Second Big Crash in Videogame industry is coming.

[Crabber85]

Well ladies and gents to sum it up the same essential building blocks that helped to destroy the gaming industry back in the 80's is repeating itself as we speak because of greed and poor product*game* development and delivery.

Back in 1983 the giants of the gaming industry namely Atari and Activision suffered major losses due to retail shock and loss of consumer support because they allowed too many cheap under-developed games to be pushed out on the masses at prices that even today we consider too high and because of this the consumer base lost their faith in the developers and stopped purchasing games for their existing consoles this lead to a huge issue in the stores because they were then carrying thousands of useless copies of games they could not sell and so the industry tanked.

The same thing is currently happening today because of companies like Activision and EA who are pushing games out a year and half to two years early because they want to beat their competition to the shelves all this has served to do is cause the games to be sloppily thrown together and then rushed out broken, buggy and largely unplayable and has eroded consumer confidence in the publishers and developers which is costing the industry millions and hurting it severely.

Activision just pushed a broken and partial game out in the Tony Haw Pro Skater series which has been dead for some time and in the publishers infinite insanity they only included the map maker or park editor on the physical disk locking the campaign and multi-player portions away requiring that you have to download a day one update that is a monstrous seven gigabytes essentially they pushed the game out before it was even fully completed and only had the park editor ready so now comes the year long or more series of broken patches and broken updates to try to finish the game post-release which does not make sense logic dictates that the game should have been completely finished before they fully released it to the public so that the sixty plus dollars game price could have at least been somewhat justified but instead they took a highly unethical and some would even argue illegal route and this is becoming more and more common place unfortunately.

Now we've got all these broken, partial games being pushed to us months sometimes years prematurely and the big triple A developers are wanting to start charging even more for the games on the new consoles because they say its costing them more to build the games for them because they are more powerful than the previous generation of consoles so the plan going forward from the end of this year is to slowly increase the base price for all video games on the XBOX-ONE and PS4 to eighty dollars this not including the additional cost of the DLC or core content they have ripped out of the game and locked away on the disks and are holding hostage waiting for you to come up with the extra fifty or sixty dollars in ransom money to unlock or gain back access to.

So now we have the base price of the games going up twenty dollars in addition to the insanely high DLC prices and they expect to be able to charge these fees for broken or incomplete games again the logic fails me here because this scenario doesn't stand up you can possibly expect people to pay $120+ for broken or incomplete games its just not going to happen.

A retraction or shrinkage in the total sales for both the games and consoles over the last four years has been evident as a lot of the hard core old school gamers such as myself have gone back to our roots and have broken out our old sixteen, eighteen or even sixty-four bit consoles because the games work and they are fun to play.

Mobile gaming has helped to destroy console and pc gaming because it has drawn away a lot of good game developers who used to put really good content out for the console and pc and now they have turned their backs on us stating that we are dieing breed and mobile gaming is the new cash cow.

So we've already started loosing our developers and the ones will still have are looking at either dropping their triple A titles in favor of smaller indie games or they are going to a much more strict schedule where they will only be putting new games out once every two years using much smaller development teams which means the games wont be near as big or immersive because the development teams just wont have the man power or resources anymore to the jobs on the same scale.

What makes me sad about all of this is the new consoles have a lot of potential for the developers to work with because they are utilizing stronger, faster and more powerful CPU's and have way more ram capacity than anything we've had before so the sky is literally the limit but the developers and publishers are letting their greed get in the way and because there is a sufficiently large enough group of gamers who will still buy no matter what because they can't see reason or logic the cycle of greed will only continue until it reaches critical mass at which point the market will loos its stability, companies will go bankrupt or completely out of business and in the end we will be left with seriously expensive paperweights because our consoles will be largely unusable.

Developers and Publishers have their own set of servers that they use to host online matches and co-op and if the Dev or Pub suddenly goes out of business like a few already have then the servers they owned and maintained will get shut down which will cause the their games to loose most of their functionality rendering them useless.

