NYT on core games dwindling
Halo 3 – Wii – Guitar Hero – – New York Times
The showcase example is BioShock… one of the most acclaimed games of all time… Yet it failed to crack the Top 10 in sales…Similarly, the role-playing masterpiece Mass Effect, the fabulous mythology vehicle God of War II and Valve’s excellent compilation the Orange Box all failed to crack the Top 10. There is hardly a question that two years ago all of those games would have made the list. Now they have simply been crowded out of the top echelon by less intimidating fare like Guitar Hero.
And perhaps it is not a coincidence that BioShock, Mass Effect and God of War II are all purely single-player games. You can’t play any of them with friends, either over the Internet or on the couch. Nine of the 10 top-selling games of 2007 include a significant multiplayer component…
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NYT on core games dwindlingPosted on February 13, 2008 by Raph
Good article, is right when said about the importance of online gameplay in the game succes, but is wrong in other point:
Many deep and complex game have great and dedicated online comunities, perhaps dont have the more BIG and mainstrean comunities, but they socialice too. MMOs how EVE and mainly offline games how Civilization saga have a strong comunities, that article dicotomy about nerd offline players vs. mainstream online players is false.
A very simple game can appeal for the masses because both, the more inteligent and elitist gamer and the more dumb and mainstrean gamer can have fun with the same game. If you want a game for the masses you need craft a game that the more dumb and casual player -or inclusive a non-gamer at all- can have fun. Is the market law.
If you apply this law to do good casual games ok, but if you tried apply this law for dumbed down more sofisticated game genres and alienate a more sofisticated and dedicated, for me that is the worst path that videogame industry can walk.
In the next GDC they could hang this banner over the main door:
Welcome to the game mediocrity empire!
I wonder, is this because games like bioshock or mass effect or selling less, or because mass appeal games like guitar hero are selling more? or a combination of the two? this ties neatly back to the post on Gender brain differences and games, specifically I’m looking at Tess’s post, to quote: “There are an awful lot of grannies out there playing bridge”. Is the difference now that said grannies are playing it on their ds? Is, to paraphrase Penny Arcade,the next generation of gamers the greatest generation?
By the way, the list the article is talking about is here
Guitar Hero is not nuanced. That explains most of it, IMO.
I seriously want to cry
Appealing to more interest groups is not mediocrity. A majority of developer time going to a slim segment of the market over and over is a business model that is finally maturing beyond that. This coming from a nerd, btw. :9
[insert obligatory reference to single-player games as aberrations]
Lol.. I like “core games”. I don’t like those other casual kinds of games. Things like Guitar Hero may be nice, but they simply don’t interest me. There are a lot of hardcore gamers just like me, and collectively they spend a lot of money on games. As long as we continue to be around, the game industry will continue to service us. Not exclusively perhaps.
AAA console games are the current pinnacle of the art form as far as I’m concerned. Stuff like Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, and Call of Duty 4 represent the state of the art (literally). Even if they don’t appeal to as wide of an audience as bejeweled, they are infinitely more interesting in terms of technology and complexity and the challenge of getting them made.
Part of market tiers collapsing is simplification enabling a broader audience. They become the mainstream and the nuanced games and gamers become the niche. There is no fight worth fighting on this topic.
Despite the fact that HTML was as dumb a hypertext language as any of us could imagine at the time (GenCoding is a very OLD style and HTML IS gencoding), every company and person that fought HTML lost. To hazard a guess, many here were possibly among the first to believe HTML was the future and anything else was old school when in fact, HTML is old school (see Truly Donnovan) and the advanced applications had to wait a decade (See US Navy MID and compare with XAML and XUL). These predictable but sudden collapses are so normal one can set their watch by them.
Network effect is observed outcomes of the laws of stimulus amplification and population frequency, not a rule for progress and peaceful immigration. There are losers. No one cares. That is why they are called ‘losers’. On the other hand, the key to keeping the so-called complex games in development is the population frequency and how much they will pay. Walled gardens exist for reasons of buying preferences.
BCNU.
I’m a gamer, I’ve been in online games since 1994. I have what I’d call almost ‘snobby’ interests in the area of immersiveness. I’m not really thrilled by just about anything I’ve seen in 2-3 years now, including the titles you listed. Added to that, from my point of view MMOs are trying to service solo players too much.
