City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Tired of the entire gaming industry?

Arcanaville

By Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2012-09-11 09:42 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba View Post
I've played all of those except Planescape. Got anything released since 2005 by chance?
Aw man, you missed the best one. You can grab it cheap on GOG, though - there's a couple of essential mods out, such as resolution and unfinished business patches.

 

Posted

Well this all goes back to "it's now a serious business". A big budget title that misses a holiday release can hurt stock prices as all the analysts downgrade your stock. So got to ship.

The biggest downside of giving game consoles internet connectivity and a hard drive is that console games can be shipped incomplete and full of bugs just like PC games.

Private development studios aren't as pressured to release a game before it's time. Sure sometimes they have to because they need to meet payroll or their investors are making a lot of noise. They are also usually run not by the money guys but by someone who was/is a game developer and avid game player. They understand the customer more because they are one.

And yes, GOG is a great place for older games for little money.

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Tempus unum hominem manet

 

Posted

Imagine my suprise to be in agreement with Bill. Alas, I've been saying this for a few years now. It's a shame, and I think it's the beginning of the end of gaming as we know it. I suppose we'll see.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ultimo_ View Post
Imagine my suprise to be in agreement with Bill. Alas, I've been saying this for a few years now. It's a shame, and I think it's the beginning of the end of gaming as we know it. I suppose we'll see.
I don't think so. I think we're moving towards what was seen with personal computers like the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and so forth. Small teams and bedroom coders putting out games, only this time selling them digitally through online services rather than via tape or disk.

We're seeing it already through Steam + Greenlight, Kickstarter, indie gaming database websites and the availability of better tools and engines for making games.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba View Post
And my dad saves my brain again: Advent!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
Played it on his Heathkit back in the early 80s. Text only rules!
Does he still have the robot?

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Does he still have the robot?
We... we don't speak of that.

Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

Gotta add my disappointment in MWO. I played all the old MechWarrior games from MW2:Mercs, although the last great MW game for me was MW3.

MWO is really just Battlefield in Mechs. Sure, the graphics are fantastic and it sounds as if they've tried to add some depth to the chassis types so that everyone doesn't automatically strive for an Assault mech, but given the Battletech universe has so much lore and depth, Piranha could have done SO much more with PVE than they have. In other words, actually having some. In essence, if I want a free to play MechWarrior based PVP game with Crysis graphics, why wouldn't I just download Mechwarrior Legends?

As for the gaming industry as a whole, I think the big problem is two-fold: firstly, there is a very strong move to appeal to a wider and more casual audience. Mobile phone games and web based games seem to be on the increase and if a company wants to make something that appeals to a more "dedicated" gamer, they'll develop it on a console platform.

Secondly, no one seems to want to innovate any more. They're all bemoaning piracy and fickle fan bases and what have you but when was the last time anyone made a game that was genuinely innovative and not stuck in a tired and over used formula? MMO developers, for example, seem to be so dead set on making the next "Wow Killer" they appear to forget that if people want to play WoW, they will play WoW. To make people not play WoW they have to do something different.

If a developer was bold enough to say "Right, what is it that every other MMO game does that bores the hell out of the players. What is it that is done to death. What do we need to include to make a game at least familiar, but not make players think, 'oh great, not this again'. It sounds as if ArenaNet have at least attempted that with GW2 from some of the reviews I've read, but for me, its the setting that puts me off.

As for Indie games, of all the ones I've tried, (at least on the Xbox) none have really managed to grab me for very long.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba View Post
I remember when I first loaded Wolfenstein 3D. I remember Doom, Wing Commander and spending days in and out playing Mechwarrior. I remember DOS and Glide and my voodoo video cards. I remember all of this through, I'm sure, rose-tinted glasses.

I remember when you had to go look for game patches and know what you were doing to get them installed.

The Mechwarrior MMO is about to come out and I'm sitting on a closed beta invite that I'll probably never use. The whole "pay to win/nickle and dime the users to death" model that the gaming industry is diving face first into rather disgusts me. I'm guessing that this is because I'm an old fogy pining away for days long gone.

I was disgusted by how empty/shallow Dragon Age 2 was compared to DA:O. I was disgusted by having to install the Origin service to play ME3 and I was disgusted at how pathetically the ending was written. I'm disgusted by NCSoft's handling of the CoH shutdown.

