This is exactly the case. Any industry that thrives does so by filling the needs of today's customers, not last year's. There is increasing variety, new games are either finding a niche or failing. Some of those "niches" are larger than the entire industry was closer to its founding. The endless angst about how this or that game is going to mean the end of everything and "people shouldn't do this" or "shouldn't support that" is complete bovine waste. There are more people playing more games every day, and the industry will continue to adapt to fill the customers' requirements.
Those people are moving towards mobile games by now, the type of players that came in with the internet mainstream age in the late 90s early 00s are playing on their IPADs now.
The console crowd still hangs on but the PC crowd is going back to the mid 90s now. It is particularly noticable with MMOs. MMOs that would have done greatly 5 or 10 years ago do very poorly now.
Candy crush and similar popular games are still games of course but something have hppened with PC games. More and more games release both on consoles and PCs today since they have to if they want as many copies sold as a few years back.
Gaming is indeed increasing in numbers but it isn't the games most of us here like to discuss. And with MMOs there have been a movement towards crowdfunded indie games lately, no larger Western publisher have a MMO in development. Daybreak is probably the largest one right now (assuming Undead labs/Microsofts zombie MMO is cancelled, not sure).
PC gaming is still growing in certain parts of the world, like China and South Korea but in the West we are more and more moving to a few huge games, sequels of already successful games and smaller indie games. Now that isn't really a bad thing unless you work for EA or Activision and small indie games can be huge fast like Minecraft.
I'm sorry are you saying there were more mmo players ten years ago than there are now? That's ridiculous!
Console are hanging on? Both the xb1 and ps4 have outpaced the previous generation box. Sorry do you even bother to look up actual facts to your comments or do you just guess?
Worried if you work for EA? Are you kidding they just posted record profits same with activision! Again a little Google search will help you before you post this stuff.
You might want to examine the facts yourself first before casting stones, the evidence does not support you.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The industry is fine and thriving it's not the developers that is the issue its those I mentioned above.
I would say it is a little less than fine. It is still recovering from a crash in 2013. Due to long production cycles it will take it a few years to get back on its feet.
Video game crash of '13 not sure what doom and gloom website you frequent but there was no crash in '13.
There was a crash, and it has caused companies to either go under, or consolidate. This is the industry re-adjusting. The last chart shows the growth of this activity, starting in 2013 and peaking in 2014.
Enjoy your Call of Duty 20, battlefield 8, Assassin's Creed 6, etc ,etc. The market for the most part is stagnant. You get a gem occasionally I'll give you that. But the rest of the time it's the same game repackaged and you know what?
That's what killed the industry last time.
This is correct... It's the same reason why fast food is really popular even though it is garbage and the main reason for obesity and diabetes.
People would rather eat dollar menu food and play shit churned out sequels of games.
There are no game connoisseurs so sadly the games today are designed for those lemmings that eat their big mac while shopping at walmart listening to Justin Bieber and believe that jesus is real. It's the middle america consumerists that continue to drive this county and market to the ground.
You have to look for the indy developer that breaks away from the mold and tries to do something different.
But yeah aside from that the gaming industry is a huge booming business... but so is McDonalds and Walmart... quantity doesn't = quality.
There's a sort of Zero sum fallacy that affects a lot of people's opinions, and you can see it at work in the gaming hobby. It's behind a lot of the loud fanboism and finger pointing arguments that seem to plague any discussion.
Many people seem to operate on the assumption that if game X is popular, then their favorite game Y is going to suffer. Or if one type of game dominates a genre, then other types are not going to be viable. It's a sort of "there can be only one..." mentality and it's poisonous.
This is probably driven quite a bit by attitudes at the larger game studios, which have corporate attitude towards everything. And it shows in their product. When one bad idea rears its ugly head, pretty soon it spreads like wildfire through the entire AAA segment as the people in charge fall all over themselves to make sure they are following "industry standard" and "best practices". It's a type of groupthink that is anathema to any kind of activity that is supposed to be fun. Games have to be made to be fun first and foremost, and the profits will follow. Not vice versa.
That's why the Indy game studios are the primordial soup of the next generation of games. The old ideas have been done to death, and because large organizations are never a cauldron of innovation it of course falls to the individuals with good ideas, as it always does. You cannot manufacture innovation. Large organizations show up later to exploit good ideas, they do not create them.
The current MMO market caters to non-MMO people. In this day and age of market segmentation a lot of talk goes on in corporate halls about swapping out customer bases when their product goes stagnant. This, instead of improving the product, is what you can expect from old, sclerotic institutions. Customers who support this exploitive and dismissive attitude towards the public are inexplicable. What kind of game hobbyist gets off on telling other people not to hope for more, not to look for better products on the market?
