Sounds like sony is going to be exiting the console market. Their continued investment in cloud streaming services and their increase in releasing games to steam points directly to it. I wonder if we will even get a ps6 now. Perhaps they will just put all their games on game pass and switch and call it a day.
2024 may not be kind for game developers.
- Thread starter Silent_Buddha
- Start date
History doesn't repeat itself 1:1. It's just patterns that emerge. I can certainly see a soft crash of the market. The games developers are making just don't really resonate with the market. So we might see a large contraction in game releases esp live services and move on to more single player centric games which seem to very popular .Entirely different. The big console was the Atari 2600 and a flood of truly horrible games over saturated the market causing people to just stop buying games. Arcades were still around to keep games alive but there was just nothing for the home market since no one wanted to be the next grand failure like Atari.
Spent a lot of time in arcades during those years, almost cried in relief when the NES took off. Interesting times and it's been f-ing amazing to see where games have went since then. This isn't the slow death of gaming it's just big business being stupid about things trying for short term gains when gaming is a long term yield type thing. Games aren't going anywhere and this is nothing like then. Now we have so many options of platforms and games to choose from it's hard for me to even conceive it and it ain't gonna suddenly fade away like the 2600 after the launch of ET.
I also think it helps that we are seeing companies move away from dei and are starting to target the core demographic of the core gamers who buy console/pc games and play them a lot.
I think Suicide squad was the wake up call and games like flint lock and concord are just the snooze going off while companies wake back up.
We haven't had the pac-man / E.T moment yet but that may be happening soon and we wont really know until we look back to see what game was the cause of it.
It was also an entirely US thing. The EU had a great time for video games in the 80s, with a thriving home computer and homebrew market spawning a lot of devs. Same with Japan AFAIK.
Wrong thread?
nah talking about the bungie news.
This isn't the thread to discuss Sony's future. You want...whichever thread that is.
Let me know what thread it is and I will end up there. but bungie is sony and sony is bungie
I was a kid, but as a consumer it was great. We had an Atari and like 6 games, and then one day all of the stores had all of the games on sale for real cheap. I remember it happening really fast. We went from having 6 games to 20+ in that time. But a lot, like probably half of those games we bought for $1 each. Games back then retailed for about $30, which would be damn near $100 inflation adjusted. So those games getting discounted that low was insane.
I don't know why most of it feels like companies believed the pandemic effect of people being locked home and spending more times playing and therefore purchasing games would last forever.
They increased their staff when they should just have put money in their safes to prepare for the end of the pandemic.
Usually when people have too much of something, they buy less of it for a while after, so they could have absorbed that effet with the money they put aside...
They increased their staff when they should just have put money in their safes to prepare for the end of the pandemic.
Usually when people have too much of something, they buy less of it for a while after, so they could have absorbed that effet with the money they put aside...
It would also have been a gamble not to grow.
Towards the end of Covid, as things were beginning to open up, high street resturants in the UK began setting up outside table areas. This has never been popular here and was usually limited to pub gardens, but people introduced to this new behavior suddenly realised they really liked it and they've now become a perminant addition to high streets during the summer.
Non traditional gamers forced into playing games due to having nothing else to do may have decided they really liked it and continued. It this case it doesn't seem to have happened.
I don't even see these alleged investments translating into any interesting game releases or announcements. All the major game franchises I've been personally interested in more or less dropped the ball in some way or another.
Origin/Odyssey great, Valhalla didn't really click, then the DEI BS took over
Division1-2 great, then nothing....
Destiny2 went from awful to great and for 4-5 years the game never felt like it was the studio's priority. DLCs are just maintenance while the player base erodes. They obviously have been working on other things but none of them have been released and a lot of canceled stuff rumours.
Halo is dying since Reach for all kinds of reasons....
Far Cry 5 was already a let down and FC6 just felt aged..
IMHO this crisis is far deeper than just money. It's management, creative vision, political BS and the economy imploding forcing people to spend their money more wisely.
I think they are clearly making a sarcastic post in response to how people are talking about Xbox(despite them clearly being in totally different situations overall...).
The short sighted management of countless publishers/studios in recent times has literally been unbelievable. There's a number of exceptions of course, but lord, it really seems like the increasingly big issue with the industry is just god awful management. I've never seen it this bad. Absolutely anybody paying attention could have told these folks that the pandemic boom was temporary and not sustainable. It was also 100% predictable that at soon as the growth stopped, they were all gonna react terribly to it.
I think the hope is for them to now access a massive group of people that they couldn’t before. It was understandable risk. People were willing to pay 3x the price for PS5 and 2X for XSX. The demand was so great, that it would be hard to just ignore it.
The gaming population did grow, however, the majority of that revenue went towards the same F2P games that own the majority of the market. And that challenge is really the same challenge all these companies are facing again and again.
