Is the AAA Console Games Market Heading for a Crash?

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

Is the AAA Console Games Market Heading for a Crash?

While the games industry has gotten too large to crash as a whole, is once segment of it going to have to bottom fall out because most of the games are crap?

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[AJ_Lethal]

TBH, I think the AAA model will not crash, but it will degenerate over time until it collapses into itself before they notice it.

captcha: "be my friend?"

that's a dangerous proposal

 

[thanatos388]

AAA games will have to shrink at some point as publishers and developers continually complain that the cost to profit ratio just is not sustainable, and as much as they try to blame and shame consumers they will have to change themselves eventually. The idea that the industry will crash because of the quality of the product when games are so mainstream is kinda short sighted, and dumb.

 

[Falterfire]

Video games exist in that odd sort of space where reviews are mainly covered by the sorts of websites you only read if you're already heavily invested in the medium. The sort of person who only buys like three games a year is the same sort of person who isn't going to be looking at a bunch of reviews to see whether or not this year's COD is substantially better than last year's or what other games are in the market.

As long as COD is fun in mostly the same ways it was last year a lot of the same people are going to buy the new one. COD is a safe title because it's a known title. GameStop doesn't exactly put review scores and summaries on all the boxes, which means if you only occasionally buy games everything besides what you know is potentially $60 for a pile of trash.

Yes, there are ways to educate yourself about games before buying them. But if you don't know they exist you may not know to go looking for them.

 

[A_Parked_Car]

I think the games industry as a whole is doing alright. I haven't bought a triple-A game in quite a while and I don't miss them in the slightest. Granted, my preferred style of games is not even satisfied by the triple-A industry outside of a small handful of examples (heavily story-driven stuff like BioShock: Infinite and Last of Us). I mostly play hardcore RTS and FPS games that are considerably more complicated and difficult than your mainstream Starcrafts, MOBAs, Call of Duties and Battlefields. As a result, the majority of games I play are made either by indie developers or are put out by small-time publishers like Focus or Paradox.

 

[gamegod25]

Unfortunately the core problem (or at least a big part of it) falls to non-gamers. By which I mean the mobile casuals, the CoD and Madden bro's, and the rest of the uninformed masses. Real gamers have long since gotten wise to the shit these companies pull and know what to stay away from. But the grandparents who barely know what a Mario is aren't going to know if they are going to make their grand kid cry on their birthday. Frat bros are gonna keep buying Madden and CoD cuz it's what all their other bros' are playing and they don't want to be left out. Even hardcore gamers can be to blame buying up yet another Final Fantasy game for the sole reason it has Final Fantasy in the name.

As long as the masses continue to hand over cash for mediocre and bland (or even just plain shit) then these companies will see no reason to improve and compete. They got their slice so what do they care what the rest of us think?

 

[craddoke]

I suppose an eventual crash is possible -- although the likeliest cause would be the final dismantling of the first world middle class by predatory banking and business practices and the financial stresses of climate change. I figure that gives us about 100 more crap installments of COD before we're all too busy with more pressing matters to buy video games.

 

[wetfart]

Gotta agree, a full on crash probably won't happen.

However, I suspect what might happen is a changing of the guard. As big publishing houses continue to lose money and fold, newer companies will take their place. Whether this means we'll be free of the current trend of DRM/DLC/Use our exclusive online service headache, I don't know.

 

[RandV80]

I don't think it will necessarily crash, but I always likened the current state of 'triple A' gaming to be like the old movie studio system of the 70's. Having a new cheaper competitor to deal with in TV, the only way the established mogols new how to respond was to keep making the exact same movies expect making them even bigger & more expensive spectacles, to the point that movies like Ben Hur cost so much there was no way they could make money. Then of course they were saved by the so called Movie Brats, young guys out of film school like Lucas and Spielberg who started making new types of movies that didn't cost nearly as much and people actually went out to see in droves.

I'm more than happy with PC gaming now but I'd love to see the big publishers return to less big budget homogenization and more medium price diversification.

 

[MartyGoldberg]

ET literally had nothing to do with causing a crash, that's continually regurgitated on websites for some reason and it's a myth. The issues that caused Atari Inc.'s (and ultimately the industry they were 80% of) downfall were already hitting before ET was even in development. ET was more of a symptom of what was happening and not the cause. You're talking about a company that was making about $2 billion in sales, one bad selling game they spent less than $8 mill developing and promoting isn't going to break an entire company and cause a crash - even in a small part.

Likewise, the "crash" was specifically a consumer industry crash (Coin and computer are separate industries, each with their own resources and markets) and confined to North America (Europe for instance was mainly personal computer based for their gaming at that time, such as the popular Sinclair Spectrum series).

