Second Video Game Recession in the next couple of years. How likely is this?

[Deleted member 13524]

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2014/11/17/traditional-aaa-gaming-is-not-traditional-gaming/

I think this is a great article that somehow envisions a second Video Game Recession.
The author claims that AAA budgets increasing, along with AAA titles coming out unfinished because of deadlines, deception tactics (Watch Dogs and Colonial Marines) being used to trick customers over visuals and gameplay, post-release review embargoes, scandals of corruption/collusion in videogame journalism, in-game microtransactions etc. may be causing an ever-growing rift between customers and AAA publishers.

boogey2988, a vlogger that I respect a lot for being very down-to-earth and moderate, has actually addressed this issue a couple of months ago:

So what do you think? Is the videogame industry completely immune to a crash like the one in the 80s?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There was no video game crash in the 1980s - there was only a console crash in the US. The rest of world had sweet, sweet gaming on 8 bit with creative, innovative, and quality titles.

 

[iroboto]

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2014/11/17/traditional-aaa-gaming-is-not-traditional-gaming/

I think this is a great article that somehow envisions a second Video Game Recession.
The author claims that AAA budgets increasing, along with AAA titles coming out unfinished because of deadlines, deception tactics (Watch Dogs and Colonial Marines) being used to trick customers over visuals and gameplay, post-release review embargoes, scandals of corruption/collusion in videogame journalism, in-game microtransactions etc. may be causing an ever-growing rift between customers and AAA publishers.

boogey2988, a vlogger that I respect a lot for being very down-to-earth and moderate, has actually addressed this issue a couple of months ago:

So what do you think? Is the videogame industry completely immune to a crash like the one in the 80s?

I guess it depends ultimately on what the market reacts positively to. If it's AAA big budget big graphics big story, then yea I can see this being a problem as it's difficult for a company to invest a lot of money into a huge risk. And games that don't have risk will more or less be the same franchises over and over again.
Ideally companies will use the profits of the games to make newer and different titles.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

There was no video game crash in the 1980s - there was only a console crash in the US. The rest of world had sweet, sweet gaming on 8 bit with creative, innovative, and quality titles.

By rest of the world, you mean Japan?

 

[Babel-17]

There might be a reaction to all of that but, as the saying goes, "the fundamentals are strong" (imo).
We have a huge demographic of people who are familiar with gaming on Consoles and the PC. And now developers are all working to develop for remarkably similar hardware. Down in the trenches we now see developers getting a level of access to game creation engines that makes low budget/high content quality games a real possibility. The hardware to power games seems to be trending nicely and the state of the art is more than adequate to hit reasonable targets.
AAA titles with tons of scripting and which push the hardware are up against a lot of challenges in the existing, competitive, environment. I guess there's room for such projects to fall out of favor without gaming as we know it also going down the tubes.
Developers of AAA titles are at this point going to start dropping support for older consoles and focus more on the current generation, and the PC. As their familiarity with that hardware grows, and the software tools mature, development seems likely to get more manageable.
Going forward, there's a good chance we'll see a smooth transition to more powerful consoles, and PC hardware, so the immediate future could easily shape up very nicely.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

A similar development platform for all consoles may solve the problems of unfinished games being released... or it may just send the higher-up suits that "games are now easier to make" to they'll just shorten the man-hours given to developers to make games.. in order to release some equally unfinished games as we've been getting lately.

There's also another thing: we're getting a shit ton of AAA game releases and I wonder if the amount of gamers/customers is increasing accordingly.
Even more with these releases all happening at the same time (Ubisoft's Far Cry 4 + EA's DA:Inquisition + Sony's LBP3 + Rockstar's new-gen GTA V + Nintendo's Smash Bros WiiU, all during this week), I get the feeling that these publishers aren't even trying to co-exist. It's like they're trying to kill each other by starving the competition of revenue, using their own games as a bet/collateral.
Perhaps this is a sign that the big publishers themselves don't think there's demand for all the combined offers?

 

[MfA]

The audience is older and less fickle, the odds of a similar crash are slim to none.

The greater danger is losing the new generation.

 

[Grall]

By rest of the world, you mean Japan?

Well, there is Europe too, you know... Even though the market was quite diverse for a number of years into the 80s with quite a few players, Sinclair and Commodore established themselves as the dominant actors fairly quickly, having pushed most of the others (except Atari) into obscurity and/or bankruptcy by the middle of the decade. Japan on their hand had the MSX.

 

[zed]

Well, there is Europe too, you know... Even though the market was quite diverse for a number of years into the 80s with quite a few players, Sinclair and Commodore established themselves as the dominant actors fairly quickly, having pushed most of the others (except Atari) into obscurity and/or bankruptcy by the middle of the decade. Japan on their hand had the MSX.

Yes the '80s was my gaming era, for me then the USA was a minor player, 90+% of the stuff I played came from europe esp the UK

 

[Shifty Geezer]

By rest of the world, you mean Japan?

