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[Robsoie]

I can't say the videogame industry is in decline, i'm a bit over my forties and have been playing games for a couple of decades and some.

And never back in those days you had publishers or guys like Newell swimming in gigantic seas of money like they're doing now.
So industry decline, i really doubt it.

Now that said, i must recognize that what have been in decline is my interest in several game genres, i guess getting old play a part, but the continous flow of clones of financially successful games that didn't really captivated me to start with play another good part.

But in the same time my like/dislike is of no importance for the industry as considering what i'm playing the most on my free time that has a gaming part makes it so i'm not the target audience anymore, so me not buying anything from modern time does not have any impact, as big guns of videogaming do not care about someone that small game time is spent on games that are either 10 or more years old or are made with visuals that can be reproduced on notepad.

Regarding indie, people trying to sell a game without having to go through a big publisher is far from something new, when i was young i remember the stories of people coding games in their garage and trying to sell them.

The only difference is that at the time those guys didn't have all those platforms helping them to make a living out of this, and there wasn't the internet as the great tool to advertize the product of their work. So it wasn't rare some of those games weren't getting more than a couple of dozen units sold from "ear to ear" , but at least they helped those guys to get a nicer curriculum vitae for when they would try to get into a company later.

Now with the insane cost of those AAA videogames, it's not a surprise that they're all more or less clones as those big publisher need to not lose money on them, as they have a need to please their investor and stock holders, losing money could just be fatal for those companies, so cloning what has been a proved financial success again and again makes sense, especially as there are constantly new kids getting in age to play videogames for whom those clones are in fact new games that they will buy.

So if you really want more than just rehash of the same thing, the indie scene is the actual place in which people will still try to make new concepts or make things they actually like first before any thought of "profit is priority" instead of just making a copy of what has been cloned dozen of times before.
Now sure you'll get a bunch of bad or uninteresting game, but you'll get some gems too, but that's the same for everything after all.

I'm with you about the over-focus on graphics lately and I honestly don't care about the difference between text-based, ASCII, Half-Life 1 graphics and the latest 3D super realistic game which came out.

Apropos of nothing, reading this made me have flashbacks to like the late 90s. It's amazing I've been reading basically that exact same line for over a decade and a half.

indeed

[Neonivek]

I think the industry is currently in a decline... but I am referring to the business side of things.

But I need to actually check the numbers.

[jocan2003]

*grabs popcorn*

You better let me have some XD

[Arcvasti]

I'm with you about the over-focus on graphics lately and I honestly don't care about the difference between text-based, ASCII, Half-Life 1 graphics and the latest 3D super realistic game which came out.

Apropos of nothing, reading this made me have flashbacks to like the late 90s. It's amazing I've been reading basically that exact same line for over a decade and a half.

SOME of us haven't lived long enough to remember that. ; ) I'm mostly talking about showing Dwarf Fortress or Nethack or Wizardry or Morrowind to someone and them rejecting it out of hand because of the graphics. Which isn't entirely fair to the poor game companies since they don't have anything to do with those people most of the time. And besides, gameplay and graphics aren't mutually exclusive. I mean, graphic designers don't necessarily have the know-how to code games. They just graphics and the programmers just program. Not ALL that much overlap. The performance of the art team and the development team is usually mostly unrelated. Except when the prior gets a vastly higher budget then the latter, I suppose. It looks like, that when there's a major advance in graphics and not in gameplay, the people will shout "ALL THEY'RE WORKING ON IS GRAPHICS" regardless of the actual effort put into either of them. It might just be that its harder to innovative gameplay then it is to art and the latter has more of a noticeable impact per unit of work put into it.

^Take the above with a grain of salt. Its a bit late for rational thinking where I live. By which I mean that my rationality is slightly impaired by my sleep deprivation.

[alexandertnt]

crap, accidently used modify and erased my entire post with something else :/ disregard this.

[The13thRonin]

Too many people are equating money to decline.

I wonder if a million dollars was offered but you had to have a lobotomy to get it how many people would choose the lobotomy.

