IronMit said:
I can't get my head around that a crash may be coming...when the internet is full of fan boys that eat up any marketing thrown at them. Maybe there really is a vocal minority..all this time I thought it was a made up thing
Well, the reason why people are saying a crash might be coming is because we're looking at brand new games like Dead Space 3, hitting 50% off a month or so after release, while riding the coattails of massive backlash over things like it's microtransaction system.
Sites like The Escapist, Gamefaqs, and others are largely not indicative of the gaming populance as a whole. You need to be pretty bloody into gaming to get on forums like this and post about games, argue about companies, hardware, and what the industry is doing. While such sites have their fanboys, understand that your increasingly seeing a lot of anti-gaming behavior that even the most intense droning fanboys cannot blot out. We're even seeing features like "Jimquisition" on sites like this one going off on the industry over the things we're seeing happen with games like "Colonial Marines" and Dead Space.
When titles need to move millions of copies at full price in order to be successful, no amount of message traffic is going to give you more than a general impression of "good or bad" though if your seeing vastly more of one than the other it's a good sign which way things are going. If the negatives keep recurring and aren't being drowned out by the fanboys, it's a good sign things aren't going well, especially if people are harpning on those problems quite a ways after a game's period of initial release as well.
Metacritic ratings are no longer a good gauge of a game's actual reception, due to the way information has been being controlled (bad ratings and reviews surpressed until after initial release), false information being fed to reviewers in the form of bogus demos (like with Aliens: Colonial Marines) and of course the general merry go round of corruption complaints based on the sources hosting reviewers and critics being dependant on the very things they review and criticize for advertising revenues (something which most heavily came to a head with the whole Gerstmann fiasco over "Kane and Lynch")... not to mention the whole issue with employees being caught apparently trying to pad up the metarating of "Dragon Age 2" when it was first released.
What is a good "gauge" is when you see big titles dropping by huge amounts so quickly after their initial release, which smacks of desperation to make as much money as possible with a failing title or IP.
When big titles like "Dead Space 3" fail, it has an effect on their publishers, and when a lot of products like this tank in succession it can do a lot of damage to even unstoppable juggernauts. Too many big-budget failures and even EA or Activision-Blizzard can go down.
People are forecasting a crash because the big publishers are getting greedier and greedier, and puking out derivitive "design by committee" products that people aren't liking a whole lot, which then underperform. To point a finger at Dead Space 3, when they took what was supposed to be a Semi-Horrorific Science Fiction epic about isolation and fighting incredible odds, and turned it into a co-op game with tacked on microtransactions as a conveinence device for a grinding/scavenging mechanic, it sort of illustrates the problem with the direction the industry wants to go in. When that game performs badly enough to see a 50% drop this quick, despite it's huge budget that's going to have an effect, especially when at the same time you see this happening you have industry big-wigs in denial trying to tell us all that "customers love being gouged for microtransactions" despite the massive backlash over it we see.
Uh well, not sure how well my rambling articulates the point I'm trying to make, but basically the crash is coming because the industry is unwilling to change, and price drops like the ones in this thread are generally a sign that the general consumers are not supporting these products despite what certain fanboys might have you believe. The people posting about how they aren't going to buy "Dead Space 3" after what EA did to it, apparently being much greater in number in reality than the fanboys screaming it's praises, which is why your seeing an attempt at "well umm, okay, well would you be tempted to maybe tolerate this product for half off? Please... please... really guys". One product isn't doing it, but look at how many games seem to be underperforming, tanking, or getting fan-rage and people making to clear they won't support a product like what is being shown (especially when microtransactions, DRM and such get involved) before they are even released.
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