. It always has been. Unless you're going to somehow gain god-like powers and stop poverty, crime, famine and everything else in third world countries, there's little you or any of us can do, even as a collective. You have to accept this, donate to charities that are trying to help where you can, and move on, so you don't get stuck in the same position.
By liking Assassin's Creed III, I think of you as the same sheep you're trying to criticise. The game was bland, combat was brought down way too easy to appeal to casuals, it was an awful PC port, and Connor was a terrible character who was almost completely 1-dimensional. I would have preferred a game following Haytham the entire way since he was a very complex individual who did actually try to promote some interesting morals.
I don't "cry over the industry". I listed my complaints. I am entitled to. I live in a first world country. I play video games. I love video games. I want to work as a game designer. I have an opinion. I want to share that opinion. Why should I be persecuted because I want to post my opinion over crying about what's happening in Eqypt, India and Africa on a daily basis? We know that those places are currently in horrible conditions. I shouldn't need to throw it down everybody's throat, because there's little we can do for civil war, rape or poverty.
Stop pestering me with your social activism, because it's not working.
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you talk much about slavery, assasins creed i never got intouch with because of ubi's drm i think you download the level when you progress the game, how does this work when the server are shutdown in a while?
other facts of ubi: afaik with silent hunter 2 or 3 they sued modders and sold thier modding stuff as expansions, then they gone online with uplay, so have you ever read the agreement you are signing by using ubisoftware?
they own everything the rights on your nickname, on your forum posts, they even have the commercial rights on you ingame chat just check it out i have a screenshot in my profile when i accidently buought ruse without checking the publisher..
it's on german but you should be able to find an english one too as you defend ubi very much you propably enslaved yourself wih ubi terms of use already ...
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=119302777
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"assasins creed i never got intouch with because of ubi's drm i think you download the level when you progress the game, how does this work when the server are shutdown in a while?"
That was never the case. You got the game on your hard drive completely. You just had to be online to save progress and they got rid of that years ago for all the games that needed that.
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call me unforgiving ... they tried it.. enough for me. In my world they have to do 5 good things for every bad thing they tried, and removing the bad thing doesn't count, but thats just my position
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Yeah, I've read naive stuff such as one guy who acts like everyone in the thread is naive, yet won't offer any insightful opinions of his own. Somehow, he thinks that makes him appear intelligent or clever, when really it makes him look like an ignorant ass. AMIRITE
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Sounds like someone should make a sequel to E.T. :p
Also maybe we should start getting worried about this too.
edit: Added that image without thinking too much about it. But looking at it again, the first map indeed looks overcomplicated.
Perhaps something inbetween SS2 and BS would be perfect.
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+10000
EDIT: To the image you edited in, I felt the change between System Shock and Bioshock's map complexity was fine, because I personally think the ridiculously super complex layout in the first two games almost caused me to suffer multiple haemorrhages (I'm a person who must visit every pathway and collect every single item, and thought of missing something makes me freak out). But I definitely get your point between Bioshock and Infinite.
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That's the way we're heading.
If you haven't noticed games that make 2-5 million to develop still are considered financial failures due to not being to sell as many copies as they hoped.
I don't like the current situation the gaming industry is in, but wanting another crash is terrible since there's a chance video games won't come back.
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Nintendo will come out with the NES and solve this crysis
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I strongly disagree with The Indie market too is not doing so well, and it's oversaturated by mediocre titles
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The Indie market is probably a LOT bigger than you think it is
No.
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Indie games are doing amazing. There are so many fantastic indie games that I'm don't even able to play all of them if I play nothing else. Yes there are a lot of mediocre titles, of course, but there are also a lot of outstanding ones that are more fun than almost every AAA titles ever were.
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I hope the crash kills indie gaming so these developer wannabes who think that making flash games is worthy of a paycheck have to quit their "IMMA WORK FOR VIDYA GAMES" manchild fantasy and get a job more suitable to their skills. Like being a cashier.
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Look I'm going to call bullshit.
The only reason people accept these practices is because they will pay for them, if people stop paying for them then they will go away. However the majority of games are fine with them so they don't go away.
