Ultratwinkie said:
You fail to notice how integral publishers are to consoles.
The only thing integral to this industry is the consumer. It's a luxury/entertainment industry. If we want games, someone will make them. You seem to think of the publishers in terms of Rand's irreplaceable producers. They aren't. They're arguably less important than they've ever been.
Do you have any idea how consoles would survive without publishers? No, you don't. You rather post hopeful rhetoric that somehow it all turns out fine and how nothing can touch consoles.
I don't really care about consoles. I like to play games. If the console model isn't sustainable, I'll play games on my PC. If fewer games are made, or lesser games, those will become my options. If no one is making games, I'll start making my own to fill that void - and I'll probably make a mint doing so.
But to answer your question: XBL/PS Store. Those platforms make money for MS and Sony.
Console development costs are high, too high for any non-publisher dev.
No publishers = no funding.
No funding = no console games.
No console games = consoles are dead.
So failing and dead publishers? Dead and failing consoles. Publishers are integral to the market or a reason. History is littered with dead consoles from "big companies" way back when only to die. Sony and Microsoft are nothing special in history.
We're at a very different time in history. Much as Microsoft wants to somehow claim ownership/invention of digital distribution, that transformation has been under way for almost a decade. It's a huge change for the industry because it does, potentially, reduce the importance of the publisher down to almost nothing. If you want to make big bucks, you need the marketing and support that only a big publisher can provide - the deep end of the pool requires that sort of lay out. But there are other depths within that pool, and I'm happy to play in any of them. If the consoles are only viable in a heavily restricted form going forward, maybe they should cease to exist. I know they will for me. I've got this lovely PC alternative, when necessary.
Since there there is no publisher competition, you either deal with their DRM or get out. A console with no games won't have an install base at all soon enough, its been proven time and time again. An argument you found obvious, so you just conceded your own point. Why WOULDN'T they add DRM? They are the only ones in town, anything they say goes.
How is there no publisher competition? You don't think publishers are in direct competition with each other? Tell that to EA, who very clearly tried to climb the CoD hill with BF3. There are certainly a finite number of gaming dollars to be had. Most people are probably buying 1-2 games a month versus 5-10. Are you suggesting it doesn't matter to Activision if those 1-2 games are published by EA?
A console with no games won't have an install base soon enough? You're mangling causation arrows here. If the install base already exists, it doesn't go away. If a console has the largest install base, game makers aren't going to ignore it and intentionally go out of business by creating zero games just to spite us. You're honestly not making sense here.
Pay to Win? Doesn't matter what its status is, Sony did the same shady ethics everyone else did. Even if players hated it, and they did, Sony didn't exactly lower prices. In fact, they increased them. "listening to what gamers want" doesn't seem to always apply now does it?
What are you specifically referencing here? You're speaking in wide swaths of generalization. I'm pointing to specific events that just occurred right under our collective nose. If you're trying to tell me that Sony made a variety of mistakes with the PS3, you'd hear no argument from me. It seems those mistakes have informed their current approach, which is a sign of an intelligent, adaptive, well-run company (or at least a wing of a company).
So where is any of the hope in your old arguments? Everything circles back to publishers controlling everything and if they die, the consoles go with them.
If the publishers die, someone else will make the games we want. That's how real capitalism works. Everyone is replaceable, including the people at the top. Unless you think there exists a world in which millions of people want to play games, and are ready to pay for those games, but no one is willing to make them.
Consumers make this entire industry possible. Period. If I rejoiced at any point in any of these conversations, it was brought on by the rare instance of a consumer group standing up to what a group of corporations were pushing as imperative to the future of an optional/luxury industry. Again, this isn't big oil or steel or coal or any other necessary commodity. It's entertainment. We don't have to put up with anything if we don't want to.
