Well, It's been almost a year since I've written a blog...so I've made up for lost time by writing a huge blog about something that's been on my mind.
So yeah, I've talked about this before, but I didn't get to finish it. While I stopped talking about it over a year ago, I still think the same thing: the game industry is setting up for another crash. I feel that the only thing that keeps it from happening is the consumers' patience; it's only a matter of time before our patience runs out.
For those of you that weren't aware, prepare for a long history lesson about the history of the great video game industry through the eyes of a old jaded gamer. So expect a lot of negativity, but I hope that this will make you aware of the dark side of gaming and what might happen.
History Repeats Itself
George Santayana's famous quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," has proven to be an axiom we all experience some time in our lives, if we are not careful. In other words, history repeats itself if we fail to learn from past mistakes. In this case, the Video Game Crashes of the past (1977 and 1983) will inevitably happen as long as the current industry doesn't do anything to change their fate.
As of late, more and more gamers have aired their grievances over games and the companies behind them. Despite this, publishers are not doing much, if anything, to cater to their customers' demands. The pressure is only going to build up between the industry and its customers and eventually, the bubble's gonna pop. But, this isn't the first time this has happened.
If you look into the details of the prior game crashes (Wikipedia summarizes both events here), you'll begin to see a pattern. One thing in common between the two crashes is oversaturation. In 1977, many companies in the market jumped ship, due to an oversaturation of systems that had a terribly limited number of games built-in. Magnavox played a major role in the oversaturation, having released eight systems in a span of three years (beat that, Apple!). The market recovered shortly after Space Invaders came around, but an oversaturation of systems occurred again in 1983. This time around, however, games were more of the cause of the second crash. High expectations were met with poor quality software, whether it was a bad arcade port (Pac-Man for the Atari 2600) or a terrible licensed games (the infamous E.T. game, again on the Atari 2600). Furthermore, many companies were coming out of the woodwork to try cashing into the videogame craze that spread across North America, but because most of these companies were ill-equipped for programming quality games. This resulted in a surge of crappy games that piled up in retail stores. People were disappointed with these games, so they told their friends not to by them. They collected dust and took up space on retail shelves, et cetera, and the rest is history.
Now Are You Beginning to See The Pattern?
Let's jump forward to 2012. So, the industry has enjoyed almost 30 years of prosperity, but I feel another industry-crashing storm is a-brewing. The videogame industry is starting to fall into the same patterns that preceded each videogame crash.
Oversaturation of Games
The current generation of gaming came up with the term "shovelware" to refer to the large amount of poor-quality games that started filling the store shelves. Add to that the plethora of underpar licensed games....sure, a few of these games have been decent, but we all know how most licensed games turn out. Also, while the sun goes down on the "plastic guitar" craze, we're left with all those gigantic boxes piled up in retail stores. Used-game stores have forsaken the concept of buying and reselling all those clunky peripherals because they have no space for them, and no one wants them. But, the pile-up doesn't end there; we have games that you can't buy without an accompanying peripheral. Skylanders comes to mind first, followed by all those Cabela's hunting games....all tucked up next to Rock Band, Rock Revolution, Band Hero, and all their third-party peripherals.
Oversaturation of Systems
Sony, Microsoft, and (to some extent) Nintendo have all been guilty of overloading the market with multiple versions of their respective systems for this generation. Whether they release a special color for their consoles, bump up the specs a bit, or drop their consoles a size or two, stores and consumers alike are feverishly trying to keep up with the high volume of redundant hardware. In some cases (especially the DS and the PSP), features like more cache space or a built-in camera were added—or, in the case of PSPgo, removed—to drastically improve the functionality of the hardware, forcing some people to upgrade to the newer versions. Those who don't keep up with the updates are bound to be confused and/or frustrated over the many similar-yet-different options for each system.
Lack of Publishing Control....?
It's hard to say at this point in time whether there is a solid argument about this. When you count the AAA titles, the budget titles, the shovelware, and the independent games, we have more than enough games to fill our backlog, but laws have been put in place since the crash of '83 that prevent just anyone from publishing a game about anything for any given platform and expect a profit. Development studios must follow a chain of command if they want to make money with their games. If you have the money to burn, you could sign with companies like EA or Ubisoft to press your games onto disc. If you want to take the indie route, you can ask Valve, Apple, and the like to distribute your game digitally. So generally, one could say that publishers have got the control thing down pat. However, Tim Schafer's Kickstarter initiative to ask end-users for funding the next Double Fine project instead of publishers might indicate that the publishers' grip on game distribution might be slipping. Publishers have a tendency to take over the creative process of a game and altering the final product for the sake of maximizing sales...this obviously doesn't work too well for the creators. The fundraiser's immediate success may serve as a beacon to other developers to fight for their freedom of creative control over their own projects, but nothing is for certain right now. Only time will tell if an uprising against publishers will happen.
Loss of Interest
The Crash of '83 happened mostly in part due to people with high expectations being repeatedly let down with inadequate games. The Crash of '77 was much more simple: people just got tired of playing the same games. Today, the video game industry is setting up for a one-two combination of both factors. Last year alone showed that consumers' frustrations over constant disappointment is starting to come to a head with the attack of the three-quels. Complaints over game redundancy have been much less apparent, but exist nonetheless. I'm sure every gamer knows at least one person that has said "I'm tired of playing [genre]" or "All of those are the same to me." People can only be frustrated so many times before they decide to give up and move on.
Here Comes A New Challenger!
