is the future of videogames starting to look bleak?

[billdotson]

if you are not aware of it games are getting more expensive to make. More programmers are needed to make a single game than ever before. With all of the new graphics and physics, etc. there is a need for even more developers. As more developers are hired the price of games goes up. Therefore in order to keep games at an affordable price point games will have to be developed so they can run on all consoles and possibly more operating systems than just Windows. So if a game is developed to work on all platforms does that not ensure that the quality of games will be less than it normally would if a game is developed specifically for one console?

And even then eventually games will have to get more expensive later on. When games get to the point where they are $75 or so I will probably quit messing with games period. To me anyway it seems that overall games in general are just getting less entertaining and there just seem to be less quality titles than there used to be. If the trend continues there will be a bunch of mediocre games with the average cost being something of $75-100.

All the newer games to have a graphical standard for them and as that standard keeps going up developers will have to focus less on the actual gameplay and mechanics of a game and more on the graphical standard they have to meet to be accepted in the market.

[ZylGadis]

All of that is true. In addition, the games being released nowadays are dumber than ever before. The innovative games that have come out since 2000 are less than 20, and that includes Civ4, for example, which is really a remake / addition to an old superb idea.
I think this is a wonderful trend, actually, because it means we won't have to wade in garbage with the hopes of accidentally hitting something worthy of our attention. In five or so years the only games produced will be non-commercial ones, which really means games with fresh and innovative ideas. I like that, because I care much more about gameplay than graphics. De-commercialization is always wonderful news for those of us who consider themselves better than the lowest common denominator.

[prizrak]

1) Everything goes up in price and that is normal. It costs me 10.50 to go to the movies (used to be like 9 or so 3 years ago) but I still go. It's the same with games, people who want entertainment will pay for it either way.

2) Games are incorporating alot of advertisements lately giving companies alternate revenue streams other than just price per copy. Online distribution is also becoming alot more popular making it cheaper to produce games, since there is no need to spend money on packaging and such and with technologies like Bit Torrent bandwidth is cheaper as well.

3) Games are starting to move towards microtransactions along with purchase price. If you want some extra stuff you will pay for it and raise revenue.

4) Game companies are making super profits and can easily loose a bit of money to keep the prices current.

5) Game engines (what does physics and graphics and all other fun stuff) are only developed by a handful of companies. Most other companies just license the engine they would like to use and build a game around it. That is not overly complicated and doesn't require anymore developers. It's basically like developing a GUI in an IDE, you drag and drop different parts and you have a GUI, you can write one by hand but that's difficult (obviously a hugely oversimplified example).

5a) There have also been some talk of FOSS game engines being developed making it even easier for companies to make games.

In conclusion, no video game future is not looking bleak, it is actually quite bright and is getting brighter by the minute. As far as games being not as fun, well the thing is that you just don't remember all those crappy old games, you only remember the good ones. That is true for everything you will have a handful of good things and the rest will be mediocre at best. For every Ferrari/Lamborghini out there you get 100 Ford Taurus's. I been browsing through some old NES/PC/SNES games and you would be amazed at that amount of pure crap that was out.

[tbroderick]

Don't buy them when they first come out. The longer you wait the cheaper they become. The only exception is if the game is "rare" and the demand far exceeds the supply.

[billdotson]

but when developers have to put more and more ads into their games to keep the prices down that means when you are playing a game you will constantly be bombarded with annoying ads. Ads = worse gaming experience.. unless of course the ads are things that come up while a level is loading or while the game is starting up.

[justin whitaker]

I wouldn't say that games are dumber, per se...Supreme Commander, Oblivion, and a few others do not strike me as "dumb" really. Rehashes maybe, but not necessarily dumb.

The sad fact is: economics wins over quality.

I was reading an analyst report on Atari, of all things, that summed up the industry pretty nicely. I'll paraphrase:

1. Games for prior generation systems cost ~#10 million to make. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but that is the right ballpark. PC games usually fall into this category as well.

2. Games for next generation systems can easily reach $20 million, and the most expensive of them will reach into the $30-35 million range. The one exception to this thatI know of is Gears, which reportedly cost $10 million to make. Epic already had the game engine done, so that cut much of the cost of development.

3. Game companies recover all of their costs and make most (70%) of their sales within the first 6-8 weeks of release.

4. There are about 2 million of these next generation consoles in use.

So, Atari, for example, has up to two months to really recover their costs and make a profit on any XBox 360 or PS3 title, and it has to appeal to as many of that installed base as possible.

So they have to appeal to the lowest common denominator: the 14 year old that just likes blowing crap up.

I think that is why World of Warcraft is so big: it appeals to everyone that doesn't like blow crap up all the time.