I've never been very good at tolerating what I consider to be ********. Hell, I left this game twice over the forced teaming/screw the soloists mindset I saw coming from the devs.

I can't shake the feeling that the bean counters have, again, won the war; that there won't be anymore games where the taint of greed doesn't overpower the happy smells of beautiful art, smooth animations and fun gameplay.

I wonder if I can find a working 486 anywhere...
I'm kinda with you there Bill.

I'm sure folks have noticed my conspicuous absence on the forums of late. That's because I'm pretty much done with CoH now.

Sure, I'll continue to play a bit until shutdown day, but both my forum presence and playtime have dropped off sharply. I'm getting myself used to the idea that the game will not be here anymore pretty soon.

And.....there's not really much else out there that has my interest. I have Skyrim to work on on my PS3, and a few other games that I haven't beaten yet. I might join some of the Pinnacle players in SWTOR after a while, but that's a few months down the road.

I'm just kinda disgusted with how things are going in the industry myself. Remember when you bought a game and you got the WHOLE game? Nowadays there are things ON THE FREAKING GAME DISC that you have to pay extra to access. Yes, there is code contained on the disc you bought at a retail store that you cannot use unless you give them MORE money.

People's attitudes aren't helping any either. If they are expected to pay for a game, they get pissy about it. If they don't get everything they want in a game for absolutely free, they get pissy about it. Spending $5 is too much to ask for a lot of people, and they expect that these games they don't want to pay for are going to be mind-blowingly awesome. Really? You expect an Elder Scrolls quality game for $0?

The day is coming where every new game is going to adopt the pay-to-win scheme, where the money you spend actually makes you significantly more powerful. Sad, but the mindset of this generation of gamers is going to make it necessary in order for them to make any money at all.

All of that is contributing to my disillusion with gaming in general. I will probably check out the Warhammer 40k MMO when it eventually comes out (IF it comes out), but that's the only game coming up I'm even a little bit interested in. Oh, and the DayZ standalone they're working on. And that's......pretty much it.

The way NCSoft handled this shutdown is souring me on MMOs in general. I spent 7 years of my life with this game as a major feature of it. Hell, I met my WIFE in this game. To have the rug pulled out from under me like this is going a long way toward an attitude change from me as well. I understand the desire for a game to be free.....why should we pay for something when there's no guarantee it will be there later?

I probably will not be posting nearly as much as I used to (never will hit 10,000 posts I don't think).

Pretty disillusioned about gaming in general here.

Claws out.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

 

Posted

I'm very tired of the gaming industry right now, and this post especially convinced me why:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Starsman View Post
As an indie game developer I can vouch a bit here. The reason the Pay-ToWin/Nickle And Dime model is becoming so prevalent is because players don't want to pay anymore.

For a game to make any money they have to be played by thousands, hundreds of thousands. If it does not, it won’t get momentum, there won’t be word of mouth to spread it or sustain it.

You are forced to spend insane budgets into marketing that sometime exceeded development costs (marketing costs for new titles were between the things blamed for NCSoft losses last quarter.)

The alternative has become clear: just give the game away for free. People play it then, and the voice spreads more effectively. Plenty won’t pay, just as many pirate and never buy standalone single player games, but others will start sinking money into the game out of pure support or falling victim to those schemes we tend to come up with (despite me saying we, I have not shipped a game doing this... yet.)

If lucky, the free game becomes popular enough to the point where the 3% that end up spending money amount to enough people to cover development and marketing costs.

It's annoying; I hate it but at the same time feel forced to do this. Both large and small studios are being forced against a wall to do this. The piracy driven mentality of the newer generation is a huge reason for this mentality. No one wants to pay even 99c for a game they will play for a week or more.

There is still some money to be made off sales if you manage to get a viral marketing campaign going, but that’s as likely as winning the lottery without playing, by having the winning ticket accidentally be dropped on your lap while you are at the local junkyard.

Not saying you have to do the pay-to-win thing though. But it’s sadly a model that has proven a bit more effective than pay-for-cosmetic-trinkets.

I've tried to write a reply four times to this post and I've deleted every single version because there's just no reasoning with the logic in this post (much as I can appreciate that Starsman is really trying to be sympathetic to the thread's focus rather than antagonistic).

