Video Games Are Dead video
The conclusion is “no” by the way. 🙂 But the video is very worth watching anyway, and I say that not just because I am in it — along with a host of game industry luminaries, I hasten to add. I sat for this interview back at GDC, actually, and it is kind of amazing how quickly things have evolved even over those few months.
Freefalling sales. Skyrocketing unemployment. Studios tanking left and right. Between the twin pressures of one of the worst recessions in modern history and a fundamental shift in the way today’s fans consume interactive entertainment, the PC and video game business is quickly coming up short on extra lives. As Season 2 of Players Only opens, we connect with the industry’s biggest names to cast aside the field’s “recession-proof” image and explore how the very fabric of gaming as we know it has changed. Tune in for the first of a special two-part series as we ask: Is it ‘game over’ for thousands of developers and publishers – and millions of fans – worldwide?
— Video Games Are Dead – Part 1 – Players Only – Digital Trends Videos.
19 Responses to “Video Games Are Dead video”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
That’s alright. If video games are dead, they’ve got at least – what? Two more lives left. And who KNOWS how many continues?
(i didn’t watch the video. Is that joke already in there?)
I guess this is kind of a given in video production these days, but does it really need quite so much “please don’t be bored, look at the fast editing and pretty colors” between each interviewee?
In the interest of copycatting everything that works, the games industry has cloned it’s own death.
Thanks. That is enlightening when contrasted with the discussions about the future of the music industry. Digital content abstractly faces many of the same problems but in different ways with different impacts depending on the production costs and the complexity of distribution by digital delivery. The video is useful for abstracting the common dimensions in the challenges to building a sustainable business over cradle-to-grave digital productions.
Good point Len. Digital productions is the name of the game. What would be good, would be for a think tank to be created, where those who understand the games, music, movie, and other digital production industries, as well as today’s efficient digital distribution technologies, could figure out a better business model, where the bulk of the players’ money ended up with the developer, and far less ended up wasted on the crowds of midwives and middlemen sucking out the life and profits between cradle and grave.
One can dream eh?
games aren’t dead and i highly doubt they will ever be, especially considering that humans have been playing them for millinia (chess, go, etc). the only thing that’s dying here is the old ways of doing business, it’s happened to other industries (i can think of the recording industry off-hand) and it will happen to any companies that refuse or fail to innovate.
i dont remember where i found the link to this, but this certainly is an interesting idea: Ransom Model.
@crosbie: I am guessing that something like that is what T-Bone Burnett and others are discussing at Taplin’s blog, not the think tank, but a model where the label and the artist have a different kind of relationship that accounts for the new symmetries and asymmetries emerging from the infusion of technologies that change access relationships among all the players in the market. Despite what some think, the music industry is adapting fast.
Of the problems artist’s still have to face if they want to be A-listers, access to capital is the unmoving rock in the river. Still, I’d rather be in the music business where production costs are stable than in the game business where they seem to be dangerously close to the unstable part of the mythical mystical long tail.
@len, but you appear to assume a reformation of the label-artist relationship rather than a rebirth of the audience-artist relationship?
The term ‘label’ comes from that archaic ‘Caesar made me’ identifier attached to each copy. And the current losing battle is being fought by those who would have what is Caesar’s returned to Caesar, the owners of copies want to hang on to their property. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for culture, copies are evaporating as a recognisable state in art’s journey from artist to audience. It is private to public. There is no copy.
The facility that is missing (through atrophied mental faculty – due to lack of use in the last few centuries) is the journey of money from audience to artist, public to private. That can happen directly just as the art can go directly from artist to audience.
And yes Tallimar, the Ransom Model is an interesting idea. There are others for those prepared to open their mind to them. These are interesting times.
Incidentally Len, do you ever get the idea that the Web is one colossal, freestyle MUD, and websites are the textual descriptions of the rooms we journey between?
The last time we bumped into each other was in ’02 – because I’d picked up some treasure you’d left somewhere:
“About a decade ago, a chap called Len Bullard was asked to have look ahead ten years. He astutely guessed that it would be “A world wide hypermedia system based on markup technology, distributed business processes, etc.” – not far off eh? He also explored issues of system stability and security in the face of ‘terrorist attack’… ”
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020805/fitch_pfv.htm
Unfortunately, I’ve been diverted from my original quest (to develop cyberspace), because there’s this fricking boss monster called copyright that I have to defeat/neutralise beforehand.
Who creates these quests eh? And why are some of them so goddamn unfeasibly hard?
I trust you are winning on yours – XML, X3D eh?
I remember that well, Crosbie. That’s why I recognized your name.
I believe the artist-label relationships are being reformulated precisely because the artist-audience relationship reformulated. The direct access that enables the artist and audience to engage, for example on Facebook, is enabling the artist to do more before engaging the label, thus having a much more symetrical relationship at the beginning. In short, the artist can and is expected to put more butts in seats before they go for the lael deal. Some don’t need that deal but at the top, they still do. Labels and production companies can provide services the artist can’t do alone but there are fewer and the label has to work harder too. This means the contracts that are such a raw deal for the artist are going away as well as those middle men. We knew this was coming. Some are crying but others are adapting. There is a big sea change in the works in the industry as the really major labels are weakening and the boutique labels are strengthening.
Copyright is a tough subject and like health care, full of mobs formenting bad thinking with bad information. We have to be careful with that one because the way it works, the songwriters are going to get screwed royally unless they are very very careful. The Taplin blogs include some industry people trying to come to a consensus with the other opinions. It is interesting reading and occassionally a good example for others to follow.