The industry has changed so get over it.
The same shit would have happened back in the 80s if all the tech we have today existed back then.
EDIT: Also you could compare the Indie Game scene to the NEs scene back in the 80s. Tons of Shit with a decent amount of greatness, but with the exception that nowadays there is a lot less shit.
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This is misguided. So often, huge projects are toted as "job creators" as if that's some kind of massive benefit. It's a short-term solution that doesn't address any long-term repercussions.
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+1
At Toaster, I said in other comments that "industry crash" was much too strong a term, but if you look at the reality, many designers lose their jobs daily. It's something that is already happening. We're lucky that design skills can easily translate into other industries.
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Rather than a crash, we need a revolution. People need to stop buying Call of Duty games or other cash-grabs. AAA titles cost too much to develop and they end up being mediocre most of the time. Publishers need to stop being such assholes and figure out how to please the fans instead of focusing on the investors. Maybe if the CEOs didn't make so much money, you wouldn't need so many investors.
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It's a road that goes both ways.
There are a lot of mediocre indie games, but there are also fantastic ones; ones where the developer but in true effort, true spirit, and even if the game doesn't necessarily mean anything, it still ends up being a more p[polished and fun game than a triple-A title. However, because it's an indie game, people will refuse to spend more than $2.50 on it. We'll spend $50 on crap, but bawk at spending even $15 on a true gem in the rough. What does this do? It provides incentive for no true work to be put into a game.
This phenomenon isn't limited to indie games. In the last few years, a triple-A game came out that did everything correctly: it had great graphics for the time it came out, the ambiance was always spot on, the characters were poignant with the story it told, that story that it told was gripping and drove me to finish the game, and on top of it all, it took a world-famous IP and flipped it on its head so that its core, basic mechanics worked to drive the theme of the game home to the player, even when it seemed to be contradicting itself. The biggest problem with creating a truly great game from a meaning standpoint instead of a purely fun standpoint is ludo-narrative dissonance; the fact that your character will do stupid shit you force him to do, even if narratively the character would never do that thing. This game used that flaw and turned it into a tool.
This game did everything, everything right. I'm not a big fan of the series, but this game, these developers, listened to everything that was being said about modern game design and development, and responded appropriately. They fixed things, or, if they couldn't fix it, used it in a truly innovative way so that you felt differently about it in comparison with the rest of the series. You know what everyone said when it came out? "Roman is so annoying, I wish they wouldn't have put in this stupid bowling mini-game."
The game was about the American dream, the crushing failure or success of the individual, and their willingness to move on or at least keep going. It wanted you to think about why it is that you do what you do; Niko Bellic came to America to live a life of peace and luxury with his cousin, a new world where he could escape his past and live a new man. Yet the world continued to force him into a life of crime and murder, reminding him of who he is and what he's done, with the player's individual actions confirming that; a game where if you fuck around between missions, you aren't interrupting the story at all. You're still in it. Those are still things that Niko would do; because in his drive to leave what he was, he has become more of a monster than he ever was.. Characters like Playboy X and Francis McCreary echo those sentiments. Meanwhile, characters like Kate and Roman leave a note of hope, letting the player know that while things can go wrong, your life will be okay. It's okay to have a shitty apartment instead of a mansion. It's okay to get married to a loving woman and raise a family instead of have a harem. Just because your family is full of bad people, that doesn't mean you have to be, and it doesn't mean you have to desert them either. Those characters show that life is life, shit happens, and we carry on.
They beg Niko with constant phone calls, pestering him, to say "Hey, Niko. My Cousin. You came here to relax, to stop killing. TO have fun. Please. Stop what you're doing...just come bowling with me. Just once. For just once, please, just relax. It's okay."
Then you hang up on him and go online to write an article about what an awful game GTAIV is because Roman ruins everything.
tl;dr It isn't just the industry that's ruining the industry. It's the players too.
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As far as GTA IV is concerned, I think people use that bowling thing not because they hate the game, but because they know the game is so close to perfection, and yet they felt as though Roman was a slight dent in the otherwise polished surface of the game.
