Game Industry Faces Adoption Challenges 12
The BBC reports that, while gaming continues to grow in popularity, the industry still faces numerous challenges in attracting new customers. From the article: "Although gaming is a huge industry, the report warned that turning a profit will become increasingly difficult. For players such as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo the fact that the market is reaching saturation point coupled with the increasing costs of producing both games and consoles means profit margins may not be a big as they would like. "
Give Innovation A Try (Score:1)
Nintendo may or may not have success with the Revolution. At least it opens the possibility of something brand new that hasn't been seen in home console gaming before. While the X-box and PS3 too have a chance for innovation the Revolution just appears the most likely for it at this time. However it's hard to say what is over t
Revolution? (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Stupid, stupid, stupid. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.nintendo.com/corp/history.jsp [nintendo.com]
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft [wikipedia.org]
(I'm sure some one could point out a better link for MS history.) MS just hasn't been around a long time. For a computer company, they have and are large enough to survive anything except global war. Nintendo & Sony have both survived a WW. (Actually Nintendo made it through both WWI & WWII.)
Mounting problems (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact that the game industry is essentially the largest niche market EVER seems to be lost on everyone in the industry. So, considering the price of the goods combined with a much smaller audience than movies or music, you get market volatility. A smaller trend can radically affect things.
Second, games are reaching the end of the technology curve. Games have been existing for years on the "ooo, lookie" factor. However, it's getting to the point where many of the non-professionals have a problem seeing the leap from PS2 to PS3. Sure, there will be detail, but the wow factor that was there from, say, SNES to N64 just isn't there.
Third, the rising development costs are bringing two things to light: first, developers can't cut it and are going under/being absorbed at an alarming rate (in the US at least). What that means is that there are fewer and fewer outlets for creativity and less motivation to "take risks" (as if it's somehow not risky to keep doing the same thing forever, but whatever). Second, those costs are making it more and more necessary to amortize development over multiple platforms. By doing that, companies CAN'T spend the money to fully utilize the systems, and you get generic ports that don't look as good as they could on the new hardware. That tends to exacerbate the loss of the "ooo, lookie" factor as well. How many reviews have we seen of XBox 360 games where people say they're WORSE than the previous games? Too many already. The HD/non-HD issue really threatens to mar the system if developers aren't careful.
Combine all of these things, and we wind up with a stagnant market that is heading towards a cliff. I don't think the simple alarmist reasons of the Costikyan's of the world are the whole story, but they're one part of something that's coming. I think of it as Hollywood around 1965. It's not looking good, and things are going to HAVE to change. Microsoft's recent revision that they won't hit their sales figures are the first tremor.
Never trust analysts predictions of video gaming (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's pick this apart, shall we?
Although gaming is a huge industry, the report warned that turning a profit will become increasingly difficult... For players such as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo the fact that the market is reaching saturation point coupled with the increasing costs of producing both games and consoles means profit margins may not be a big as they would like.
The report then goes on to claim that the market is reaching saturation point because almost half of everyone in the western world plays games. Honestly, for anyone making any product, that's a pretty good problem to have.
Likewise, consoles are the same price as always adjusted for inflation. [ign.com] The Genesis launched at 390, the Nes at 350, the Playstation at 370. Same Same.
Games are getting more expensive to produce, but only because people want better and better games, and capacity is making that possible. But it isn't required. The best game on the Xbox 360 is a downloadable vector-graphics game called Geometry Wars, and it is probably the most successful game of the 360 launch, despite being small enough to be made in a month with a team of three. Likewise, there is a lot of room for consolidation on teams... the proliferation of sub-quality clones was (and remains) a problem for many years, but consolidating those teams down to fewer bigger projects should produce better games overall, while letting smaller houses focus on the smaller, more experimental games.
Anyone who thinks there isn't any room for profit in gaming needs to expand their revenue streams a bit. Any team can keep their costs in line while still providing an amazing experience to the player and being rewarded with sales.
The report also warned that mobile phones and portable media players could supersede portable games consoles such as the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.
Analysts who believe the PSP and the DS will be replaced by mobile phones any time soon have obviously never used both the PSP and their mobile phone to play games. It is possible to play games on your phone, and it is even possible that someone will release a successful [dealtime.com] phone / game hybrid. But besides a shared battery there isn't a lot of point to a single, dedicated device. Heck, Phone PDA combos and phone MP3 combos have been in the works for years, and they're still terrible in a way that would be unacceptable in the console realm. Consoles require lots of dedicated single-use processing devices that don't make any sense for phones, and phones have all sorts of broadcast equipment that don't help out consoles at all. They're both small candy-bar shaped electronic devices, but there the similarities end.
"While gamers will increasingly use their new consoles for non-gaming activities, this functionality will not be enough to convince non-gamers that buying a console is the answer to their digital convergence dreams," he said.
Let me straighten this out for analysts: consoles play games and there is nothing wrong with that. Consoles sometimes play DVD's also, and that's cool too (though their interfaces are pretty bad). But in the same way that DVD players play DVDs, and televisions display television, consoles play videogames. That's what they do. They don't need to be digital Swiss Army Knives to justify their existence. In fact, pretty much every digital Swiss Army Knife console to come along has been terrible. They don't need to be PVR's. They just need to play the games that people desire to play, and that is it. Anything else is cream, and historically nothing else has been helpful. The
Re:Never trust analysts predictions of video gamin (Score:1)
Expansion (Score:2, Interesting)
Standardization is difficult when you've got a five-year cycle and three competing major platforms with no interoperability. A low price point is impossible when the hardware and software are both created entirely for technophiles who demand more features and better performance. If you can get games and game hardware cheaply, on a standardized format that is not monopoliz
At least get hard facts straight... (Score:1)
Gee, according to wikipedia and a previous article here on Slashdot, World of Warcraft broke 5 million suscribers months ago. This guy at Forrester got paid to write this?
Re:At least get hard facts straight... (Score:2)
Does it have 5 million now?
Just because something hits the magical 5 million barrier doesn't mean that it will remain at 5 million. It may have dropped off to 3.5 million for varying reasons.
His figure may still be incorrect, but neither is assuming that the maximum is always current.
A Revolutionary Strategy (Score:1)
A Revolutionary Strategy [nwizard.com]