Why modern gaming sucks (according to the Escapist)

[JarlFrank]

Except modern graphics are dumped down too due to console limitations. If graphics is where most of funds are going to somebody is getting fucked in the ass because the results are not there.

You don't need graphics that are actually good if you just spend the money on marketing and convince people that your graphics are awesome, they will believe it if you add enough bloom and explosions.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Good fucking God, how I hate all that marketing stuff...

 

[desocupado]

Good fucking God, how I hate all that marketing stuff...

So do I.

 

[DragoFireheart]

While I'm not quite sure what to make of the argument being made, shouldn't we be hoping for another crash considering the last time it happened it caused a positive rebirth of the video game industry?

 

[fizzelopeguss]

No, because the next company that revives it could be apple.

 

[DragoFireheart]

No, because the next company that revives it could be apple.

Are you saying things would get worse? If they did, wouldn't that just delay the rebirth?

 

[fizzelopeguss]

I wonder if there would 100 000 customers for a Fallout-like game nowadays.

There wouldn't be 100K customers, but 100K people would pirate it, the tiny indie company making it would die and people would sit around on message boards bemoaning the passing of a real Fallout-making developer. While playing their pirated Fallout-like games.

And this guy knows what he's talking about.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

No, because the next company that revives it could be apple.

Are you saying things would get worse? If they did, wouldn't that just delay the rebirth?

The App stores are loaded with shovelware, and those games control like dogshit beyond even Wii levels of bad for the most part. So yes it could get worse.

I'm not even sure what there's supposed to be a revival of, the whole reason they go for the mass market blockbusters is because it's such a long return on investment for these games. A small or medium level of profit on a game isn't nescessarily going to keep you going through 2 years of development.

The Amnesia devs made small profit, but now the studio lives or dies on their new game being a success.

http://beefjack.com/news/amnesia-the-da ... st-canned/

Everyone wants a MW2 or WoW so they can milk that fucker to oblivion and keep everyone elses lights on.

 

[deuxhero]

I always find it refreshing to pick up various obscure titles that never tried to be new or the best ever, but were still an excelent example of their genre.

For example I found Gladius for 6 bucks or so. Is it the best sRPG I ever played? Not by a long shot. Did it do anything new? Beside the unique arena histories adding a lot to the otherwise genericish setting, not really. Is it a solid experience I would buy again? Yes.

 

[DraQ]

Do you honestly think another crash will happen?

I'm almost certain it's inevitable.

Most of the large gaming companies will collapse into pools of liquid crap when their huge graphics oriented economies flatten against the photorealism barrier and choke on their own stagnation unable to attract ever growing crowds of retards target groups.

And I will dance on their fucking graves.

Maybe some underdogs, like Eastern-European companies able to produce actual atmosphere and qualities other than GFX and hype will be able to adapt and survive, but other than that it's going to be a wasteland.

After that I expect great renaissance of procedural content generation methods - previously their main attraction was that they allowed to produce much more content that could be fitted on puny floppies, now their main attraction will be their capability of producing much more content that would fit within your puny budget.

The required sales statistics looks depressing, but it doesn't incorporate two things. First, the graphics driven economy will necessarily break down really soon, because of photorealism barrier, second, what we really want to compare is how well do modders of today make stuff compared to the companies of yesterday, because this is the kind of tools and resources upstarts will have at their disposal once the giants fall.

 

[Luzur]

I wonder if there would 100 000 customers for a Fallout-like game nowadays.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uuDKrY7eW0

check the comments.

id say no, except for the hardcore oldschool Fallouters.

@Nightmarez753951n Yeah, I've played the first two, they were garbage. Bad gameplay, shitty story, and unbelievable characters. Bethesda made it this game right. I love it now. I knew Van Buren was supposed to be Fallout 3, but I'm gad that didn't happen, because now we actually have a decent game. Cheers!

i couldnt go beyond page 2 of the comments section...i...i just couldnt.

 

[Destroid]

The graphics barrier has been put off another 5 years at least until the nextgen consoles come out.

So some time after 2015 is the earliest possible date for ITz.

EDIT: Van Buren had wosre graphics than Fallout

 

[Brotherman Bill]

Which people? Who earns 20 million? Average salary of a video game developer is 66000$, not 20 million.

The company.

Wasn't this shit like common Codex knowledge? Or has the hivemind gotten a stroke?

