The game industry is doing “okay” in this bad economic time compared to other industries. Primarily, Nintendo is rocking the house with their games, hand-held’s and consoles while mobile developers are showing some great successes in the industry. Many success stories in our industry are based on small titles, downloadable games of the more “casual” style while a few larger titles are experiencing slower than expected sales trends.
We’ve mentioned this in the past, but the tough economy gives many smaller developers great opportunities for success. While big publishers struggle to look good in the eyes of the investor, tiny developers can produce quality titles for minimal cash investment and time to market. Ten years ago, smaller developers tried to compete with the big boys making larger titles, cloning successful titles or simply asking investors to put it on the line for their game. Today, developers can create a small iphone app, a cute WiiWare title or exploit the XNA efforts of Microsoft for Xbox Live Arcade and actually have a chance.
There are still challenges with these smaller developers when working in the WiiWare and XBLA publishing channels, your game marketing and promotion becomes highly reliant on Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony for PSN. Tom Prata, senior director of Nintendo of America talked to Gamespot about this issue:
“Finally, there’s the problem of promotion. It’s not enough to make a great game if nobody notices it. Prata specifically said Nintendo will be devoting more resources to support the promotion and development of WiiWare games in the future.” (gamespot)
Of course, in the world of smaller game titles and downloadable casual games, you’re going to be at risk of finding a lot of “shovelware” — products that are only released to make a quick dime, often based on some license or popular theme/character. The great game titles will, hopefully, rise to the top and show themselves off amongst all the wanna-be money makers.
Those smaller developers putting a huge passion into their titles actually have a chance in this new industry trend. Game makers, internationally, now have a chance to grasp a small piece of the industry and make their dreams come true. The core audience may see this as a trend of noisly low quality titles, but I believe the industry needs this change to grow a new generation of developers based on niche interests.
While many can wait for their next release of Madden the rest of us will continue to spend a little money to see what the future innovators are going to be bringing to the table.
@ Halo won’t be a yearly franchise:
Right, I’ll take their word for it. Thing is, with their current schedule, yearly franchise or not, they will have sales for the earlier one eaten up by the later game.
@ Kinect appealed to “more hardcore” than expected:
Microsoft doesn’t have to do anything. I believe that the game developers will manage to create a control scheme for hardcore game(r)s.
@2M users sign up for COD: Elite beta
Protest or not, this is just an improvement in the matchmaking service. Why not play Quake Live?
What I am saying is that there will always somebody willing to do this for free.
@Wizardry Online announced, will feature permadeath:
Permadeath + PVP = niche market. The only thing that can make it worse is high-damage / insta-kill weapons.
Speaking of MMOs:
http://thenoobcomic.com/index.php?pos=19
@How much do you think the Wii U will cost?
Man, I hate price guessing …
I say 150 USD. Middle way between a plain controller and the 3DS. Bare in mind, this is just for the controller.
oh yeah its back
QOTW:
I’d say $350 USD including the console and a controller. Which will probably end up being $550 Australian or more 🙁
QOTW – I’m going to say $350. Probably 250 for the console and 100 for the controller. Maybe less for the controller and more for the console, but I’m thinking somewhere around 300. I can’t see it going much higher than 400 though, I don’t think the casual audience that the Wii appealed to will want to shell out the extra 300+ dollars for a new console. Its going to be interesting to see what the official price is.