Overall, the point is that the market is segmented and nuanced, but the offerings were meeting too few people’s interests. There’s no loss of availability to established markets, only loss of exclusivity as you said.
It’s worth noting that Halo and Call of Duty are #1 and #3, and Madden and Assassin’s Creed also made the top 10. A few of the games on there are single-player only and many of them are played single-player the majority of the time. Also Bioshock would have made the list if they had combined PC and 360 titles (although of course that would also increase sales for the Guitar Hero titles and Madden). Overall the list doesn’t seem to be as aberrant as he indicates. Several core titles mixed in with Mario, Pokemon and Guitar Hero. The biggest aberration, Wii Play, is only there because Wii Play was essentially $10 tacked onto the price of a hard-to-acquire piece of hardware. It is indicative of how well the Wii is doing of course, which is nothing to sneeze at but his point about it doing well despite a 58/100 MetaCritic score doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given that people bought Wii Play for the controller more than they did for the game.
As for Bioshock and Mass Effect I think what matters most is comparing their sales to sales of System Shock and Baldur’s Gate. Bioshock did great compared to Sysstem Shock and Mass Effect is doing just fine compared to acclaimed single-player RPG’s like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout. It’s important to remember that few single-player RPG’s or RPG/FPS hybrids have ever made it onto any top 10 lists and that this was true well before the Wii came out.
Again, core games aren’t really dwindling (and I’m not even sure that’s what the NYT is saying). What we see instead is that the market is growing at a healthy rate while the non-core market is growing at the very rapid pace we’d expect of a newer market. You’ll make a far better (and more correct) point if you just focus on the growth of non-core gaming instead of feeling the need to shoehorn in comments like “core gaming is dwindling”.
The game industry will continue to make games that interest niche audiences as long as the games are profitable. What the article argues is that core gamers are dwindling. I doubt that. What is more likely to be happening is that casual gamers are growing more rapidly than core gamers.
I disagree. But that’s art for ya! It’s not about the complexity of the making, it’s about the complexity of the playing experience. Nobody cares how many brush strokes it took to paint the Mona Lisa. Everybody cares about its mystique.
Allow me to replace “all of those games” with some specifics:
“There is hardly a question that two years ago, a bad port of a good PC game, a Bioware RPG about talking to people, the sequel to an under-performing game, and the spiritual successor to System Shock would have made the top 10 console sales list.”
Hardly a question? Please. Games about shooting and stabbing people in the face continued to sell as well as ever.
Meh, painters care a great deal about how many brush strokes it took to paint the Mona Lisa. 😛 Likewise, designers and developers, be they professional, armchair, or otherwise, definitely care about how hard they are to make. 😛 Thing is, the smart dev will try to figure out how to make them EASIER to put together, not more complex. In a way the AAA titles are a failure of design; they cost too damn much to put together and they’re not *that* much more fun than they were in the previous iteration. And on top of it, the audience isn’t growing fast enough to sustain the ramping costs, so it’s going to come to a crisis point eventually. The only way out is to abandon the old ways of doing things.
And really, we haven’t seen much change in a long time. You can’t target new audiences with the same old games, and the old audience is a little too difficult for new people to approach, so you end up with market shrinkage rather than growth after a point. I mean, even just looking at those examples, how different is BioShock from System Shock 2 as far as gameplay mechanics? How different is Halo 3 from Halo 2? Not very. Even Mass Effect doesn’t stray too far from its roots. Implementation of gameplay systems changes a bit, is refined, adjusted, but at the core in all of these ‘hardcore’ games, the systems remain mostly identical in concept to their predecessors. That’s not state of the art design, it’s state of the art eye and ear candy. Wii Sports is a design shift, Wii Fit is a design shift, Guitar Hero is a design shift, Brain Age and Nintendogs are design shifts; these are more ‘cutting edge’ in terms of gameplay than anything from the Halo, BioShock, WoW, and Mass Effect camps. I think at this point it may actually be impossible to really innovate in that space… it’s too narrowly defined, it has too much in the way of pre-existing expectations, and worse… damn near everything even remotely obvious has been tried already. We’re not quite at a saturation point in terms of design concepts, but we’re damn near close. After that it all becomes permutations of pre-existing ideas, and eventually the best permutations float to the top, and then you’ve got a completely stagnant genre. Fortunately, now that things have been turned upside down by Nintendo and some other groups, we may never actually *get* to that point, simply because not enough resources will be devoted to finding that perfect permutation.