The SOUL of gaming is in decline. As an industry it has always and will always make some kind of money.

[Glloyd]

Regarding indie, people trying to sell a game without having to go through a big publisher is far from something new, when i was young i remember the stories of people coding games in their garage and trying to sell them.

Indeed. In fact, just look up the Scratchware Manifesto. I mean, Rollercoaster Tycoon was made entirely by one guy.

[The13thRonin]

I'm with you about the over-focus on graphics lately and I honestly don't care about the difference between text-based, ASCII, Half-Life 1 graphics and the latest 3D super realistic game which came out.

Apropos of nothing, reading this made me have flashbacks to like the late 90s. It's amazing I've been reading basically that exact same line for over a decade and a half.

That... that might say something about the actual existence of a recent over-focus on graphics. Unless we're talking recent in the, like, centennial sense or something.

If you've been reading the same line for 10 years then there's probably something to that line.

[Frumple]

Yeah, I don't think there is. But you're welcome to rant on the subject if you want to, since you've already made it pretty clear you're not interested in actually discussin' stuff in this thread. Ain't gonna' try t'stop yeh, heh.

[alexandertnt]

The SOUL of gaming is in decline. As an industry it has always and will always make some kind of money.

The "soul" of gaming is extroadinarily subjective, vague, and far from being something thats fixed.

If you've been reading the same line for 10 years then there's probably something to that line.

Alternatively they are like the apocolypse preachers, endlessly preaching about something which never comes to be. Which I think is what Frumple was implying. (A better analogy might be "Damn kids and their rock and roll!").

This is really the only thing in your post I find serious fault with. To quote Jim of Jimquisiton fame: "When did making money become a holy quest above scrutiny"
Just because a company is expected to care about making money doesn't mean it "has a inherent right" to actively exclude what is quite simply a more advanced platform. Could putting their game out for PC hit their figures? Sure, but its still a nice thing to do, probably isn't going to bankrupt them anytime soon, and will help make them look less evil in the long run, so there is benefit there.

I agree with the premise of your argument in some circumstances, like food and medicine. But video games??

You do not have some inherent right to have video games ported or developed for your pc. It is not "the wrong thing to do" to decide not to port a game, or to not develop a game onto the pc.

Is it a nice thing to do? Yes. But if they don't, its absurd to feel morally offended. By all means, complain to them (thats one way companies know that there is some interest), but don't act like its "the right thing to do".

PC's are only more "advanced" in the sense that they expose more funcitonality to the end user. What is available and relevant to developers is quite different. The PS3's Cell processor destroyed PC processors for quite a long time, and was coupled with modern hardware was very much advanced (moreso than the PC in many ways).

[The13thRonin]

The SOUL of gaming is in decline. As an industry it has always and will always make some kind of money.

The "soul" of gaming is extroadinarily subjective, vague, and far from being something thats fixed.

Not everything in life can be measured with a yardstick. Are you saying that because it's difficult to measure it can't possibly decline?

If you've been reading the same line for 10 years then there's probably something to that line.

Alternatively they are like the apocolypse preachers, endlessly preaching about something which never comes to be. Which I think is what Frumple was implying. (A better analogy might be "Damn kids and their rock and roll!").

Or maybe they're like the countless people who predicted the start of WW2 before it happened and were ignored because DOOMSAYERS! "We shall have to fight another war again in 25 years time." ~Lloyd George, talking about the Treaty of Versailles. People who are able to look at the past and the present and make intelligent inferences about how these things will impact on the future.

[Shadowlord]

There are occasionally still good games made [heck Minecraft came out in the last 5 years and that was fantastic] but I do believe the overall quality of the industry and games has dropped dramatically.

You know, I didn't like Minecraft at all, any of the times I've tried it. Just didn't find it fun. *shrugs*

The first gaming rig I owned was a rig that ran DOS. I loved the crap out of that computer and managed to amass quite a collection of floppy disks. It certainly wasn't convenient or easy to be a gamer... Hardware cost a small fortune and I remember some games being up to 8 floppy disks. Later on I acquired a Super Nintendo and then after that an N64. I remember fondly a bunch of games that I can no longer remember the titles of. One game that particularly caught my fancy was Harvest Moon for the Super Nintendo.