The moral of the story is: buy every THQ/EA/SE/VU title that isn't stupid. The only way you can get them to develop something smart is to make sure you vote with your dollars.

[tigerpants]

if you are not aware of it games are getting more expensive to make. More programmers are needed to make a single game than ever before. With all of the new graphics and physics, etc. there is a need for even more developers. As more developers are hired the price of games goes up. Therefore in order to keep games at an affordable price point games will have to be developed so they can run on all consoles and possibly more operating systems than just Windows. So if a game is developed to work on all platforms does that not ensure that the quality of games will be less than it normally would if a game is developed specifically for one console?

And even then eventually games will have to get more expensive later on. When games get to the point where they are $75 or so I will probably quit messing with games period. To me anyway it seems that overall games in general are just getting less entertaining and there just seem to be less quality titles than there used to be. If the trend continues there will be a bunch of mediocre games with the average cost being something of $75-100.

All the newer games to have a graphical standard for them and as that standard keeps going up developers will have to focus less on the actual gameplay and mechanics of a game and more on the graphical standard they have to meet to be accepted in the market.

Two problems with the games industry in my opinion:

1) The industry has forgotton how to make games. They are obssessed with meaningless crap like animating beads of sweat on a chars face or rendering realistic lens flare etc. Which is why they hire more programmers. I mean, who really cares about that sort of crap? All this eyecandy does is make crap game after crap game good to look at. Why not try making the game good to play?

2) Technology sucks. I mean, why do we need all these platforms? Apart from the obvious answer, ie, to lock customers into one product, it serves no meaningful purpose. What is the point of producing "Ninjakickass 3" 6 times for 6 completely different platforms? They all look the same and play the same, but the expense of porting these titles is ridiculous. Why not just have one platform and make all consoles the same standard so then choice of platform comes down to personal preference, style and features?

The games industry is run by greedy idiots, by and large. When the whole industry implodes on itself, I'll be sitting by, pointing and laughing.

[billdotson]

yes but why should I have to buy a game just to give the developers incentive to make better games.. you know capitalism is a good system but there are the downsides.. big companies tend to make products that will just bring in $ but not necessarily please everyone. Microsoft for instance does not seem to care about making the user a better OS, but making an OS that is just functional enough to make $. While the downsides of capitalism are clear in cases like that it is much better than say communism where I would have to wait in line for hours for some crappy gov't-made orange juice when I don't want orange juice I want milk.

The only real way to actually get what you want is to not support their products and to actually get that to work A LOT of people have to do that. And 14 year old Billy who likes anything where the characters cuss and blow things up (ie: Gears of War.. IMHO not the great game they hyped it to be..) is always going to buy regardless of how good the game actually is. His mom will just go out and get it for him and those that enjoy quality games are sitting doing nothing because the general game market is ignorant and just buys something because it is the "cool" game this week.

The answer to problems with companies like Microsoft where you can't really just not support their product as many times there are no viable alternatives is FOSS, but there have yet to be many Free-and-Open-Source-Games. Maybe some FOSS developers could make a few good game engines and there could be some pretty good FOSS games out there in the future

It seems that generally the smaller game studios make better quality games because they are less concerned with money, where as larger developers tend to have lower-quality games because they are bigger companies who are generally more money-hungrier than the smaller guys.

[G Morgan]

I see no reason why we can't have good FOSS games, it's just that the skill sets are very different to what OSS has been good at in the past.

Personally I think the best solution is a mixed system with FOSS game engines but some proprietary content. You simply cannot develop some things via attrition by the users. OTOH there can be some totally free games with the proprietary ones used to fund the endeavour.

[tigerpants]

yes but why should I have to buy a game just to give the developers incentive to make better games.. you know capitalism is a good system but there are the downsides.. big companies tend to make products that will just bring in $ but not necessarily please everyone. Microsoft for instance does not seem to care about making the user a better OS, but making an OS that is just functional enough to make $. While the downsides of capitalism are clear in cases like that it is much better than say communism where I would have to wait in line for hours for some crappy gov't-made orange juice when I don't want orange juice I want milk.

The only real way to actually get what you want is to not support their products and to actually get that to work A LOT of people have to do that. And 14 year old Billy who likes anything where the characters cuss and blow things up (ie: Gears of War.. IMHO not the great game they hyped it to be..) is always going to buy regardless of how good the game actually is. His mom will just go out and get it for him and those that enjoy quality games are sitting doing nothing because the general game market is ignorant and just buys something because it is the "cool" game this week.

The answer to problems with companies like Microsoft where you can't really just not support their product as many times there are no viable alternatives is FOSS, but there have yet to be many Free-and-Open-Source-Games. Maybe some FOSS developers could make a few good game engines and there could be some pretty good FOSS games out there in the future

It seems that generally the smaller game studios make better quality games because they are less concerned with money, where as larger developers tend to have lower-quality games because they are bigger companies who are generally more money-hungrier than the smaller guys.


