The Brave New World of Computer Gaming

F

Fatcat

Swabbie
Banned
After talking with many fellow gamers, I have become aware of a disturbing new trend in PC games in general. Each year, less and less games are made. If someone wants to make a good, top-of-the-line game (Half Life 2, Oblivion), you need tens of millions of dollars. Each genre has one top game each year that everyone hears about. There's one RPG, one FPS, and one RTS, and you never hear about any other games. Why, you may ask yourself? Because they don't exist. In order to make a competitive game, you need money. Lots of money. Small, independant games can't be made because they are inferior in quality to top of the line games. Even if you pitched the idea to a game company with lots of money, the idea can't be very radical. No one will dump millions of dollars into a game that may flop. Look what happened to (Shield your eyes) Daikatana. Any idea that is too different from the usual fare of PC games would be to risky to spend lots of money on. This is why back 15 years ago you could make a game like Loom where you play songs with a magical staff. Back then, making a game wasn't a dangerous and possibly financially dihibilitating risk. In the future, we will only see bland RPGs, FPSs, and RTSs, not the creative, ecclectic games that made the 90's gaming's heyday. Games are now Hollywood movies. Even now, the movie industry is more stagnant than it has ever been, with trashy remakes and crappy flicks pushing out any real creativity.

But hope is not lost, as i've seen with all the dedicated people keeping Wing Comamnder alive. Happy 7th Birthday, CIC!
 
Fatcat said:
After talking with many fellow gamers, I have become aware of a disturbing new trend in PC games in general. Each year, less and less games are made. If someone wants to make a good, top-of-the-line game (Half Life 2, Oblivion), you need tens of millions of dollars. Each genre has one top game each year that everyone hears about. There's one RPG, one FPS, and one RTS, and you never hear about any other games. Why, you may ask yourself? Because they don't exist.
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I hear about plenty of RPGs, FPSes and RTS games still being made. Maybe not for the PC, but plenty in general. The issue is that your average console game sells much better than a standard PC game. Developers get a much better return on their investment to develop for these more lucrative platforms. There's still a stream of all types of games for the PC though.

Fatcat said:
But hope is not lost, as i've seen with all the dedicated people keeping Wing Comamnder alive. Happy 7th Birthday, CIC!
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Yay!
 
i think its more a matter of convience for gamers. consoles you dont have to run out and upgrade every six months (not that you have to do that so much with PC's anymore now), as opposed to PC's which they're pretty well outdated within six months. and, as chris said...theres more of a return on console games than PC games.
 
Fatcat, don't underestimate the drift of creative powers: Most industries have experienced that the consumer can't be "led" forever. People want to design and create for themselves - be it cars, houses, music, stories or even computer games.

It's somewhat true that the market nowadays is much tighter, and new products are launched because of the approval of some budget controller. But at the same time that companies are focusing on the profitability margin, the gamers start to create their own games. I've never seen so many high-effort fan projects as today, and even if most of them lack the professional polish or balance, the possibilities seem endless.

So in the end, there will be enough creativity left to spawn games on the complexity and originality levels of Loom. You just have to look. To start, take a look at something that is already quite old, but always a great source of inspiration and wonder: IFarchive.org stores years and years of independently developed text adventure games. Okay, it's "only" text, but take a guy who had the idea for one of them and put him in front of a graphical development system, get him in contact with 3d/CGI/voice/whatever artist, and there you go. Or play Dink Smallwood instead..
 
spiritplumber said:
I think that part of it is that in suit perception, if not in reality, console games get pirated less.
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Less doesn't equal not. I have seen working emulations and ROMs for anything but next-gen consoles.
 
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