Blog FeedThe Manufactured Crisis
Their has been a lot of talk about the decline of innovation in gaming; that somehow if gaming doesn’t really reinvent itself in short order it’s in danger of going into a period of decline. Some people have proposed that gaming can’t survive without a constant stream of innovative designs, some people have suggested that this is evidenced by the slowing of growth in Japan, some people have suggested that we need a radically different piece of hardware to act as a bulwark against decline and to this I’ll quote the great American comic George Carlin when he said “some people are fucking stupid”. The truth is, there is no crisis; gaming is doing just fine and doesn’t need to radically alter itself, furthermore those who’d suggest that games need radical deviations from the norm can’t show me one mature industry that operates along these principles.
I’m going to start with the Japanese issue because it’s one of the real cores of the notion that gaming is in trouble. In Japan the games market has seen slowed growth and even regression. There are those who view this as a failure of games to innovate with the times. Fact is that the decline in gaming expenditures in Japan is due to a variety of unrelated factors. For one thing the real heyday of the Japanese economy was the late eighties and the early nineties. Since then their economy has gone from a recession to some very modest growth. Yes there was growth in parts of the recessionary period but to expect that to continue ad infinitum without a real economic reversal of fortune is absurd. Furthermore if you take a look at the demographics in Japan they’re a country which is getting older. Although gaming does have some pull with older folks in that country it’s still largely a younger person’s entertainment even there. Finally you’ve got a remarkable market in Japan for second hand games which makes the pre-owned sections of EB and Gamestop look like the amateur hour they are. There are shops in Akihabra that I’ve only seen in photographs that are still stocking hundreds of Famicom and Super Famicom titles. Of course not a penny of these sales makes its way to a publisher. Perhaps it would be reasonable for them to find a solution where the publisher gets a small percentage of the price of a used game but again this contributes to the problem as there is simple over saturation of the market going on here as publishers simply made too many games. It’s similar to the US market before the crash except for the fact that the games aren’t so god awful in this regard. Why spend 50 dollars on one new game when you can get 6 used ones for the same price? This might be a trouble sign but it’s a problem exclusive to Japan and given the cultural differences between Japan and the West I don’t foresee it becoming a problem in the largest two markets in the world. And designing a hardware solution to this problem while not addressing concerns in the US and European markets first and foremost is folly.
So seeing that the Japanese market isn’t the best indicator of the worldwide market for games what can we say about the supposed decline in radical innovation? Well it’s a natural and good thing for the industry. Somehow we’ve been conditioned to think that new is always better. Fact is in a mature industry new doesn’t equal better. New equals new, if you need proof of this remember “New Coke” that Coca-Cola introduced in the eighties. It was new; it was also one of the worst tasting products I’ve ever had. Fact is quality is always good, refinement is always good, polish is always good, innovation is a neutral. Sometimes it’s good sometimes it’s not so good. And when it comes to large picture innovations we’re seeing less of them of course. And the reason we’re seeing less of them is because gaming is growing up as an industry. We’re not making games in garages these days but rather in studios with millions of dollars of funding behind them. Back in the early days if you made a crap game it wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t millions of dollars of shareholder money down the drain. To give you another example of this, look at the automotive industry in America. 100 years ago or so there were 100 makers of automobiles in the United States. Today there are two GM and Ford. Were their more innovative cars back in the day? Heck yeah if you don’t mind a steam powered car or a car that requires a crank to start instead of a key. While there was more innovation back then, the quality of these cars was pretty uninspiring by modern standards. Today we’ve got a lot of experiments that showed what works right and what doesn’t so we mostly put in stuff that worked right in different combinations. Well, gaming is the same, we’ve got a lot of time worth of experiments and we’re not going to put stuff in that was soundly rejected the first time they tried it. Therefore it’s more quality and less innovation and I can always live with that.
