Gamers Killing Video Game Industry, Gamers Don't Know What They Want!

I'm fairly sure Bioshock Infinite sold pretty damn well, at least $4million. My QA lecturer made the same mistake, Irrational didn't close because of Infinite's sales, it closed because Ken Levine got bored

To clarify, I was using "tomorrow" figuratively".

Didn't sell well? Is over four million copies not good?

There are far better examples. Ever heard of Battle Engine Aquila? No, you probably haven't. It's a PS2-era game where you play as a mech that can turn into a jet. Mission-based, open-level gameplay. You're not some magic badass that can stomp all over everything, you're just the latest weapon in the war. It does a good job of putting you in a situation where you feel powerful, but not to the point where you've been imbued with the power of Thor. Almost every mission has the rest of the army fighting the battle with you and you will die if you're not careful.



War of The Monsters? No? Hands-down best fighting game I've ever played. Basically all '50's/'60's monster movies combined into a game. Open, destructible levels. A nice variety of monsters each with four different skins, and special attacks, a few levels with interactive environments. Nothing is more awesome than playing as a giant gorilla (basically king kong) and beating a giant praying mantis to death with an Easter Island statue or playing as the Cold War robot (my personal favourite) and launching a small nuclear missile at a dragon. It had some really nice mechanics too. You could catch stuff your opponent threw at you and throw it back, and you could even whack it like a baseball with a giant steel girder. And there was also this really nice touch where the loading screen for the level was a movie poster featuring one of the monsters.



Now those are games that didn't get the sales they deserved. Albiet, War of the Monsters is on the PSN store now (totally worth buying). Seriously look at this thing:

The sales weren't enough to warrant the cost of the project and the development time invested. Surely, you should know that it's not just as simple as "look this sold a lot of copies"?

@Kvalheim: incorrect. Reign in those biases against Levine, and read up on the subject.

It made a profit didn't it? Also, there's an entire wikipedia page for all the awards Infinite won.

It was not a financial success by the margin required for the owning company to satisfy their investment.

Basic economics. Basic games development. I'm trying to offer what I know here, so excuse me for getting frustrated.

Yes, it won awards. That has nothing to do with anything, apart from proving it was a good game.

Well you're not explaining it very well.

What is so hard to understand? I dislike the patronising, so have some back. I shouldn't need to explain something so patently basic you could look it up simple.wikipedia.org.

Copies sold does not necessarily indicate a game's financial success. End of story. That's it.

That's why Minecraft made notch several hundred thousand pounds overnight, but Infinite wasn't deemed a commercial success. The costs in making each project were vastly different.

I agree with everything else you said, but debate that part. Gaming 'journalists' are fanboys themselves and that makes game journalism suck donkey.

Funnily enough I completely read the bold line without taking it in at all. Now it makes sense. Isn't that ironic?

"by the margin required" was invisible to me because magic.

Oops.

Sorry for getting agitated Geers, even when we disagree I respect your opinion.

Except when it's wrong I guess?

I disagree, and I agree. There is a lot of bad gaming journalism, but good journalism does exist. I try to be objective when I stick up for a particular game, developer, or the like because I have some amateur experience myself and know decent journalists within the industry (from my time as a community moderator).

I also strive to admit my biases, clearly, before defending a particular game.

In context, I haven't ever played Infinite, nor do I own it, and I haven't even completed the original Bioshock. I don't know why, though I suspect it's because I'm becoming bored with a lot of video games. I can't really give a reason that doesn't make me sound like a pretentious ***, either!

All hail to the pirate kind, overlord of free games yarrr.

There are a lot of things that may or may not be killing video games, gamers being stuck on same thing and just dislike different perspectives is one of them, the guy in the video just made a theory. There are many factors to count. For me the price played huge role, I just can't afford 50+ euro games and another 30-50+ euro dlcs so I went for terrible free to play games where fortunately I found two good ones.

Fun fact: games haven't really increased in price, and neither have consoles.

I don't have biases against Levine, but Bioshock was a relative success. The only thing I could find was that TakeTwo in general (the company that owns 2K Games) made a loss that year overall with all their products. The thing that happened with Irrational was that Levine wanted to move onto creating smaller narrative-focussed games.

We are above par by a large amount but still have the backseat lead developers in here as well.

Besides that, it really is that. They complain about things they demand but dont want and stuff, just like you said. And no, he is right, CoD and Madden are MOST COMPLAINED and MOST SOLD with LEAST DEVELOPMENT COST AND EFFORT. Meanwhile, how many copies has the holy grail of indie, Minecraft, sold?

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/mi...ve-been-happy-to-sell-1-million/1100-6418779/

Well, that was well-timed, just 5 minutes ago this was posted. 12 million sales, over the course of how many years are we going on now? Ghosts already beat that. Ghosts costs more.

So guys, srsly, quit doing that, that, that right there, stahp it, srsly guiz.

It is literally like every interesting store disappearing in the common Mall, and filling with nothing but clothing stores like Hollister. Then, complaining about it, when those damn clothes stores get 15x the sales of the arcades and specialty shops.

I'm going to throw out Grand Theft Auto V. Massive budget well spent if you ask me. Except they probably could've bought a few more server....buildings.

borderline innovative actually. It at least made a blend of things not done before, with pointless open world crime commiting just for fun, in a 16 player loading world, using a microeconomy like a f2p and a system sort of like a micrommo. I recognized right off the bat that it was just a smaller scale mmo using gta, but it was neat nonetheless.

This is what I want people to stop doing:

He does realize that over time you get more fans and more reliable sales numbers right?

The issue with innovation is that nobody knows they like it yet. Would you invest in a game you aren't sure you'd like over the ones you are?

Tell me about it, let me do my research, ill be honest, ill even find someone with a copy of the game to let me see or obtain a copy to test myself before purchase. Most people I know consider that legit.

I don't subscribe to the whole "video games are dying" belief. CoD and Madden, while fun to mock, are just filling a demand that someone else would fill if not for them. I'm pretty convinced it's just a vocal minority parroting about the death of the industry, while the rest of people just play what they want.

And on the topic of pretentious gaming youtubers. I actually bought the Wii U and most of those underselling games at full price, so that sh*t didn't apply to me. EC is terrible, I absolutely hate when people use that EC "multiplayer balance" video to support arguments, as if it's some godsend revelation and not just common sense.

The Wii U is the joke of the console community. Funny thing is, jokes on them, anything on a console is usually on a PC and usually better. EXCEPT for Nintendo Titles. That's why the PC community usually has all their games on PC and a Wii U on the side and often NOO PS4 or XBox One.

Also, the industry is dying. Large game companies, are catering to dumb things. This happened about 20 years ago? When the game industry last crashed, it sucked, crappy games with no standard amongst them and no solid console presence and tons of generics.