Starsman, I think you set yourself up for failure the minute you say "players don't want to pay anymore." That's ignoring the fact that the gaming industry constantly puts itself at risk by soliciting investors to support their business - which is why the emphasis shifts from "let's make a great game" to "let's make a game that will get players to shell out more money."

When you say "No one wants to pay even 99c for a game they will play for a week or more" I keep thinking, Folks pay $10-20 a shot for Monopoly - and that's a board game with incredible replay value that's survived the gaming industry for *decades* -- so why wouldn't they pay 99c for a video game? Why not $20-$30 for a video game if its done well?

The fact that Guild Wars 2 sold 1 million preorders on a retail MMO game with a one-time fixed cost should be a wake-up call to the industry: yes, we CAN do better but first we need to focus on making a great game with *incredible* replay value first and foremost.

People *will* pay for games - but they have to be *good* games, not "bare minimum" games catering to the lowest common denominator (keeping in mind that the lowest common denominator probably aren't interested in playing games right now; they're looking to get off the unemployment line and earn sufficient income to keep their homes and feed their families). If the gaming industry hasn't figured this out by now and it isn't willing to re-assess the investors' smothering demands on their bottom line then I'll have no sympathy for the next game developer/publisher to go under quite suddenly and inexplicably.

Me personally, I believe the burden of having to pay back investors first and foremost is what's keeping businesses from getting out from under their worsening debts and holding them back from achieving sustained success and long-term profitibility -- and game developers are seeing the worst of this more than any other industry right now. Any game developer that's foolish enough to seek investors rather than try to finance their projects independently is just asking for trouble - which is why your industry is obsessed with the "what game can we make that will get players to pay out more and help us appease our investors?"whereas we're all thinking "when are they going to make a good game that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg to play?"

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba View Post
I remember when I first loaded Wolfenstein 3D. I remember Doom, Wing Commander and spending days in and out playing Mechwarrior. I remember DOS and Glide and my voodoo video cards. I remember all of this through, I'm sure, rose-tinted glasses.

I wonder if I can find a working 486 anywhere...
You had Wolfenstein in 3D?!?! In my day it was 2D monochrome - and we liked it!



.... and still like it!

Get dosbox http://www.dosbox.com/
Or AppleWin http://applewin.berlios.de/

to get your retro game on.

________________________________
"Just cause you don't understand what's going on don't mean it don't make no sense
And just cause you don't like it, don't mean it ain't no good" - Suicidal Tendancies

 

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... And now I'm left to wonder if Wolfenstein 3D has been ported to the Nintendo 3DS yet ...

 

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Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleDavid View Post
... And now I'm left to wonder if Wolfenstein 3D has been ported to the Nintendo 3DS yet ...
HA! YES! I only play retro games on my 3DS - and it's in there with the game boy advanced games.

Funny thing, I have a 3DS and don't own one 3DS game. I just run emulators on it with the SuperCard DSTwo (mame, stella, applewin, gameboy/advanced, nes, snes, intellivision, sms, coleco, etc.... even a dos emulator).

________________________________
"Just cause you don't understand what's going on don't mean it don't make no sense
And just cause you don't like it, don't mean it ain't no good" - Suicidal Tendancies

 

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rubberlad View Post
The fact that Guild Wars 2 sold 1 million preorders on a retail MMO game with a one-time fixed cost should be a wake-up call to the industry: yes, we CAN do better but first we need to
spend millions of dollars marketing a game, promote the hell out of it for seven years by paying every freakin' game store in two continents to place cardboard cutouts of our characters on the salesfloor, running constant online ad campaigns, and then make a sequel to it with a similarly huge hype campaign?

Speaking as someone who is not an indie game developer, Starsman is perfectly correct. Companies that make money on small projects follow the Zynga model of business.

Quote:
People *will* pay for games - but they have to be *good* games, not "bare minimum" games
Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Ahahahahah.

hahah.

haah.

Oh, I think I'm done -- Wait.

Oh god I can't breathe, I can't breathe!