Now I want to be clear on this point, I’m not opposed to innovative ideas in and of themselves. I like innovation from time to time; but rather don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Nintendo’s obviously pushing this stuff more than anyone and when I really think of the Nintendo Revolution, my feelings are very well summed up by the message of the Beatles Song Revolution. Since I’ve found most of the people I know aren’t familiar with the song I’ll sum it up for you: it’s a song that was about moderation in the 60’s social revolution. Yeah Nintendo we’d all be happy if you come out with something really unique that’s a major improvement for video games. Conversely however we must be wary of change for the sake of change. Touch screens, Gyroscopes, and such things I hear about aren’t clearly the kinds of things that really make the experience better. When I was a younger man PC hardware companies were out there in force trying to replace the mouse and keyboard as the standard controller for games. Well, this never got anywhere except putting out garbage hardware that didn’t work right. I think we still use a controller because well it works well enough for the technology we have. Yeah we had the minor shift to analog controls but in the end we’re still using the same controller they started with all those years ago. It’s not that people haven’t thought up other ideas it’s that they didn’t work as well as a controller with a joystick and or d-pad with some buttons.
28th May | Reply
You have some good points and also the most likely view of what the future holds. While we may loose innovative titles for a while it will not be permanent. Eventually new gameplay types and designs will become what is mainstream and the big publishers will have to out-innovate each other.
However I think the “death of innovation” claims are a sheet over developer’s true concerns. With the millions and millions of dollars it will cost to make games developers fear that they will loose all control over the titles. I personally wanted to get into the industry sometime in my future but I fear that I will just be a nameless animator or modeler stuck in a warehouse of an office building working 9-5 churning out such a tiny piece of the overall game that I cannot even call it a product of my own anymore.
The idea of small teams working together to produce a shared vision is a much more attractive work environment. Unless there is some innovation on the development side making the huge technical hurdles easier to jump I am not sure if there is a solution. Online distribution will definitly allow smaller developers to independently create their own games without a publisher. However, how will those games compare to games with millions of dollars behind them?
However this seems to be how all industries that get big end up. Perhaps someday we’ll have computers making computer games.
28th May | Reply
I’m not in the least worried about the gaming industry. The movie industry hardly sees any innovation in the mainstream genre’s and is still doing fine. Sure, perhaps special effects get better and the occasional eye-opener movie is released, but crappy Hugh Grant style romantic comedies, and relatively uncomplicated James Bond / Triple X action movies have been, and probably always will be pretty succesful, even tho you can watch one of these movies and basically have seen them all.
The audience doesnt want innovative, lifechanging approaches to gaming all the time. Most of the time we will be content with bigger, faster, better same old. And don’t worry, there will always be those games that make everyone wonder why this hasnt been seen before.
28th May | Reply
Oh and doc, lets elope and start our own rogue game studio. Just you and me pal, we’ll take the world by storm!
28th May | Reply
It does annoy me when people come out and say we need innovation, yet they can’t name any new ideas (or at least, good ones) themselves. I think that they get into this mindset from seeing companies like EA absorb smaller companies (which have innovated in the past) and just get them pumping out new titles all years round, with nothing really new. The other problem there though, which I have experienced, is that they are also not very well polished at all.
Blizzard for one bucks that trend. I can’t remember the last time they did some serious innovation. The only thing that comes to mind is having heroes being so critical in WarCraft 3, with their “Role-Playing Strategy”. I know I didn’t like that aspect very much though. Still, their games have always been largely bug-free, well polished, well balanced, and interesting. And they sell bajillions of games. StarCraft is still to date my favourite game ever, and it didn’t really offer anything outrageously new. It was just the pinnacle of real time strategy.
28th May | Reply
I still say that Artificial Intelligence has massive room for refinement. In order to refine AI though I think we will need to innovate it. AI in its current form (even the best) is just tricks. Even the smartest bots are full of holes and never really feel “aware” of their surroundings.
If any of you remember the tangent I went off on priority based AI I notice that HL2 has a similiar (although simpler) structure for their character’s random facial expressions.
29th May | Reply
I personally think that major innovations are virtually impossible now…everything new (and most importantly good for a game) has been thought up. We are just left with refinements. And I have nothing against this. As long as games remain good and fun to play, I dont care if they are not ‘innovative’. I never tend to go for quirky Japanese games anyway.
29th May | Reply
The other thing is that you can only innovate and refine so far. I mean, in theory the way things are going we’ll end up with one of two scenarios: The best game the ever be made or, as Penny Arcade put it, Frasier 3D.
Innovation is good, but it’s rarely feasable these days. And, as Thornhillboy said, innovation is hard to think up these days. It’s just unfortunate that eventually we’re going to end up with one game on the shelves.
