Has the videogame crash arrived ?

richymcdermott

this is no the videogame industry is doomed thread but it got me thinking after watching a couple of articles but with the likes of sony posting a 8 year loss in a row aswell as nintendo and even microsoft posting losses aswell if the console market on the decline ?

We have also seen alot of companies , big and small that have gone out of business, with the likes of THQ,Midway,Sony Liverpool,Zipper Interactive etc..
http://ie.ign.com/articles/2012/12/11/20-studios-we-lost-in-2012

Would their be drastic changes in the way videogames are being made in the future ?.

I used to be the first in line to raise my pitchforks over locked on disk dlc, online passes and even microtransactions from dead space 3 but with more and more publishers shutting down studios it seems the games we loved in the past will be hard to find again.

With the wii u out for 3 months game sales in the uk alone is in 30k mark , thats less than the ps vita and maybe that could change with nintendo first party games to come out but could this be an indicator that consoles have reached their peak to becoming the for front of the industry.

To me at least i think its to clustered and theres too many people trying to grab the last slice of cake. We have Wiiu, ps4,xbox720,steambox, 3ds,ps vita,apple ios, ouya ,pc

is this not gonna end on what happened in the last videogame crash ?

KonFusion

Videogames will never, ever die.

Companies who fail to adapt to changes in the market and their buyers will fail. This is the same for every industry.

But no, the videogame crash has not arrived. These companies (Nintendo, Sony, M$) have huge resources at their disposal. Much like the video game crash of 1977, to which I believe you refer, the big companies were ok for the most part. It was the one's failing to innovate and selling the same old crap that passed on.

This can only be a good thing.

EoghanIRL

I feel tempted to return to pc gaming now to be honest .

Retr0gamer

I have to agree, videogames are going no where. Videogames have survived 2 crashes already and they are proof enough of this.

In 1983 the market crashed in the US because the market became flooded with so much shovelware that consumers lost faith in the videogame market as did investors. Games bombed in price and could be found for about $2 in bargain bins. What investors failed to notice was that people were still snapping up these games and in Europe and Japan videogames were booming. Nintendo recognised this and recognised that if they could get consumer faith back in gaming they could kick start the entire US industry which they did in style.

Then there was the crash of 1993 which few people have heard of. The transition to CD and the multimedia/FMV bubble left a lot of companies in dire financial trouble or worse. However investors did not flee the sinking ship since they knew from 1983 that it was only a transition phase and that consumers still demanded games.

The market is going through a transition phase now. The focus is not on more powerful consoles but on going mobile. Traditional console game making is becoming more precarious for companies but indie and mobile development is booming at the moment and is one of the few growth sectors. Even MS and Sony have gotten in on the act, their next consoles really aren't impressive machines technically but favour power efficiency and when they are shown off I'm guessing they'll be small and well designed.

There's only one thing you can be sure of in the games industry and it's change and at the moment we are going through one of the biggest transition periods in gaming ever. It's not a bad thing, just some companies are slower to adapt than others. You'll see some big players closing down but there'll a lot of new companies springing up that played their cards right.

Grumpypants

A crash? No, but a slump yes. You can see from the big publishers like THQ going under that something is a miss. A lot of it is due to poor confidence in the stocks that is keeping share prices low.

As the new consoles get announced and the publishers and third party devs start showing off games it will pick up again.

It has changed though, it is more likely for publishers to close studios after a game performs poorly than let them try again with another title.

The indie scene has taken off but I do worry that it is not as lucrative as some think. There are a lot of games that make money but for the vast majority of indie devs they will not make enough from the game to support the studios without external investment. The nature of the indie market a small studio can support one or two failed games as costs as quite low but before long life catches up and many indie devs will be looking for a 9-5 just to pay the bills at home.

It is certainly an interesting time.

BizzyC

There's still too much consumer money available for a crash.
I think the problem here is that too many firms stretching themselves too thin.

Companies like THQ get a couple of money making franchises and expand too quickly.

They took on too many projects at once to be sustainable with their finances, they got greedy in a very competitive market.

In terms of console manufacturers, I can see the budgets coming down.
The way things are going, consoles will soon be just as pricey as a gaming PC with a fraction of performance and functionality.

tiny timy

they need to lower the price of consoles and games.its getting out of hand,people just dont have the money for this kind of stuff anymore.