In any case, the game revolution continues despite calls on these boards for the world to stop right where it is. Indy studios, led by passionate individuals, will fumble and stumble blindly along and still succeed in mining out the gems of the ideas that will seed the next great generation of gaming. That's the way it is in any industry, and that's the way it is in life. Enough of the groupthought and rooting for the overdog.
The truth is Video Games have never been better, there has never been such a wide range of games available to us. The saying misery loves company and clearly there are some who can't understand sometimes you just grow out of a hobby. There is nothing wrong with that I remember when I was 7 and didn't like micro machines anymore. I can't believe I was more mature at 7 then some of the 50 year olds here who can't move on if they can't find a video game they enjoy.
I work in game industry and can tell you that this what you wrote above is exactly the core of the problem.
There are so many games right now, on average day there is 20 new games published on steam. And if we talk AAA titles the bar is rised so high with titles like Witcher 3 or GTA V, that if you dont have 500 people company with at least 300 million dollar investment , you are out of competition.
Do you read news ? Just this month : Gazzilion layoffs , Funcom is bankrupt and closing , Cryptic layoffs , Turbine closing servers and rumored to be on verge of closing , Pathfinder Online whole team fired. Thats just this month.
Right now working in game industry feels like episode of survivor
What you see a lot in these forums is false I agree. The haters and defenders go at it in every post. The people who are mad how the genre went to crap, and the overly invested fanboys who will defend stupidity with their last dying breath. Let me reiterate Fanboys are the worse. If you slight their company they will do everything to prove you false even when the fanboy is 99% wrong lol. Then you have the truly curious people looking for a game that never really looked at forums. They see the reviews and don't know what to make of it. Then there is the few who are in the gaming industry that read reviews to get a pulse on whats going on. They end up becoming rabid Fanboy posters that pretend they just love that certain game. They too are the worse but funny, because most of us see right through them. I myself fall under the mad the genre went to crap category. I'm like an agnostic if that makes sense. I believe there's a great mmo out there but until I actually see it I continue to act like a mmo atheist.
I would generally agree with the idea that gamers currently have access to a great variety of quality games, and that the future holds a lot of interesting promises. I don't think this applies to individual genres, however, as some of them continue to be reinvented in surprising ways on a regular basis, while others seem to stagnate. The decade long WoW chase seems like its come to an end, and the last few years for MMO's hasn't been as bad as it could have been. Still, the massively market continues to miss out on fantastic opportunities time and again, and is steadily becoming one of the more predictable, albeit most played, of the genres.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
Do you read news ? Just this month : Gazzilion layoffs , Funcom is bankrupt and closing , Cryptic layoffs , Turbine closing servers and rumored to be on verge of closing , Pathfinder Online whole team fired. Thats just this month.
Right now working in game industry feels like episode of survivor
Hardly breaking news is it though. Games companies that couldn't cut the mustard are closing/laying off staff.
LOTRO HAD to close servers. Having 29 servers for an 8 year old game is a bit to much.
Well, for MMORPG's I would say the genre is in transition. Big studios aren't making MMORPG and the cost are still to expensive to make a quality MMORPG without it being indie or focused. If some of these public fund and indie MMORPG's don't make it I don't know what's going to happen.
Its hard to say with the rest of game. Lots of mid/low level games are good and a few AAA that aren't total rehash.
Not gonna say that the rest of the MMO gamers are being left behind now too, but as loke pointed out, there is an increasing trend in western gaming towards mobile and casual gaming.
MMOs have a growing market share in gaming still, but that's in part due to the weird classification of some game types as MMOs, and in addition to that it transition eastern titles are going through that make more of them into online games. The reality is that a good chunk of the MMO market does not belong to the west and we will not see the benefit of it for the most part.
The genre with the biggest market growth for us? Those little games you play on your phone, not MMOs.
And there is a point that while we have a number of titles being released, they are not that strongly deviated from one another. Less innovation in the face of derivation. The variety people bemoan as missing is in some regards not a matter of it being too niche, but too underdeveloped.
Take the linked Neverwinter Nights MMO as a direct parable of this. That was one of the first graphical MMOs, derived from the AD&D rule system. MMO's like Meridian and Everquest followed in the wake of that title, mimicing many of it's core mechanics and tweaking them to produce their own title. That's far from the only vein of classic MMOs out there though. Asheron's Call, DAoC, even Ultima all had different rule systems and mechanics that heavily deviated from the standard set by that chain of titles. What they lacked was kinship and as a result a refinement of their concepts.