At least we won’t have to worry about silly things like choice.
29th May | Reply
It pisses me off immensely when I am playing CnC Generals, and my Tank Hunters are firing their rocket launchers inneffectively at infantry when there are enemy tanks neaby that they could have targetted instead - and won the battle for me with. I don’t know if this was just because Generals’ AI was made somewhat shoddily and hastily (like a much of the rest of the game, in the EA way), or if it reflects other AI as well - I don’t play enough other games to notice.
This particular problem would be solved by a few simple added commands, I think. But I agree that for genuine success on something like that, having my Tank Hunters more aware of things happening around them would make them much more effective, and would remove the need for silly micromanagement. I don’t want to have to babysit a small group of infantry when I’m trying to think about how best to make a nuclear strike.
31st May | Reply
I have to side with Nintendo on this particular issue, though I may be reading too much into their comments, and perhaps as Freud might say: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Anyway, Nintendo isn’t trying to sell me on a controller that uses my body odor to control in-game functions, where the smellier I am the more power I have. No one really knows what is so revolutionary about the Revolution, but they are taking steps in the right direction.
First, Nintendo is taking on the second-hand market that Vermouth seems to gloss over as no big deal. Surely, Vermouth admits that publishers see not a red yen over these sales, but does not take into account how to recover money from these transactions. In Japan, where space is a premium, would you rather have four generations of consoles taking up space, with their requisite games or one disk-drive sized console that plays all of those games, stored on Flash memory that is a fraction the size of the collection? That is a bold move by Nintendo, make no mistake about it.
Even if publishers charged only a dollar for the downloadable content, that is a hundred percent more money than they were making on the second hand sales, and is all profit, the game has already been developed. Furthermore, I think that slides right in with the possibility of a DS-style game pad. If the controller is a touch screen, the control functions are as limitless as your imagination. For example: I download Super Mario Brother (NES) to my Nintendo Revolution, I load up the ROM and get ready to play, while the ROM is loading, a custom control scheme is loaded onto my controller, when the game is ready to play, what is in my hands? A D-pad, start, select, A, and B. The Revolution Controller is now a NES controller. Pretty awesome if you ask me.
Of course, any discussion of the Revolution and its controller is purely conjectural, and I’ll leave that part of my coversation for another day, as I may be asked to substantiate my theories with facts.
As for innovation in general with regards to gaming, yeah, let’s see some. Let’s innovate me TIE Fighter 2. I’m sick to death of World War II First Person Shooter 58. Enough. I’m actually getting sick of FPS games in general. What games were hot at E3? Quake IV, Gears of War, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Perfect Dark Zero…
How about some more RTS games, Space Sims, 4x games, Civilization games, like where the hell is Alpha Centauri 2?
The videogame industry IS stagnating just like the movie industry is stagnating. A couple of responses have talked about the movie industry and how it is doing just fine, well, I hate to break it to everyone, but it isn’t. Year over year ticket sales are down and the only reason half the movies make any money is because ticket prices keep going up. That isn’t a model I want emulated.
I’ll finish up by saying: I’m not paying $299 for an Xbox 360 and $60 or more for Madden, just so I can see the pores on the players faces. I don’t give a shit about that kind of graphical fidelity. If development costs are going up and the only thing I’m getting is a better texture, I’m not buying. I want good, polished games, I want them at a reasonable price, and I want graphics that won’t make my eyes bleed. I don’t need to see all of the dimples on Madden’s ass. Take the time to model his cottage cheese and use it to refine the gameplay, or eliminate it and get the game to market six months earlier.
There, I think that about covers it for now.
31st May | Reply
Firstly…if once again my attempts at quoting have failed miserably, I apologise. This is my attempt using Cyrris’ guidelines…
Secondly, do you mean Head881 that on the Touch Screen there will be a NES pad that we can use where our fingers can press the corresponding buttons? I see a big problem with this, namely that pressing a screen is not as easy as pressing specific buttons on a contol pad. It does not feel the same and to me seems as though it would feel awkward. It would also make the screen extremely grubby.
31st May | Reply
Head881-
Yes nintendo is taking on the used game market. Something which is an issue for something like 1/5 of the Global video game market, it’s a Japanese phenomenon. In other words making it the center of your consoles features is essentially ignoring about 4/5 of the customers in the video game buying territories. The United States and Europe are the first and second largest markets so dealing with a problem which is wholly Japanese as a major feature of your console doesn’t make so much sense if you don’t fix issues which are afflicting it in the US and Europe.