The first computer or console I played any games on was a Commodore 64. The 64 meant it had a whopping 64 KB of RAM! The computer was built into the keyboard. Floppy disks were actually floppy. You could fit 8 games on a single floppy disk. There was MULE and Archon and Spy vs Spy (and Spy vs Spy 2) and Lords of Conquest and Repton (the one with the phase-cloaking spaceship/fighter/thing, not the other one) and I'm out of really memorable games to name. Well, Potty Pigeon was certainly memorable and amusing, too.

It was an exciting time to be a gamer. Everything was always constantly improving, game design, technology and game developers seemed to respect gamers.

You missed The Videogame Crash of 1983, triggered because of shit games, market oversaturation, too many consoles, etc. The wikipedia article goes into a lot of detail.

Somewhere along the way... It's hard to pinpoint an exact date the focus for developers shifted from game design to graphics. At first this wasn't such a bad thing...

I agree that if you throw almost all your money at having amazing graphics, there's an opportunity cost, in that you could have been spending that money on something else. That's not to say that you can just fund a game designer to design "amazing gameplay," because you can't really predict if something will be fun or not without trying it, and it wasn't until this recent indie phenomenon started that you could even get a game with many sales if you "neglected" (e.g. "went retro on") the graphics.

Even so, history shows that the problem of companies making shit games and bloating the market with them existed long before it was possible to make games with amazing graphics, before the internet infrastructure existed to make 'free' puzzle games which charge you $0.99 for an extra 'life' or games with $40 spaceships or where you pay $2.50 for a minuscule fraction of a percent chance to get a spaceship from opening a lockbox.

If graphics are advancing at the cost of every other single part of the game then there is a problem... A serious problem. I think that the focus on graphics became a problem when we hit the 'bloom' generation of graphics... Let me state this right now... Bloom is not making anything look better... What it is doing is making my eyes bleed.

Let's sidestep bloom for the moment and go back to the issue of whether graphics are advancing at the cost of every other part of the game. I'd like to compare two games.

First, Commando for the C64. Here's a video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_789845&feature=iv&src_vid=hDAhixO2t5w&v=ymBBQN45shA
Second, compare that to whichever you may have played of the last few Call of Duty games, or the Battlefield series. Doesn't really matter which one!
Can you say that the only thing that has advanced there is graphics?

Of course, Commando's design is remarkably simple, it's remarkably short (if you don't die repeatedly, which is what you're expected to do), and it's not even multiplayer. But for some reason I cannot fathom it's #1 on http://c64s.com/toplist/ (I even played it in the 80s myself and never got past the first level, but then, I was a kid and that's a lot of bullet and grenade spam).

Two games with more depth from the 80s are M.U.L.E. and Archon, both multiplayer. M.U.L.E. is a co-operative (but also competitive!) multiplayer colony/trading game. Archon is a magical battle on a chessboard between light and dark to control Power Points. Power Points are proof against magic.
The 90s brought strategy games with a lot of depth (Master of Magic, Master of Orion 2, etc), but often so much depth that the AI couldn't handle it all, and couldn't deal with a player who found an effective strategy. AI still seems to be a problem today for a lot of studios, but it's certainly much easier to make your AI cheat than to make your AI understand all the tactics a human player will, especially in a deep strategy game. Throughout the 90s, any game or game level including an AI companion was dreaded, because the AI was always *terrible*. It tends to be better now, but at the same time developers have made changes which you've noticed - like turning off friendly fire - the result of which is that the AI no longer runs in front of the player and gets killed in the middle of battles, or if it does, it at least doesn't take any damage, and is less likely to incur the wrath of reviewers, especially if the game makes the companion immortal instead of requiring the player to start the level over if they die. Players shouldn't need to worry about the AI being stupid, and it's cheaper and easier to make the AI tougher or just immortal than to make it clever enough to stay alive as well as the player can.