Maybe, but it's so much easier to blame the corporations, the Jews or some other conspiracy than to actually look and analyze the causes. So yeah, it's probably a stroke.

I am sorry, but I can't see what you say on the article you posted. Yes, the rising costs are certainly responsible, but to me this seems to be a direct effect of the publisher's greed.

Greed, schmeed... If given the choice between making a high risk low paying innovative game, or making a medium risk high pay game, they typically choose the latter. They are like you and me, they want to maximize revenue.

I can't really say I'd done anything differently actually, after all it's a competitive business and you gotta sell an amount of units to keep the job.

Not only that but the reason why making games like today is the "greedy" choice is that consumers prefer their games like that.

It was them that created the graphic loving gamer culture of today.

Bullshit. Gamers have always been suckers for graphics.

Companies have every incentive to keep the reins in on the graphics, seeing as it is one of the most expensive parts of the game. But consumers have time and time again showed that they value good graphics above gameplay, so they keep making games like that.

Sometimes I wonder how you guys visualize an average company meeting...

Is it like this:

Hey, boss, we just made a new survey

Yes...?

We found out that if we cut graphics costs and focused on gameplay, C&C and multiple paths we could triple our income and revolutionize the genre! Shall I give the orders?

No. In this company we're greedy. We're all about making money.
So, make sure to make the selling point of our game is graphics which is the most expensive thing we do. Even though our customers value gameplay more, you should also try to make the gameplay as generic as possible. Remember, we're greedy in this company.

.... But, thats not a greedy thing to do, it won't earn us any mon-

SHUT UP! SHIT FOR THE NEW SHIT! POP FOR THE POPAMOLE GOD!

 

[MetalCraze]

2009: 7th generation premium videogames cost $1,000,000 to develop, $24,000,000 to PR and retailed for $60-$80

Fixed

Because I will never believe that, say, MW2 that looks like a cheap polish trash costed more to develop.

Games today are as cheap to develop as they were 10 years ago. Just stop spending money on megaparties in hotels for journalists and suddenly the cost insta-drops (Oh but then consoletards won't buy your extra-shitty game with 100m long low detailed corridors - because they can't give a shit about games - they buy PR)

 

[SoupNazi]

I wonder if there would 100 000 customers for a Fallout-like game nowadays.

There wouldn't be 100K customers, but 100K people would pirate it, the tiny indie company making it would die and people would sit around on message boards bemoaning the passing of a real Fallout-making developer. While playing their pirated Fallout-like games.

If it wasn't an indie developer but a standard one with a publisher and everything, there'd be enough marketing and advertisement that there'd definitely be 100k+ buys. It wouldn't matter much because it wouldn't even remotely cover the expenses but that wasn't the original poster's question.

 

[treave]

I wonder if there would 100 000 customers for a Fallout-like game nowadays.

There wouldn't be 100K customers, but 100K people would pirate it, the tiny indie company making it would die and people would sit around on message boards bemoaning the passing of a real Fallout-making developer. While playing their pirated Fallout-like games.

If it wasn't an indie developer but a standard one with a publisher and everything, there'd be enough marketing and advertisement that there'd definitely be 100k+ buys. It wouldn't matter much because it wouldn't even remotely cover the expenses but that wasn't the original poster's question.

Yeah, even Alpha Protocol sold more than 100k.

 

[Tycn]

I'm sure most people here would be inclined to remove from inventory if a game of Fallout caliber was actually released today. At least that's how I feel about AoD, which is the closest thing we have (assuming that it will be released, of course).

 

[MetalCraze]

I think you will be disappointed to learn that AoD will have nothing on Fallout (we already know that combat sucks - if VD & crew put as much effort into everything else - well...).
Copying Fallout's interface does not make Fallout.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Lol, this talk about an imminent crash is just silly talks. We all know the game industry will continue to thrive and grow. It has been in the past and it will continue to do so in the future.

FFS.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Which people? Who earns 20 million? Average salary of a video game developer is 66000$, not 20 million.

The company.

Wasn't this shit like common Codex knowledge? Or has the hivemind gotten a stroke?

Maybe, but it's so much easier to blame the corporations, the Jews or some other conspiracy than to actually look and analyze the causes. So yeah, it's probably a stroke.

I am sorry, but I can't see what you say on the article you posted. Yes, the rising costs are certainly responsible, but to me this seems to be a direct effect of the publisher's greed.