In other words, part of the issue is that aspects of many of the past titles were effectively "too new" to be used. They were rough and lacked the kind of refinement that comes with a lineage of development that those falling into the vein of Everquest and it's predecessors did. Big reason why WoW was designed like it was, as a step-wise improvement of the most tried and true vein of game design.
The thing is, that doesn't mean the other games were bad or truly niche game concepts. They were simply not up to the bar in terms of quality necessary. In order to reach that point though, people need to develop such titles. It's a catch-22 in terms of obtaining variety and innovative gameplay mechanics.
Minecraft is a big example of this. Voxels are not a new thing. They hearken back to the early days of computer development, as it was a way to organize and map data that was easy on the hardware. The downside was just how much memory it ate, which made it unfeasible for the time.
As a result, many projects reliant on voxels fell by the wayside. No big development happened with them and instead they only peeked out as a little study project occasionally. It wasn't until Minecraft showed up, utilizing the much expanded amount of memory our modern hardware has, that suddenly voxels were shown to be a viable game tool again. It took someone coming along and refining their design to display to the world, and suddenly something that was smaller than a niche in the gaming industry boomed into mass appeal.
When the game concepts aren't invested in, no duh they are going to be relegated to a small niche. It's not necessarily because there is not demand or otherwise, but because the development of the concepts into a AAA standard has yet to be achieved.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
So a quick look through these forums, most game forums and other sites and it's is easy to see the real issue with mmorpgs and video games in general is the vocal minority who litter forums with QQing.
The good news is those who QQ about games they don't play, games not being free enough, games are not the way they were back during 8bit and dial up, those who can't move on after a game they played closed and spend four failed years QQing about a game that took its place and those who think they are entitled to everything now are the minority.
The truth is Video Games have never been better, there has never been such a wide range of games available to us. The saying misery loves company and clearly there are some who can't understand sometimes you just grow out of a hobby. There is nothing wrong with that I remember when I was 7 and didn't like micro machines anymore. I can't believe I was more mature at 7 then some of the 50 year olds here who can't move on if they can't find a video game they enjoy.
The industry is fine and thriving it's not the developers that is the issue its those I mentioned above.
The real issue with mmorpgs and most other games is not the vocal minority, but the PUBLISHERS!!!! Plus the newer generation of mmo players are not the same as what started the industry.
I can't directly blame the developer, because they have guide lines they have to follow according to the publisher. This is why Kickstarter has taken off for games. Developers don't want publishers telling them how to create their games anymore, and how to "best make money". This is a big problem
Then you have players who repeatedly buy the same game every year. Call of duty, Battlefield. Granted its a newer game, better graphics probably, little more content, but its basically the same game. If they are having fun, im really happy for them. But this trend just creates the same rehashed games. Does not really force any creativity from AAA companies.
The mmo market is not the same due to people no longer wanting to invest as much time as before in games. This leads to what we call "cookie cutter" or "hand holding". This point, i can agree with in a sense. It shouldnt take forever to get somewhere in an mmo. However it should feel rewarding. This is what they forgot to put back into mmos. Also people are Idiots as a collective group. I want to play this free game because i feel $15 a month is too expensive. But then you spend more on cosmetic things. Like costumes. This leads to the Publisher saying to the Dev, "Hey! make more cosmetic stuff to sell! it's bringing in big bucks! Content? SCrew content. When cosmetic sales go down, then we will push a content patch, that will bring new players, and old players back. Then we can introduce new cosmetic stuff!". Gone are the days where you simply pay your monthly fee and you get content updates. Where the only time you had to spend more money was the expansion packs.
Following the above model, those of us who could care less about that, and care more about the story, group play, content, etc. We are getting screwed. The argument that we need to change with the times is just dumb. We see how badly the times are screwing us over, thus we protest. Yet since the younger generation knows no better, they say we are just old.
There have been some really great CONSOLE/ PC games that have come out. But as for MMORPGS... Crap in my opinion. I wonder if those people playing f2p games are really enjoying them still, or kinda zombiying them. mindlessly playing the games because of the amount they spent on it, no longer really enjoying it.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Interestingly enough, the OP's avatar has a locked gate image across it, does that mean he took a ban on his account?
Ha. I would guess you are correct, and personally I think it is well deserved if indeed that is the case. Kinda like the look and the whole idea. Lock 'em up!
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
If you would like to really dig into how the industry is doing (and, in relation, how MMORPGs are doing), just hit up the ESA's essential video game facts they release every year. It's a nifty little PDF that details who's buying what, and where.
