This question has for some time flying around my brain. What will be the future of the niche markets in PC Gaming? As I understand it, revenue from PC gaming has decreased over the last years and at the same time concentrated around some specific brands like World of Warcraft (at least shop sales show that, how much sales there are on the net is not covered by many of those statistics). So what is going to happen to PC game development ouside those few cash cows in the next years? We have seen quite a bit of freeware and open source development going on in the last half decade that partly provided new games, partly recreated old classics to be played on modern computers. But many projects just died after a couple of months or years without a finished or at least half finished product. Some of those finished provided fun playtime, some new interesting concepts, but many just were subpar to even those products they tried to emulate from the early 90ties.
But Id say the overall quality of freeware and open source games improved over the last years. Wing Commander has had its fair share of such ventures (partly mods of existing games, partly self produced engines). So with the prospect of not getting new games in ones favourite genre will we just see these genres slowly dying out until a surprising success may revive them (or not), or will development of such titles shift to noncommercial "hobby" producers? With decreasing quality of many releases in the Space Sim genre the door seems open for those projects to compete with commercial developers, which in the end might discourage them even more to invest into games within the genre (having to compete against free games can be problematic if they have a certain level of quality). Or will something new develop in the next years in game development mixing commercial development and hobby programers into a new form of industry?
But Id say the overall quality of freeware and open source games improved over the last years. Wing Commander has had its fair share of such ventures (partly mods of existing games, partly self produced engines). So with the prospect of not getting new games in ones favourite genre will we just see these genres slowly dying out until a surprising success may revive them (or not), or will development of such titles shift to noncommercial "hobby" producers? With decreasing quality of many releases in the Space Sim genre the door seems open for those projects to compete with commercial developers, which in the end might discourage them even more to invest into games within the genre (having to compete against free games can be problematic if they have a certain level of quality). Or will something new develop in the next years in game development mixing commercial development and hobby programers into a new form of industry?
