Of Three Types of Game Developers, Two Are Going Extinct

[The Maddest March Hare]

This was nothing more than a lengthy chunk of marketing copy written as a way of justifying the author's current business strategy. The concept of AAA games going under to be replaced by cheap/free games is just laughable. You really think that people are going to put down Skyrim and pick up Ridiculous Fishing? Sure, both are fun in their own way, but there is absolutely no way that mobile gaming and the free to play model like LoL are going to replace the AAA gaming scene.

The examples of businesses who have fallen is taken out of context and doesn't focus on why they actually fell. It's like someone claiming that Mobile Device manufacturers are all going to die out soon because BlackBerry went under. They were making poorer quality games, being badly run, they fell behind and were, ultimately, lost. It had nothing to do with the AAA industry as a whole, and a lot more to do with their own personal internal issues with management and production.

Mobile gaming is increasing, for sure, but that doesn't mean it's replacing anything. Please go pout to yourself in a mirror instead of posting your self congratulatory drivel in the guise of an "article" again. Thanks.

 

[infinity_turtles]

I literally started laughing so hard I cried at the thought of Nexon prioritizing player happiness. While I wouldn't say it's a smart or accurate article, that alone means I've got a bit of a soft-spot for it as a comedy piece.

 

[Jachwe]

When you start reading the article you think this text is supposed to be an argument about how the industry is changing but soon you realize how wrong you were.
In the end it is a too long advertisment for Rumble Entertainment that only is pathos and preying on gullible people to believe anything at face value or already in accordance to their believes.

The text works on two levels: First we get a philosophical history about the video game industry that reminds the readers of the marxian history. The age of the "old guard" is the feudalism, the "online opportunists" are the capitalists and the now dawning "new innovators" are communism. Interestingly the slave owning society was left out but this is simple to rectify. It can be the time before 1983 as the video game crash was a game changer for the industry and the "old guard" as we know it just like the crumbling of the roman empire and the beginning of the dark ages. Specifics are not the point here, but the subliminal effect of the text is.
Second we get a dichotomy. The "new innovators" are opposed to the "old guard", the "new innovators" are oppsed to the "online opportunists". The phrase is carefully crafted advertisment. We also see a development as the "old guard" gets replaced by the new "online opportunists" which in turn will be replaced be the "new innovators". First the "old" disappears then the "oppportunists" disappear leaving only our utopia of game development. Both "old" as well as "opportunists" have a bad connotation and our "new innovators" are in juxtaposition to both these words. We are being forced not by reason to agree to the "arguments" of the text but by how the PR department have worded the text. This is the lowest denominator. It tries to tingle our heart strings by envoking pathos wihtout our reason coming into play and qeustion the arguemnts that are made.
As for the arguments, there are none. The text consists of statements disguised as arguments because the author lists examples of specimen examplifying what he is talking about. One might be inclined to say it is enough to list examples but this someone would be wrong. All the author does is list examples and I dont know why they are supposed to be in the same group of game developers. It is very telling if words like "thus" or "therefore" not even words like "if" or "when" are used. How are all the statements or examples logicaly connected? Is the argument reasonable? There is no way of telling with this text. We dont know "where", "when", "who", or "how" anything is supposed to have happended or is supposed to happen because of something. Only once the word "because" is uttered. In the conlusion:"The New Innovators will survive and thrive in the modern game industry because they are dedicated in quality". This refers of course to the statement about gamers wanting quality content (for free). But the author never tried to argue if gamers want this quality content. He simply states in his marxian way of thinking that gamers evolve from getting free to play games that implement short term monetizationmodels to demanding quality content for free. There are no numbers nor any sentence with a "because" which would try to convince us using reason.

The author assumes you are already inclined towards his weltanschauung and only at the very end we get to know why he uses all this wording and the pathos. It is to convince us of this "new" age of game development. It is to advertise his own game development studio which is supposedly part of this "new" development. I dont know much about the focus on quality in their games but I can certify the amount of quality and care this studio takes in its advertisment.

 

[Grubby Ham Wallet]

What a load of bollocks. This reads like an extended ad for the author's own company, in which he states that they are part of an elite few that are going to be the saviours of the game industry, while all other companies are just clueless conglomerates. Besides all the incredibly vague ad-speak guff, the only difference between Rumble and their competitors that they seem to state is that while their rivals are happy to blindly produce games without asking people what they want, Rumble are good enough to tell the people exactly what it is they want before giving it to them. If their next game comes anywhere close to entertaining me as much as 'stale' AAA games like Deus Ex: HR, Portal 2 or Fallout 3 have then maybe I'll be less inclined to feel like this bloke's talking out of his arse, but I highly doubt that happening.

 

[Use_Imagination_here]

It reads like propaganda, basically. The points are unsubstantiated or outright falsehoods.

 

[Lightknight]

Old Guard? The huge studios with all the money and all those successes under their belts? The only studios that are failing are the ones who forget their niche. You don't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an RPG thinking that it'll make COD money just because COD makes it.

The studios that do that deserve what they get, or what they don't get as the case may be. But other studios know exactly what their target market is and what their budgets should be. The innovators are making a splash because they go into development cycles expecting to fail. They budget conservatively and their game has to survive on it's own quality. If it succeeds, then their ROI is huge. If not, then their losses are minimal. It would also be silly to pretend like for every new successful entrant to market success that there aren't thousands of failures around it.

As for clutching the old dedicated console model. This isn't a mistake. GTA V has two versions of the same game in the top 10 biggest sellers of 2013. In fact, the ps3 version is #1 with almost 15 million copies sold and the 360 version is #2 with over 12 million copies sold. They didn't even release a PC version (yet). That's a combined 27.3 million copies.

The ps4 and XBO are selling faster and better than they EVER have before. So, the notion that consoles are going to disappear or aren't worth selling on is a naive notion at best. It does not take into account that EVERY console generation marks the death of the console and/or the death of the gaming pc. Yet every time, both do well and everyone forgets what they said a decade ago.

So the old guard are dying, not because they aren't adapting quickly enough, but actually because they're forgetting basic business principles:

1. The customer is always right (aka be nice to your customers whenever possible).
2. Budgeting:
    a. Forecast the amount of money you can likely make, not how much you "want" to make.
    b. Budget according to that forecast while leaving room for the desired profit and accounting for unforeseen shortfalls and expenditures.
    c. Stick to the budget as closely as possible.
3. Create a product people want to buy.

Take EA for example. The reason we hate them is their failure to maintain number 1. They take losses on games that sell really well because of a failure in number 2.

Square Enix gets number 1 and number 3 just fine, what they fail on is number 2. That's the only way you can have three titles (Hitman, TombRaider, Sleeping Dogs) that sell MILLIONS of copies each and still lose money. Something happened in budgeting whether the problem was in forecasting or the budget itself. All three of those games were some of the best selling games in their years.

Any business, regardless of product and customer relations, can fail if number 2 is messed up. When you get into hundreds of millions of dollars being put into a failed budget then yeah, you're going to hurt. But these losses aren't the same to these companies that they'd be with others. Failures here are easily comped by past or future AAA hits. Ones that fail to adapt after a few failures are the ones that don't deserve to survive.

 

[FoolKiller]

This seems more like Rumble Entertainment's mission statement then an actual article.

It also seems very narrow-minded and one-sided in its description of things. It seems like someone is basically advertising here for their market.