Greed, schmeed... If given the choice between making a high risk low paying innovative game, or making a medium risk high pay game, they typically choose the latter. They are like you and me, they want to maximize revenue.

I can't really say I'd done anything differently actually, after all it's a competitive business and you gotta sell an amount of units to keep the job.

Not only that but the reason why making games like today is the "greedy" choice is that consumers prefer their games like that.

All that you post in this thread is pretty irrelevant to the Codex.


Anyway, here's the real reason why gaming, especially cRPG gaming became shit:

That reason is modding. In the old times - the golden age and before, the only way the talented designers could make games was doing it the hard way - learning programming and then creating their own engine and their own game or joining an existing team. That's how the great ones of the industry got into business and how they started making great games that we worship to this day. They had to put a lot of hours into learning how to make games.

Nowadays, one just has to buy a game and start modding it which is a lot easier and requires much less learning. So, hundreds if not thousands of talented potential developers work their asses off, creating free content for the industry giants instead of becoming the next generation of independent game developers that would continue the traditions of the old great developers.

That's why we can't have good new cRPGs.

 

[MetalCraze]

You are absolutely wrong.
It has nothing to do with the games being easier to make.

Why do you constantly forget that designers and developers are just people and that means that an average designer/developer today knows about gaming as much as an average Halo/MW fan?

We have shitty games because 95% of people making games today consider MW and Halo to be the pinnacle of gaming. Plain and simple. Remember many Bethesda devs saying that they never played Fallout in their life?

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

We have shitty games because 95% of people making games today consider MW and Halo to be the pinnacle of gaming. Plain and simple. Remember many Bethesda devs saying that they never played Fallout in their life?

I'm talking specifically about people who could be creating games for us, not for the lowest common denominator and are driven by passion for our kind of gaming, not by greed.
They tend to fail to become game developers nowadays.

 

[MetalCraze]

People who want to create games for us - create games for us. Results may vary of course because talented designers were always very rare (Elemental will be a perfect example). They are much more rare now (as well as people who want to make games for us) for the reasons I've mentioned in my previous post. Simply because the old generation of designers doesn't do anything anymore and the next-gen is just clueless about the better stuff and thus can't replace the old-gen.

 

[desocupado]

POP FOR THE POPAMOLE GOD!

:D

 

[DraQ]

Lol, this talk about an imminent crash is just silly talks. We all know the game industry will continue to thrive and grow. It has been in the past and it will continue to do so in the future.

FFS.

Well, it *did* crash in the past due to greed and incompetence.

FFS.

 

[Alex]

(...snip)

I am sorry, but I can't see what you say on the article you posted. Yes, the rising costs are certainly responsible, but to me this seems to be a direct effect of the publisher's greed.

Greed, schmeed... If given the choice between making a high risk low paying innovative game, or making a medium risk high pay game, they typically choose the latter. They are like you and me, they want to maximize revenue.

I can't really say I'd done anything differently actually, after all it's a competitive business and you gotta sell an amount of units to keep the job.

But that is the point, you gotta sell an amount of units. The problem is with maximizing profits. For example, suppose you love to play a certain style of game and wants to design games in that style. If you are doing this because you like it, because you want to make a certain kind of game, maximizing profits isn't an important factor. The most important factor is to make a game you yourself want. If you earn your living out of making the said games, then sure, you will want to at least sell enough games to get by. But you won't make games you dislike just to earn more money (if you needed to make games you disliked, then why wouldn't you simply move to a more lucrative industry?).

Then you got the publishers. Maybe they weren't always like that, but publishers nowadays are more or less all business people. They don't really care about what they are publishing, they don't really care if they like their own games. All they care is to make the most money out of their work. That, to me, seems like uncontrolled greed. Maybe you look at this and don't think publishers are "evil". Maybe you simply don't see the pursuit of money for money's sake to be something morally wrong. If that is the case, ok, that is just that, we see things different, nothing to discuss.

Not only that but the reason why making games like today is the "greedy" choice is that consumers prefer their games like that.

It was them that created the graphic loving gamer culture of today.

Bullshit. Gamers have always been suckers for graphics.

Companies have every incentive to keep the reins in on the graphics, seeing as it is one of the most expensive parts of the game. But consumers have time and time again showed that they value good graphics above gameplay, so they keep making games like that.