As per Grall. In Europe there were lots of options. In the UK, it was also extremely lively, a Golden Age. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum launched in 1982 with an incredible range of software that kept coming for over a decade (some of it pretty comically as arcade games were shoehorned onto the completely incapable little box!), much written by bedroom coders. Spectrum owners had 'lively playground debates' with C64 owners, Acorn/BBC owners and Amstrad CPC owners. The range of games covered the full personal computer spectrum, so platformers, racers, shooters, adventure games, and strategy games.

While Americans wree burying crap Atari games in landfill, we were in gaming Nirvana!

 

[MfA]

MSX did pretty well in the Netherlands as well because of Philips.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

As per Grall. In Europe there were lots of options. In the UK, it was also extremely lively, a Golden Age. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum launched in 1982 with an incredible range of software that kept coming for over a decade (some of it pretty comically as arcade games were shoehorned onto the completely incapable little box!), much written by bedroom coders. Spectrum owners had 'lively playground debates' with C64 owners

Everybody I knew (I was 10/11 in 1982) went from owning an Atari to owning a Spectrum or 64. How the hell our parents afforded this is a mystery. The 64 was £200 quid, needed a £25 tape deck and burned through PSUs like paceman eating power pills. I remember saving £140 over several months for a 1541 disk drive.

Where there's a market void, there's a market opportunity.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The 64 was £200 quid.

You're definitely low-balling. The Spectrum was the sub-£200 computer which is why it was affordable and had wide appeal. C64 was a super luxury machine. Wikipedia

The C64 debuted at £399 in early 1983, while the 48K Spectrum cost £175.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

£399? My parents were awesome!

 

[Deleted member 13524]

The audience is older and less fickle, the odds of a similar crash are slim to none.

The greater danger is losing the new generation.

Losing the new generation to what? Facebook games?

 

[milk]

That article seemed quite naive and silly to me. The way it bounces from one random topic to another loosely connected by its poor argumentation don't give its hypothesis much credibility.
I don't see AAA gaming going nowhere on the near future. These game have been selling well and the market is very alive. A lot of his complains almost seem like echoes from the early ps360 days with pretty much the same cries about big budgets, over-milked franchises, on-line content and yada yada yada.

 

[Rangers]

Well my longstanding theory is that there is a group of mostly somewhat younger and male gamers that gravitate to complex, graphically rich experiences. These are the core gamers. They wont be ever happy with an iPad game, because if nothing else touch controls suck and there will never be an easy tablet controller solution that doesn't require some level of hoop jumping that most people wont do. They wont ever gravitate to candy crush or facebook because that's not the experience they are after.

I dont think core gamers are going anywhere, unless there are no more males produced by the human species, so I dont think there will be a crash. There would be more of a gradual threat from PC imo there, as far as a possible destination for core gamers, but that wouldn't be a recession, and I still think console has built in advantages (and disadvantages, sure) vs PC.

There probably is some incremental fraying at the edges of core gamers, those for whom tablets and PC's and smartphones has pushed them a bit away from consoles, but I think the majority remain intact, and should for the immediate future.

Some kind of paradigm change like VR could in many years end consoles, but again that's not a recession per se just a change of platform, and highly speculative.

 

[Grall]

I don't see AAA gaming going nowhere on the near future. These game have been selling well and the market is very alive.

Strongly agree. If anything, the PC and peripherals market is healthier now than it has been in a long time, with high-end gaming carrying the PC desktop platform forwards when most aspects of PC sales are either languishing or in decline. Gaming also single-handedly awakened Intel's interest in tweaking and overclocking, they now embrace this aspect of computing to the point of releasing OC-enabled (and more expensive, of course!) chipsets and processors and even hosting OCing events and so on when in the past they've either completely ignored or even actively opposed it.

 

[London Geezer]

I disagree with a lot that guy on the video says. These days there are multiple ways to have a very clear idea whether a game we will buy will turn out to be turds, or whether we will simply not like it.
Information available of anything today is orders of magnitude more accessible than in the 80's.
I do agree that consumers need to vote with their wallets, but these days I find it hilarious that someone will take a game home and be 'surprised' that it's crap. If a game is crap, someone will have written it somewhere on a review.

 

[dobwal]

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2014/11/17/traditional-aaa-gaming-is-not-traditional-gaming/

I think this is a great article that somehow envisions a second Video Game Recession.
The author claims that AAA budgets increasing, along with AAA titles coming out unfinished because of deadlines, deception tactics (Watch Dogs and Colonial Marines) being used to trick customers over visuals and gameplay, post-release review embargoes, scandals of corruption/collusion in videogame journalism, in-game microtransactions etc. may be causing an ever-growing rift between customers and AAA publishers.

AAA budgets are increasing because AAA sales are increasing. I consider Skyrim "slowly killing your save" more problematic than any bugs that ACU throws at you. Bethseda's AAA open world franchises are well known for their buggy releases and we have yet to see their major franchises this gen. And how does the alleged incident involving a dev sleeping with game journalist to influence a review score generate more outrage then a gaming site allegedly firing an editor due to pressure by a publisher over a low review score?

Nothing is new, its happen before. We will see another recession when the market gets flooded with trash no one wants to buy. I don't believe we are anywhere near that point yet.