We all get diverted. I’m not doing much with X3D right now and XML Is Stuffed and On The Mantle (no change in years) so I seldom have much to say about that. Fortunately, we had all those arguments in the days when only a handful of us knew what to argue about. 🙂
Yeah, a “maze of twisty URLs” is like a world. I don’t do MUD. 😉 I think it would be neat to see Facebook pages become avatar-enabled worlds where the avatars can ‘recite’ the texts conversationally automatically (use the Facebook API and pull the texts into an X3D viewer that is either synth voice or sample-voice enabled). It would be fun and hilarious at times with a little bit of text analysis and a decent behavior library. That was where I wanted to go with HumanML. Useful? Probably not but it seems we lost a lot of energy when we monetized the web and quit having fun like a garage band gone industrial.
The problem I have with this theory that digital distribution is the key to unlocking the chains of publishers is this:
It’s the gatekeeper model all over again.
We have consoles, where the prime publishers are the console makers themselves. They, together with the other publishers with channels into the bricks and mortars, are the gatekeepers. That’s how they call the shots.
With digital distribution, the gatekeepers change to the delivery system makers. Apple’s app store isn’t freedom from this, look at what’s happened with app approval and where it’s now moving to ‘premium’ publishers. Same goes for Xbox Marketplace. Steam (even tho I love Valve) isn’t freedom for this either, developers have complained about Valve’s percentage. Xbox Live certainly isn’t a break from
Sure, you can make an indy distributor, but bandwidth and infrastructure is only cheap until you become significant. Then will you adopt the same practices as gatekeeper?
The point is:
The cowboy days of the indy game gold rush for digital distribution are already over. Not just because the bigger boys are pushing their weight around, but because it’s getting crushed by its own weight of shovelware.
The only way these kind of dreams may get realized is if someone really big plays benevolent dictator as gatekeeper. Pray for Google to jump in?
@Rog. Just imagine:
1) an open platform – PC + Linux/Windows
2) unencumbered middleware (GPL/BSD)
3) direct exchange of games/money between developer and players
You’ve all the ingredients apart from money->developer. There’s game->player, no problem, but the money in the opposite direction currently has to go via some convoluted retailer/distributor/publisher value chain that saps 90-99% of the revenue.
It’s pretty ridiculous isn’t it? No wonder the games have to be so huge budget just to ensure enough revenue actually gets back to the developer after publisher/distributor/retailer gets their cut.
I’m suggesting that instead of getting 1% of retail price from 10% of all players via publishers, that developers get 100% of revenue from 0.1% of all players directly. It may be the same money, probably more, but it’s an ethical alternative.
You weren’t expecting it to be far easier and vastly more lucrative now were you?
The challenge is pushing web servers to the edges.
It isn’t the Big Bad. It is the cost of owning and maintaining server farms PLUS content generation. It is like garage bands with their own radio stations. And that isn’t a bad thing. A practical technology? I don’t know. A fascinating thought though.
The problem is the web is not different than the media that precede it in one aspect: getting noticed costs money unless you are very diligent and persistent at spreading it yourself long enough to get the credibility to access the capital required to be noticed by more audience. Marketing is expensive even on the web. That said, prior to the web even the march to credibility was too expensive and that isn’t true now. The power in the negotiations is shifting toward the artists if they are strong enough to take it.
@Crosbie Fitch: I’ve been imagining that for awhile now.
There’s a disconnect however between getting the games into the hands of the players without the middleman. Because what the middleman provides most, oddly, is the gate. Without the gate, you need
I hate making cross-media comparisons, but in this case I’d say it’s apt: Music has been available to download for quite some time now, with early approaches pre-dating the web, yet it’s still the same top 40 that sells and it isn’t selling from the independent distributors and the only serious success stories of direct-from-artist sales are from exceedingly well established artists (IE: Radiohead).
This is where reality butts heads with what we’d like to see. I’m not calling it complete fantasy, but I’m hearing the same old 20+ year “it’ll happen soon” dreams. I’d love it to happen and oh boy, yeah I can IMAGINE.
But it’s an uphill climb that’s been around long enough already to look a whole lot like a non-moving treadmill.
Raph’s comments in this video illustrate this like no other. For how long now have set-top boxes been predicted as getting games into the hands of casual gamers? Hell, Commodore, frickin’ Commodore kept saying this.
I adore Raph’s perspective on a lot of things, but on this particular thing, it sounds more retro than future.
I don’t mean to deride the entire video or topic, this is just one specific aspect of it.
Bah, typing late at night my self-editing sucks. I apologize for the half-finished sentences.
It’s just that this has been a topic of passion for so long now, having it presented as new is frustrating, it just demonstrates how much it’s standing still. I wouldn’t care if I didn’t want to see it happen. The frustration for me, is to see efforts wasted on words and deprecating tech (Flash, on set-top boxes? How many years way too late is that?).
Rog, I think the PS3 and the 360 almost ARE set-top boxes.
It has definitely taken a long time, that I agree with you on. 🙂
@Raph: Yeah I would agree, the consoles now are finally approaching that convergence that’s been predicted since– Ralph Baer or so. I’m not convinced people actually make much use of them that way though.
I hope my late night rambles don’t come across too reactionary. =)
@len, marketing ‘through the looking glass’ (the paradigm inversion) is discovery. I suggest that instead of artists paying for their work to be promoted, we’ll see audiences paying to discover good work. The artist simply has to make their work’s ability to proliferate as easy as possible, i.e. low friction, no copyright.
The artist is also not the one to pay for value to be added. Each adder of value (deriving artist) has their own audience, their own direct revenue stream.
@Rog, It takes a while to develop a ‘disintermediated exchange infrastructure’ all by oneself, but this is what I’ve been working on, i.e. http://contingencymarket.com
It will ‘happen soon’. That’s because the monopoly of copyright is running on empty. For copyright to end may be unthinkable, but it’s the only conclusion that remains after you’ve eliminated the impossible.
[…] https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/08/10/video-games-are-dead-video/ […]