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What cau$ed the decline?

DraQ

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I bet Oblivion too - it was like a kick in the balls in every single aspect (maybe except for modability ot this). Other shit games of this times were like "ok, it's not good, but who cares", Oblivion was like "Why everyone is trying to convince me this shit is actually good?" Bad game is bad game (U9 for example, or M&M 9 to stay with 9 series), but bad game with all 10's in every single gamers magazine is like red alert for gaming industry.
It still doesn't mean it was *THE* patient zero. At best it was when the decline hit with full force.

Oblivion is when I first noticed that game "journalism" was a hoax
For me it was Diablo 2, but never was it so apparent as with Oblivion.
Good post. :salute:
 

pippin

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Vidya is a business, so publishers will always be looking for the next big hit. Sleeper hits are dangerous and cult classics are only interesting for certain retailers like GoG. That's why EA is being shady with the launch sales for DA:I, saying it was the best Bio launch, but still appling powerful discounts for an AAA title just weeks after it was released. First it was New Years' sale, then it had another discount on Valentine Day's weekend. The problem is the only reference suit people have is the top 10 sales lists, which is obviously plagued by popamole, so they won't be willing to risk their money with a project which is not 100% sure to be a best seller. It's not necesssarily a thing of vg being a risky business, it's mostly related to publishers wanting to reach Call of Duty purchase numbers.
 

DraQ

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I think what's even more interesting is to think of the flip side of this question: what caused the incline?

Think about it...the Internet has been around for a while. Why did it take until 2012 for Kickstarter?
Kickstarter allowed people to vote with their wallets for games not yet existing.

Also horror vacui - the more AAAAAAA+ gaming advances (in the direction of its choosing, at least), the more unoccupied space it leaves behind. Add to this that while the costs of AAAAA+ game are increasing, the cost of a unit of given quality content are steadily dropping due to ever improving tools. So we may end up seeing turn of the century quality and scope games, both 2D and 3D developed on fraction of budget, yet rivaling the classics.
 

Mustawd

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Vidya is a business, so publishers will always be looking for the next big hit. Sleeper hits are dangerous and cult classics are only interesting for certain retailers like GoG. That's why EA is being shady with the launch sales for DA:I, saying it was the best Bio launch, but still appling powerful discounts for an AAA title just weeks after it was released. First it was New Years' sale, then it had another discount on Valentine Day's weekend. The problem is the only reference suit people have is the top 10 sales lists, which is obviously plagued by popamole, so they won't be willing to risk their money with a project which is not 100% sure to be a best seller. It's not necesssarily a thing of vg being a risky business, it's mostly related to publishers wanting to reach Call of Duty purchase numbers.


That's fine. But why aren't there niche publishers? There certainly is for books.
 

Machocruz

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On graphics and graphics whores:

Good graphics doesn't always mean the highest technical standard. The most powerful consoles rarely win, Crysis games don't dominate sales charts, etc. But if you can supply good graphic design, or come up with the coolest visual ideas and tricks, you can impress the average person well enough. This is why I prefer to use the umbrella term "spectacle" now. And your spectacle just has to be good enough and available at the right price. There is a minimum standard. Most AAA games meet it.

And why go through the trouble of asking someone to install a graphics card, waiting for them to get around to it, when they can just go down to the shop and get "good enough"?
 

Trodat

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Vidya is a business, so publishers will always be looking for the next big hit. Sleeper hits are dangerous and cult classics are only interesting for certain retailers like GoG. That's why EA is being shady with the launch sales for DA:I, saying it was the best Bio launch, but still appling powerful discounts for an AAA title just weeks after it was released. First it was New Years' sale, then it had another discount on Valentine Day's weekend. The problem is the only reference suit people have is the top 10 sales lists, which is obviously plagued by popamole, so they won't be willing to risk their money with a project which is not 100% sure to be a best seller. It's not necesssarily a thing of vg being a risky business, it's mostly related to publishers wanting to reach Call of Duty purchase numbers.


That's fine. But why aren't there niche publishers? There certainly is for books.

There are companies like Paradox that I think would qualify.
 

Telengard

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That's fine. But why aren't there niche publishers? There certainly is for books.
Despite appearances, publishers actually do fund a range of game levels. They usually have multiple projects going at each of the levels of 5-10 million for small studio, 10-20 million for medium, and 20+ for large. A few even do a couple budget titles (under 5 mil) here and there.

Here's the issue for RPGs, though. Take a step back and look at the funding pattern for the Kickstarter games. They got budget-tier level of investment by getting individuals to pony up upwards of $500 (or even more) on a single game. Now, publishers wish they do that (wish it real bad), but they take a lot of heat just for DLC milking, much less trying to raise the price on the base game. Then look at the number of backers - it's in the tens of thousands. Publishers are looking to move hundreds of thousands, usually millions, not tens of thousands.

