The death of gaming

[Tage]

Here's an inflammatory but still very interesting article (editorial, really) about why the gaming industry is going to have the same kind of economic crash that happened to the internet a couple years back.

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/crash.html

warning: uses semi-vulgar though hilarious insults

[Fellfrosch]

It's an interesting article, and has some good points, but his conclusions are pretty poorly supported (which makes sense, I guess, since it's just a disillusioned rant and not a research paper). For example, he makes that point that Grand Theft Auto 5 will essentially be the same as Grand Theft Auto 1, and people will eventually get sick of it; that's true, but he fails to mention that Grand Theft Auto 1 was a completely original game model that showed up more than 20 years after the gaming industry began. If that's not an argument in favor of future innovation, I don't know what is. Also, I had to laugh every time he passed off the obvious counterarguments (such as multiplayer and PC gaming) with abortive, ill-formed jibes.

I won't be surprised if the gaming industry changes, and I'm interested to see where it goes. To call it a crash, though, and to predict that video games themselves will disappear, is pretty silly.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

well, i guess we wouldnt' have pop culture prophets if people didn't come up with wild speculations and then announce them. As many of those people as there are, ONE of them has to be right, even if they are all unsubstantial.

some of the points he failed to make: most of the people I met in real life who game also game online. Many of them insist that gamnig online is better than gaming not online.

Also, yes, the customer base cycles, but it hardly shrinks. More kids I know that are Onion and Gorgon's age (you guys are about 15, right?) play games than did when I was that age. Their gaming is also more prominant than the people I knew who played.  in addition, on the whole, the appear to have more disposable income than my friends did.

I *am* 30, and I've played games more in the last 5 years than I did when I was a teen. I wouldn't justify the expense wehn I was a teen. I'd rather buy records or go to movies with what I reckoned was an exorbinant cost to video games. I'm not the most fanatical gamer, but I play MORE than I used to. Anyone like me gives mroe money now than before.

Also, what does he mean by "crash?" that the game industry will disappear? Is that why there are new communities that are making money on it at this late stage? Did the Internet crash END the Internet? (I hope not, or else where am I typing this?) Sure, it hit some hard times, and I'm sure the game industry may. But that will just cause them to re-vamp. Perhaps game prices will drop. But Internet business didn't die. Sites like ebay and Amazon are doing MORE business now, and no company lacks a web site to for a contact with customers. A crash does not mean the end of the industry, or even an end to it as a major player.

Rolls eyes. Ok, enough of the would-be Timothy Leary.

[Entsuropi]

Yeah. What SE said. I mean, i buy... oh, 2 - 4 games per month. Thats in addition to warhammer and RPG's. Almost all my IRL friends regularly buy games as well. All the game stores, all 5 or so of them in town, are bustling. This is not a crash. A crash would be where there was not enough backbone to support an expansion - like the internet, where there was not enough demand to justify the supply.

Oh - and precisely how did the X-box fail? Loads of people own ones, and it has a good selection of games now. Sure, it had a sucky start, but then so did the PS2.

The man is a spanner.

[Fellfrosch]

Yeah, I thought referring to the X-Box as a failure was pretty funny too.

Regarding the problem of aging and not having time for games, I find that I have more time for games than for any other time-wasting activity. He says that with kids you never have time to sit down and play a game because they take so long, so he ends up watching DVDs instead. As a father of two toddlers, I can tell you that finding time for a 2-hour DVD is really hard, whereas finding time for a half hour game of Warcraft is fairly easy. Gaming fits into your schedule because you control the size of the chunks of time required.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

I do think that gaming on computers is becoming obsolete though. Once upon a time console games sucked, and offered nothing but arcade style mindlessness, but now you can save, and do 8 million other things faster and better because you also dont have to render space age planets in bryce or do a gazillion page spreadsheet, the controllers are on the whole better and the systems are smaller than a lot of pc's.

[Fellfrosch]

A lot of that is true, but...many of the problems this dude addessed in his article are solved by gaming on the PC rather than a console. I simply can't see PC gaming disappearing, even if it's only for strategy games. You simply can't do a strategy game on a console as well as on a PC, because you don't have nearly as many hot keys. Remember how horrible the console port of Starcraft was? Of course, as soon as I say that somebody will develop a new type of console controller or keypad or something and prove me wrong.

[Entsuropi]

The simple thing is...
a) PCs will always be around - they are work machines.
b) It is cheaper to develop a game on the pc - you do not have to buy multi hundred thousand dollar dev machines off sony or microsoft or whatever.
c) Easier to go online - simply because they have it built in, rather than consoles where it is at best an add-on.
d) Keyboard and mouse is far superior to any other control set for a lot of game types - strategy, FPS, any interface with lots of buttons, so slower RPGs and MMORPG's... again, this is built in due to the PC, whereas any console would have to do wierd things to get them in as standard.
E) People will continue to buy PCs as gaming machines simply due to the fact that then they can decide how good the gfx are, rather than be contrained by the limits of the platform.

[Spriggan]

b) It is cheaper to develop a game on the pc - you do not have to buy multi hundred thousand dollar dev machines off sony or microsoft or whatever.

I actualy thought that too Entropy, but several interviews that I've read (like with the on from some of the Black Isle guys) claim it's the other way around, that's why PC sales are realy poor now a days (comparied to about 5 years ago).  The interviews claim that while you have to pay a lienceing fee, the overall production and publishing fees are less.  

Don;t wory I'll go find some of these articels, just don't have time know and not sure when I do.