5 Reasons the Video Game Industry Is About to Crash
Aug 28, 2014 22:19:09 GMT -5
Regolyth likes this
Post by Morreion on Aug 28, 2014 22:19:09 GMT -5
5 Reasons the Video Game Industry Is About to Crash (Cracked)
#5. We Put People Who Don't Know Gaming in Charge
Not to stereotype here, but the type of person who knows how to make an awesome video game about fighting dragons with a giant chainsaw tends not to be the same type of person who is an expert in business and finance. So if you look at the CEOs and executives of game studios today, you won't find many that actually have professional experience working as game designers. And that would be fine, except for the fact that, due to the way games are made, these guys wind up making the creative decisions. It's similar to the problem with big movie studios, only much worse...
#4. Budgets Have Gone Insane, and That's Making Innovation Almost Impossible
Let's say you've been put in charge of planning a child's birthday party, for some reason -- maybe you lost a bet or something. You've got one day to plan, a $50 budget, and five people to help you. Not a big deal, right? Put some balloons in the yard and hire a clown. Done. But what if that party was for a rich kid and your budget was $50 million? Do you think that makes it easier or harder? Let's put it this way: Instead of five friends helping you, it's 500 strangers, and all of them have different ideas about what a party should look like. How long until you see your first fistfight break out? How far into the party before you hear yourself scream, "OK, who hired the stripper?!?"
Well, in the world of game development, this change from small-scale projects to massive productions happened overnight -- the average game costs freaking 30 times as much as it did in the days of the original Sony PlayStation. Back then, the average game could be made for $800,000 on the low end, but by the PlayStation 3 era, the number had ballooned to $28 million. With the new consoles, that's going to go up again. At this point, it'd be cheaper to just create real zombies to chase people around...
I'm sympathetic to the article, but I get the impression that gamers will hurl lots of money at just about anything these days. F2P whales aside, people are spending hundreds of dollars on beta packs. You can pretty much make a AAA version of crap and it'll sell millions. Millions of gamers rage at this, but millions of gamers eat up the same old junk every single release. Hence the state of the gaming industry.
#5. We Put People Who Don't Know Gaming in Charge
Not to stereotype here, but the type of person who knows how to make an awesome video game about fighting dragons with a giant chainsaw tends not to be the same type of person who is an expert in business and finance. So if you look at the CEOs and executives of game studios today, you won't find many that actually have professional experience working as game designers. And that would be fine, except for the fact that, due to the way games are made, these guys wind up making the creative decisions. It's similar to the problem with big movie studios, only much worse...
#4. Budgets Have Gone Insane, and That's Making Innovation Almost Impossible
Let's say you've been put in charge of planning a child's birthday party, for some reason -- maybe you lost a bet or something. You've got one day to plan, a $50 budget, and five people to help you. Not a big deal, right? Put some balloons in the yard and hire a clown. Done. But what if that party was for a rich kid and your budget was $50 million? Do you think that makes it easier or harder? Let's put it this way: Instead of five friends helping you, it's 500 strangers, and all of them have different ideas about what a party should look like. How long until you see your first fistfight break out? How far into the party before you hear yourself scream, "OK, who hired the stripper?!?"
Well, in the world of game development, this change from small-scale projects to massive productions happened overnight -- the average game costs freaking 30 times as much as it did in the days of the original Sony PlayStation. Back then, the average game could be made for $800,000 on the low end, but by the PlayStation 3 era, the number had ballooned to $28 million. With the new consoles, that's going to go up again. At this point, it'd be cheaper to just create real zombies to chase people around...
I'm sympathetic to the article, but I get the impression that gamers will hurl lots of money at just about anything these days. F2P whales aside, people are spending hundreds of dollars on beta packs. You can pretty much make a AAA version of crap and it'll sell millions. Millions of gamers rage at this, but millions of gamers eat up the same old junk every single release. Hence the state of the gaming industry.