All the platforms, except maybe Nintendo, are suffering from decreased spending.
Wasn't the big issue that Atari bet big on pac-man basically pre producing a cart for every console sold through already at retail . But then pac-man was nothing like the real pac-man and no one bought it. That was followed up with the E.T debacle basically crashed the market . Then a few years later the nes came to america and that was actually powerful enough to mimic arcade games well enough while also ushering in stuff like side scrollers.
That sounds about right. I forgot about how much the pac-man cartridge sucked, I had no idea they'd made that many!
I also remember the super cheap cartridge bins after the crash and I splurged mightily in 'em!
I think I gamed on a VIC-20 for a while before the NES came out, but it was long ago and it feels like about 3-4 lifetimes ago now.
That was part of it. I believe part of the problem was that Atari let retailers ship back stock for a full refund and a bunch of that stock started coming back at the same time. There were obviously quality issues with some of the games, and I'm sure that had some sort of effect, but I don't think any single game, like Pac-Man or ET could really be blamed. The real problem was mismanagement, followed by a lack of demand. The ET situation, for example, is remembered as a bad game that failed, but the reality is that Atari had guaranteed something like $25 Million for the rights to the IP. Remember that games were roughly $30, which means that you had to sell roughly a million units to cover that, plus 5 million for development, manufacturing and marketing. And that would be just to break even. So they manufactured more than that, reportedly 5 million carts, which increased the manufacturing cost. And that's a gamble that didn't play out. Is it because ET is a bad game? I would actually argue that ET is not a bad game. But that's irrelevant. I was a gamer back then. I can't name a media source I read or watched from back then. Nobody knew what any game was going to play like except for what the box told you, or perhaps because you saw one of the rare TV spots. We were buying games based on their boxes, friend recommendations, and stuff that we played in a store display, or based on it's name recognition (like ET and Pac-Man). So by '83, 5 years after the VCS launched, most people who bought the console to play some games had the games that they wanted to play, and most of the new stuff was kind of same-y. Demand for the games just plummeted, and Atari management was operating as if demand was going to be ever increasing.
I've always read that the US market crash was caused by Atari (et al?) letting low grade junk get published, so all the games stank and people ended up not buying them. Which is why Nintendo went hardball on licensing and put on their Seal of Quality. You could trust your hard-spent money on a Nintendo game. I guess cost to develop games was nothing. Who fit the bill for publishing them? Who paid for manufacturing and packaging and distribution?
In Europe, we didn't do consoles much. Gaming took off with computers and tapes. 'Publishers' were people with tape copying machines. They compiled a master than then just spent days duplicating it onto audio tapes. Games were I think £5 for the best, but then you had budget labels that sold them at £3 and £2. Pocket-money prices, easy accessibility, and industry driving by bedroom coders doing what they loved.
In Europe, we didn't do consoles much. Gaming took off with computers and tapes. 'Publishers' were people with tape copying machines. They compiled a master than then just spent days duplicating it onto audio tapes. Games were I think £5 for the best, but then you had budget labels that sold them at £3 and £2. Pocket-money prices, easy accessibility, and industry driving by bedroom coders doing what they loved.
That sounds about right. I forgot about how much the pac-man cartridge sucked, I had no idea they'd made that many!
I also remember the super cheap cartridge bins after the crash and I splurged mightily in 'em!
I think I gamed on a VIC-20 for a while before the NES came out, but it was long ago and it feels like about 3-4 lifetimes ago now.
I was born in 81 so I don't remember too much. I remember having like 40 intellivsion games and a bunch of atari games.
I think when you make millions of carts which were very expensive unlike a cd and none of them sell an you are on the hook for them it really hurts a companies ability to compete. It also turns off the consumer because they are just seeing low quality junk and seeing prices drop off a cliff. Kinda similar to what is happening now.
It also didn't help that the 5200 wasn't compatible with the 2600 games at launch. Also lets be hoenst its not like the 5200 had a big jump in graphics.
Also I don't think et itself is a bad game. I think it was extremely confusing until you knew what to do. I think atari and hte market wouldn't have had such huge issues if they stopped trying to put games on the systems that weren't capable of handling them. If Atari wanted pac-man so bad on their systems they should have just made it exclusive to the 5200 which launched the same year. MS pac-man on that system is so much better than pac-man on the atari 2600.
Eh, The only company making atari games from 1977 (the launch of the 2600) to 1979 was atari. The first third party activision didn't exist until 1979 and i would hve to look it up but most likely didn't launch any games until 1980. So if there was jank on the atari 2600 that is almost all on atari itself.
Also lets not forget even with the seal of quality there was a lot of jank on the nintendo side. Also the seal of quality mostly existed to keep companies buying carts from nintendo.
From what I could find in 1983 video games made 3.2b which would be 9.8b now and in 1985 made 100m which is 283m now. That is almost 97% drop in revenue across the board