The Game Crash of 2013?

[Vzzdak]

So essentially, back in the early 1980s there were several factors of game production were in the hands of business types that didn't understand the amount of time necessary to develop a software product, and whom had no appreciation that it is the playability that makes the game successful (as opposed to the me-too mimicking aspects of previous titles). Worse, they were unduly rushed by industry politics that led to fatal mistakes in the supply chain.

Variations on this sort of thing are still going on. For example, with any size of development team, you're going to have different personalities each placing their emphasis upon what they each believe has greater value. It is in this manner that a title loses fun gameplay elements in exchange for game design by committee. And we have cases where business types and/or a development team that gets its hands on a franchise and runs it into the ground (i.e., didn't appreciate the original product and just hashed together stuff to meet a deadline).

So a pattern with AAA development is along the lines of: 1) securing a significant pool of money for development, but then 2) underestimating the amount of time required for design, development and testing, which leads to 3) the release of buggy Beta (or even Alpha) product that 4) weren't entirely well thought out in terms of gameplay (i.e., lack of early design work), and then 5) poor sales that are blamed on declining interest in that genre, instead of acknowledging management errors and learning what not to do.

With respect to supply chain, we've had an unexpected issue the past number of years with used games sales cutting into the sale of new titles, and in some cases used sales being purposely optimised without consideration to harming new game sales. Steam seems to be a suitable solution (to the used game issue) in that a wider number of people are encouraged to buy discount games, such that volume sales compensate for reduced pricing. But some game publishers fail to appreciate the convenience that Steam provides, and so we're seeing weak attempts to provide competing online stores by withholding product from Steam (i.e., more politics).

 

[Callate]

Hmm.

Well, as one of the people who was around for that era and had my own Atari 2600, I have a question and a note.

The question is simply this: while the Atari 2600 was, of course, the big player in video games of its era, there were other options in the home console arena, namely the Mattel Intellivision and the Colecovision. Much as it pains the heart of my five-year-old self admit it, both were significantly more powerful than the Atari. If people were really looking for a more technically sophisticated experience, why wasn't there a lateral move rather than simply a ceasing-to-exist?

By way of comparison, videos of the Colecovision and Atari 2600 versions of Donkey Kong post-spoilertag.

Spoiler

My comment is that while Atari produced a lot of shovelware at the end of its run, that same period was simultaneously the golden age of design for the system, simply because of the strict limits of its apparent capabilities. Activision's Pitfall II, in particular, reads like a laundry list of the things the article says the Atari 2600 was lacking- distinct characters, music (admittedly not the most sophisticated music, but a remarkably varied and impressive soundtrack for the era), an enormous cavern to explore, and even the skeleton of a story in the hero's need to rescue his niece and pet. Imagic also produced some visually impressive games, tapping the outer limits of what the hardware could do.

Which brings me to my usual prophet-of-doom schtick.

Shamus is quite right that there won't be a video game crash quite like the one of 1983. But I'm still not entirely convinced there might not be a crash- at least, as far as the AAA-publishers and game console creators goes.

I don't think I really need to run the whole lap again, everyone recognizes the basics: Current AAA games have localization teams whose listings run longer than the credits of entire games from even ten years ago; every person on those credits draws a paycheck. Many games don't bring in the kind of money that justifies the expenses incurred in those paychecks, along with the attendant marketing campaigns, manufacturing costs, server upkeep, and so on. Cue closings, mergers, DLC, Online Passes, in-game advertising, the vilification of the used market, and so on.

And that's before we get to manufacturing hardware at a loss, expecting to make back those costs on first-party games.

Then bring on the next generation: second verse, jazzy verse, like the first one, only worse. Pity the poor studio lead faced with the mission to justify the customer's move to "next-gen" hardware, construct games that give all the new visual capabilities a workout-- while simultaneously pulling back the reins on that spiraling budget.

There might some silver bullets out there. Engines that are both powerful and easy-to-use, making it possible for a smaller team to do work that used to require a larger one. Libraries of high-quality assets that developers can use and re-shape, lessening the costs of production without significantly jarring overall quality. A greater specialization in companies, so that AI teams and level designers and texture artists come together for a project and drift apart as needed, much like composers and voice actors might be hired for single gigs today. But... I'm not hearing a lot of solutions. I hear some developers recognizing there's a problem, occasionally offering wish-lists. But I don't hear a lot of people coming forward granting wishes.

What I suspect is that people will keep doing what almost, but not quite, works. There will be a few more XBox One-style attempts to fit square pegs through round holes, to try to force the old ways to work rather than come up with new ones. There will be more studio closings, more mergers, and it's entirely possible that the generation following this one will have one less player- though I wouldn't place bets just yet on which one.