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I'm not convinced, simply because of gaming diversity. During the 80s when the gaming industry crashed, there were what 5 companies? 2 gens worth of games?
How many of us still play the PS2? Or 3? Or the 360? Or the SNES? Gameboy? N64? Smartphone apps? F*cking Steam?!
I agree that AAA publishers may crash, but the entire industry? No. There are simply too many indie devs, nostalgia gamers, backwards compatible games, ports, and emulators.
I myself play FF6/3, BattleTanx and Conker's Bad Fur Day on Emulator, and I love Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas. I couldn't care less what happens to AAA market.

 

[Zydrate]

So basically we're going to keep getting remakes of Assassin's Creed 2 as long as you* idiots keep buying them.


*general you

Alas. I don't see myself as an idiot, though. I have some buyer's remorse for Revelations (Since it outstayed its welcome) and AC3 (Which just wasn't fun to play, the game just punished me for attempting). Black Flag however was GREAT and if they do more of that, I'm happy with the series as a whole.

 

[gargantual]

By the time AAA falls apart, the laid off, and independent will have already put on a few years and grown. We may be looking at the next, Nintendo and Id Software of the future someday, and look at how far their ideas pushed gaming.

All it takes is some fresh adaptable games.

 

[ThunderCavalier]

Am I the only one that's kinda depressed in that, at least from Yahtzee's point of view, the only two avenues we have right now are:

1) Stop buying the Triple A garbage, and risk a crash and burn in said part of the industry.
2) Continue buying them, and nothing changes.

I know these are relatively extremist stances and it's likely that the former would happen if profits did dip 97% in the next year, but the reality that the saturated Triple A part of the game industry is so saturated to the point where the only sensible plan to some people is to simply torch and burn it is rather sobering. I really, really don't care for every incarnation of Call of Duty that gets released every year (although Advanced Warfare does like kinda nice OHDEARGODI'MFALLINGINTOTHETRAP), but the fact remains that there are still people in those studios making those games, and that the only likelihood of seeing a break in this trend might jeopardize their livelihoods is... you know... not that satisfying.

 

[Thanatos2k]

Sadly I don't think it's actually going to crash for AAA gaming. It's going to be the worst possible outcome instead - many studios will fall apart, but the biggest (and most despicable) publishers will survive. That's EA, Activision, Ubisoft and friends.

Now with them EXCLUSIVELY controlling the direction of AAA churning out mainstream slop that remains profitable despite being crap, and locking idiots into subscription services draining their bank accounts month after month, gaming will suck even more than it already does.

I can't wait for this wonderful future.

On the other hand, I absolutely think a mobile gaming crash is coming. The mobile market is rapidly starting to be viewed with distrust and contempt by casual users, with games on the platforms only viewed as banal time wasters instead of any kind of quality experience. Most mobile games aren't profitable, and eventually people will wake up and figure out they really don't want to be wasting their money on this pointless crap anymore - causing the big mobile titles to fall apart. Sort of like how people got burned out on MMOs - even the non-gamers will eventually have had enough of these mobile free to play crap mistransaction fests. As Yahtzee pointed out - the novelty will have worn off. And then you get a Wii U situation - where will the money come from? All real gamers have already been alienated. You have no one left.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

The more the budgets increase for AAA games, the less risk developers will take on original ideas and gaming experiences. Soon games will all look and play the same and that will kill gaming. That and increases in DLC and micro-transactions. DLC is fine as an extra but now they advertise it before the game is even released and also cutting out great parts of the game to sell back to us.

 

[medv4380]

ET gets far too much credit. The crash of 83 was more the crash of Atari.

For example, if Valve goes under we will see a PC Gaming Crash. Steam has cannibalized the retail market, and EA is just as toxic as ever. Valve going under would be bad. I could see people abandoning Steam in waves because of how they've collected all the garbage on their front page for all to see.

The Console market isn't nearly as bad because it isn't as centralized. However, MS is currently undergoing massive changes. They could cut their losses and abandon consoles entirely in favor of actually taking their Android Profits, and not subsidizing the Console market any more. A lot of big developers have married themselves to MS. That kind of change could hurt a lot of developers.

Sony isn't exactly in a great position ether as a company, but at least they aren't subsidizing the way MS has. As long as they sell off their gaming division before they implode things will be all right.

Nintendo has to make a lot of mistakes to get where Sony is.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

AAA companies can definitely go bankrupt and give room for other smaller companies to grow. So, there won't be a total crash. But something like a controlled demolition could still take place.