The future of the gaming industry
AAA games are becoming more and more technically complex, and as a result, game budgets and development time are increasing.Once upon a time, in the 90s, a small group of talented developers could write a game tech demo, get some publisher interested, and develop an advanced game for that time in 2 years without any huge budget.
Over time, games became more and more technically complex, the complexity of development and budgets grew. For example, Half-Life 2's budget was $40 million, which was a record for 2004. And now AAA games are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Only wealthy publishers can afford technically advanced games. A bunch of talented developers without a big budget can no longer make a cutting-edge game like they used to.
In addition to the cost, the development time of the game has increased. If 20 years ago games were made for 2-3 years, now it takes 5 years or more (if this is not a conveyor belt).
As a result, profit was at the forefront, because at such a cost and development time, the game simply will not pay for itself if it is not sold in multi-million copies.
Large publishers have set up a conveyor release of games, when different developers work on games in the same series with the maximum borrowing of assets from other games in the series.
Marketers who are afraid to come up with some innovations have begun to rule the ball, releasing template games that are guaranteed to sell well.
And, most importantly, more and more games are slipping into donation online wankers, in single-player games there are also more and more donations and DLC.
Therefore, I consider the further growth of iron capacities to be meaningless.
If the hardware capacity continues to grow and the games become more and more technically advanced, then with such huge budgets and development timeframes, it will not be profitable to release anything other than donation conveyors and online wankers.
It will not be profitable to develop a game for more than 5 years for 500 million dollars, which the player will buy once and will not donate.
Classic singleplayer games will only be eaten by some Sony as image games, and then in the future it may switch to online games with donations. By the way, Sony began to release their exclusives on PC, because 10 million sales for their exclusives is already not enough, with such and such budgets.
Yes, the gaming market is growing, but mainly due to mobile games and microtransactions, sales of classic games have not grown that much and cannot keep up with the growing budget.
The same Elden Ring is scolded for an outdated engine and the use of assets from other studio games. So it's good - instead of racing for graphics, the developers focused on the gameplay.
And if the developers made a new engine and advanced graphics, then with a limited budget, this would be at the expense of the size of the game and the gameplay. Either the developers would have had to increase the budget and development time of the game, the game would have come out in another 2 years and it’s not a fact that it would bring enough profit for such a budget, and the next game of the developers could be another donation wank to bring enough profit.
Another example, the developers of Cyberpunk 2077 tried to make a technically advanced game with advanced graphics, the game eventually suffered because of this (bugs, cut out features, the plot was obviously planned to be longer and non-linear), and this despite the budget of 320 million dollars against 67 million for The Witcher 3.
Would have done on the old engine, the situation would have been better.
So in the future, more and more games with a minimum of innovations, donations and a service distribution model, or pipelines like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty will be waiting for us.
There will be fewer and fewer single-player games, and then publishers will try to cram donations, DLCs and other ways of additional monetization into them.
But I think there will be more good indies with original ideas - players will get bored with endless pipelines with a minimum of innovations and donation dumps, the demand for good and original indies will increase.
RikoChiko wrote:
a larger fish will redeem.
With such huge capitals as they have, they are unlikely to go bankrupt. Maybe over time they will row the loot in smaller quantities until someone picks them up. For every fish there is a larger fish with a huge greedy mouth)
For about half a century of the history of the industry (probably, in this case, the countdown should be taken from the appearance of arcade machines, when it switched to commercial "rails"), it has had ups and downs, crises, the disappearance of some market leaders and the emergence of others. And there were predictions about what would happen next ... Only in the last 15 years, they have already predicted the disappearance of single-player games (there should have been only online projects), and the collapse of consoles (only mobile gaming), something neither happened.
The fact that the industry will change is for sure, there are prerequisites for this. The current "giants" have become lazy and insolent, they produce "raw" products, but they shout about "development is getting more expensive, we are raising prices." Indies (I'm not talking about 2D and pseudo-retro) show that even with a relatively small budget and without a team of 200+ people, you can create good and interesting games, with interesting plots and sometimes unusual gameplay.
The world is dying. More and more people are switching to either mobile games or curling irons. Yesterday I learned to play Sonya 4 in Resident 2. So far, two points. It's very difficult for me to manage. I swear a lotâ˜ºï¸ Soon Peka will have golden privileges for the rich class. But curling irons are not an option. Still can't learn with camera view. But horror, how interesting it is to learn)
The future of the gaming industry
Games are being re-released, players are being "updated". As long as there are those who pay full price, the gaming industry will not die. Starting around 2006, games will be re-released and people will continue to buy.
Man is such an insatiable creature, and even now is the time of the "consumer society", the future of the gaming industry is in the hands of the gamers themselves. As they say, people hawala, so the next time you spit on the hyped expensive AAA project that turned out to be shit, you need to keep in mind that we ourselves paid more attention to it than to a lesser-known game, which is much more interesting in the gameplay.
It used to be... Buy a set of dominoes and play it for 50 years. And now they have smeared themselves with new igors and everything is not enough for them.
SpoilerAbout the games on Steam and the like, I generally keep quiet ... Buy a game for full price for rent. Absolutely e-bo-bo? Okay GoG - you can take it with you there.
Denis Kyokushin
Denis Kyokushin wrote:
Games are being re-released, players are "upgrading". As long as there are those who pay full price, the gaming industry will not die.
For cash income from beginners and young gamers, this is true, but the future of the gaming industry implies an increase in opportunities in the game, otherwise there will be stagnation and a decline in interest in games. The nature of a person is such that interest arises from a novelty that is emotionally significant for him. While in games this is an improvement in graphics, which gives more immersion in the game, and more important, the gameplay and motives in the game have remained the same, because. everything in games, including artificial intelligence, is built on scripts that are essentially comparable to the reflexes of animals and humans. To increase the possibilities in the game, you need to introduce more complex features for characters and NPCs, such as the memory of events and relationships, logic, and elements of invention. But so far this is impossible, not only in terms of the technical capabilities of computers, but also in terms of the intellectual capabilities of developers.
vftor
The player is different for the player: someone is sitting on the tanks, someone, except for GTA5, has not seen anything else. few
Denis Kyokushin
That's true, but sooner or later any player will get tired of the monotony, and he will either abandon the game altogether, or want something new emotionally significant for him in the games, which is not in the games. Such is the nature of a normal adequate person. If he constantly pecks at the same games, not wanting anything new, then such a person in psychiatry is called an Addict (it's like a car without brakes). These include drug addicts, alcoholics, gamers, workaholics, etc., and this is not treated. For them, the future in the gaming industry will always be bright, they were born that way until they die. But that is another topic. And here we are talking about the future of the gaming industry, and it is supposed to be for normal people.
vftor
vftor wrote:
And here we are talking about the Future of the gaming industry, and it is supposed to be for normal people
So I wrote about the future: "As long as there are those who pay full price, the gaming industry will not die." New players come, they do not know the old ones games. But they experience wow-effects from new ones, that's why they buy.