The MMORPG is not doing well but SP and MP games are doing much better by comparison.
Just look at Steam numbers for MMO and SP games the numbers are quite disturbing. As an example LOTRO right now has 754 on, Rust 11,802. Skyrim 20,831. It is common across the board. SP and MP over RPGs is scary.
The MMORPG is not doing well but SP and MP games are doing much better by comparison.
Just look at Steam numbers for MMO and SP games the numbers are quite disturbing. As an example LOTRO right now has 754 on, Rust 11,802. Skyrim 20,831. It is common across the board. SP and MP over RPGs is scary.
Yes because people like me, those left behind, who want to play online MMOs are served online Single player RPGs, why would I bother playing? I dont play SPRPGs, in fact I dont play SP anything. So why would I play SP online games?
It seems European developers are doing far better than the US ones, in fact US developers seem to have focused on the general mainstream, 'accessible' gaming on portable platforms. That is probably where they see the money but that's just not for me.
The only US based developers game that I played recently was hearthstone.
Otherwise - Gajin, WarGaming, My.com with Obsidian, Harebrained Schemes, CCP, CD Projekt Red.
Maybe I am wrong, but my feeling is that there exists a kind of differentiation of who is going for which part of the market. Its not fully crystallized yet and there are overlaps but there seems to be a general sensibility forming between different developers and markets.
Right now games made by US developers (massive generalization) seem to be aimed at kids and casuals, while European developers seem to be hitting the audience that looks for a challenge. Asian developers again have their own sensibilities which occasionally work in the west. Of course, there are overlaps but looking at my own gaming history over the last few years I realized that I am mostly buying from European developers and being disappointed by the US ones, and I am always disappointed for the same reasons.
The reason I realized this is because I have a slight dislike for a certain country, and (stupid, I know) don't wont to buy anything from there, but find myself in the end mostly spending on games made there. So I thought, why is this happening?
OF course, this would need a deeper analysis, for now its just a theory.
The truth is Video Games have never been better, there has never been such a wide range of games available to us. The saying misery loves company and clearly there are some who can't understand sometimes you just grow out of a hobby. There is nothing wrong with that I remember when I was 7 and didn't like micro machines anymore. I can't believe I was more mature at 7 then some of the 50 year olds here who can't move on if they can't find a video game they enjoy.
I work in game industry and can tell you that this what you wrote above is exactly the core of the problem.
There are so many games right now, on average day there is 20 new games published on steam. And if we talk AAA titles the bar is rised so high with titles like Witcher 3 or GTA V, that if you dont have 500 people company with at least 300 million dollar investment , you are out of competition.
Do you read news ? Just this month : Gazzilion layoffs , Funcom is bankrupt and closing , Cryptic layoffs , Turbine closing servers and rumored to be on verge of closing , Pathfinder Online whole team fired. Thats just this month.
Right now working in game industry feels like episode of survivor
He's not talking about working in the industry. By EVERY other measure - number of releases, industry revenue, successful titles - every other measure is one of success.
That game developers don't know shit about how to manage a company is irrelevant. The industry thriving in spite of that is yet another measure of its amazingness.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I agree there has never been such a wide range of garbage available to us, well said. But how does that translate to we are in a better position then ever?
Call of Duty 25: Making a Dooty Assassin's Creed 22: The Ice Age Hitman: Re-re-reborn Borderlands 12: Claptrap's Revenge FarCry 16: Purple Rain Grand Theft Autohhhh fuckit: Again Saint's Row 69: Let's do each other Metal Gear Flaccid: Where's My Geritol Final Fantasy XXXIVVIIXX: Big Eyes, Small Mouth BioShock: Discworld Splinter Cell 33: Seriously, get a pair of tweezers Battlefield Mars: Cause we blew everything else the fuck up Total War: Anglo-Zanzibar Mass Effect: Shepherd's Ghost The Sims 24: Baltimore Slumlord Lego Conan: Forgotten IP's
Cause, like, there's so many original amazing games out there these days. Yep, we've never been in a better age for gaming.
In case you're wondering my eyes rolled so hard they fell out of my fucking face. Now I'm typing blind.
Sorry but if the industry was fine t here wouldnt be so many huge AA failures and pure crap games put out there by established dev companies.
The industry is rotten to the core, and the rot started with Publishers. Hopefully it will end when dev companies realize box copies are not worth needing a publisher for to get them in the different nations stores.
The internet and crowdfunding will change the industry for the better I think. Giving developers a way to produce the games they want to produce without some know nothing profiteering suit telling them what to do is a good thing.
