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.
@The Lund Report: September 2011 NPD:
No surprise in terms of MSFT domination: they made sure they had a platform easy to develop software for => biggest game library => biggest sales numbers.
@Catwoman requires online pass to play in Arkham City
One thing needs to be remembered: people can still (and should!) vote with their wallets.
The only way this is a bait and switch is if they advertise Catwoman and not mention the extra costs.
@Battlefield 3 is ‘mission accomplished’:
I guess this is bound to happen, as games become more and more complex. Testing time should be extended accordingly, but that would add delays to shipping dates.
@EA defends cop killing in Battlefield 3
Link changed to:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/battlefield-3-PC-gaming-FPS-cop-killing-ESRB,13667.html
I all these kinds of controversies, people forget that players control an imaginary character, pointing an imaginary gun and shooting at other imaginary characters.
For f|_|cks sake, we used to “shoot” each other with toy guns since we were kids, half of us being the cops, half being the robbers (thank you, Jordan). And us kids were pretty real, no anti-alias or hardware tessellation required :P.
@Legit Forza 4 users banned for “pirated” copies:
I always love when a DRM scheme turns to crap: legit customers get the bad user experience, while pirates get the clean one. When will they learn …
@Xbox Live Accounts scammed for FIFA DLC
Oh boy … he should also talk with his kids. As for phishing, well, what can I say, keep your eyes peeled.
Jonah, excellent point in terms of phishing at the user support level, and hinting that some companies do bad support. Thumbs up, I never thought of that.
@QOTW:
Oh … I don’t do that. Sorry. I always try to find out something about the game.
@Catwoman requires online pass to play in Arkham City:
Personally I don’t care about this because I only ever buy new games. I also don’t think it’s entirely a bad thing because it will pull people away from buying into the used games “scam” which these stores are making lots of free profit from and give more money to the developers to keep making quality content.
@Battlefield 3 is ‘mission accomplished’:
I worry about this because I think there will be a lot of problems on release which will never get fixed. Have you read that Battlefield review copies will not be sent early due to the Day 1 patch? I hope this isn’t as catastrophic as I think it is.
@QOTW:
The first and only game I ever bought a game I knew nothing about was Need For Speed Prostreet, back when I was about 11 years old and the only gaming experience I had was about 2 hours in Need for Speed Underground 2. I sigh whenever I think back to that day and I remember that I would’ve bought a crappy movie license game if it hadn’t been for my small familiarization with Need For Speed.
The issue with Catwoman is less that she’s DLC but that her DLC status makes her irrelevant to the main story. She was advertised as though she’d be a major player, the artwork makes it look like a Batman-Catwoman adventure, and to find her relegated to this side story with Poison ivy while Talia al Ghul is cast as a would-be love interest is where the real Bait and Switch charges are coming from. It’s not the $10, it’s simply not the story we were sold. They sold us one thing and delivered another, that’s a bait and switch.
xbox live accounts scammed! That’s kind of scary. First play station and now that. How do we know if our money and privacy are secured when playing online? And the statement Mivrosoft issued is just even more concerning. The least they can do is look into what happened instead of just denying it.