I think that is something that a lot of people have a hard time getting- a third party company can’t keep making high quality games that cost more money to make than the money they get in return. It doesn’t matter how awesome a game is, if it doesn’t appeal to enough people to make a profit, it isn’t viable making.
The only ways those are profitable is if it has a different function, like bringing people to hardware for other future purchases or if it builds a repuation in a different teritory. So unless Sega is going to be paid off big time to do one of these niche things (Microsoft, Sony), I can’t see it happening.
You have to realize that May 12th is the day the exhibition hall opens at the E3 convention. Everybody and their mother is going to be making explosive announcements that day. Of course Sega’s going to make announcements May 12th. So will just about every other major game company.
The problem is untested games can be viewed in the same light and no one is willing to experiment with new ideas as a result.
Judging from the direction in which games seem to be going now, by the time the next decade arrives no one will be willing to make anything new or unique because… it might not sell! Perish the thought of that ever happening. There’s nothing stopping a games developer from turning a failed concept, money-wise, into something lucrative. Just throw three half naked women who tend to pose for the camera on a regular basis into the mix and stir.
I find the notion of great games being tossed aside as worthless just because they don’t sell to be symptomatic of an industry dominated by moronic fashion victims.
Hell, I’ve seen successful developers drowning in wealth go out of business, so applying a pure business ethos to gaming will ultimately be its undoing. There has to be a method to this madness other than sheer hunger for money.
Journalist: “What motivated you to make games for a living?”
Games developer: “Why, money of course! I live and breath to drain the potential revenue out of every single idea I can recycle from the gaming status quo!”
No wonder Shinji Mikami feels so disgusted with Sony.
Geoff: Relax man.Take the movie industry for example.Sure there are MANY mainstream games out there but after 80 years or so you can still catch great movies.
Honestly though, the problem isn’t the game developers, it is the consumers. I love both Saga and ICO, two games that sold very badly. If sequels aren’t made because people didn’t buy them, you can’t blame the developer (you can maybe somewhat blame marketing, but that is besides the point… sometimes the marketing is fine and nobody still buys it).
Look at what does sell- Did you see the results EA posted? It isn’t just some mean juggernaut, they are providing the world with games people want- People vote with their dollars and they are voting for EA, not these innovative, smaller niche products.
If there was a market for newer, untested ideas then you would see more of them out there.
Think about this- You run a company. This company has shareholders to appease (you’ll lose your job, perhaps every future jobs would be harder to get) and you have 60 employees who have families and lives that you’d like to keep working. Do you do a newer, untested idea, that if it doesn’t do well you and all those employees will lose their jobs, or do you do something a safer that has a good chance of you and those employees keping their jobs?
Again, if you don’t like that there aren’t better games out there, blame the people who buy crap, not the developers who can’t afford to make more interesting titles.
I agree- Same thing for music- If tools get a lot better and hardware stabilizes and it becomes possible (cheaper) to do a ‘indie’ game that can compete with big budgeted titles, we will see more of this. But I think we are a couple of generations away.
That’s why I love garagegames.com/ lagi.
Seems to be one of the few (if not the only one) companies that gives so much support to indie devs
They will soon update Torque with their TSE (Torque Shader Engine) that massively improves the graphical potential of the engine, it will about double the price but it’s still a WAY cheap engine for what it offers. Don’t even try to compare it with any free/open source engine, it’s miles ahead
Here’s some info on the upcoming TSE: garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=748
I think there’s more than enough blame to go around, though mainstream gamers are mostly responsible for the changing face of gaming. It’s a shame that only the richest developers can afford to be creative now. Without Capcom, Camelot and Sega I dread to imagine what would become of the games industry. Many developers now just have no sense of vision or artistic integrity.
Sincerely I hope this crap-for-retards games the publishers release in swarms will fund some great games every now and then. Thousands of companies made games only for profit since the 2600 and they are all dead now. Any company wanting to survive will have to make great games.
Making games is a excruciating task. The most hard kind of software to program. As programmers and designers normally didn’t get loads of money for their work they’ll go away in the day the only reason to make a game is to churn money into shareholder’s pockets. The only reason these guys stay there is because they love their work. Without this love they’ll go away to make more money programming databases or weapons systems for the army.
