[Op/Ed] Are We on the Verge of Golden Age or a Crash?

[fitbabits]

Gaming as we know (and have known) it is in constant flux - it surprises me that more people are not aware of that. It has ALWAYS been a business about making money. Companies will do whatever it takes to make their shareholders happy, even at the expense of their 'core' audience.

Fads come and fads go, and they'll always be part of entertainment (including gaming). Think of torture porn in movies and the rhythm genre in gaming (related?!?) - they've both largely come and gone, but the underlying industry persists.

I'm not going to like everything about gaming, but I don't like everything about other forms of entertainment, either. It doesn't mean any of them are heading for a golden age or crash.

[Darkmatter]

I don't feel like the big companies are working towards long term profit and growth. I think they're sort of "drunk" on this idea of "The One." They want to make that game that floods their pockets with endless amounts of money. We saw a lot of that over the past few years with all the failed MMO's and I think it'll continue into the next generation. I think the focus on MMO's is more or less over thanks to all the flops sending companies running for the hills but that just means they've switched back to the more traditional single player / co-op / DM game.

I fully expect to see a LARGE number of gaming companies go belly up with this next generation. They're going to roll the dice, and most of them are going to lose.

[MagGnome]

The current generation saw a huge number of publishers and developers go belly up. Of course that's happened in previous generations as well, but it seems to have increased in frequency. That could just be perspective though. The next generation is likely to see even more of this, although so many great indie developers have arisen that there will still be plenty of awesome games to play, they just won't all be "AAA", which is fine with me.

[bean]

It's ridiculous to assume that every game needs a $100 million budget for development, marketing, and distribution or must return a 100% ROI after a two-year investment.

That's certainly the goal for a AAA major IP franchise, but that's not the goal for EVERY game.

In fact, for developing new IPs that they HOPE will become huge AAA titles, the budget is normally around $20 million. We don't see quite as many absurdly amazing visuals like you get in the CoD games or the expansiveness you get in a Rockstar title for that amount, but there are plenty of amazing games delivered at that much lower development cost (and these are games that are aiming at AAA. . . they just aren't established yet).