But yes, I do see your point, and we need games to start changing people's opinions and get them to put their money into much more exciting and deep experiences regardless of if they're indie or AAA.
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We're actually in the beginning of a crash that began slowly 2 years ago. The current returns for most AAA titles do not exceed the budget spent enough for companies to make real profits. This forces them to go with the most popular genres in order to not have commercial failures (thus the disgustingly high amount of AAA FPS games and almost non-existant difficulty and creativity), but as budgets are expected to increase significantly this generation and returns will stay the same, you'll see a lot of companies collapse or step away from AAA gaming. THQ was one of the first victims, and Sega is on life-support by Nintendo (hence the exclusivity deal between them right now).
The end result will be a significantly lower amount of AAA games and an increasing dominance of indie titles and mobile games. The console creators are aware of this too, which is why they have significantly increased the ease for indie developers to get on their systems.
tl;dr I embrace our new indie gaming overlords
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What I knew understood was why budgets were increasing when many AAA games are getting smaller (less than 10 hours of gameplay). Now, it may be that they need bigger teams of artists to be able to create the HD environment, but I still feel as though a lot of the budget is used on necessary expenditure.
Anyways, very hopeful that more amazing indie developers will rise up and carry us into a new platinum age of gaming.
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That's because of the expense of modelling. Nearly every three years, the amount of polygons that are acceptable to the public doubles as people become more spoilt by the graphics of today. More expensive graphics means less money that can be devoted to storyline and also means that less areas can be modelled at the same consistency of visuals.
Thus, a budget that could make an open-world rpg with possibly 100 hours of gameplay with many environments and Gamecube-level graphics instead ends up being a 10-hour corridorfest with few environments at PS3-to-2013PC-level graphics.
As a person that has modelling and music experience and is attempting to become a professional developer, I can guarantee that modelling takes far, far more time than programming anything. Heck, it probably takes more effort to model than it does to supply the voice acting, movement coding and weapon abilities judging from what I've seen. That was not the case 12 years ago, when it only took a similar amount of effort as any one of those. Virtually nothing else about gaming has increased in price, in fact, making music and coding is actually easier and cheaper than it was a decade ago, it's just that modelling has increased that much to completely consume any gains from them.
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Aren't there ways to make concessions while still having nice looking games though? Like most Blizzard games go with the "cartoonish" look nowadays and I imagine those softer edges help speed up modelling. Also I figure a game like Borderlands 2 probably saves a lot of time on modeling since they use cel shaded textures in conjuncture with more basic models. Like if you look at Claptrap, his front panel is almost entirely flat yet there are drawn in bolts and other things like that, that if you actually had a real claptrap unit in person it wouldn't be a flat smooth surface like you see in the game. Same goes with a lot of their environmental models, I've seen heaps of trash that are very basic models but are seemingly 3D through the use of the textures and some additional basic 2D models. I even think it makes the game more unique. But anyways, it's not like developers don't have options, although I understand certain games/genres benefit from having the more realistic/immersive graphics.
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Cel-shading is one way of making modelling easier since people are more willing to accept lower polygons for cartoonish stylization since you typically use less details, but for games that try to look realistic in stylization, it takes a lot of time to get down, especially since the uncanny valley is a lot easier to trigger in a pseudo-realistic style than, say, Team Fortress 2.
That's one of the main reasons I like cel-shading and cartoonish (i.e. the style of Super Smash Bros 4 or Super Mario Galaxy 2) styles: they allow for more freedom without needing high costs to pull off.
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I hope we dont. My brother works in the games industry and was hit hard with the last one (had to keep getting a new job because the companys he worked for either went bust or just couldn't afford to pay him). He's finally got a stable job again, and he works his ass off, I'd hate to see him go through that hell again.
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Industry Crash was much too strong a term and I was wrong for using that. I was referring to more like a kind of revolution.
Either way, it's terrible what's been happening to your brother, but I'm glad he's back at it again. Just make sure he remembers that gaming is supposed to be about fun, not about money.
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Indie scene is okay, of caourse you are going to get a lot of shit, you can´t hope everybody to be Mozzart.