It's just laziness and greed, TBH. Which is how capitalism functions. I'm not here to argue the relative merits of capitalism/socialism/communism, etc, what makes all these mechanism crap, and I believe they are all crap, is people. Alot of people say things like, "communism is great on paper, but doesn't work in the real world", because of human nature. The exact same thing is true of capitalism - great on paper, awful in practice. We are, by nature, a greedy race, and it manifests itself eventually in all things.

The video games industry has been slow to mature and when it did, it exploded big time - round about the time of the first Playstation. Everyone wanted a piece of that pie. Games flooded the market, quality went down, volume went up. People that had been gaming for years thought "this is crap, standards are dropping," but audiences that were new to gaming didn't know any different. But that bubble of novelty has now burst.

The other problem is, people are full of crap - and that includes seasoned, experience gamers. They moan about the lack of innovation in videogames, and about how formulaic games have become, yet when games manufacturers try and do something genuinely innovate and different, no one buys it. How many people bought Rez or Ico compared to all the rest of the generic FPS and half-arsed racing games that topped the PS2 charts for weeks on end? If gamers don't support the innovative titles, they won't get made again.

This is a very simplistic argument, I know. But from working on the fringes of the games industry in a previous working life for 5 years, and knowing quite a few professional that work in the industry, its probably pretty close to the truth. Consumers drive demand, demand is not imposed on people. Game makers make crappy boring generic eye-candy because people buy it. Stop buying it, it stops getting made. That's how capitalism works.

[G Morgan]

The problem with communism is greed is part of human nature. The problem with capitalism is general apathy is also a part of human nature. Both are based on pretexts that don't exist in the real world but when capitalism starts to struggle we generally see apathy drop and it re-asserts itself. People just aren't as thrifty as they need to be when things are comfortable and will buy any old crap on a whim.

Personally I've bought loads of innovative games over the years since I always find them interesting. Play one FPS and you've played them all pretty much without exception.

What is needed for innovation is a better distribution and development method. Perhaps something like an independent steam could handle distribution. Development requires the appropriate IDE's to be built around the various technologies we have available.

[Somenoob]

Personally I only play mathematical games(like Sudoku) usually they are freeware and more beneficial than commercial games.

[tigerpants]

Play one FPS and you've played them all pretty much without exception.


Play 1 game you've pretty much played them all, move, dodge, shoot ad infinitum. Difference between Doom, Half Life, Gears of War? Nothing. Just the candy they've slapped on to dupe people.

[G Morgan]

These days definitely. In the past new ones tended to add something new. Duke 3D added destructible terrain for the first time, HL ran the story line through the game engine making it feel more immersive, Quake used Polygons bringing us into the 3D world for the first time.

Since then I feel they offer nothing new. What does the latest FPS offer that I couldn't get from a total conversion or even a mission pack. This is why episodal gaming might not be bad thing if the length is long enough. Instead of buying new games you will be buying extra content for the same game at (hopefully) a lower price to represent the lower costs of development.

[justin whitaker]

Figures: point out a market mechanism, and the conversation veers off into a communism v. capitalism debate.

Tigerpants is absolutely right: if you keep buying the crap, they will keep making it.

I find it funny, though, this argument that there should be a triple A FOSS title. I agree, from a purely selfish point of view: I would love to play, say, a game the quality of World of Warcraft for free.

Keep in mind, there are alreay free MMOs that provide a similar experience...but they are not WoW.

The fact is, if you have the skill set to produce this title, which would you rather do: work for free and struggle and beg for resources from a community which is not interested in paying you, or get a piece of a $10billion pie?

Maybe it is time for FOSS supporters to start funding projects that get us what they want?

[G Morgan]

Figures: point out a market mechanism, and the conversation veers off into a communism v. capitalism debate.

Tigerpants is absolutely right: if you keep buying the crap, they will keep making it.

I find it funny, though, this argument that there should be a triple A FOSS title. I agree, from a purely selfish point of view: I would love to play, say, a game the quality of World of Warcraft for free.

Keep in mind, there are alreay free MMOs that provide a similar experience...but they are not WoW.

The fact is, if you have the skill set to produce this title, which would you rather do: work for free and struggle and beg for resources from a community which is not interested in paying you, or get a piece of a $10billion pie?

Maybe it is time for FOSS supporters to start funding projects that get us what they want?

You can have a FOSS game that you have to pay for. FOSS refers generally to the source code. All the coding could be done openly in place of the engine licenses, there is a benefit here and it is a workable model but requires direction. You of course would have to pay for the content.