Also you start out by stating the industry is fine, and then finish by saying video games are great now. For every great title out now, there are 1000 pure shit titles, so really you are just cherry picking me thinks.
Except the truth is that some elements from older games are no longer available, and that people haven't fallen out of love with their hobby but cant find enough quality that they used to. But go ahead and blame the customers, clients or players however you want to call them.
Why bash the gamers that take an effort to share their desires and set down in writing what they would like and be willing to pay for. When that happens about the products that my company provides we are extremely grateful as it makes our jobs easier.
I have tried all modern MMOs and think they are terribly boring, so I play a 10 year old one. Unfortunately the UI is clunky, the graphics are dated but the worst is the lack of players. So I have tried everything else on the market and nothing was as good. Honorable mentions would be Eve which kept me for over a year and AoC about 2 months. The rest couldn't manage more than a few hours.
So I play a 10 year old one that gives me the play style that I crave, group based, challenging and with relatively open world, with no endless quest lines and ability to solo everything.
Skyforge has grabbed me for 4-5 days now and thats awesome but I can tell that it lacks certain things and it wont last long, probably a month but I am so happy and grateful when that happens these days.
You mean FFA PvP? Full loot of player corpse? Standing in a position for hours and farming the same mob over and over again? Don't you worry, game like these are coming too. They will just be niche with 1000 or 2000 players. Hope you enjoy them.
On a completely unrelated note : Our government is trying really hard to make minimum age at which girls can be married to 18. But there are people who want to go back to "golden age" where girls could be married at 9. "Golden Age" must be nice for some people..
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
So a quick look through these forums, most game forums and other sites and it's is easy to see the real issue with mmorpgs and video games in general is the vocal minority who litter forums with QQing.
The good news is those who QQ about games they don't play, games not being free enough, games are not the way they were back during 8bit and dial up, those who can't move on after a game they played closed and spend four failed years QQing about a game that took its place and those who think they are entitled to everything now are the minority.
The truth is Video Games have never been better, there has never been such a wide range of games available to us. The saying misery loves company and clearly there are some who can't understand sometimes you just grow out of a hobby. There is nothing wrong with that I remember when I was 7 and didn't like micro machines anymore. I can't believe I was more mature at 7 then some of the 50 year olds here who can't move on if they can't find a video game they enjoy.
The industry is fine and thriving it's not the developers that is the issue its those I mentioned above.
I have to agree with you on this, time has changed, players' taste changed, a new breed of gamers came into market, gamers who are able to adjust to new idea and new kind of mechanics have also entered the market. It is far easier to cater to these kind of gamers and current industry or at least majority of this industry are trying to cater to the new market. It is a given that improvement of technology will improve not only life but also gaming but there is a very niche crowd who wants gaming to stay back in 1995, that is not a good idea and industry veterans know it, thus they moved on from these "back dated" gamers. those companies that are suffering now, they are suffering because some of them was trying to cater to to those back dated gamers by bringing back "golden age" and some of them are suffering simply because they promised a lot to their customers but failed to provide even 5%. Industry as it is now, it has done magnificent and blessed us with so many great games over the last several years and in coming years they will provide even greater games. Looking forward to the coming years and change they will bring.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
What some developers and movie makers are finally starting to take note of, is the "niche" market of boomers that were not only the ones who got the ball rolling on both console and online gaming, but are likely a fairly large segment of the gaming/movie market that has been ignored as everyone has been too busy chasing after the "new" money, the ones who can't live without their cell phones and laptops, oops that should now read tablets. I call them the F2P generation(I have two of them still living at home...). www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/imax-touts-baby-boomers-as-821557
This "boomer"(I use the term lightly since some Gen X falls here as well) market includes the pen and paper aficionados, early console gamers which supported rpgs like the Ultima series, Dragon Quest/Warrior, FF, BoF, Zelda, etc. and were the first online gamers in UO, Tibia, EQ, etc.
Sooo, if you're in the business to make and sell pc games and want to woo a certain market/demographic(ie. the one that is still the largest supporter of desktops that are IMO the only way to play online) that has been largely ignored and is hungry for a product that both entertains and allows a means to socialize(some even do so while at work with our new work at home society), then what kind of games are you going to make?
IMO, it surely isn't jrpgs with their childlike personas and rainbow pooping unicorns, or even the still mindboggling to me popular billionth rehashed action sports games(assuming you could even get the rights to use popular team logos), and I doubt you will even be going after the Mario crowd, it will be to produce games that not only evoke nostalgia to draw these early gamers in, once again, but also provide a product that those consumers will willingly spend their money on(a core product, subscriptions, expansions and yes, even cosmetic cash shops let alone all the real life stuff like mugs, mousepads, t-shirts, and so on(hint, boomers usually have nothing left to spend their money on but their "hobbies").