Rather than pushing against the capabilities of what the current hardware is capable of, designers have been moaning for more space to pursue their visions. Honestly, I think that may be part of the problem. While the "indies" are making games like "Thomas Was Alone", "Braid", and "Bastion" that would hardly have stressed last generation's hardware, the AAA people seem convinced that what we really need is photo-realistic hair on our dogs. Or universal Internet connections, with the unspoken premise that gamers are better at entertaining one another than they, the professional entertainers, are.

(When people speak of a "Big Brother" future, they don't usually have an obligation to keep a bunch of younger siblings entertained in mind...)

So, yes, a new "1983 Crash" wouldn't seem to be in the cards. But I can still imagine a future that looks very different from the one we have now, one in which the distinction from a crash would ring very hollow to many of today's players. We may face a crash not so much from a lack of technical capability but an excess, not so much a lack of quality as a lack of imagination, an aversion to risk, and an unwillingness to change.

 

[Fearzone]

The machine had just 4k of memory. If you fed the Atari 2600 the raw text of this article, it would have run out of space in the middle of this paragraph. That's just text. And in that space you needed to fit your graphics, sounds, and machine code to run the game.

I believe that is not exactly correct because the games had their data on cartriges, which were like ROM and could hold more memory than that. My Vic-20 had 4k too, but plug in a cartridge and you could play much better games than what would fit on 4k.

 

[RicoADF]

The machine had just 4k of memory. If you fed the Atari 2600 the raw text of this article, it would have run out of space in the middle of this paragraph. That's just text. And in that space you needed to fit your graphics, sounds, and machine code to run the game.

I believe that is not exactly correct because the games had their data on cartriges, which were like ROM and could hold more memory than that. My Vic-20 had 4k too, but plug in a cartridge and you could play much better games than what would fit on 4k.

Your getting storage and memory mixed up. A cartridge is like a DVD/Hard drive, it stores data for later usage. Ram, aka memory, is where data is located while a process is in action. Eg: To display this reply the quote and my reply is stored in the ram so the display can display the text. If it was a word document it would be saved on the HDD after closing. He's saying that it would run out of memory and thus not display/be able to load the whole paragraph of the raw text. Yet had to cram graphics, sound and text into the 4k to be shown on screen/heard as being played.

 

[Skorpyo]

I've never really been able to take the idea of a new video-game crash to heart, mostly because of what I see going on outside of the AAA side of the industry.

Indie titles have been going absolutely nuts lately, and some of the most notable titles we've seen in years are projects that are getting started off of a Kick-starter campaign. They're games made by fewer people with larger imaginations, and now they have all the access to distributors they could possibly want with things like Steam's Greenlight and all of the self-publishing available on the more recent consoles.

AAA titles may be starting to lose some sales, but ultimately we're at a point where sheer variety and publisher access is keeping everything strong.

 

[Adon Cabre]

This industry can't crumble; it's built on the internet; not to mention that it is human nature to be obsessed with cutting edge.

 

[Amir Kondori]

Reading the title of the article I was all prepared to come in talking about how ridiculous the idea of a crash happening today is but then you said it for me. Dang misleading titles!

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Reading the title of the article I was all prepared to come in talking about how ridiculous the idea of a crash happening today is but then you said it for me. Dang misleading titles!

At least you read the article, I can easily see half a dozen posters in this thread that didn't appear to do so.

I kinda do want the industry to at least experience a slump, because at this point none of the big players seem to have a clue how to run a stable business.

 

[Autumnflame]

we may be getting less games a year. but the quailty of said games has certainly increased.

A crash for Production companies ( ea, bioware ect) a boon for quality for the consumer

 

[Roxor]

As for distribution options the retail stranglehold is done. There are dozens of options for PC games including buying directly from the developers, something unheard of even 15 years ago.

Say "hello" to Apogee and Epic, circa 1991.

 

[Aedes]

That's about $100 in today's dollars.

Welcome to my everyday reality! Where console games do indeed cost $100 or more.

Aham, sorry the little rant above.
Anyway, I don't know what the big game industries and their AAA titles will do about that but I don't see games running short anytime soon. I blame the indie genre for that. Usually done by a small group of people and not that much cash to start with.
We're pretty much being flooded by them nowadays. I find that to be a good thing.

captcha: fool's paradise
I'm not so sure, captcha, but I can see how it fits in.

 

[Lightknight]

Yeah, this certainly isn't the year of a crash. As stated in the article, these companies are pouring more money into the development and marketing of the game than they can ever hope to make back. These lofty failures were rendered from a point of excess where companies actually had the money to spend an extra several millions of dollars on a game because their forecasting/market research team swore that COD revenues were in their grasp...