Since the game industry had plenty of time to evolve without being disrupted by any major market disaster, there are many more factors involved in making a game than there were back in the 80's. Like a machine, however, the more moving parts are involved, the more things can go wrong and the harder it is to maintain. On top of the factors that have caused the video game industry to fall in the past, there is a new host of other factors that will help sink a larger industry just as fast if things are left unchecked.
The Worldwide Market
While the United States wasn't the only country involved in the evolution of video games throughout history, the first two market crashes were pretty much self-contained within North American shores. However, between then and now, Japan controlled the market for most of the time, but focus has recently shifted back to the Americans and the growing demand for Hollywood-calibre experiences. Additionally, most games today are developed by studios located in Canada, France, Singapore, and other countries all around the world. Should the video game industry collapse today, it would most certainly leave an impression on the world economy.
Running Out of Creative Ammo or Public Complacency?
A concrete catalog of genres in video games came about during the Atari 2600 era and has since evolved into a vast spectrum of categories and their respective sub-genres. However, we haven't really seen anything entirely new in a while. Sure, the indie market has emerged in the past ten years and has provided us with fresh ideas from time to time, but those games usually are either too obscure to fall under a single genre, or do not fall under a genre other than the miscellaneous "indie" genre. One can speculate that the industry is just simply running out of original ideas, but then again, what if we factor in the business aspect of making games? In other words, if publishers don't think that a game will sell well, they won't release it. It seems that the games that sell well today are games played in either first-person perspective or third-person perspective. Even IP reboots, like XCOM or Syndicate, just to name a couple, have forsaken their original strategic/tactical gameplay elements in favor of first-person action. Whether the gameplay change was a creative or executive decision remains to be seen, but in the end, we're stuck with two more first-person games added to an already oversaturated genre.
Diminishing Returns
There was a time when video games were written by a single person. These days, games require very large teams to produce. Furthermore, to keep up with the demand for Hollywood-calibre productions, studios hire Hollywood directors, writers, composers, and voice talents. In short, games can be expensive to make. Unfortunately, sometimes games are not well received, regardless of the production costs. Whether it's because the expectations for the game were set too high, or the game just sucked, game studios and publishers suffer great losses and sometimes even shut down. If things don't change, these costly disappointments will start shutting down even the biggest studios.
Rushing Incomplete or Unpolished Games Out The Door
For the sake of striking the iron while it's hot, publishers insist on keeping an aggressive deadline for games so they can maximize sales while people are still excited for their games, whether the dev studios can finish or refine the games in time or not. There have been a good number of games that were obviously released incomplete, leaving gamers frustrated and feeling ripped off having paid full price for an incomplete product. Even though publishers sometimes go out of their way to announce patches or add-ons for their games just prior to their release, the damage is already done. In more extreme cases, some games are sold with entire pieces of the game missing, and customers are charged for the missing pieces when they are released as an add-on. If enough people catch onto this marketing strategy, this will give publishers a good amount of trouble.
Obsolecence of the Handheld Gaming Market
While I make it a point to never listen to what he says, Michael Pachter was actually onto something when he predicted that the handheld console era is coming to a close back in 2010, but I don't think it was wholly accurate. Contrary to what Pachter said, I feel that mobile phones will have a greater impact on the handheld console market than the iPod Touch, mostly because it's a phone as well a multimedia device. Also, now that Android phones have proven their worth as a competitor to Apple, consumers now have the freedom of choice. Most importantly, mobile devices are now powerful enough to run the Unreal Engine. Essentially, we don't need the 3DS or the Vita anymore, because our phones can practically do anything now.
Game Over....New Game.
So what happens when the video game industry goes down? Whether big publishing companies go small and live on with the mobile division or abandon video games altogether and go into other software markets like alarm clock apps, one thing's for sure: the mainstream will stop caring about games. If you ask me, I'm really hoping for this to happen, but I'm sure you know about that, considering I just wrote a GIGANTIC blog about it. That said, I'm not too worried about video games disappearing from existence, because as history has proven, video games will not only find a way to survive but evolve into something greater.
While things fell apart around the industry in both 1977 and 1983, a parallel world of video game development ran quietly underground, which was mostly unaffected by the events that happened above them. While the public focused on burning the Odyssey and Pong machines in 1977, university students across the U.S. were developing the precursors of RPGs, MMORPGs, and FPSs on their school's mainframes. In 1983, when the public enjoyed rumors of Atari burying truckloads of copies of E.T. for the Atari 2600 somewhere in New Mexico, the personal computer scene was on the rise. Aside from receiving faithful ports of arcade games, magazines published source code for games, so that users can type-in the code onto their machines to be rewarded with a game to play and customize to their liking.
If (or when?) the current industry collapses, what underground movement will keep games alive? Thanks to low-cost, indie-friendly publishers like Valve, Apple, or Google, anyone willing to dedicate their time to making a game would be able to distribute their games with little overhead from publishing costs. Secondly, the free-to-play model seems to be making great strides in helping bigger game studios build larger and higher-quality games without needing to rely heavily on publishers.
In the case of consoles, unlike the consoles that were around during the first two Crashes, this generation's systems (or possibly, whatever future generation the Crash will happen) have a good chance of survival, thanks to the digital distribution of games. Even if stores, physical or otherwise, will stop carrying disc-based games in their warehouses, willing gamers will still be able to buy games on their respective platforms' networks (XBL, PSN, Nintendo Network, etc.). However, because consoles today are primarily disc-based systems, and the number of disc-based games would significantly be reduced due to a lack of publishers, consoles may become obsolete. This is especially true if you factor in the fact that PCs are getting smaller, cheaper, and more powerful.
In any event, video games will survive. That is, if the rest of the world survives 2012....but that's another story.
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