pspkiller626 wrote...
We live in a world where the gaming history is hurt by three things; biased previews/reviews, CoD games and non-hardcore casual games.
As you have mentioned in the article, many people look towards previews and reviews for a decision as to whether they should buy a game or not. Jewels like God Hand were terribly hurt by IGN's infamous verdict and even though they apologized later for such a scathing review, the damage was already done. God Hand remains one of most overlooked Triple AAA games in the history of gaming.
Second is.... CoD. Now, I am pointing out the CoD series specifically for the damage they have done to the creative side of the industry. Activision/Treyarch has been dishing out the same game with a few minor rehashes EVERY year since CoD4:MW. And yet we, the simple minded sheep are coerced into buying every single game every year. Due to simple yet effective marketing techniques Activision/Treyarch has gotten away with loads of cash each year by releasing subpar games that are more or less the same game with minor differences. Competitors naturally look towards their strongest competitors in the industry and they see CoD, a series of games that have pulled off the originally taboo act of releasing games that have absolutely no innovation or original ideas at all. To emulate that success they do exactly the same thing. This is hurting the creative/original market and games like El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (which I enjoyed immensely despite negative feedback from Netizens) eventually fade away and each year we have to say farewell to another original and innovative developer. I miss the time when we had something different in every game. Nowadays I see FPS games EVERYWHERE. Personally I have nothing against FPS games and indeed my fondest memories of school usually involved me playing Deathmatches against my friends on Counter-Strike.
These kinds of problems are usually found in the Western world of gaming, where gamers are brainwashed into nothing but CoD-playing zombies. In the Japanese industry, we can see that they are striving to introduce something new with each new release. Some, if not most of the best cult classics have come from Japanese developers. They brought us DMC, Sonic and much much more. Hell if it wasn't for Japanese innovation we'd be playing Pong all day. But now due to the proliferation of CoD that innovation is dying from a lack of recognition in the Western world. No matter how well a game sells in Japan, Japanese gamers at the end of the day only account for 10% or less of the gaming world. The majority of the market is still based in the western world and now that western gamers treat CoD as their god, no wonder Japanese developers disappear faster than you can blink.
Nowadays we live in a hectic, fast-paced world where not everyone has the time to sit down and enjoy a good hardcore game. Most people do have the desire to play games but they simply cannot squeeze out the time. This is where casual games come into play; casual games are usually based on mobile devices and they never have a total running time that goes over an hour. While back in 2005-2006 people were not pleased to play lacklustre games, nowadays they have grown accustomed to it and now, IOS games and Android steal away a huge portion of the gaming market. Small-time developers who need immediate success turn to casual games as a way of making easy money, and usually they succeed; indeed casual games have a low developing cost and seeing as how everyone has an Iphone or an Android device nowadays recognition is not an obstacle. Couple this with the CoD phenomena and you get a gaming industry where hardcore gamers are finding it increasingly difficult to find quality games and where subpar games are rewarded many times over. Indeed there is talk that the next generation of game consoles will be the last, seeing as how downloads are increasingly common and with casual games being completely downloadable, there would be no reason for a game console to exist. In fact, not only would the gaming industry be hurt, even the DVD/Bluray industry will be hurt as a result due to the possibility that gamers will no longer buy physical copies of games.
May God help us if the day comes when hardcore games/gamers lose their ground entirely.
What is your take on the situation? Do you think the gaming industry is dying?
i stopped there.
This is dumb, the video game industry is bigger than it has ever been. It grosses profits over the movie industry and is more widely accepted/mainstream/accessible to people than ever. You say there is no innovation yet minecraft released last year is perhaps the biggest expression of the true gamer's reality you are describing to date.
I think you're just being elitist.