I dispute that you can’t play Mass Effect with other people. My girlfriend and I are playing it together, just as we did with Oblivion. Sure, I’m the one with the controller in my hand, but we decide together what to do, where to go next. Running the controller is almost incidental to how we play these kinds of games.
In a similar fashion, I used to play earlier Ultima games back in high school with friends even though they were “single player” games. Each of us would take a party member and would decide what that person was going to do, etc, though I was usually the one at the keyboard itself.
–matt
@eolirin:
Thanks. That is one answer to the the question I asked in another thread about the maturity or aging of game genres (eg, new gestures or new types of games). I wonder how this compares to the aging of other media genre such as film. I wonder if this is not a media limit but a genre limit. I suspect the answer is yes.
That may be where virtual worlds are even more important. Industries tend to settle into sub-optimum conditions given Markovian predictors of market demands. Something has to ‘thunk’ them to get them to break out of the annealing pattern. Virtual worlds may be exactly that. New hands that don’t know what the market expects do new things because they aren’t afraid to fail. Will all of the punditry from the game industry and social networks help or hurt?
About Biochock…
There was hype, so I downloaded the demo. The next 4 hours I spent fixing driver issues, rebooting, reconfiguring and trying to get the thing to show up anything except a random assortment of beige polygons.
Then I gave up, deleted the game and considered it to be a dud. On the same day, I downloaded latest Unreal demo, and after going through all the “Your computer is not powerful enough to play it” proceeded to play 2 hours online with no problems of any kind. The reason I mention this is because Bioshock uses Unreal engine.
In other words, the entire social and viral marketing got completely lost on me. Bioshock may be the latest greatest, but for me it’s a poorly written game (sorry developers, I know what’s really behind it, I’m just speaking as a customer).
Accessibility, as often noted, is demonstrated in more than just “dumbed down gameplay”. I would wager that all these disappointments suffer considerably in that department.
Even single-player games have a large social component. Hearing about demo, looking it up (why do I need to submit my blood type to your questionnaire before I download) downloading it quickly (why is my demo 2.5 gigabytes in size) and playing it (why do I need to sacrifice my first-born so the thing will even run)?
PS: Being someone fairly seasoned in ways of software development, none of the problems encountered were trivial misconfigurations or user errors.
I have a hard time understanding why Bioshock (an FPS. You know, with the shooting. From the first-person viewpoint.) is “critically acclaimed” while Guitar Hero, the beginning of a completely new and totally thrilling genre, is “light fare”.
I think if we’ve learned any lesson in the last three years, it’s that new controllers are great. Not only do they open up new experiences, they open up massive new profit centers.
Matt, interesting to hear you play Oblivion with your girlfriend. Sounds like a good idea. Having Oblivion multiplayer would of course have been even better 😉
I think Bethesda is a perfectly good example of how niche/hardcore games won’t disappear. They appear to enjoy making games for a specific audience, and as long as that audience is loyal and will pay for each game, everyone is happy.
One thing I’m interested in is how the increasing casual game market might appeal to lead designers. Will the industry leads be more interested in incrementing the genres that brought them into game design and development in the first place, or might there be an exodus to the appealling (and I assume profitable and alluring) casual space?
Having a look around I guess we can see new companies with new aims appearing, and industry veterans moving into areas they haven’t previously worked in, so maybe the answer is already apparent. Change is inevitable.
Having Oblivion multiplayer would of course have been even better
Like, say, Super Mario Galaxy? Or were you thinking of something different?
You forget that you wouldn’t have counted anyway, since you were playing the PC version. 🙂 Similarly, the PC version of any Valve title was too unimportant to consider when discussing the evolution of game audiences, as was World of Warcraft.
What is Half-Life, then?
Gaming press is making me nauseous these days.
/agree Sorry for the ridiculous generalizations, this is a complex theme for my bad english xD (I post form spain)
Please don’t be discouraged! A lot of what you said had merit, I was just objecting to certain adjectives :9.