*wipes eyes*

Okay, look, there's a reason why all the real PC gaming scene is on delivery platforms now like Steam or Origin or Battle.net. We stole everything. For years. One of my friends is a computer consultant who makes huge piles of money, compared to me, and I have only slowly managed to convert him to not stealing games. I don't think he ever did pay for the first Borderlands, and we played the hell out of that (and yeah, we even had legit and non-legit copies networked together). (Nor, for that matter, either Prototype, or Dragon Age... but he uttered nary a harsh word about 'having' to pay for Arkham Asylum. Buying PC games simply didn't even occur to him.)

 

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Personally, I prefer console games to PC games. Not sure if its the controller aspect or the type of games that mostly are found on consoles like my xbox 360, I just tend to enjoy them more. For example, I just pre-ordered and paid for the upcoming Assassin's Creed 3, after purchasing Transformer's Fall of Cybertron. Which btw..is a BLAST TO PLAY.

So I really couldn't care less about the current state of MMO's. Mainly because I realize its a business like all the rest. Created to make money, not to make people all warm and happy. While yes the idea of video games is enjoyment, if they didn't make money noone would make the damn things.

 

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It's not just the gaming industry. Look at television and movies. Heck, look at just about anything, but entertainment is probably where it's just most obvious. MMOs, TV shows and movies cost a lot of money to produce. So, to get the money they need, producers and developers have to go to a big corporation for backing. Big corporations are dedicated to profits for their investors. So, your producers and developers are forced to prove that they can be profitable and one of the easiest ways to do that is to show a track record of success. Truly original creations do not have a track record, and so you are stuck with remake after remake and reboot after reboot.

Corporations are in the business of making money and, as a result, they are the ones who have money. You see very few successful corporations who truly believe they are in the business of creating original content because, if they really do believe that, it is really hard to be a successful corporation. Expecting a corporation to be dedicated to creating original content would be a bit like expecting an army general to be dedicated to building stylish tanks. It might be pretty, but it doesn't win wars.

Unless the market changes to make original content more profitable than remakes, or the world changes so that making money is no longer the all-important goal of corporations, things aren't going to change. I suppose the bright side of this is that, when you get a real gem like City of Heroes, it shines all the brighter.

 

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba View Post
I can't shake the feeling that the bean counters have, again, won the war; that there won't be anymore games where the taint of greed doesn't overpower the happy smells of beautiful art, smooth animations and fun gameplay.
I'm an MMO gamer. I like seeing other people around, even if I don't team with them very often. As an MMO gamer, I've spent 8 years watching studio after studio blow through hundreds of millions of dollars, then repeat the same mistakes over and over again. We're probably closing in on three billion dollars invested in the MMO bubble, somewhere around a dozen or twenty major titles, and nothing to show for it, nothing that's stable or growing instead of circling the drain, but WoW, EVE, RQ, and maybe GW -- all games that I hate for one reason or another.

I stuck with Anarchy Online until it visibly began to crater, I played Neocron and Neocron 2 almost all the way to the day they turned the servers off, I played SWG until the second time Sony wrecked it, I played Auto Assault (for crying out loud!) and Tabula Rasa and WAR until their developers got laid off, I played STO until PWE turned it into a casino. I didn't fall for CO or DCUO, and I didn't get around to MxO before it began to die, and I never thought Vanguard or Mortal Online or RIFT had a prayer. I'm still vaguely here. Funcom has already laid off most of the staff of TSW.

I can't stomach WoW, EVE, or RQ, and I think GW looks like garbage, and publishers and venture capitalists have stopped being willing to fund new alternatives. I still love MMO gaming, but there just isn't anything to play.

 

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I know the feeling of the OP. I was, at one time, considering buying GW2, but I'm so anti-NCSoft right now that i just can't bring myself to buy it. I'm rather quite paranoid atm about MMO's in general. The games I'm looking at instead?

Torchlight 2 - I skipped D3 because of it being such an overpriced piece of tripe.
Baldur's Gate EE - I loved the originals, some of which I no-longer have the disks for.
Borderlands 2 - I loved the first one, but unless there's another pre-order special like there was last month (that I missed) I probably will wait a while for this one.

I've been playing Dark Souls currently, with a dash of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite with some friends. I have a few games in my Steam account I still haven't tried yet. Evochron Mercenaries looks like it has potential (a space, Privateer-type game).

I long-ago beat the main puzzles in SpaceChem, but there's still many ResearchNet puzzles I haven't beaten yet, or older puzzles to revisit to make them more efficient.