Reekwind

THQ's demise was largely due to the massive gamble that was uDraw sinking like a stone

That said, I think there is something badly rotten at the heart of the AAA industry. There is a lot of money around - games are more popular than ever - but that means little when the industry's model is so inefficient. In particular, the studio system and accompanying massive costs of developing top games; the likes of Modern Warfare or Mass Effect have budgets that run to tens of millions of Euro for development alone (advertising can easily double that). Which leads to blockbuster behaviour: a focus on a few guaranteed hits with the risk that a wrong shout can sink a studio/publisher

None of this suggests landfills being filled with COD games but the behaviour of the industry over the past decade is surely not sustainable in the long-run

lazlo

Personally I hope CoD and all it's spawn crash and burn. And I will gladly throw one hundred or two hunred dollars to the kickstarter campaign for the next dreamfall game. AAA FPS titles have sterilised the industry for years and caused stagnation in a lot of other genres. Thank god for the recent naissance of high quality indie gaming.

ScumLord

It's not by any means, all that's happening is publishers aren't making the obscene profits they want to make. Pity about them, for normal people every things rosy.

EoghanIRL wrote: »

I feel tempted to return to pc gaming now to be honest .

I bought a handful of major titles last year, assassins creed series, hitman (hated it), was batman out last year? That's the only other major game I remember buying.

I have been having great fun getting into sim racing though. I had to make a further investment on a steering wheel but it's so cheap after that with top sims costing as little as €15 and most content after that coming free. You can have more fun and depth with one car on one track than you can in an entire console racing game and all it's DLC. this year for €30 I got two racing sims that will never be "completed" and have sucked up hours of my time to the point I have to stop playing because my arms have become weak.

Plus I think if you ramp up the force feedback on your wheel that it's technically exercise.

Nody

ScumLord wrote: »

Plus I think if you ramp up the force feedback on your wheel that it's technically exercise.

You're having to much fun for it to be counted as excercise :P

ScumLord

Nody wrote: »

You're having to much fun for it to be counted as excercise :P

I've noticed that labelling hobbies as exercise becomes very regular after you turn 30. When I went airsofting there was a group of us 30 some things affirming the health benefits of running around fields shooting toy guns at each other. Went to research racing go karts and I was told how good a form of exercise it is. I think I've scrapped the bottom of the mid life crisis barrel of "it's exercise really" by labelling games as exercise.

ShadowHearth

Its not crash, its business as usually.


some companies doing well and rolling in money and woman. Some companies are shiet and rolling in dept and their own crap. Survival of the fittest.

circadian

There's going to be a shift in how games are made. A triple A title costs a ton to produce and if it doesn't make a profit then you're screwed as a developer. This happens a lot as is evident in closure of studios everywhere. I firmly believe that EA's tactic of DLC and paying for online play to inhibit trade ins is detrimental to the industry on the whole. It's merely a quick fix for their shortfall on money spent on producing a title and what is likely to be made from it.
Their studio in Vancouver is a fraction of the size it was. They used to produce NFS there amongst other things but it's all been outsourced. Expect these smaller studios to disappear soon enough.
Activision effectively shut down Radical games after Prototype 2 didn't make a profit.
A change has to come in how games are financed and marketed.
Mobile games are booming, small teams producing simple yet quality games that don't cost much. Lower price-higher yield.
I was lucky in my last job we had a games library. I could play the latest title without the cost but if I dropped 40 or 50 quid on a game that lasted me half a Saturday you'd be damn sure I'd be pissed. Anyone would!

Crash? Maybe. Slump? Likely. Change? Needed.

Sarky

In fairness, I don't think THQ did themselves any favours with expensive advertising like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PEU_201IfI

Really freaking cool, yes, but not cheap...

RedXIV

I wouldn't worry too much about the likes of games companies going under, most of those guys walk straight onto other projects in no time, If you're good at making games, you'll continue to do so, just under a different companies name.

Slozer

AS with all industries the companies who don't move with the times, technology and customer demand will always fail no matter how big they seem to be. There have been many big games companies who have failed and there will be may more.

There is a big shift towards online gaming in recent years, just look at WOW which has 9 million plus subscribers paying 12.99 approx a month and you have a steady strem of income to keep supporting and developing this product into the future. But then again if they dont appease the fans they will see their subscriptions diminish.

I also suspect that a lot of game developers would currently be working on new titles for the next Xbox and playstation.

So the gaming industry may seem quite at the moment but that could all change with the release of the next gen gaming consoles.

Reekwind

Slozer wrote: »

There is a big shift towards online gaming in recent years, just look at WOW which has 9 million plus subscribers paying 12.99 approx a month and you have a steady strem of income to keep supporting and developing this product into the future. But then again if they dont appease the fans they will see their subscriptions diminish

A business model that now looks positively neolithic. Very few companies can successfully pull off subscription MMOs any more

Sarky

Is wow not losing players?

I like the models League of Legends and Planetside 2 have adopted. PS2 is free but I've still spent around €90 on bits and bobs for it because the game is good and so are the bits and bobs. If they keep it up I'll happily give them more money.