Game devs going under

[Guest Mogie56]

Thread should be deleted.

[Astaroth-Lite]

The growing number of new studios and publishers isn't offsetting the small number of businesses closing their doors how? The video game industry is still growing, more and more people are able to get by in the business; a few stragglers fumbling behind doesn't really change that.

 

Though, yeah, magazines are going down the tubes; print media is in sorry shape but that has nothing to do with video games specifically and more to do with the direction of modern technology and societal changes.

 

And as for kickstarter, it's a great new resource that allows development studios that may be too small to get their projects going or for studios that want to avoid executive meddling; the latter being something many people attribute to the stagnation of the medium. It's not so much that people are having a hard time finding money for projects via the traditional routs, they are having a hard time finding money for the projects they actually want to do as opposed to having some suit tell them they need to make another overly-simplistic modern military shooter set in the middle-east.

[Kamen Rider Kuuga]

And how long until those new start ups fail, or are bought up by bigger companies? Indie isn't a savior, and a huge amount of devs have lost their jobs, even if you didn't hear about them. Just look at Sony and all the companies they either bought, or branches they created to produce games, and have closed after one or two because they didn't sell enough to justify the stupid production costs.

 

There is only one way the industry can go, long term, and that's below the surface of the Earth and hang out with the mole people, because this bitch WILL crash, and it will be bloody.

[Emily]

Atlus is bankrupt, Yo.

[Kamen Rider Kuuga]

Well shit.

[GreatKazooMan]

In ten years it'll all probably be owned by Disney. They got Marvel, then they got LucasArts...tomorrow the world! ;

[Trykz]

As much as I hate to say it, and just as much as most refuse to believe it, the problem is World of Warcraft. Now before you ask why:

 

WoW fosters one very significant factor affecting gaming in our age (ALL gaming, not just MMO and RPG).....

 

instant gratification.

 

Other games don't need to offer this, but they try. And therein lies the problem. NO other company can compete with Blizzard's masterful manipulation of the instant gratification factor. The studio that's spending 10's of millions of dollars building Elder Scrolls Online is going to learn that lesson the hard way as well. Every gamer today (especially in the MMO branch of the genre) asks themselves this question at one point or another:

 

"why play this when WoW is so much better, and actually feels like I'm getting something for my time?"

 

WoW's influence touches every branch of the gaming genre. And since it essentially rewards the instant gratification crowd (which grows ever more prominent these days), challenge, depth, and immersion are being pushed to the wayside. The RPG branch of the gaming genre shrinks faster than it grows, as more and more of it's veteran gamers leave, and not enough new players join it.

 

Welcome to the millennium age. Where it's a'okay to expect everything handed to you with barely any effort at all required.

[lordofthedread]

As much as I hate to say it, and just as much as most refuse to believe it, the problem is World of Warcraft. Now before you ask why:

 

WoW fosters one very significant factor affecting gaming in our age (ALL gaming, not just MMO and RPG).....

 

instant gratification.

 

Other games don't need to offer this, but they try. And therein lies the problem. NO other company can compete with Blizzard's masterful manipulation of the instant gratification factor. The studio that's spending 10's of millions of dollars building Elder Scrolls Online is going to learn that lesson the hard way as well. Every gamer today (especially in the MMO branch of the genre) asks themselves this question at one point or another:

 

"why play this when WoW is so much better, and actually feels like I'm getting something for my time?"

 

WoW's influence touches every branch of the gaming genre. And since it essentially rewards the instant gratification crowd (which grows ever more prominent these days), challenge, depth, and immersion are being pushed to the wayside. The RPG branch of the gaming genre shrinks faster than it grows, as more and more of it's veteran gamers leave, and not enough new players join it.

 

Welcome to the millennium age. Where it's a'okay to expect everything handed to you with barely any effort at all required.

 

As much as I agree that WoW was somewhat damaging to gaming in a way I dont believe it is totally true.

 

For example a game like Dark Souls got a very nice success and coverage while being stupidly difficult (remembers me the old try and die games), and it is not the only game that was successful and not instanty rewarding that came out since WoW did.

 

By the way WoW was not like that at the begining, I remember how hard it was to make a single 40 people raid in vanilla and people bitching that the last boss of Molten Core was inpossible to defeat.

 

For me the main problem comes from the fact that a game nowadays is very costly to produce. Because we all crave for realism (even in our fantasy worlds) and that means actual acting and voice acting, larger devellpement teams, larger R&D teams etc....

 

When you see how much is the budget of an AAA game there is no wonder why they want to touch the largest part of the gaming population, and to touch the largest part, you have to make a game that the largest part can actually play while keeping the fanbase happy(quite an impossible mission actually).

 

As for MMOs, they tend to be all the same (mostly due to limitations of the business model and the massive multiplayer part) and there is no way you could release a game that is as big as an old timer like WoW, I mean this game is freakin huge and it seems on this part ESO will at least succeed from what I saw (time will tell), on the other hand most of the complaints about new MMOs is the lack of end game content, and thats not something that came instantly in WoW, they were there longer and gamers are now used to MMOs mehcanics thats all.

 

It is, for me, way to easy to blame one game, it is also because we tend to have a lot wider audience in gaming nowadays than back in the day, and yes WoW dragged a larger population in gaming than any other game, thus said gaming today is not reserved to some geeks playing in a dark room with no social interactions anymore, gaming is touching a whole larger public and with or without WoW I believe that was something that was meant to happen.

 

Back on the very core of a topic, because how costly it has become to make video games, a studio could go under for one single bad game, even if that was a successful studio to begin with.