I am not saying that the average consumer doesn't love graphics. What I am saying is that it was the game companies that, by trying to appeal to the greatest amount of people, made it impossible to have smaller, independent companies. In the 80s, Infocom created these amazing games that had no graphics whatsoever and a shelf life of several years. When they released a new game, people didn't see the older games as outdated. Maybe the newer game was better, possibly because the author got better at creating them since his last game. But the games weren't like, say, a 486 chip which was objectively better than a 386. They were simply different and if you liked one's newer game, there was really no reason to not go and try his earlier ones.

But companies changed these expectations. Most games are nowadays made by a lot of people, so rather than assign a person as the author, people will see a company as a game's author. Games have very little shelf life now, since marketing is now one of the major investments (and you don't want to share the marketing budgets between many games, so you market only the newer ones). Older games nowadays are frequently seem as outdated, as if what was fun 10 years ago would, somehow, not be fun today. I see this as a result of always trying to sell more, of always racing faster in an attempt to earn more money.

If games had never become popular, if the companies hadn't tried to make the most profit they could, then the market would never have changed (or at least, changed this way). If the people who took decisions were the same people who were creating the games, gaming would have evolved according to what the authors wished, not what the business people wanted. And I don't know how it would look like today. Maybe it would still be something I don't like, heck, maybe it would be even worse! B0ut at least it would have become so because of the people who really liked gaming.

By the way, please don't think I take what I am saying about the gaming market today as if it was an absolute truth. I know people still play older games, I know come companies still manage to make a profit in their back-catalog, and I know people like Sid Meyer or Will Wright (heck, even Peter Molyneux) still enjoy name recognition from gamers. But I see these things as exceptions to the rule.

Sometimes I wonder how you guys visualize an average company meeting...

Is it like this:

Hey, boss, we just made a new survey

Yes...?

We found out that if we cut graphics costs and focused on gameplay, C&C and multiple paths we could triple our income and revolutionize the genre! Shall I give the orders?

No. In this company we're greedy. We're all about making money.
So, make sure to make the selling point of our game is graphics which is the most expensive thing we do. Even though our customers value gameplay more, you should also try to make the gameplay as generic as possible. Remember, we're greedy in this company.

.... But, thats not a greedy thing to do, it won't earn us any mon-

SHUT UP! SHIT FOR THE NEW SHIT! POP FOR THE POPAMOLE GOD!

I never accused companies of being dumb, only greedy (the dumb ones are the people working inside the companies for next to nothing hoping they get a chance to design a games as they see fit). Like I said before, I expect that, one day, these companies will move away from games. I don't expect, however, that the head honchos of these companies will ever suffer for it. They are too smart and detached to get in harms way, and will simply leave once the pickings are not good anymore. The ones who will suffer will be those who actually like the new games being made, the ones who actually loved their work.

Edit: I was thinking about this post and I realized something. Calling the people who are duped by the gaming industry "dumb" might come as insulting. That was not my intent. In fact, I have a great deal of respect for the ones who actually manage to release something fun in the deal, and feel sympathy towards those who don't. Maybe naive would be a better word. If anyone was offended by that, sorry!

 

[zeitgeist]

I'm sure most people here would be inclined to remove from inventory if a game of Fallout caliber was actually released today. At least that's how I feel about AoD, which is the closest thing we have (assuming that it will be released, of course).

The problem here is that most indie and small developer games that try to stay within the currently dead or near-dead genre constraints just plain aren't that good. They're not even approaching the level of some of the better (not even the best) genre representatives from 15+ years ago (and in reality they should be surpassing those games by now).

They just copy a few concepts from the "classics", simplify it a bit and call it a day, relying on the starved niche market to buy enough for them to finance their existence. Of course, they will be marketed as True Fallout Spiritual Sequels and whatnot, but when they get released, they usually only retain a few rabid fans who "drank the kool-aid", and everyone else looks at the game and decides it's not worth their time.

Unfortunately, due to the marketing and hype in various online communities, and the desperate need to justify the perceived failure of the game, there is much disinformation - leading to the general public getting the opinion that "Fallout-like games don't sell anymore". Instead of the correct conclusion, which is "of course they don't sell if they're horrible".

 

[SCO]

Lol, this talk about an imminent crash is just silly talks. We all know the game industry will continue to thrive and grow. It has been in the past and it will continue to do so in the future.

FFS.

Well, it *did* crash in the past due to greed and incompetence.

FFS.

Problem is, it crashed before there were so many idiots playing. They fed us shit back then, we stopped eating. Now the retards will ask for second servings.