Indie scene has brought me games like Killing Floor, Naatural Selection 2, payday 1 and 2, Thomas was alone, Hotline miami, Defense Grid, Awesomenauts, FTL,Serious Sam 3, etc.
Triple AAA games are not all of them crap, there are more games than CoD, MoH or Battlefield. Most AAA are misguided and companies will have to learn from failure.
DLC most is crap, but generally you can ignore.
In the end the problem are not the company but the people who still pay for this "shit" so you canpt blame them. Best we can do is support with our money the games we love or spread the word.
Things change onstantly and it is normal t have a period that sucks before having a good one. Still we are not that bad as it looks, it is just that the game industry has grown a lot.
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I don't like the gaming industry as it is. Everything sucks. AAA is less about trying to take chances on making something incredible and more about pleasing the lowest common denominator, of which many screech from the tops of mountains, belittling those who actually have a valid opinion. Publishers no longer are PUBLISHERS but instead feel as though they are the ultimate gods of gaming, purchasing out the licenses to the best gaming franchises and milking them for all their worth. DLC practices are getting worse and worse, and the push to have more "free" (Read: Missing content designed to fool the non-informed consumer) online games. Hell, the industry is pushing more and more towards complete digital, online services, believing everyone in the world to already live in the future under the benevolent rule of Skynet.
The Indie market too is not doing so well, and it's oversaturated by mediocre titles by developers who don't have a passion for gaming but simply want to make a quick buck. The last console not to be produced by one of the three "mighty" titans was absolutely bollocks and showed that its creators were just as evil as the people making the other consoles. Games as good as Minecraft (in terms of what it did for indie gaming) are few and far between, and typically spawn a bazillion clones because these clone-developers believe that "if ain't broke, don't fix it" actually was supposed to be "if it ain't broke, remake the entire thing in Unity but miss everything that made the original good because we're unoriginal and we don't understand the golden era of video games."
Let's Plays by Pewdiepie apparently somehow are able to warrant millions of spoiled brats supremacy of YouTube, and Kotaku can write whatever random garbage spews from their mind and there will always be people who won't bat an eyelash. Some developers are leaving the industry because they receive enough hate over tiny decisions to match the Sun, whereas other developers are complete degenerates and it takes only a tiny realisation that nobody is laughing with them for a shitstorm to start. People review games by comparing them, not based on the games own merits, and people believe that all manner of "technical issues" (LEIK GUIZE ITZ LOCK'D 2 30FPS DIS R SHITE) should detract from the game's overall score, when it's clear they're the only one with their problems.
Console and PC wars continuing to rage on, and yet no developer wants to properly merge the gap out of fear they might actually convince gamers its okay to choose what works best for them. Ubisoft fucks PC games daily, Bethesda (generally) gives console players the cold shoulder, and Microsoft loves to screw with everybody equally. People still have it in their minds that console-exclusives are a good thing, and there are still "hardcore" gamers convinced that because a game has no more than the occasional button-click here and there, it shouldn't classify as a game. Meanwhile, "casual" gamers spend money on buying new items for Farmville or Angry Birds, items that take no more than 5 minutes to make and rake in hundreds of thousands of kilos worth of cocaine every day, giving the big publishers the incentive that suddenly all gamers are like that, so they can begin to push DLC right down the unwilling gaming public's throat.
I'm not done with gaming, but I'm pissed off that we've come to this. Only a few years ago, we were still in the warm and fuzzy period of gaming where things weren't as bad. YES. Some of these problems have been a constant. But they were nowhere near as drastic as they are now. This industry used to be about put players into places they've never been before, to experience things they've never felt before. The people who worked in it did so with passion for what they did, not so they could make it rich. Publishers weren't obsessed with licenses or DLC, they just wanted to rake in some profit off the side for distributing the games, as they rightfully should. Back then, you could look inside a game store and find a huge library of amazing games, not just a few awesome titles scattered through a lot of waste. Mario changed the industry forever. We need a new Mario (NOT A SEQUEL LIKE YOU'VE BEEN DOING FOR YEARS, NINTENDO).
Hate me if you will, but that's my perspective. Your move, gaming industry.
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