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

I second this motion.
His voice makes me want to close the video, and his smugness makes me want to punch him in the face.

No.

is, is that a forecast? Like the one before a storm that says sunny all day? Or that stock market has record gain right before great depression, or like the housing market?

Wrong link, fixed now.

If at the least I'd change the video from "Killing the industry" to "Killing creativity"

The guy in the video is only looking at the big cash cow titles on consoles. TBH, I couldn't care less if they all went away over night. All the Call of Metal Gear Battlefields are completely interchangeable for me. Show me 10 minutes of gameplay and I still can't tell you which game I'm watching.

Compare this to the Kickstarter/Early Access indie market and its game like PA, SMNC, Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, FTL, Banished, Banner Saga, Shadowrun, Magicka, Race the Sun, Prison Architect, Rogue Legacy, Legend of Grimrock, The Stanley Parable, Don't Starve, Papers Please, Surgeon Simulator, The Swapper...
I'm going to stop now because this would become a VERY long list.

The truth is: Creativity, innovation and new ideas have moved to the indie market. Developers had wonderful, innovative ideas for a long time but nobody willing to give the the funding to turn them into successful games. The overhead of old publishers like EA is so high that they can't afford to take a risk or make a title that doesn't sell millions of copies. They know that it is safer for them to make Assassin's Creed MCXXIII instead of giving that spot to let's say a Star Citizen.

A smaller title might make make even more profit compared to the amount of money you would need to fund it but companies like EA have a limited amount of titles they can publish per year. Better to fill them with games that bring in hundreds of millions instead of tens of million. The big fish can't afford small morsels, they need large chunks with every bite they take. The budget for advertisement is probably larger than the development costs, so it has to big titles all the time.


What does that mean for the years to come?
EA will keep making the same old but profitable games. The biggest innovations you can expect are titles like Titanfall - which are really just the well known concepts recombined. CoD with a bit Mech Warrior and DotAlike creeps to farm. Good ideas, new feeling but safe.

If you really want innovative games you should start by selling all your consoles. Developing for any console is much more expensive than on the PC. Developers with innovative ideas will go to Kickstarter, Early Access, GOG.com where you get funding, can patch on a daily basis and the largest part of your budget goes into rent for your appartment and keeping your supply of coffee and energy drinks topped off.

There will be a lot of remakes but how long has it been since the last great space opera was released? How long since the last CoD, *** Creed...? Enough time has passed to make even remakes feel fresh again.

The video is interesting, but misses some important points.

Jessep gets a lot of them, but I would summarize:

• Creativity is alive and well. Publishers, especially ones that are publicly held, feel they have a fiduciary responsibility to be very cautious and avoid risk. If something is, and continues, to make big bucks with minimal risk, that's what they'll do primarily. I don't like that myself, but I certainly understand it. But there are many avenues that are enabling really fantastic creativity and giving gamers a voice in showing what games they want.
• The most chilling potential thing I see more of, especially in some digital distribution communities, is the constant railing on price, often by people who haven't played a game. PA, and Uber, has been called uncountable, and certainly un-postable by our rules of conduct, names repeatedly in places like that. Communities that refuse to have a real discussion about assigning real values to what you get out of a product will find something though - and primarily that is those communities will be somewhat marginalized as a voice. You can only try and talk to a brick wall for so long before a company, especially small ones, decides energy is better spent on communities that want to actually hold real conversations, not screaming fits.

It's very easy to claim one thing or another is happening, but it is almost never as cut and dried as any one problem or any one solution.

I personally won't start to worry about the state of gaming until the first year where I don't see at least half a dozen innovative or cool games, big or small, coming out. I've been gaming on computer since 1982. I don't recall a year yet that has come anywhere close to that point.

That video is terrible, and the usage of sales statistics is near useless without any sort of normalisation to take into account long-tails, market size changes, and various other factors.

I doubt that the entire video-games industry is going to crash. There are just too many people willing to part with their cash for these exception electronic entertainment experiences in order for the whole industry to go down.