These days developers don't even bother to advertise FEATURES of the game anymore... They just show things exploding and then fart out their brand name afterwards. You just know somewhere there's a CEO in an office yelling at a group of guys because their modern FPS shooter had three less explosions in their ad than the other teams modern FPS shooter had in their ad.

I generally don't watch those things, because I don't want to get hyped about something that might not even be accurate.

Let's get this out of the way straight away... Game developers [at least the big ones] believe you are an idiot... It's OK they believe I'm an idiot too.

It's not that they think you or I are idiots, it's that they've learned that to appeal to the most people they have to design their games to be playable by people who don't know what the frak they're doing, or who are having a bad day, or who don't feel like reading the almost-400 page manual (Dominions 4 - I read it), or, yes, are idiots. Idiots should be able to play games too, n'est-ce pas?

What's completely astounding is that gamers do not want to be treated this way... Games that do not hold your hand [Minecraft, Portal, Dwarf Fortress, etc] have been crazy successful.
I might be alone in this but if I'm playing the game I want more than just an on-rails experience... Let me wander the halls... Let me call the shots... LET ME OPEN THE GOSH DAMN DOORS.

Modern FPSes have trained me to know that in most games, I don't have to worry about anything that looks like a maze or a forest or anything else that one could normally get lost in. Just charge right in and fate will ensure that you go the way you're supposed to go, because every way you're not supposed to go will be impossible to go. If there are actual mazes, well, you can usually still tune out and use the right-hand-path solution to solve them without thinking about it. There are, of course, games which aren't like this. Skyrim, the Assassin's Creed series, and so on. Skyrim gives you quest markers showing you precisely where to go, of course, but it tends to be some cave clear on the other side of the map...

I can point out games that don't hold your hand which didn't get a lot of sales or publicity and weren't crazy successful, if you like. One particular one is named The Summoning, and it's an SSI game from 1992. Personally, I'd call it a very good game. The wikipedia article doesn't have much information on it, and if you acquire it, you'd really want to read the manual for the backstory and how the magic works and such. (I wonder if GoG has it... doesn't look like it)

You know what I love? Spending $2000 on hardware so that I can play a terrible port... Why... For the love of all that is good in the world would you not start development on the platform with A) the best hardware and B) the most possible variations of hardware... Common sense would dictate porting to a simpler, fixed specifications platform would be easy from that position... I really have nothing more to say on this... I'm perfectly happy for consoles, I know that a lot of people love them but that's really not an excuse for developers to abandon the PC almost entirely.

It seems logical to me: It's much easier to develop solely for one or two hardware configurations (consoles) rather than all possible PC hardware configurations, which lead to strange incompatibilities and errors and missing DLL files and so on.

On the subject of shit ports, with the rise of Steam, I believe companies have realized they stand to get a substantial amount of cash from making ports that aren't total shit (one hopes) - and some kinds of games are for the most part not on consoles anyways (such as TBS 4xes, or RTSes, of which you can find very few on the 360).

Remember when playing a game was as simple as putting a CD key in? Now you need to go through five extensive background checks, report to your local government agency, show them your passport, pass a drugs test, qualify for the Winter Olympics and then after all that you can play.

On the XBox 360, you basically put in the game CD and that's it. Or if it's installed on your hard drive and you downloaded it from XBox Live, you don't have to do anything at all. This is the main reason I get games for it. The sales on XBL are kind of shit, though. MS has been giving two free games away per month to XBox Live Gold subscribers, though. (Some good, some crap - right now it's Dungeon Defenders, which I didn't even bother to download.)