The key is to NOT get so greedy that you kill the golden goose, consumers can be very unforgiving once you've lost their trust.
Although phrased in a rather trollish manner; I do agree that overall the variety and number of games available today is better than ever before.
Games have necessarily changed, and I think this is largely as a result in advances in technology, which allows both faster access to the internet and improved graphics/ twitchy gameplay. No longer do we need to rely on the timesinks and tediously slow tab targetting of old, we can now have games that are fun in terms of gameplay.
Would I roll back the clock? With regard to certain elements I would, I think that some immersion and social aspects of MMOs have been lost; but overall I'll take fun gameplay 9/10.
I agree there has never been such a wide range of garbage available to us, well said. But how does that translate to we are in a better position then ever?
Nintendo crash of 1983.
But standing on the soapbox and shouting "the end is nigh" won't convince anybody. Nor should it.
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"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
http://gamepolitics.com/2013/10/21/report-video-game-industry-mergers-and-acquisitions-top-5-billion-2013/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/23/game-industry-acquisition-deals-turned-red-hot-in-the-last-12-months-exclusive/
http://marketrealist.com/2014/09/lucrative-sector-look-asias-gaming-markets/
http://www.statista.com/statistics/259455/value-of-games-industry-mergers-and-acquisitions-worldwide/
There was a crash, and it has caused companies to either go under, or consolidate. This is the industry re-adjusting. The last chart shows the growth of this activity, starting in 2013 and peaking in 2014.
People would rather eat dollar menu food and play shit churned out sequels of games.
There are no game connoisseurs so sadly the games today are designed for those lemmings that eat their big mac while shopping at walmart listening to Justin Bieber and believe that jesus is real. It's the middle america consumerists that continue to drive this county and market to the ground.
You have to look for the indy developer that breaks away from the mold and tries to do something different.
But yeah aside from that the gaming industry is a huge booming business... but so is McDonalds and Walmart... quantity doesn't = quality.
What are your other Hobbies?
Gaming is Dirt Cheap compared to this...
Many people seem to operate on the assumption that if game X is popular, then their favorite game Y is going to suffer. Or if one type of game dominates a genre, then other types are not going to be viable. It's a sort of "there can be only one..." mentality and it's poisonous.
This is probably driven quite a bit by attitudes at the larger game studios, which have corporate attitude towards everything. And it shows in their product. When one bad idea rears its ugly head, pretty soon it spreads like wildfire through the entire AAA segment as the people in charge fall all over themselves to make sure they are following "industry standard" and "best practices". It's a type of groupthink that is anathema to any kind of activity that is supposed to be fun. Games have to be made to be fun first and foremost, and the profits will follow. Not vice versa.
That's why the Indy game studios are the primordial soup of the next generation of games. The old ideas have been done to death, and because large organizations are never a cauldron of innovation it of course falls to the individuals with good ideas, as it always does. You cannot manufacture innovation. Large organizations show up later to exploit good ideas, they do not create them.
The current MMO market caters to non-MMO people. In this day and age of market segmentation a lot of talk goes on in corporate halls about swapping out customer bases when their product goes stagnant. This, instead of improving the product, is what you can expect from old, sclerotic institutions. Customers who support this exploitive and dismissive attitude towards the public are inexplicable. What kind of game hobbyist gets off on telling other people not to hope for more, not to look for better products on the market?
In any case, the game revolution continues despite calls on these boards for the world to stop right where it is. Indy studios, led by passionate individuals, will fumble and stumble blindly along and still succeed in mining out the gems of the ideas that will seed the next great generation of gaming. That's the way it is in any industry, and that's the way it is in life. Enough of the groupthought and rooting for the overdog.
Cheers...
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
LOTRO HAD to close servers. Having 29 servers for an 8 year old game is a bit to much.
Its hard to say with the rest of game. Lots of mid/low level games are good and a few AAA that aren't total rehash.
MMOs have a growing market share in gaming still, but that's in part due to the weird classification of some game types as MMOs, and in addition to that it transition eastern titles are going through that make more of them into online games. The reality is that a good chunk of the MMO market does not belong to the west and we will not see the benefit of it for the most part.
The genre with the biggest market growth for us? Those little games you play on your phone, not MMOs.
And there is a point that while we have a number of titles being released, they are not that strongly deviated from one another. Less innovation in the face of derivation. The variety people bemoan as missing is in some regards not a matter of it being too niche, but too underdeveloped.
