

The Game Business Is A Year From Irrelevance - teej
http://boesky.blogspot.com/2009/03/game-business-is-year-from.html

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EvilTrout
I think the author gets a lot of points dead on.

The changes have already begun. First the largest game expo, E3, was killed
off and brought back as a shadow of its former self.

Then we've seen the rise of the indie game. Braid and World of Goo have shown
to be excellent examples of games that cost very little ($15-20) and provide a
compelling experience.

Large studios are investing less into smaller games, like Valve did with
Portal, and earning better profit margins by distributing them digitally.

There will probably always be blockbuster games like Grand Theft Auto, but the
market is splintering. Millions will continue be lost in many of the big
studios.

I personally think it's healthy. As a huge consumer of games, I don't think
there's ever been a point in time when there's been so many amazing games
available.

~~~
jcromartie
It is absolutely a good thing for gamers. Gaming is becoming a cottage
industry _again_. Games were produced by small teams on small budgets at
first. It's coming full circle, except this time around it's about as easy to
develop for a console as it always has been to develop for personal computers.

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unalone
Thank God. I'd hope so. The people who develop games are among the most
tasteless hacks I've seen in any field - partly because gaming is new, partly
because there's just a constant immaturity about things.

Now if only the gaming MAGAZINES would get mature, too. The level of self-
obsession is worse in something like Game Informer than it is on the gossip
rags. Obsession with nostalgia is a constant pain, the overrating of big-name
games makes the reviews irrelevant, and there are very few writers for
magazines that say anything at all interesting.

The minute the RPG field gets developers who aren't obsessed with Final
Fantasy VII, or the FPS scene gets people who realize how irritatingly
mediocre the Bungie developers are, we'll see people experimenting. (To be
fair, Valve is already doing a damned good job at that - they're the best
hardcore developer around today.)

People who haven't played Passage yet should really get a copy and play it.
It's cross-platform and a truly inspiring game.
<http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/>

~~~
cubicle67
I think some of the reason people obsess over Final Fantasy VII is that it
really was a brilliant game.

~~~
unalone
I played it last of the games in the series. My two biggies were FFIV and
FFVIII. FFVII I just played a month ago for the first time, and it was
disappointing.

The plot goes really slowly. The writing's pretty iffy. The big death scene is
_way_ overdone. I played it right after rewatching Season 1 of The Wire, which
has one of the most shocking death scenes I've ever seen, and it struck me as
sad, how immature the writing mindset of videogames is. Even Half-Life 2,
which is a pinnacle in a lot of ways, sheers away from really mature themes in
plot.

Possibly for its time it was a masterpiece. But having played FFVIII to death,
moving back to VII saw a lot of things suffer - this opposed to, say, Super
Mario 64, which has a childish plot but the gameplay of which is still
timeless.

(I don't like the slow-paced RPG battle system. Pen and paper works really
well with it, but video games are played live. You should be thinking on your
feet. For that reason I like the Kingdom Hearts system a lot, though I feel
that got botched when KH2 came out. The emphasis switched again away from
tactics and towards brute force.)

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peregrine
The website was in such a format that made it impossible to take seriously and
read. A Billion Dollar Industry does not become irrelevant in a year.

~~~
time_management
I think he means "irrelevant" in the same sense as that by which Paul Graham
considers Microsoft "dead".

The problem with the game industry (and much of the entertainment industry) is
that anything with a $20 million budget is going to be designed by committee,
in addition to being harmed by culturally semi-illiterate moneymen who let
economic interests crush aesthetic concerns.