PC games have had onerous copy protection since onerous copy protection has existed, in one form or another. First it was code wheels and finding pages in the manual - There was an Indiana Jones game for the C64, with a red film that you had to hold over a page to see some text, so that you could prove to the game that you owned it. Frontier: Elite II had you look up ships in the manual, I think. Curse of the Azure Bonds (A D&D game) had a code wheel. Eventually games started including CD checks (... and CDs), then things got more nefarious. I don't think anyone installed any DRM in DOS, they were still trying to get by with looking things up in the manual back then. (Photocopying the entire manual was a thing people would do when pirating a game with such DRM before the Internet was big). Of course, installing some kind of rootkit into your OS is a lot more nefarious, but those games are easy to be aware of and avoid.

Steam is a whole lot better than all that. For that matter, GoG doesn't have even copy protection on anything they sell, at all - and most of it is old games already set up or patched to work on modern OSes, but they also have some newer games (including the Witcher 1 and 2, for example).

Oh wait no you can't because the servers aren't up...

You just have to know who has/had the terrible DRM and not buy from them, on the platform where it exists, e.g. Ubisoft on PC, although they have said their new games no longer have it, IIRC.

My singleplayer Steam games still work when I can't reach Steam (You have to have steam auto-login / save password).
So do my xbox 360 games.
I think not getting achievements (on steam) while offline is the only real issue there.

You do have to make sure not to buy games that have DRM other than steam included with them, but their Steam store page will say if they do.

Dear Kickstarter... I hate you... You are a land of broken promises and failed dreams... The cake was a lie.

From what I've read over the years, it normally takes about as long as Kickstarter has been around, or longer, to create, complete, and release a game (5+ years). (For an actual development studio making an actual game, of course...) Of course there are some studios that manage to release a new game (Call of Duty) every two years, and swap off every year with a different studio so they can put one out every year, but they're also building off their previous games and so on.

Moving on to the 'indie' scene. You know what you were lacking games industry? Hipsters... Well worry no longer! Because now we have an army of indie developers and just look at the armada of interesting games it has created:

Braid - retro style platformer
Fez - retro style platformer
Super Meat Boy - retro style platformer

I'm raising my eyebrow like Spock again. I think you're probably overgeneralizing, but then I've only played one of these games and only for a few minutes (that being Braid).

What's more worrying than the fact that a large part of the 'indie' scene is even less creative than AAA games is the extreme dickishness of the developers:

Example: Phil Fish, creator of Fez: "PC's are for spreadsheets". Phil Fish also told critics to "go die".

Did you happen to see what said critics were saying to Phil Fish? That's not to say that telling people to "go die" is good promotion or publicity, because it's not. But Fish didn't hire a publicist or anyone to manage his communication with the rest of the world (which has a tendency to include jerks), and he had the kind of personality where if someone attacked him, he attacked them right back. And it snowballed out of control. AAA devs use publicists and the like. Back in the early 90s devs didn't have to deal with people getting on the internet and flaming them on forums, twitter, and facebook, spamming up their emails, and so on.

From my perspective it doesn't look bright. Every day I lose a little bit of hope. One day I hope I can get excited about the future of videogames again. Until then I guess I'll always have Dwarf Fortress.

Have you played Papers Please?

[Flying Carcass]

I think that the focus on graphics became a problem when we hit the 'bloom' generation of graphics... Let me state this right now... Bloom is not making anything look better... What it is doing is making my eyes bleed.

I agree with this part 100%, just because developers CAN put a ton of shaders and graphical effects into a game doesn't mean they SHOULD. Moderation is key. Of course, the graphical effect I absolutely hate the most is motion blur.

[The13thRonin]

Interesting post Shadowlord.

[BFEL]

PC's are only more "advanced" in the sense that they expose more funcitonality to the end user. What is available and relevant to developers is quite different. The PS3's Cell processor destroyed PC processors for quite a long time, and was coupled with modern hardware was very much advanced (moreso than the PC in many ways).

Yes, and during that time it still had zero games out to use that sexy processor on

The big thing about computers is you have access to practically every game ever made.
Wanna play the newest AAA thing? You can do that. Wanna play something from last gen? You can do that. Wanna play something from fucking Atari??? Do so.

Consoles only let you do the first now. Is sads