The sad reality here is most of the games that have been out since 2007 or so have been dependent upon a connection to either the developer or publishers servers to authenticate your right to play the game and for access to online multi-player and if those servers go down you loose your access to those games entirely because they couldn't authenticate your right to play.

Since 2012 or so a lot of developers have opted for online only games which means you download the client side portal which gives you access to the games servers and then you can play but with online only games if the servers ever go down or you loose your internet connection then those games don't work and apparently with the new consoles the games being made for them are getting to be more and more online only or online intensive which is why with the XBOX-ONE your required to have a constant internet connection at all times if you don't then about seventy percent of the current titles out now for it wont work.

I've been noticing a real lack luster performance from some of the biggest triple A developers over the last five or six years it seems like they really like to focus on super-hyping their games but that is as far as they go and when they finally get the game out its nowhere near what they said it was going to be because they have started cutting corners and rushing to meet a specific dead line and their games have suffered tremendously.

In this economic climate people are struggling just to make ends-meet so video games have become a luxury that they just cant afford and with the price hikes coming up the industry is just making it tougher for folks to justify spending eighty plus dollars on a single video game when that money can be used to help pay a bill or get some groceries essentially the industry is pricing itself right out of business and they don't seem to care.

The industry is on a bell curve and it has already peaked and is now on the down slide when it will hit bottom nobody really knows but all the signs are there so it can't be that far off.

[CrazyCrab12]

I've definitely noticed this trend in the sims series. Instead of the expansions bringing more to the game, they're necessary for the game to have any value what so ever, and they still aren't up to the standards of old games.

[Crabber85]

Yeah the Sims franchise has been in trouble for a while now they've had two back to back botched releases, net code issues as well as a slew of other coding problems, EA got into the habit of rushing their games to beat their competitors new releases and it has done nothing but bite them in the tush because they began rushing their Battle Field installments six months to a full year premature starting with Battle Field 3 which had a really buggy mostly broken release and then they rushed Battle Field 4 and put it out in even worse shape than its predecessor and it's still largely unplayable more than a year after it's release.

Crytek has been struggling since about 2010 to pay its bills and two years ago started renting out its game engine Cryengine to other developers looking to use a more powerful engine to build their games but that backfired because Crytek couldn't source enough developers in need and during that time they produced one of the most expensive and low profit yielding games that they'd ever undertaken which was Ryse Son of Rome which cost something like 2 million dollars to make and it only generated a couple thousand dollars in sales because it was such a horrible game most folks didn't want to play it and of the small number who actually went out and bought it like my cousin were instantly displeased with the game and took it back within a week.

Now you've got AAA developers like Konami ditching the console/pc games they'd been working on for mobile gaming and because of this we have lost a lot of our critical developers because they decided to follow Konami in waving bye bye to three generations worth of game content on the console and pc platforms.

I just saw where the base game price is going up from sixty dollars to eighty dollars in the next six months and that price increase is not even including the price hike for DLC purchases and even thought the price of the games are going up you'll be seeing more and more content locked away thats already on the disk because the dev's are getting greedier so they are going to be locking away more and more of the core game in an effort to force the player into spending even more obscene amounts of money just to be able to play their games with all the base content available.

The mobile gaming industry in combination with the current lack of decent working games being produced on the console/pc platforms has lead to tipping point just like back in 1983 only this time there are more players ie the dev's and pub's than there were over thirty years ago which means the problem is bigger and wider spread than it was the first time.

What gets me the most is that on the XBOX-One Microsoft is including an app that will allow anybody to make an indie game and then push it out to the public on the games marketplace for the same price as a triple A title which is insanity because this is exactly what happened back in 83' to many little bitty basement developers were pushing out junk games which caused the player base to loose faith in the games being sold so they stopped buying which lead to an overage in stock limits and helped to bring on the first collapse of the industry.