Now, publishers could do a lot more budget level games. But, people don't actually like budget level games. I mean, just look at the amount of complaining that is done about these games now, and that's with the indie shield protecting them. A publisher doing that level of game gets raked over the coals. And then on top of that, they have to slap a budget price on it, not whatever-you-can-pay and get a few $500, not $60, nor even $30, But $10-$25 depending, causing them to make even less money.
 

Mustawd

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That's fine. But why aren't there niche publishers? There certainly is for books.
Despite appearances, publishers actually do fund a range of game levels. They usually have multiple projects going at each of the levels of 5-10 million for small studio, 10-20 million for medium, and 20+ for large. A few even do a couple budget titles (under 5 mil) here and there.

Here's the issue for RPGs, though. Take a step back and look at the funding pattern for the Kickstarter games. They got budget-tier level of investment by getting individuals to pony up upwards of $500 (or even more) on a single game. Now, publishers wish they do that (wish it real bad), but they take a lot of heat just for DLC milking, much less trying to raise the price on the base game. Then look at the number of backers - it's in the tens of thousands. Publishers are looking to move hundreds of thousands, usually millions, not tens of thousands.

Now, publishers could do a lot more budget level games. But, people don't actually like budget level games. I mean, just look at the amount of complaining that is done about these games now, and that's with the indie shield protecting them. A publisher doing that level of game gets raked over the coals. And then on top of that, they have to slap a budget price on it, not whatever-you-can-pay and get a few $500, not $60, nor even $30, But $10-$25 depending, causing them to make even less money.


This rings pretty true. Niche winemakers, for instance, DO have to charge more for their products due to a smaller client base. Ditto for many other types of niche/cult products.

So basically, we don't have good niche games because we, as gamers, are a cheap bunch. :negative:
 

Unkillable Cat

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Thanks to everyone for naming the developers that are still in business since 20+ and 30+ years ago, even I didn't know that so many of them were still around.

The point remains, however, that many of them only survived because of the reasons I mentioned, they were either well established in other fields and had the financial backing to take risks, or went through corporate hell to survive as a name-only enterprise or a subsidiary of a larger entity. Psygnosis, for example, was still around last year (or was it 2013?) but when they were shut down they had a completely different name.

One other 'home computer' developer that I had forgotten about since the early 90s: DMA, of Lemmings fame. Nowadays they go by the name Rockstar.
 

Telengard

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Guys can somebody fucking explain to me how the development costs have risen so much? As far as I understand it, the development cost is the salary of the people in the office, the office itself and the shit like free coffee mugs for every office worker. Where is the rise? What more do they need than they needed before? I don't believe these claims about the humongous costs through the roof. All the money goes somewhere else, most likely the PR and some internal corruption.

Music, voice acting, cinematics, getting third party devs to do ports and other stuff, etc.
hm, so the older games didn't have music, cinematics and ports?
The devil is in the details, mon.

A few midi ditties don't cost very much. 10 full-on orchestrals and a fully-voiced intro pop song costs quite a bit.

This guy doesn't cost very much to make and animate (he swings his sword! - so cool).

This guy can cost quite a bit to make and animate.


A painted box doesn't cost that much to make (the way early 3d games were made). A transparent box surrounded by a detailed background shell, railings, and lots of mixed details can get pretty expensive.

Now, new tools do reduce the cost of using old tech, but that is true every year all the way back to the 70s, and the tech race ever marches forwards beyond the tools, with graphics whores demanding ever more detail to be added to the people, to the background, to the textures, to the number of unique objects, to the number of unique animations, and so on.
 

Keldryn

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Visual assets that have to look good on a 1920x1080 50" HDTV are time-consuming and very expensive to produce. That big screen is unforgiving. There was a dramatic spike in game budgets that coincided with the arrival of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. AAA games have massive art requirements, to the point where the development teams often have a dozen artists and still have to outsource much of the art for props, background elements, and incidental characters. Everything has gotten more expensive, but the artwork makes up a disproportionate amount of that increase.
 

Avellion

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All this because gamer's standards are rising.

As in, they demand more flash, but are completely fine with lowered substance.
 
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Kinda late to the party but I just saw the thread. My take on it is that the decline was caused by two separate processes. The first was the increase in game budgets and the second was the expansion of the target audience for games.