Take the linked Neverwinter Nights MMO as a direct parable of this. That was one of the first graphical MMOs, derived from the AD&D rule system. MMO's like Meridian and Everquest followed in the wake of that title, mimicing many of it's core mechanics and tweaking them to produce their own title. That's far from the only vein of classic MMOs out there though. Asheron's Call, DAoC, even Ultima all had different rule systems and mechanics that heavily deviated from the standard set by that chain of titles. What they lacked was kinship and as a result a refinement of their concepts.
In other words, part of the issue is that aspects of many of the past titles were effectively "too new" to be used. They were rough and lacked the kind of refinement that comes with a lineage of development that those falling into the vein of Everquest and it's predecessors did. Big reason why WoW was designed like it was, as a step-wise improvement of the most tried and true vein of game design.
The thing is, that doesn't mean the other games were bad or truly niche game concepts. They were simply not up to the bar in terms of quality necessary. In order to reach that point though, people need to develop such titles. It's a catch-22 in terms of obtaining variety and innovative gameplay mechanics.
Minecraft is a big example of this. Voxels are not a new thing. They hearken back to the early days of computer development, as it was a way to organize and map data that was easy on the hardware. The downside was just how much memory it ate, which made it unfeasible for the time.
As a result, many projects reliant on voxels fell by the wayside. No big development happened with them and instead they only peeked out as a little study project occasionally. It wasn't until Minecraft showed up, utilizing the much expanded amount of memory our modern hardware has, that suddenly voxels were shown to be a viable game tool again. It took someone coming along and refining their design to display to the world, and suddenly something that was smaller than a niche in the gaming industry boomed into mass appeal.
When the game concepts aren't invested in, no duh they are going to be relegated to a small niche. It's not necessarily because there is not demand or otherwise, but because the development of the concepts into a AAA standard has yet to be achieved.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
I can't directly blame the developer, because they have guide lines they have to follow according to the publisher. This is why Kickstarter has taken off for games. Developers don't want publishers telling them how to create their games anymore, and how to "best make money". This is a big problem
Then you have players who repeatedly buy the same game every year. Call of duty, Battlefield. Granted its a newer game, better graphics probably, little more content, but its basically the same game. If they are having fun, im really happy for them. But this trend just creates the same rehashed games. Does not really force any creativity from AAA companies.
The mmo market is not the same due to people no longer wanting to invest as much time as before in games. This leads to what we call "cookie cutter" or "hand holding". This point, i can agree with in a sense. It shouldnt take forever to get somewhere in an mmo. However it should feel rewarding. This is what they forgot to put back into mmos. Also people are Idiots as a collective group. I want to play this free game because i feel $15 a month is too expensive. But then you spend more on cosmetic things. Like costumes. This leads to the Publisher saying to the Dev, "Hey! make more cosmetic stuff to sell! it's bringing in big bucks! Content? SCrew content. When cosmetic sales go down, then we will push a content patch, that will bring new players, and old players back. Then we can introduce new cosmetic stuff!". Gone are the days where you simply pay your monthly fee and you get content updates. Where the only time you had to spend more money was the expansion packs.
Following the above model, those of us who could care less about that, and care more about the story, group play, content, etc. We are getting screwed. The argument that we need to change with the times is just dumb. We see how badly the times are screwing us over, thus we protest. Yet since the younger generation knows no better, they say we are just old.
There have been some really great CONSOLE/ PC games that have come out. But as for MMORPGS... Crap in my opinion. I wonder if those people playing f2p games are really enjoying them still, or kinda zombiying them. mindlessly playing the games because of the amount they spent on it, no longer really enjoying it.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Do some more research and come back.
The MMORPG is not doing well but SP and MP games are doing much better by comparison.
Just look at Steam numbers for MMO and SP games the numbers are quite disturbing. As an example LOTRO right now has 754 on, Rust 11,802. Skyrim 20,831. It is common across the board. SP and MP over RPGs is scary.
If you are interested in making a MMO maybe visit my page to get a free open source engine.
It seems European developers are doing far better than the US ones, in fact US developers seem to have focused on the general mainstream, 'accessible' gaming on portable platforms. That is probably where they see the money but that's just not for me.
The only US based developers game that I played recently was hearthstone.
Otherwise - Gajin, WarGaming, My.com with Obsidian, Harebrained Schemes, CCP, CD Projekt Red.
Maybe I am wrong, but my feeling is that there exists a kind of differentiation of who is going for which part of the market. Its not fully crystallized yet and there are overlaps but there seems to be a general sensibility forming between different developers and markets.