What might happen (emphasis on the might) is a partial collapse of the AAA side of the industry. This would be due to a combination of factors, including consumer backlash over recent fiascos, rising production costs, the necessity of console developers to shift towards the next generation, a potential bursting of the whole "mobile FTP cashgrab bonanza" bubble, a general lack of innovation (in that side of the industry), failure to embrace new marketing channels to the same degree as smaller competitors, increased usage of alternate funding methods allowing non AAA studios to access competitive amounts of start-up capital, growing competition from a more cost effective indie scene and a collapse of traditional distribution channels resulting in increased parity with smaller competitors. There have been recent cases of big AAA titles selling millions of copies of games and still being viewed as "commercial failures" simply because of the exorbitant development costs of making said titles (which is not something that the video touched on). Even if these are profitable in some degree, it is important to remember that viability of large companies is not determined on how profitable they are, but how profitable they are perceived to be by their shareholders. Mix that all together and there is the possibility for the AAA industry to be in for some tough times.

I'm not an expert, but I would anticipate two main outcomes of such an event. Firstly, only the larger AAA companies are able to weather the storm, likely by taking even less risks and playing it even safer. Secondly, a series of lay-offs from AAA studios could create a flood of smaller indie companies, particularly now that crowd-funding is a thing (although said Indies would need to choose their first project very carefully).

Of course, this is all very speculative indeed.

Did you just compare Metal Gear Solid with CoD and Battlefield?

I think the sh!tstorms you see on forums are often a direct result from new funding methods. Developers have to please new players and players who have been around since the first version at the same time. The veterans want more features, deeper gameplay and could care less if you implement a tutorial which will make playing more fun for new guys.

Best example: Kerbal space Program. You have players who have never even left Kerbin and players who can unlock the ENTIRE tech tree with ONE monster rocket. There are constantly people on the KSP forum requesting, heck demanding, to get a second solar system while others struggle to get into any orbit at all.


Then you have pricing. Dear Ceiling Cat, what a mess! Some indie developers start from scratch (PA), others have private investors and are just collecting money for more ingame art and additional features; some start with a sale, some with a higher price for hardcore fans; some only need a small budget, some a couple of millions. The old standards no longer apply. Developers have to guess how much money they can get to fund their game and might be completely overwhelmed by the result (Notch, Minecraft) or have to shut down their studio because the budget is too small (GPG). It's like a gold rush: You might find gold or dig your own grave if you overreach. You don't know for sure until it's too late...


As competition and quality on the indie market increases so do player's expectations. Developers have moved from their cubicle in some nameless EA studio to the frontpage of large gaming news sites. They are on Youtube, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter, give interviews and hold public events. From almost complete anonymity to PR front man in a couple of years. Modern indie devs have to be PR pros if they want funding.

It's not entirely unexpected that you get your feathers ruffled quite a bit, Garat. It's not pretty and it will probably get worse. Every gamer expects you to make him 110% happy, support your game for a decade at least and release free DLC every 2 weeks. For less than $20 of course.

The expectations are often unrealistic and the nastiness on the web unproportional. Same as with celebrities or anybody else who is exposed to a lot of public attention. Indie devs are now internet famous, their names have become basically trademarks - with all the up and downsides. Who would care about "Scrolls" if it wasn't "that new game from Notch"?


As indie developer you should probably ask yourself if you want that kind of attention. It's not an easy question to answer I guess. You gain independence from large publishers and can work on your own design ideas but you will always get a flood of negativity - no matter what you do really. Somebody will always be unhappy and make sure you know about it.

Even I have been pretty mean after some design decisions I didn't like in the past. Sorry!
Most of the time it's not meant half as serious as it sounds though. It's easy to be nasty on the internet and people overreact a lot due to the smallest things.

Yes, they are all huge AAA+ titles with several franchise releases in their past. They stand for all the large franchises that can be considered "safe" for large publishers. You might not share my opinion but for me they are all part of what I call the gray/brown/muzzleflash shooter genre. There is certainly less innovation in their whole franchise than in Kerbal Space Program, Banner Saga or Papers Please.

All the MGSs, CoDs and Battlefields bore me to death with their 'realistic' gameplay and graphics. Thank you but I prefer a small update to KSP or FTL any day of the week.

....You know what MGS is right? Because it really sounds like you don't.