Around that time, there was a lot of pressure for video games to become 3D even if early 3D games looked worse than 2D (e.g. Age of Empires 2 vs. Warcraft III). There weren't a lot of 3rd party tools and engines for that either, so it was a lot more expensive to build or license and modify a 3D engine, and that in turn soon lead to physics in games, another costly thing. 3D games also led to other expenses, for example reading tons of dialogue text in Planescape: Torment feels fine, but in a 3D first person game like Morrowind, it felt very uncanny valley-like. So now, most newer games have full voice overs with actors, which is even more expensive when you consider that they need to hire actors to read the text in every localized language version. When you add all of these things up, the cost of making games skyrocketed, and smaller publishers that were around in late 90s and earlier started going under, unable to finance these newer games and forced to sell out to larger publishing companies such as EA and Activision. These earlier smaller publishers were led by people who might have had some business skills, but were still game enthusiasts at heart, because they got into the industry before there was big money in it. So while their decisions might have had some business logic in them, they also had to do with making high quality games. The larger publishers that emerged after this phase, on the other hand, were pretty much run by businessmen who had no connection to actual gaming. Many of them have probably never played a game in their entire lives, and their decisions were strictly financial, business decisions.

In parallel, the target audience for PC games was exploding. With its architecture more similar to the PC than any other previous console, and with Microsoft's backing, XBox allowed PC developers to simultaneously develop for multiple platforms with minimal increase in cost, a trend that only grew stronger with subsequent console generations. But that wasn't the only thing happening. In late 90s/early 2000s, PCs were still not ubiquitous in homes, and not everyone that had them used them for gaming. So PC gamers in that era and earlier ones were relatively sophisticated people. But over time, PCs became more and more common, a lot of people who grew up on Nintendos were more open to playing games as adults than previous generations, and gaming in general lost its stigma, and became an acceptable thing to do. So throughout the 2000s, the PC gaming audience expanded to include a lot of more casual gamers with less sophisticated tastes when it came to games.

When these two phenomena combined, the result was the profit driven publishers chasing the largest possible source of profit, and the complete simplification of games. What's happening right now with Kickstarter, Steam Greenlight, and general indie development is that the original sophisticated audience for PC games hasn't gone anywhere, and that niche is still there. Once the dust settled from the big publishers chasing all the big money ideas and some sort of equilibrium was reached, that allowed people to see the niches and split out to service them, as generally tends to happen in any kind of market. But to do this, since games are still very expensive to make, these niche developers generally have to make sacrifices, such as worse graphics.
 

rezaf

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So basically, we don't have good niche games because we, as gamers, are a cheap bunch. :negative:

Basically, I think you spelled out the unfortunate truth there Mustawd. There are a few notable exceptions - wargames come to mind, some of which have a pretty outrageous price tag - but by and large, even among gaming enthusiasts, the term "Ill buy it when it goes on a Steam sale" is eerily omnipresent. You can't sell a "quality game" made with effort to cater game enthusiasts of a particular genre like you could sell a wine, or a meal, a car, or a dress, a pair of shoes or whatever other physical good comes to mind.
Well, you can try, but chances are you can't charge a price high enough to make it worth your wile.

Maybe, one day, there will be a state fund financing deep RPGs with good mechanics like the way (in many countries) everyone is forced to pay for opera houses and theatres with his taxes even if he doesn't care one bit about them...
Heh, ok, that's not very likely, but isn't the audience for operas and the audience for quality RPGs (just to pick the genre that seems obvious for these parts) kinda in a similar camp?
If you like music in general, I guess you can listen to Taylor Swift, and if you like RPGs in general, I guess you can play Diablo 3, but if you have a more sophisitcated taste ...
_____
rezaf
 

Modron

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Been a long time since I D1P anything really, only the company where I would just blindly buy their games outright was Troika, off the top of my head since they closed their doors I have really only purchased Primordia, Memoria, FTL, FO: NV and probably one of the Deponia games on release. Oh and I guess I Morgothed some kickstarter stuff technically :D.

Make stuff I'll love and I will buy it full price but since good rpgs are not regularly released and this thing is kind of a toaster I don't really have any incentive not to wait for 50-75% specially when I am only about 2/3 of the way done with my steam catalog, not to mention my gog backlog. I will be playing games until my heart explodes.
 

Night Goat

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_____
rezaf
Rezaf, do you realize that you've manually typed your moniker around 50 times on this forum alone? Are you aware that most modern forum software can automatically attach a signature to your messages? Do you have OCD, by chance?

Qwinn
 

rezaf

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Rezaf, do you realize that you've manually typed your moniker around 50 times on this forum alone? Are you aware that most modern forum software can automatically attach a signature to your messages? Do you have OCD, by chance?

Lol, it's kinda a bad habit from a site which didn't allow signatures. When I first acquired it, it coincided with a (horrible) source control software thingy that was used in the company I worked at the time, in which every developer would sign his submittals in such fashion as to avoid confusion.