If anything, this is beginning to be a right-sizing of the market. The companies that don't know how to budget are dying and the valuable IPs are getting purchased by companies that do know how to budget. The bigger companies took some hits and will hopefully learn from their mistakes before their own IPs get parcelled out. Either way, it looks like there will always be someone waiting to scoop up those IPs and soldier on.

I also agree that our current tech could carry us a long way. There's only so far you can go before things look and feel realistic. Eventually we will reach the bottom of the bucket and graphics will be as good as companies want them to be. I am looking forward to this next generation, not for graphical improvements but for improvements in AI and physics. We have gotten to a point where games are being limited by the consoles so this was certainly necessary but absolutely not as necessary as in the 80's.

The crapware of the 80's also was even worse than had everyone made a crappy FPS like Colonial Marines. I mean, we're talking direct game development by cereal and pasta companies. It was just silly and people had to pay for this crap in a day and age where there wasn't an internet to look up games on. Nowadays, we know even before launch of major titles if they stink. These companies also have pedigrees that enable us to know approximately what to expect from them in a way that wasn't present in the early 80's.

 

[Fearzone]

The machine had just 4k of memory. If you fed the Atari 2600 the raw text of this article, it would have run out of space in the middle of this paragraph. That's just text. And in that space you needed to fit your graphics, sounds, and machine code to run the game.

I believe that is not exactly correct because the games had their data on cartriges, which were like ROM and could hold more memory than that. My Vic-20 had 4k too, but plug in a cartridge and you could play much better games than what would fit on 4k.

Your getting storage and memory mixed up. A cartridge is like a DVD/Hard drive, it stores data for later usage. Ram, aka memory, is where data is located while a process is in action. Eg: To display this reply the quote and my reply is stored in the ram so the display can display the text. If it was a word document it would be saved on the HDD after closing. He's saying that it would run out of memory and thus not display/be able to load the whole paragraph of the raw text. Yet had to cram graphics, sound and text into the 4k to be shown on screen/heard as being played.

Hate to get into a nerd war over this one, but there is a difference between ROM and storage. Cartridges are ROM memory which are directly accessible by machine code, i.e. information on cartridges do not need to be loaded into RAM memory but can be directly accessed. So you would have the 4k internal RAM in additional to game resources on cartridge ROM.

 

[MartyGoldberg]

The machine had just 4k of memory. If you fed the Atari 2600 the raw text of this article, it would have run out of space in the middle of this paragraph. That's just text. And in that space you needed to fit your graphics, sounds, and machine code to run the game.

I believe that is not exactly correct because the games had their data on cartriges, which were like ROM and could hold more memory than that. My Vic-20 had 4k too, but plug in a cartridge and you could play much better games than what would fit on 4k.

What's the original quote on 4k from the article referring to? Certainly not the 2600? That only has 128 bytes of memory (RAM), not even one K. However, the 2600 is a non-bitmapped system, it works via building a single raster display line in real time for the television, and both the playfield and screen objects are represented by hardware based objects (vs. software based sprites), hence the lack of need at that time for more RAM. As the demand for representing bitmapped arcade games on the 2600 rose, so to did the additional technology for it - and more RAM on a system like this means higher resolution graphics. It was a problem already solved at the time by adding more RAM on the cartridge as some companies like Nintendo did during the NES. Take a look at Parker Bros. Frogger vs. Starpath's Frogger (Starpath's cart adds an extra 6K RAM):

http://atariage.com/2600/screenshots/s_Frogger_1.png
http://atariage.com/2600/screenshots/s_FroggerTheOfficial_2.png

Likewise, fit what sounds? You're simply sending commands to the TIA to trigger various sound effects. As far as ROM storage, the initial carts were 2K then 4k then 8k (2600 Asteroids is an 8k cart) then 16k (Dig Dug in 1983) and so on. Bankswitching allows a theoretically unlimited ROM size of 1K, 2K, or 4K blocks over and over.

And it's not like Atari didn't know the technology was getting old, but the sales were still there. However, it's precisely why they moved to the 5200 being the high end console and 2600 being moved to low end, and then the 7800 as high end in '84 when the 5200 was cancelled. They were also working on a 68000 based console for release in late '84/early '85 which would produce a three tiered console offering of high, mid, and low end consoles.

After Atari Inc. collapsed and was split up, the next company - Atari Corporation - released the 2600 Jr. as a budget based console, where the 2600 remained a strong seller through much of the late 80s.

