Modern Games Industry: How'd We Get Here?

[chuckster]

That is unless there's a major collapse like we saw back in the 80's, where there was a total teardown-rebuild paradigm shift.

This day is coming for the indie scene.

As much as I love me some indie games, I hope that day hurries the fuck up. Indie games are like anti-biotics; they're fantastic, but when you oversaturate all of existence with them, they end up creating a bigger problem than they tried to fix.

I do think it's coming, you can see the maturation of the scene year over year, along with more attempts to cash in. It seems like more of a slouch toward a better indie scene. Things like Greenlight and crowdfunding are here to stay, for better or worse, and it won't be long until someone with a real business plan comes up with a better method to collect dozens of these tiny devs who are looking for a leg up. If you can do that with 50 games a year across half a dozen platforms, you can take risks on odd stuff while still guarding and ensuring quality. It's like the huge stables of throwaway pop stars 60's records labels maintained.

I don't mean to sound like a quack, but the gap of class inequality has widened into the games industry! AAA games are the one percent with the grassroots indies taking up the mantle! Huzzah!

[Fragems]

One thing I would really like to see go away or at least slow down is the whole idea of paid
"Early Access" games on steam. It's just an excuse to let devs cash in on an idea before it's completely thought out and some projects are getting abandoned/"completed" long before they are even finished. Also not a huge fan of some of these dudes changing their games name and/or making "sequels" which they then merge with the original games store page in an attempt to bypass reviews.

[LensOfTruth]

Furthermore, I can understand buggy, unbalanced, or story-lite games when you and 5 other guys made it on your days off from Target, but when a game is developed by a team of 200+ people (who are forced to work long hours for marginal pay, with little hope of outliving a project before being laid off) and a budget of tens of millions, I do expect to be able to have a complete, enjoyable experience. If there are minor glitches or bugs I understand, but when you look at what happened with the Master Chief Collection, AC: Unity, and Arkham Knight, it really brings questions like "was there any playtesting at all?" and "How did this make it pass QA?"

Some may feel this is entitlement, saying "This game should be this or that for MY money," but I just look at it as a company doing a bad job, and if you look into it you can tell whether or not you will like a game, so the decision of buying is on you (and you can always return it, right?). Vote with your wallet.

I think that's completely justified. If those games you mentioned came out two generations ago, they'd be recalled. Pre-HD console releases had to work completely, so Q&A and playtesting were important.

Think about when these modern servers go down. The fact is that many modern games won't be playable anymore -- All those Day One patches and even some Single-Player Campaigns (think Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5) will be gone! I feel bad for the preservation community.

Speaking of preservation, I bet fans of P.T. and Scott Pilgrim have a lot of work/waiting to do. After all, that game content has to remain safe and offline for a good decade or more while the you-know-what developers do their thing.

[Fragems]

Really the game industry is all for cheap and easy. Sadly preservation and shoddy work don't mix well . That being said Publishers don't give a shit short term sales is all they really care about the legacy of their product doesn't really matter to them since 10 years down the road they aren't going to be making money off that Used copy of a game. Honestly it's better if that game is a useless paper weight because that leaves one less product that their new game has to compete with for your entertainment time plus it opens room for them to charge for yet another rerelease . Just imagine the near future when everyone milks the hell out of their old catalog like Capcom, Konami, Atari, Sega, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Square Enix, and....

Also the whole deal with the Master Chief Collection is shady as hell. In all honestly I believe they gimped the hell out of that games multiplayer intentionally in order to insure people wouldn't choose it over Halo 5 once it came out. Honestly imagine how much larger and active the community for that game compilation would be if the MP matchmaking wasn't utter shit.

[darsparx]

Heck, I still can't get DSL, and my parents can in the middle of nowhere!

I live 2 miles from my dad. He can get DSL at his house, but Windstream won't run it to mine. I know your pain.

Yuck....I don't know how windstream is near you but they're unreliable as crap here.