In a forum, this stuff is not necessary in the first place, is it? I mean, my user name is prominently featured right to the left of the post, isn't it?

I'll try to drop the habit if it bothers you guys.
___ ... oh, wait.

Edit: On second thought, maybe I should keep it up just to annoy people that disable forum signatures and still have to read mine because it's typed out and not an automated signature? Decisions decisions...
 
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Night Goat

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Edit: On second thought, maybe I should keep it up just to annoy people that disable forum signatures and still have to read mine because it's typed out and not an automated signature? Decisions decisions...
I like the way you think.
 
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The larger publishers that emerged after this phase, on the other hand, were pretty much run by businessmen who had no connection to actual gaming. Many of them have probably never played a game in their entire lives, and their decisions were strictly financial, business decisions.
Why leaves an interesting question: after business side of those corporations will get into hands of people who were playing games from their youth(generation change), will they produce better games? Those gamesr may still be infected by popamole, through....
 

Avellion

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The larger publishers that emerged after this phase, on the other hand, were pretty much run by businessmen who had no connection to actual gaming. Many of them have probably never played a game in their entire lives, and their decisions were strictly financial, business decisions.
Why leaves an interesting question: after business side of those corporations will get into hands of people who were playing games from their youth(generation change), will they produce better games? Those gamesr may still be infected by popamole, through....
The people that played Gears of War in their childhood (9s to 10s) will now be 18. Chances are, they have been infected by the popamole.

I have seen gamers go around touting Neverwinter Nights and Kotor as true old school too. With the Goldbox games, Ultima and Wizardry being nothing more than outdated ugly 2D products for "loser neckbeards" and "elitist pricks"... assuming they have even heard of them. That and discard games because they had someone die in the first battle. Thankfully there is the occasional glimmer of hope. I managed to get someone born in the 21st century to be interested in old school RPGs (and he even enjoys them more than what the AAA rpg genre devolved into).
 

DraQ

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(...) Eh, kids these days...


vs


Fixed.

Good job for posting what amounts to intro, in most other FPS the corresponding part would have been an FMV or in-engine cutscene, if at all present.
It's not really supposed to have gameplay. It's supposed to set the scene up for the gameplay.
The reason why intro in HL was employing the normal gameplay mechanics was seamlessness.
Agreed that HL intro is a bit drawn out, but I suppose it was the way to get the player into the mood and it worked.

Not a interactive movie, but you can't deny that Half-Life popularized story-driven, "immersive" shooters.

Yeah, how awful that HL helped popularize a less abstract kind of FPS (along with SiN, System Shock and a few others).

You know what were the major draws of HL back then?
  • AI, both in terms of quality and diversity - it was one of the only two really good FPS AIs back then, maybe less smart and environmentally aware than that of Unreal, but compensating with more diversity (different behavior and using different senses to keep track of the surroundings) and better teamwork.
  • gunplay and the rest of gameplay mechanics - HL gunplay and hit mechanics was unrivaled by anything released in 1998 or before. The only comparable game was System Shock (at least I loved the recoil modelling in it), but its age and technical limitations worked against it. The rest couldn't really compete with HL's excellence across the board even if they did a thing or two extremely right (like Sin's damage skins and ability to shoot weapons out of hands).
  • graphics - not the best out there but almost comparable to Unreal in most areas and surpassing it in few others (skeletal animation, some special effects, decals).
  • interactivity - being able to break, push or otherwise use stuff, decals, etc.
  • cool aliens
  • scares - with System Shock 2 yet to come HL was *the* scary atmospheric FPS of its time. More of a startler, than proper horror, but there wasn't much to pick from back then.
  • telling story without even a single cutscene - never taking the player out of their avatar in terms of perspective and direct control was pretty much *the* HL's shtick - even during otherwise noninteractive intro and outro you could look and move around as you would during normal gameplay (less so during the outro), the only moment player wasn't in control was when they were dragged half conscious after their capture.
Yeah, HL popularized immersive shooters, but "immersive shooter" back then simply meant a continuous, unbroken experience trying to make some sort of sense beyond just abstract vidyagame logic - something we could still use more of, even almost two decades after HL's release (HL2 was regressive in that regard with some rather glaring gamey shit here and there).
It wasn't cinematic shit, especially in the modern sense. It was quite the opposite - you were in control all the time rather than during fragmented, incoherent bits between cinematics.
 
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Xathrodox86

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Consoles did it. Not to mention the fast pace that is so popular in all of media nowdays. People want everything to be fast, go quick and then jump to the next, best thing. Sadly.
 

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