I saw this video recently and thought it would be interesting to stir some discussion about it.
/discuss
I stopped watching at about the halfway point. It was interesting. I don’t think the entire gaming industry will collapse - there are a lot of crappy games coming out but at the same time there are indie developers making some really good games. Take Grinding Gear Games for example. This team of about 12 people in New Zealand worked for years developing a game called Path of Exile. It just went into open beta this year.
Many people are calling Path of Exile the true successor to Diablo 2. I agree with that notion. Diablo 3 was disappointing, and for many, Blizzard has lost some reputation. I wasn’t completely surprised because I knew that Blizzard North - the development team for Diablo 2 was no longer working for Blizzard - anyways, getting to the point. Grinding Gear Games is doing things right - it’s not only free to play, but they are trying to release new content once a week, and the only things you can buy with real money are either cosmetic or for convenience - like a bigger inventory space.
So yeah, some big name games suck these days, but there are so many good indie developers that the gaming industry can stay afloat.
I would edit the above for grammar/spelling but I’m typing this on my iPhone and can only reply. My apologies -.-
Well, yeah, that’s my point actually (more-less) of posting this video here - on a relatively small and not connected with any huge companies developer/publisher forum.
I think it’s interesting thing to discuss while not arguing about licences, loyalty and frigates supremacy. 
I mean, CleverNoob made few good points there about general tendency (and THQ’s collapse is some sad confirmation of it), but on the other hand we have a bunch of very successful titles which tackled an essence of “good game” perfectly.
Question is, though - what impact (if any) is going to have hypothetical collapse of Activision, EA or Blizzard on developers like Grinding Gear Games, Gaijin, Wargaming.net, CCP or FunCom (to name just few).
Or maybe their success actually grows on big gaming “corporations”? Do people who get disappointed with Diablo 3 are part of new player-base in Path of Exile?
Or maybe it’s other way around? People who found out about PoE won’t go and try D3 - hence somehow reducing Blizzard’s revenue?
This is a really fun and challenging question that involves well… a lot of stuff to be able to answer. I for one, have no clue…
So I think what happens here is if a good development team succeeds, it earns itself a bunch of followers. Those followers are less likely to purchase a game from a different company as long as they are satisfied. What it means is that the big, crappy games will make less money. The big companies have to shrink - or they might completely go out of business. If that happens, the better companies win.
This is the good thing about the gaming industry - the system of competition WORKS. There are TONS of different kinds of games out there, ranging from free, to a dollar, to $60 or more. Because their is such a huge market with so much variety and SO MANY different developers out there, we have a very robust market. There are no bailouts either, so no crappy developer gets propped up by tax dollars. I’d say that the gaming industry is a good example of capitalistic theory in practice.
Anyways I think the future looks bright for the gaming industry - so long as we don’t run into issues with peak oil or something crazy that causes a dramatic shift/decline in the status quo.
Overall I am not sure on this.
Also flying, click on post and edit/quote buttons appear in bottom right of post.
<= using an iPhone.
I notice this for some time now, 3 years or so
and yes, games that get development now are just trash, that belong in a trashbin.
I seen quility, and i not talking about only Graphics, but games with a story, charactor, personality.
games you play at least 4 times over.
A crash in this industry is like asking when the sky is falling. But I have to say that the industry is not crashing, but being divided. We have people that want quality games(in terms of story blah blah) to waste time(games that grind the hell out of your life), and to explore(bioshock: infinite or games that asks difficult questions about our lives). but no matter how you ask the question, people will do one thing during their xxxx lives. People want to escape. like a good book, or a good TV show, they want to leave their current world to take their lives to a temporary story-line and experience that new world.
as long as their is games, books, movies or story tellers in general. People will pay that given industry to keep getting more stories.
*no i did not watch the video. I wanted to answer the question first before being influenced by any material.*
Edit:
Its still no. indie will pick up the slack for their customer’s are realizing the quality games that are available from small teams. Hell, I see a xxxx TON of newer more interesting games from companies that I’ve never heard of on steam right now. what the video didn’t talk about is that the bar for producing a game is MUCH lower then what it use to be. A person that has the knowledge to produce a game can do it and for much lower prices.
Hell if I REALLY wanted to. I can use the 3D animation that I learned from school to produce a movie on youtube, or recruit a team of programmers to turn my 3D animations into a game of some kind with the help of crowd funding and word of mouth advertising.
Heh, my tenpence:
Once gaming industry adopts “golden parachutes” for their “effective managers”…
Umm, let me rephrase that – once gaming companies start following advice from people who know nothing about games, but care only about revenue – we get “EA’s situation”.
One cannot assume that gamers are loyal – gamer loyalty is not a stable constant… It is a variable and should be treated as such.
It should be… umm… “cherished”? Yeah, cherished… and some companies show some attempts in honing gamer loyalty.
For example, even some of the “low quality” indie games that came out last year had a price tag of $10-$15.
Ahem, just one look at GOG or Steam store clearly shows the absurdity of such situation.
Games are somewhat more than purely eye-candy.
Who cares about best graphics, if the story is absent, and replay value is lim->0?
Recently, DFC Intelligence report stated that PC game market is valued at a whopping $20 milliards/billion and will grow even bigger.
This could explain bold announcements like Ubisoft’s “Gamers won’t get tired of annual AC releases” or EA’s “Gamers like F2P”.
You see, the history from the video in OP isn’t simply repeating… It is in the process of happening again!
IMHO, “noname devs” asking a sizeable sum for “student projects” and “big name devs” expecting to milk gamers purely on assumptions, without offering anything new…
Now, this year (2013) has some surprises stored for us, let’s see how this whole thing unravels.
I’d say that PC gaming started with fanatics who had IDEAS. It didn’t start with franchises.
Ideas that caught enough attention and interest to allow looking past the initial horrible coding and bugs…
Games and gameplay were defined by ideas, not DRM.
In conclusion, I agree with CDprojectRED – “good games will be bought anyway”.
So, the games have to be good enough that the “dreaded pirates” will want to spend money on them.