You know I’ve never seen a car with wheels that weren’t round. i mean surely you could build one with Square Wheels, or Octagonal Wheels but I’ve never seen one with anything but round wheels. Maybe the reason that in 30 years we’ve come up with 3 widely adopted ways to control games is because those 3 really are the best a D-Pad, a Mouse and keyboard and an Analog Joystick. Don’t think people haven’t tried lots of people from companies big and small have tried all sorts of ways to replace those three as the eseential means of control most games (obviously driving games have wheels and their are yokes and a few other esoteric types). And frankly it’s all of it sucked pretty badly. I don’t know anyone who’s really yearning for the days of a Power glove, or playing games with the Claw.
Your movie industry critique is misguided because the movie industry is changing. They’re loosing viewers at the Box office but overall movie viewership is up actually when you look a tthe sale of DVDs included into their numbers. More people are investing in having a home theatre and DVD library instead of going to the Cineama and given the prices I can’t blame them.
The only thing i’m getting tired of isn’t any genre. I’m just getting tired of bad games. I wouldn’t pay 60 dollars to see the pores on Randy Moss’s face but you know what they’re not asking you to. Sports games get a bad wrap here but if you look at the Madden series each year they come up with something new. I prefered the 2k series who did a better job in some areas but let’s look at Madden this generation for an example of how you can innovate within a established product without even radical change to the general notions of the game. These years are based on the game year, subtract one for the calendar year.
2001-Tiburon brings out the PS2 version
2002- Introduces Xbox and Gamecube Version.
2003-Online Play Introduced on PS2
2004-Playmaker controls introduced for the first time
2005-Major Defensive revisions including Hit Stick and Defensive playmaker which allows for on the fly adjustments at the line of scrimmage to the Defense. Support for Xbox Live added as well.
2006–QB FOV to be introduced, Truck Stick to be added to running game.
I’m not seeing any year here where the game just got a roster revision and improved graphics.
1st June | Reply
I think the movie industry has really taken influence over the gaming industry in the last 10-15 years or so…gaming has gone from a niche market to a very profitable marketing tool. The money invested brings greater research and design, but as we’ve noticed there are strings attached.
Much like the movie industry, games right now are pushed to achieve in specific genres (FPS, MMORPG) and/or establish themselves as some sort of franchise. Franchises have built-in audience loyatly (through at least one iteration), and that’s why movie execs love lord of the rings, spiderman, x-men etc…the sequels is where they really get rich. It’s a bit of a vacuum for new ideas, however, because they’ll always support the sequel instead of something “new” and unproven.
1st June | Reply
I don’t agree that there is no crisis in so-called “game industry”. The game developement is getting more and more expensive and the quality of games is slightly dropping in my opinion. Look at Half-Life 2: Immense developement cost resulted in a quite good quality game - that can be finished within a single day.. And generaly, a computer game used to be a piece of art, today it is only a investment, a product of “game industry”. Maybe the problem is the lack of taste among players who are buying games.
12th June | Reply
I wholeheartedly agree with that last comment about lack of taste.
When tons of people buy games liek FIFA street is it any wonder that the games industry - to gamers who like quality at least - is in trouble.
Of course it isn’t in trouble - financially at least - in fact it’s in better financial state than ever.
What some gamers seem to forget is that as this is an “industry” making money is as much an object as making quality games.
So for every game lovingly laboured over and crafted to be a great experience there are ten lazily made, buggy liscenced titles which will be greedily snapped up by ignorant parents sucumbing to the pester power of their equally ignorant children.
Yet despite this there is still quality and whilt there isn’t true innovation there is a constant evolution of current techniques, think how much ragdoll physics has improved since it’s inception.
There are also other ways forward. Mashing together several genres of gmae could well produce some interesting titles.
And as has already been stated their is massive scope for improvment in AI. However I believe this is unlikely to be happening any time soon - if at all.
It would just cost to much effort and resources to make a trualy reactant AI system.
Still as long as ther is enough great games coming out to keep me intrested I’ll be playing them and if there isn’t I can always go back and play the ones I’ve missed - I know there are many.