Earlier games in the MGS series obviously don't deserve to be lumped together with cod, I doubt he's saying that. Later ones I don't know (never played them). I'd rather replay the old ones than try MGS4, but maybe that's saying more about me than the franchise.

Maybe I'm mixing up some names but that's not the point. Replace MGS with Halo, GTA, Assassin's Creed, Resident Evil, FIFA, Gears of War, Madden or recent releases of Tom Clancy games, Lara Croft... The point is that those games have huge budgets, sell hundreds of thousands or million of copies and can be considered safe havens for large publishers. Well, until they utterly mess it up, repeatedly.

It's about big budgets and numbers in the name and not much innovation. Sorry, didn't mean to offend your favorite franchise there, Geers!

Oh kitty - my favorite franchise was listed, too But I understand what you mean. I've seen changes made in games as a direct result of how it tested with potential customers. Which can bring us back to the topic of "gamers don't know what they want". Level too hard? Add tutorial. Can't find your way? Change to linear pathing. If the numbers show the gamers are happy, then the publisher is happy. But when something is innovating and exciting, it can pique the interest of the community and become desirable, even to the big guys.

It's actually not my favourite franchise, I don't believe in favourites generally. But I believe in giving respect where it's due and the story-driven stealth-action of MGS definitely deserves that. Just because games are in a franchise and "safe" doesn't mean they're cursed to repetitive sequels. GTA V was a lot of money and a lot of work thrown together to craft what is an undeniably good game. You might not like it, but it is a good game. Any of the main series CoD games judged by themselves are fairly good. If you're in a franchise, you don't have to revolutionize the gaming industry, you just have to build off the solid foundations of previous titles to make something new. Modern Warfare 3 didn't do that, GTA V did.

Let's play spot the difference:





One of those is MW3, the other is MW2. Unless you know your CoD campaigns, they're indistinguishable.

Let's try that with GTA:





There, now you can see a clear difference. You can see work has been made to improve and grow. Just because a franchise is safe doesn't mean it'll stagnate. Franchises are not to blame, it's the people who make the decisions affecting said franchises. Releasing GTA V wasn't a risk, but it was still a major step up for the franchise. Modern Warfare 3 wasn't a risk either, but its "step" consist of reskins and a gimmick which persisted for a couple of levels before never being seen again.

That's very superficial change though -- evolution, but definitely not innovation. What did you do in GTA SA in a nutshell? You shot people in an open world and played missions. What did you do in GTA V in a nutsheel? You shot people in an open world and played missions. They've definitely improved upon the formula, but they have not innovated it.

Also a Warsow (and PA actually) friend of mine played one CoD game and judged it on its own. He told me it was utter garbage (the MP that is).

CoD is not that bad. It can be pretty fun I've sunk what is frankly an embarrassing amount of hours into Black Ops, because it was good action shooter to pass the time. You have a gun and you shoot people with other guns, the end. It worked well, the gunplay was straightforward, there was always action happening, very few dull moments. Although to be fair I played on a hardcore server, so that may affect how one views the game.

I think you're being a little unfair with GTA. What's SupCom in a nutshell? Build lots of units to kill other units. What's PA in a nutshell? Build lots of units to kill other units. You're being too general.

GTA V did take steps forward for the franchise, gun customization was added, the way vehicles handled was changed to be more enjoyable, the map is the biggest in the series so far and while being a location once visited, it still felt very new and fresh.

The biggest change of course would be the addition of three fully controllable characters who each have their own special ability. That's fairly interesting, I haven't seen anything like it before. It leads to some very interesting scenarios.

Also there's a fully functional stock market, which I just find hilarious. The best way to make money in GTA used to be running over prostitutes and now it's trading stock.

I also think the multiplayer deserves a mention. Sure it had its problems in the beginning, but now it works fine. There's plenty of content with more on the way. You meet up with a friend, steal a helicopter, watch a foreign film, rob a liquor store, then drive around town flipping off the police before having a game of tennis. It's a fairly big step forward for the franchise. There wasn't any of that in GTA IV, you just ran around trying to escape the rectum that has the helicopter with miniguns and played pool. Now there's missions and side activities galore.

Aw yes, I forgot about the MP. That definitely was innovative. The sp wasn't imo.

So you're going to skip over the fact it had three characters? Come on, that deserves credit.