Either way, all this is moot and silly as an argument to a cause for the "crash" because the crash included the next generation of consoles.

 

[Amir Kondori]

Reading the title of the article I was all prepared to come in talking about how ridiculous the idea of a crash happening today is but then you said it for me. Dang misleading titles!

At least you read the article, I can easily see half a dozen posters in this thread that didn't appear to do so.

I kinda do want the industry to at least experience a slump, because at this point none of the big players seem to have a clue how to run a stable business.

I don't think it is necessary, with Kickstarter and all these indie games we have more options than ever. Also companies are working on making games easier and less expensive and that should help us see more interesting games down the road. Currently AAA games are so expensive to make that the publishers and developers have to make sure they have a wide appeal, otherwise they might not get to make another AAA game. It has happened to many developers before.

 

[PoisonTaco]

I'm by no means an expert but isn't gaming a lot bigger and a lot more diverse than it was in 1983? Today there's many different markets, different business models and different ways of playing games. If one game market has a crash, I don't see others following suit.

If the console market has a tough time and the new generation doesn't kick off, I don't see PC or mobile gaming going anywhere. League of Legends doesn't rely on consoles to have 30 million players. If the big publishers go bust that's not going to stop Mojang, Paradox or other small developers from making new games. I'd like to think that core gamers are smart enough to find what they like and the developers who make it for them.

The comparison that always baffles me is AAA development vs CD Projekt Red. How is it that Tomb Raider sells 3 million copies in a month and Square Enix considers it to be a failure when The Witcher 2 sells reasonably well, so much so that CD Projekt is able to fund the development of a brand new enigine, The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and a whole second studio?

I think if we're ever going to see a crash it will be in the big budget, AAA blockbuster market. The EA's, Activisions and Ubisoft's of the world will spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make the biggest and best games that suck up as much money as possible. When their bubbles burst they'll be the ones who hurt a lot. Everyone else who can keep a reasonable budget, aim for the right audiences and realistic expectations.

 

[eBusiness]

And if making a good product and being in touch with your audience is such a big deal, why hasn't some indie upstart swooped in and stolen EA's lunch by now?

Who says they haven't? People for some reason keep assuming that EA is the behemoth of the gaming industry, and that they swallow up cash like an oversized cookie monster. The books tell the story, EA is barely breaking even, and with sales of $3.8B per year and a market cap of $8B it is on both measures smaller than Activision Blizzard. If you compare EA to big technology companies like Microsoft, Google, Intel, IBM and Apple, it is not even 1/10 the size of these.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Logarithmic&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1375905600000&chddm=484058&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:EA&ntsp=0&ei=vYoCUsGlMqaUwQPfIA

Indies combined make way more money than EA do.

 

[Something Amyss]

Unfortunately a crash might be a good thing in the long run. It might make the ones left standing take a good hard look at themselves and see why they are standing. Everyone will say Look at activision and their cod and their billions.

Or, very possibly, it might kill off mainstream gaming entirely as the ones left standing decide it's no longer worth it.

There are three huge differences between the crash and now that are important right now: cost, reputation and quality control. Now, quality control is a double-edged sword: the closed system of console gaming has made a lot of it off-limits to smaller companies. This is changing, and maybe it'll work to the industry's favour, but not so much right now. One of the major factors in the crash was a flood of shitware.

"Cost" refers to the cost to manufacture and store physical stock. This was streamlined due to the advent of Optical discs (CD, DVD, BD), which already had facilities in place and reduced the need to come up with your own technology. One of the big things that caused the crash was a huge stock of games (most notably ET) that didn't sell. They ate that cost and they ate it hard. This is hard to replicate, even with "disappointing" titles. THQ's failure is likely the closest we'll come, and that's because they banked on proprietary hardware. Is it possible to overstock with discs? Yeah, but a lot harder and prints tend to be more realistic. With a shift towards digital, it'll be even harder. There's also the fact that people are more willing to stock titles because....

Reputation: The crash came at a bad time because gaming was starting to take its first steps out of "fad" territory. Gaming is no longer a fad. It's big business. A crash might convince publishers, however, that the boom is over. Remember, these are the guys who will cut and run on a franchise if one game doesn't go over like gangbusters. It doesn't even need to fail, just fail to pwn.

It could fall to the indies, or just fall. there's really no middleware market anymore, so that's rather risky. Especially for a market that's supposed to be recession proof.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

So you don't need to worry about some horrible crash. You just need to worry that things might not get better.

I don't think "worried" is quite the word to describe the people who keep going on about an impending crash. "Wishful thinking" might be more like it. (Not unlike 90% of people who talk about the world ending, frankly.)