I still occasionally dabble with Terraria too, although I'm still a little bummed that the game will likely never be 100% completed. There's some games coming down the road though that might fill the Terraria itch. Although Fortenight will be a AAA title, I've always been a fan of Epic.

 

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rubberlad View Post
Starsman, I think you set yourself up for failure the minute you say "players don't want to pay anymore." That's ignoring the fact that the gaming industry constantly puts itself at risk by soliciting investors to support their business - which is why the emphasis shifts from "let's make a great game" to "let's make a game that will get players to shell out more money."
Jack_NoMind already did a good reply for this, but I want to clarify something: As usual, when someone says "no one" or "everyone" I am simply referring to "most people" or "a huge percentage of the current market."

Quote:
When you say "No one wants to pay even 99c for a game they will play for a week or more" I keep thinking, Folks pay $10-20 a shot for Monopoly - and that's a board game with incredible replay value that's survived the gaming industry for *decades* -- so why wouldn't they pay 99c for a video game? Why not $20-$30 for a video game if its done well?
Two things:
1) Monopoly actually sells at 99c but it has a lot of rep behind it.

2) People [see disclaimer above] are way more willing to pay money for tangible goods than virtual ones.

I still have a hard time getting people that know ME, and seen me kill myself developing, how much work goes into it, to pay 99c for a game they like instead of keeping it on a watch list hoping it goes free someday. This while in a BK line where he super sizes his meal!!! Odly that same guy spent $25 in in-app-currency for a game he once he got hooked on, but first, he had to download it for free...

The game in question was MonTower for the iPhone.


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People *will* pay for games - but they have to be *good* games
No. They have to be marketed games. How do you know a game you have not tried is good? I am certain most people that bought Guild Wars 2 had never played it. But the marketing campaign made sure to paint it well.

However, marketing is very time sensitive. Eventually, marketing budget drains. You can't keep marketing forever. That tends to be the point where MMOs jump to F2P and social-media-lize every move they can.

Quote:
not "bare minimum" games catering to the lowest common denominator (keeping in mind that the lowest common denominator probably aren't interested in playing games right now; they're looking to get off the unemployment line and earn sufficient income to keep their homes and feed their families).
I doubt those are in the list of people that either buy a new iPhone, or pay 60 bucks for a video game. That' is not your target as a developer (unless your goal is to go free and USE those people as word of mouth advertising machines.)

I'm not saying there is no one out there that would rather spend money on pay-up-front games. But that's not where the real profits are anymore. The market is too competitive, especially in the pure digital front.

Here is a perfect example: Bejeweled. You likely are familiar with the game.

Right now there are two versions of Bejeweled in the iOS app store. A free one with IAP and a paid one with a lot of game modes and extras. In any standard, the 99c is a sueprior app with 6 fully fleshed game modes. The free has a timed mode that is designed to suck money out of you.

Right now, the paid app is ranking at 169th spot in the grossing charts. That's not bad for the amount of money that moves in the App Store, but again: the name Bejeweled is VERY well known.

The free app is ranking at 21th spot in the top grossing today (after a strange drop, it was 10th spot 2 days ago.) One thing to keep in mind, in the App Store, the amount of money an app makes the closer they get to the top tends to be nearly exponential. We are not talking about the free app likely making 148 "times" more, we are talking about way way more.

All this, because people are too cheap to pay a price of entry, and once they get hooked, they don’t even care there is a paid version, they are in their tiny fun box now and should this box manipulate their grindy-senses, they will open their wallets.

So yes, the gaming industry has "figured this out" and THAT is the problem. That is precisely why games are every day more bare bones and free up front. In fact, you may be laughed at if you go to an investor today and tell him you just want to make a product and sell it. They want you to make something social that will grow so they can then "exit" via an acquisition, or they want you to use the freemium path since it’s so much more profitable.


Quote:
Me personally, I believe the burden of having to pay back investors first and foremost
Investors are not banks. Investors expect ownership on your company. They are not lending you money; they are buying a percentage of ownership in the company. It's insanely rare that they will just sell you back the ownership. What they want is for you to make your company more and more appealing for big guys like EA to acquire.

Stock holders are similar, but they may expect the company to make money, grow, so they can then sell that stock at a profit due to increased company value.