My problem is though with the modern game industry we've gotten to the point where the big companies are playing it safe pumping out sequels that no true fans of the series even want. When it seems like up to i'd say wii era people still experimented, played around, and gave us interesting things. But now it seems like you have to dig for what's not crap and usually then it's by a startup indie dev(which what some of these are making now seems like most of the games reborn in a modern era....and I don't know if that's a good thing at this point...)

[MrEco]

Not sure if anyone has commented on this yet, but there is one thing that really annoys me about this modern era of full color moving computer games.

Digital games potentially becoming the standard. Fuck, please no.

They've already become the standard on PC because of Steam, and companies are pushing hard to make them the standard on consoles and handhelds as well. I don't mind that digital games exist. I have nothing against consumers who prefer digital games for any one of numerous reasons. But I do not want it to reach the point where digital games are the only option on consoles or handhelds.

The exception to this is indie games, because I admit that many of them probably wouldn't exist if they couldn't release their games digitally. Many indie developers probably wouldn't have the money to pay for having those physical copies published.

But for higher budget games, or anything with a publisher signed on, I don't think theirs any reasonable excuse. It should be this way on PC too, but even on the rare occasions when a physical game is released it's usually a glorified Steam key on a disc.

This is honestly my number one video game related fear, and the biggest thing that could get me to opt out of modern consoles. If there's ever a console released that has no disc drive and becomes digital only, there's like a 99% chance I won't even consider buying it no matter how good the games on it might be.

[darsparx]

That actually scares the crap out of me. I like the occasional digital game but i don't know I'd rather have a physical game when and where possible......especially since we're still not to the point especially in america where everyone either has internet or decent quality internet(I fall in that latter one for sure, it's supposed to be a 6mb plan but ugh it's slow and I don't have the ability to somehow pay for a personal connection that might be faster if it was possible). I perfer my physical games especially since I still love popping in cartridges and discs(more so cartridges)

[MrEco]

I perfer my physical games especially since I still love popping in cartridges and discs(more so cartridges)

And that reminds me, I'd love for a console to go back to cartridges. The main reason for the switch to CD's from cartridges was because CD's could hold more data. But nowadays we have mini-SD cards that can hold 64 GB's of data and such. A "cartridge" based modern games console would be so awesome.

[KalessinDB]

I perfer my physical games especially since I still love popping in cartridges and discs(more so cartridges)

And that reminds me, I'd love for a console to go back to cartridges. The main reason for the switch to CD's from cartridges was because CD's could hold more data. But nowadays we have mini-SD cards that can hold 64 GB's of data and such. A "cartridge" based modern games console would be so awesome.

Someone brought that up... somewhere. I don't know if it was this forum or another one I'm on, but that's been considered. Consensus was it's basically impossible to make SD cards that can't be duplicated, so piracy would run rampant.

I 100% agree that it would be awesome. But I don't see it ever happening.

[Erik_Twice]

No way that's true. Just looking at the rate of indie PC and iOS/Android mobile releases alone right now dwarfs that time period.

According to Mobygames, there was a peak in the 80s and the number of titles got reduced in half by the time CD-based consoles were released. I think you forget how many Spectrum, Atari and C64 games existed and overstate how many "indie PC games" there are.

There were around 1600 new games on Steam last year. Do you know how many books were published just in Spain last year? Over 68 000. Are there too many books? I mean, a national retailer (La Casa del Libro) lists 1 600 000+ books in its online store. Steam listed 3400 games back in 2014. Are there too many books being sold? Should we remove 99,68% of them? What about Amazon? Are there too many books on Amazon? Too many films, comics, sculptures?

I really don't think it's an issue!

So you think it's frivolous for someone to attempt to browse huge libraries of games trying to find the couple of gems worth buying?

If it's so hard, does it mean it's impossible to buy good books, movies, comics or music because even the smallest store has orders of magnitude more products than Steam?