Right now games made by US developers (massive generalization) seem to be aimed at kids and casuals, while European developers seem to be hitting the audience that looks for a challenge. Asian developers again have their own sensibilities which occasionally work in the west. Of course, there are overlaps but looking at my own gaming history over the last few years I realized that I am mostly buying from European developers and being disappointed by the US ones, and I am always disappointed for the same reasons.
The reason I realized this is because I have a slight dislike for a certain country, and (stupid, I know) don't wont to buy anything from there, but find myself in the end mostly spending on games made there. So I thought, why is this happening?
OF course, this would need a deeper analysis, for now its just a theory.
That game developers don't know shit about how to manage a company is irrelevant. The industry thriving in spite of that is yet another measure of its amazingness.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Call of Duty 25: Making a Dooty
Assassin's Creed 22: The Ice Age
Hitman: Re-re-reborn
Borderlands 12: Claptrap's Revenge
FarCry 16: Purple Rain
Grand Theft Autohhhh fuckit: Again
Saint's Row 69: Let's do each other
Metal Gear Flaccid: Where's My Geritol
Final Fantasy XXXIVVIIXX: Big Eyes, Small Mouth
BioShock: Discworld
Splinter Cell 33: Seriously, get a pair of tweezers
Battlefield Mars: Cause we blew everything else the fuck up
Total War: Anglo-Zanzibar
Mass Effect: Shepherd's Ghost
The Sims 24: Baltimore Slumlord
Lego Conan: Forgotten IP's
Cause, like, there's so many original amazing games out there these days. Yep, we've never been in a better age for gaming.
In case you're wondering my eyes rolled so hard they fell out of my fucking face. Now I'm typing blind.
The industry is rotten to the core, and the rot started with Publishers. Hopefully it will end when dev companies realize box copies are not worth needing a publisher for to get them in the different nations stores.
The internet and crowdfunding will change the industry for the better I think. Giving developers a way to produce the games they want to produce without some know nothing profiteering suit telling them what to do is a good thing.
Also you start out by stating the industry is fine, and then finish by saying video games are great now. For every great title out now, there are 1000 pure shit titles, so really you are just cherry picking me thinks.
On a completely unrelated note : Our government is trying really hard to make minimum age at which girls can be married to 18. But there are people who want to go back to "golden age" where girls could be married at 9. "Golden Age" must be nice for some people..
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
What some developers and movie makers are finally starting to take note of, is the "niche" market of boomers that were not only the ones who got the ball rolling on both console and online gaming, but are likely a fairly large segment of the gaming/movie market that has been ignored as everyone has been too busy chasing after the "new" money, the ones who can't live without their cell phones and laptops, oops that should now read tablets. I call them the F2P generation(I have two of them still living at home...). www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/imax-touts-baby-boomers-as-821557
This "boomer"(I use the term lightly since some Gen X falls here as well) market includes the pen and paper aficionados, early console gamers which supported rpgs like the Ultima series, Dragon Quest/Warrior, FF, BoF, Zelda, etc. and were the first online gamers in UO, Tibia, EQ, etc.
Sooo, if you're in the business to make and sell pc games and want to woo a certain market/demographic(ie. the one that is still the largest supporter of desktops that are IMO the only way to play online) that has been largely ignored and is hungry for a product that both entertains and allows a means to socialize(some even do so while at work with our new work at home society), then what kind of games are you going to make?
IMO, it surely isn't jrpgs with their childlike personas and rainbow pooping unicorns, or even the still mindboggling to me popular billionth rehashed action sports games(assuming you could even get the rights to use popular team logos), and I doubt you will even be going after the Mario crowd, it will be to produce games that not only evoke nostalgia to draw these early gamers in, once again, but also provide a product that those consumers will willingly spend their money on(a core product, subscriptions, expansions and yes, even cosmetic cash shops let alone all the real life stuff like mugs, mousepads, t-shirts, and so on(hint, boomers usually have nothing left to spend their money on but their "hobbies").
The key is to NOT get so greedy that you kill the golden goose, consumers can be very unforgiving once you've lost their trust.
Games have necessarily changed, and I think this is largely as a result in advances in technology, which allows both faster access to the internet and improved graphics/ twitchy gameplay. No longer do we need to rely on the timesinks and tediously slow tab targetting of old, we can now have games that are fun in terms of gameplay.
Would I roll back the clock? With regard to certain elements I would, I think that some immersion and social aspects of MMOs have been lost; but overall I'll take fun gameplay 9/10.
But standing on the soapbox and shouting "the end is nigh" won't convince anybody. Nor should it.