Future of games eh? Well like any multi faceted industry this is almost impossible to predict, according to certain ‘industry professionals’ in the car industry by now were all supposed to be being driven around by autonomous flying cars and seeing as how games are now the fastest growing entertainment medium its doubly hard to reasonably predict gamings future over an entire industry, today’s big break through can become tomorrows fad and yesterdays classic becomes today’s has been.
Maybe its reflective of the age games as a whole, sure they’ve been around in some shape or form for around 60 years but it wasn’t until much later they began to take a huge global impact, around 1985 I think that by my games to humans anthropomorphic personification process would make the games industry a sprightly 21yr old, short attention span jumping from idea to idea still trying to get to grips with being a ‘big boy’ constantly trying to impress its older stale brother dressed in its new suit of ‘immersive gameplay’ and hat of ‘digital actors’. Course there was a time, not so long ago when you consider the evolution of other entertainment media, when a boy in his room armed with just a idea for a game and an inquisitive nature could create a commercial hit, course like any start up industry essentially made up of enthusiasts more than capable with a bit of code but not too great at marketing and ever escalating development costs the suits closed in – in this instance dressed as publishers.
The premise was simple the people would develop the new games and the bespoke publisher would advertise and package the final product creating shelf space for it in spectrum world or wherever you kids went then. This has essentially been the blue print ever since, developers propose a game to a respective developer and they decide whether or not it’s worth making.
At the start there wasn’t a problem, games were still cheap enough to develop for a publisher to take a few commercial failures before the developers had there breakthrough and created there smash hit clawing back the dosh, new genres were being created almost every month with the likes of Dune heralding in the RTS genre and Wolfenstein properly introducing the world to the FPS perspective (that Ultima game doesn’t count – was technically 2d just used a scrolling panel)
*Went a bit wacky with me tense here – basically your in the future 2010, got somewhat confused writing it for some reason*
Fast forward to 2010 and what do you find? Still no flying cars but games are now huge the largest fastest growing entertainment medium and publishers have warped into the game equivalent of film studio’s commanding billions in assets but playing the entire industry as just that, an industry with opportunities for profit not new gameplay opportunities or interests in pushing the industry forward. A modern game can now take roughly 50 million dollars to produce, not factoring in advertising and packaging costs why should the publishers who still provide the money for the development houses to produce these games provide the money if there not guaranteed a return on there investment?
Publishers and the entire industry to a certain extent are now stuck in an inescapable circle – forged at the very start of modern gaming. As games become more and more complex requiring more time and money to develop publishers are less likely to take risks instead relying on sequels and expansion packs to tried and tested formulas. Where before new genres were being created constantly now the same tired idea’s and game types are trotted out year after year – Any sports game identical to last years but with this years stats copied and pasted into, whatever time period every single fps shooter suddenly decides to visit bouncing along humanities timeline like a space hopper ad infinitum, countless expansion packs revisiting the originals gameplay dynamics but in a slightly different social setting, I’m looking at you Sims. Add on to this the strict development times publishers command of there developers and the end product is a clone of every other game on the market, merely emulating gameplay style rather than creating new ones – revolution rather than evolution.
But developers are fighting back, with the advent of high speed world wide internet around 2000 and the introduction of pioneer content delivery systems like Steam it’s now simply not viable to have a publisher create a hard copy of what is originally in a digital format easily transferable and copied, then placed on a DVD and physically placed on shop shelves for the customer to come and buy something that could have been easily and quickly downloaded directly to his/her computer by the time it takes them to walk to the shops. With Developers starting up secure download services for customers to quickly download the games, publishers are taken out of the picture in one swoop now developers can concentrate on making new games exploring new gameplay techniques and not worry about excessive time limits or having there intellectual properties held to ransom over the money required to develop them, this also combats a spiralling problem and one that ran in parallel to the overall cost of a game, piracy.
For every game sold, 4 people have downloaded it free. Once a publisher factors in this dynamic a game has to be incredibly successful for any chance of a developer hoping to create a sequel.
Especially in the PC sector piracy was rife every apparently ‘copy secure’ disc publishers trotted out a few days later the game would be freely available online stripped of its copy protection, unlike the music and film industries who instead of embracing the internet and its high speed content delivery have tried and constantly failed to ban the transference of film and music. Games on the other hand at one with the emergence of the internet and its worldwide explosion have offered secure content delivery – a specific account bound to a customer’s name and credit card details ensuring unless someone is willing to share credit card details with someone online piracy is pretty much wiped out. However games are still getting progressively more and more complex with costs ever spiralling, instead of developers throwing more and more money at it like the previous publishers developers concentrate on streamlining there development process factoring in content creation to AI in one single pipeline ensuring games are produced much more quickly and to a generally cheaper budget.
On the hardware side consoles are still just that, consoles. Every new generation and there apparent move to a more PC architecture always heralds the apparent death knell for the PC. It never comes – however much people say consoles are becoming more and more like PC’s there simply not. A hard drive does not make a pc, consoles are prefabricated boxes technological snapshots of whatever the cutting edge was on there day of creation you cannot upgrade a console to the same extent you can a PC sure you might be able to upgrade the hard drive increasing the storage capacity but I can do that with my digital camera.
There huge modular nature and the fact all new graphics and processing technologies are tested first on the pc as well as all games being developed on the pc regardless of the games final destination ensure the PC will always be at the cutting edge. Actually that’s a good point if modern consoles are supposed to be like PC’s why don’t we see developers actually creating the games on them? It’s not a case of control a keyboard and mouse can easily be connected but of distribution and networking if individual developers can’t share assets it’s useless.
As for the entire industry getting bigger – new target demographics are being sought with new control methods and means of presentation , as started by Nintendo in the early 2000’s once the apparent play thing of the nerdy teenage boy games are now enjoyed by most age groups. Once games were seen as ‘murder simulators’ shallow two dimensional play things there now seen as equal to film or literature, simply telling a story – the same genres exist but the opportunities for expansion by way of the explosion in audience ensure new methods of gameplay.
This could essentially be seen as the renaissance for the games industry