The benefits of this are:
1. There is still a way to make money exactly the same as before except costs are greatly reduced.
2. Portability comes naturally.
3. The code base gets the standard OSS benefits via Linus's law etc.
4. The community gets the benefit of quality code being available.

This still needs a lot of money to start or a corporate patron.

[billdotson]

they should seriously start working hard on a really good FOSS game and publicize the crap out of it. If there was one really popular and good FOSS game then more would be demanded and people wouldn't complain about the price of games because they would be free.. and if things in the game needed to be fixed someone could fix it or submit bugs, etc. to the FOSS devs. I like FOSS.. it takes the business out of software and makes software that people want or need without emptying their wallets

[justin whitaker]

they should seriously start working hard on a really good FOSS game and publicize the crap out of it. If there was one really popular and good FOSS game then more would be demanded and people wouldn't complain about the price of games because they would be free.. and if things in the game needed to be fixed someone could fix it or submit bugs, etc. to the FOSS devs. I like FOSS.. it takes the business out of software and makes software that people want or need without emptying their wallets

People still need to eat though. I have taken to donating my "gaming cash" (I'm addicted to WoW, and that is covered, so I don't have a game to buy for the forseeable future) to open source projects I like.

I think that that is a more wholistic way of dealing with FOSS v. Business. People should get something for their time, but if you cannot donate, then that's cool.

Perhaps is more people did this, we would see an open source triple A title like "Gears".

[G Morgan]

they should seriously start working hard on a really good FOSS game and publicize the crap out of it. If there was one really popular and good FOSS game then more would be demanded and people wouldn't complain about the price of games because they would be free.. and if things in the game needed to be fixed someone could fix it or submit bugs, etc. to the FOSS devs. I like FOSS.. it takes the business out of software and makes software that people want or need without emptying their wallets

Not as simple as that. A commercial quality game is a huge undertaking. M2:TW comes on 2 DVDs and takes up 11GB on my HDD. Ubuntu, itself a huge project, comes on a single CD and I don't think the OS has ever taken up 11GB on my HDD. Just shows the scale of what you are suggesting.

What is needed is serious organisation. A large website with books, lectures and tutorials. A solid centralised collection of available code with appropriate documentation around it. An array of development tools built around the various game engines. A standardised platform which to build against (the technology exists, just a matter of choosing some libraries). A consistent method of delivery (would make sense if built around a standard gaming platform).

That alone is a huge undertaking and would just be a beginning. It is without getting into the fact you need to attract talent. Outside of programmers you need all the various artists, actors and graphics people.

Could the community do this? Perhaps but I cannot see this area coming about spontaneously. We need somebody like ID games to come along and offer to sponsor the community. To achieve this we need to show that there is a benefit to them in doing so.

[tigerpants]

The real point is, games don't need to come on DVD's with huge installs of 3,4,5+ G's. Most of that is eyecandy and bling - total bloat. But without that bling, no one would buy the title to start with. It's a circular argument.

The whole point of a game is to entertain. Increasingly though, gameplay and entertainment plays second fiddle to how a game looks and sounds. Its like people that buy HiFi by how it looks - "Hello!!!! You listen to a Hifi dumbass!!!" It never ceases to amaze me, quite frankly. Same thing with games. Gamers have lost sight of the fact that games are meant to entertain.

I don't know what the answer is. There probably isn't one. All I know is, I won't be buying a games console and I won't be upgrading my PC to play them, as that will, inevitably involve purchasing Vista. As for gaming on Linux, well, I don't care quite frankly - I can take it or leave it. The real point isn't that it should be free on Linux, but that its good. If its good, then something is worth paying for. The problem is, there are too many things in life that aren't worth paying for, but we buy them all the same.

[G Morgan]

I agree entirely but we were talking about taking a successful FOSS game and publicising it. To do that it needs to fit the actual market rather than the one we would like see.

[cprofitt]

I think that PC games have suffered recently, but think that console games are doing just fine from what I can see. I lament the distillation of games down to graphical beauty and hope that game developers will start paying more attention to the quality of game play over the pretty factor.

I read an article about GPGPU that gave me hope that games on the PC could improve in that direction. The article talked about the power of GPUs to process parallel-data much faster than standard CPUs. Certainly the references given about improving MRI equipment and the potential boon to programs like Folding@home are good too.

The article (http://www.firingsquad.com/matrix/blog.asp/12941/409/NVIDIA_8800GTX_EXPOSED_AND_EXPLOITED)

I am just reading up on the references the author gave so I can't speak much to GPGPU yet, but it appears to hold great promise for real-world applications as well as improving games in non-graphical ways.

Myself I would love to learn enough so that I could harness GPUs to process the search for Lychrel numbers.

[%hMa@?b<C]

imo, the last great, worthwhile game was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time