This story might startle you and sound outrageous following the frenzy that we have seen after release of Xbox 360 and the great eagerness awaiting the impending release of Sony’s PS3. But if you analyze the way what the main stream media (MSM) is doing on the gaming industry, you would find that this is a balloon set to burst anytime.



Scrap the surface a little and you would find that the gaming industry is diseased as the way the entertainment industry was prior to the spectacular crash in the 80s and mind you, the gaming industry is putting in much higher capital in games and consoles than Hollywood was during that time or even now! An article in The Inquirer says; ‘MSM is recognizing gaming as something that a wider demographic than goths-with-guns(tm) and overweight basement dwellers do, and the industry is raking in more money than Hollywood’.



The last crash came at the height of Atari’s boom time. Atari was dishing out hit after hit games in rapid successions like Pac-Man, ET, Asteroids, movie tie-ins, overflowing arcades and a rabid fan base. It seemed that it was invincible. But crash it did.



The industry died, almost before anyone realized it. The 2600, Colecovision, Intellivision and others made way for a string of mediocre market failures like the 5200 and 7200, all of which probably didn’t make a dime.



Let’s analyze how the gaming industry might crash.



1. There was a deluge of games in the market. Great games were made, but too many got resigned into the clouds of mediocrity.

2. Magazines shied to give big names bad reviews as that meant revenue losses.

3. Outright stupidity in the name of originality and creativity bored gamers no end. The article puts it as - Rocks floating around to shoot? Eating dots in a maze? Aliens moving left, right and inexorably downward? Centipedes? Who thinks this stuff up, and what were they taking? *chuckle*



Unfortunately, the current scenario is not much different from the earlier one when it crashed. In fact, it is remarkably similar. The same old things are repeated, the same circumstances prevail.



1. Again a deluge of mediocre titles. Over ninety per cent of them are crap. The old creativity is extinct, that is the one new twist. The article posts a question - ‘How many games are not sequels, fight games, drivers, or FPSes?’ Very true! One look at the XBox 360 sports games shows there is nothing new to write home about, and they really aren’t even trying. Role Playing Games have been reduced to barely interactive PG-13 movies. May be there is one, possibly two titles a year that can be considered really new and innovative. Alas! That’s barely enough to sustain an industry.

2. The moderately better games are shockingly expensive to make. Gaming has evolved so much that we are in the world of real life-like images and graphics where every single detail has to be remodeled. Every piece of background like architecture has to be distinct from the other. Artists are expensive, talented artists are more expensive which makes it impossible to shortcut this anymore.

3. Programming, net code and everything else has taken what was a job for a single person to teams of over 150. Development cycles have gone from a few months to years. A team is extremely lucky to put out a third game on any given console before it is end of life making experience pay off shockingly low. From 10s of 1,000s before, costs now run up to 10s of 1,000,000s.

4. Then the next-gen consoles pushing costs up, economics pushing risk taking down, and prices going up. Despite the XBox 360 titles, and presumably PS3 ones, have gone from $50 to $60 console makers are not holding on to the dream of making much money out of it. MS is already selling its latest Xboxes about 10 dollars lesser than the cost of production and doesn’t hope to break even till late next year. MS might have different reasons for keeping costs low, but what about the gaming industry as a whole. Besides, there isn’t much difference in the entertainment value of an older game played over a TV through a TV game system and playing the latest game in Xbox 360. The cost of testing one that has an interesting looking box just went up 20%, and you are more likely than ever to be disappointed. Customers don’t like this. Game companies don’t like this. Console makers don’t like this.



So, you have the same situation that you did in the past, swathes of high priced boredom. Mediocrity with no way of picking the good from the bad. Anything that could help you has been co-opted, and you have to throw darts with $60 attached to each one.



However the article concludes saying; ‘There is one way out though, read reviews before you shell out a day’s wages for a potential stinker, read anything you can on the game. Remember when I said in the old days there was a co-opting of magazines, which was in the pre-web 1980s? Well, now it is worse. The pestilence of flash aside, most gaming sites and magazines are so far from publishing a real review it is laughable. Sadly, the gaming industry is in a self-imposed death spiral. Everyone is putting on a brave face, touting the latest v6 of a game that came out before most of it’s audience was born. Rather than take a step back, they are addicted to marketing plans and money men. It will kill them, and in a few years, good will arise from the ashes. It happened with arcades, it happened with the first wave of consoles, and is about to happen again.’



Read the full article by The Inquirer here. Thanks