Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, Steven Tyler dropping F-bombs on American Idol, Dr. Dre defeating Death Row, or your favorite Zamfir performance, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
Gaming is at a crossroads. Big changes in the business are already underway and even bigger changes are on the horizon. Epic Games’ Dr. Mike “Busta” Capps recently chatted with Industry Gamers about the changes happening in the gaming business. While they’re exciting from a gamer’s point of view, they’re scary to developers and publishers:
We have not been this uncertain about what’s coming next in the games industry since Epic’s been around for 20 years. We’re at such an inflection point. Will there be physical distribution in 10 years or even five? Will anyone care about the next console generation? What’s going on in PC? Can you make money on PC if it’s not a connected game? What’s going on in mobile?
Tons of really scary things… It used to be, ‘Well, of course PlayStation 3 will be successful because PS2 was amazingly successful.’ But can you say for sure that you know everyone’s going to jump to the next generation? I sure hope so — I’m going to try to make some great tech that will make everyone want to. But it’s scary.
If there’s anything that’s killing us [in the traditional games business] it’s dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that’s really worth it … They’re used to 99 cents. As I said, it’s an uncertain time in the industry. But it’s an exciting time for whoever picks the right path and wins.
Digital distribution, mobile gaming, and social gaming are challenging traditional game makers and publishers. These relatively new forces are also challenging traditional gamers. I’m reminded of friends in the ’90s that loved PC gaming, but couldn’t adapt to a console world. I’m reminded of friends that loved 2D fighting games more than anything, but couldn’t deal with the shift to 3D. These friends are no longer the gamers that they once were.
What do you think of all the change that’s happening in gaming? Will you change with the times? Or are you perfectly comfortable with the disc-and-console model? Will you resist change and hang on as long as you can? If you don’t like what the future holds for gaming, will you look for another hobby? As for me, no matter what happens in gaming, I’ll be like Jefe from The Three Amigos: “I’m still here El Guapo!”
Playing NFS: Shift on the G2X is pretty awesome but I can't see myself buying anymore (Shift came with phone) games on that phone. My biggest gripe with mobile gaming is the lack of vibration that I have been accustomed to since '98.
"My biggest gripe is the lack of vibration that I have been accustomed to since ’98."
Thats what she said!!!!
Lmao!
Something does need to change. I haven't found a game I was willing to pay $60 for (and be happy with it) in a very long time.
I think a lot of it has to do with companies cutting back on the SP aspect of games and focusing on the MP. I would guess it is because you can get by with a lot less work on MP. You build a few maps and put them out there and people are happy with them for some time since its always different people playing different ways. But I hate MP for the most part. I buy games for ME to sit down and play, not to have to rely on the idiots out there who don't take it seriously or that just suck. I get too competitive with online play and I DON'T lose. I am used to being the top player at the end of each match and I only lose because of retards. ANYWAY…..
I don't feel like I get my moneys worth when a game relies too much on MP. Its the game developers fault for getting 'lazy'. I don't feel sorry for them, mostly because the price of games has steadily risen.
I enjoy having a console. I (used to) enjoy my games. I do not want FB-like games to take over. Mobile games suck, I have yet to find one worth playing more than once. (Gun Bros. was fun but never finished). I don't want thing like OnLive to become the standard. I hate the thought of digital only games being the norm, because of the limit of hard drive space. My PS3 is sitting at 232Gb of 250 total. No videos or music on it anymore, just games, saves, and game data.
This is all just my OPINION.
@Slicky
I agree. It would be nice if they put out the yearly release MP games in a MP only sku that was cheaper. As it is if you buy CoD you pay $60, $15 for DLC, then 2 months later $15 again for the new DLC. That's damn near $100 (it is if you use MS points) for 1 game that doesn't change year to year if you only do the MP part.
I felt that way about MAG. Great game. They did a good job with what they sought out to do but the price tag was too much for what it was. Should Madden be $60 every season? No. CoD? No. You get where I'm going I suppose.
A new pricing tier needs to be in place for some of these games. I don't see why EVERY game that is somewhat INTERESTING has to debut for $60. I have to bold the word interesting because there are shovelware crap that nobody has ever heard of coming out for $30 brand new and a suit from one of these companies would just point me in that direction.
Retailers and publishers would hate large differences in pricing. I'm not saying that it's right, but it's the same for movies and music. A DVD of $200-million movie costs roughly the same as a movie that was made for $5-million. An album that costs $10-million to make and market costs the same as one that was made for $100-thousand.
I'd like to see the pricing structure of games change dramatically, but I sincerely doubt it happens at traditional retail. If anything, a digital future makes this more possible since it eliminates one of the players (retailers).
Yeha but the difference there is that a movie will rapidly drop in price if it is crap. Many many crap games that have been out for several months are still $59.99 or if you catch them on a good day they'll knock it down to $54.99.
Great movies are always great, same with music. Games have a shelf life and they try to milk as much money out of them as possible until they just get pulled off the shelf.
My main issue with a digital future is that so far the pricing is exactly the same as a retail release. So I don't see the point of digital distribution with the bigger named games.
Games depreciate fairly quickly too. Aside from first-party Nintendo games, significant discounts can be had after four or five months.
As for digital distribution, it's still in its infancy. You need to think forward. Right now publishers are not in a position to piss off retailers. As the infrastructure gets in place, publishers can be more daring with prices. Will they? Who knows, but the potential to do it digitally is there whereas it's not with physical retailers.
Four or five months?? That's a long time for me to wait for a crap game to lower to a crap price. They may depreciate at a decent rate, but I feel like DVD's depreciate quicker. However to be sure of that I would have to see a statistical analysis of the percentage of change between games and DVD's.
After 4-5 months they are off the shelves at places like Best Buy. (or so it seems)
Depends. If gaming goes social like FB games or more mobile type games, then I'm hanging my hat and saying goodbye. Those games will never satisfy me. I don't want lots of cheap games to fill the time one real game could hold. Digital, 3D, and motion don't matter to me. All that matters is the game behind.
If anything, mobile games and Facebook games are going to get better and deeper.
But will they get as good as traditional games is the question. If the answer is or becomes no, then I won't want to play many of them. I would probably get so bored, I'd end up making my own games. (I would now, but I would rather enjoying games than making them. Even though it is a huge fascination of mine.)
@sandrock
you have to ask yourself…how do you feel about micro transactions? I think that is where it's headed as far as quickie or social games are concerned.
All those facebook ppl are to blame.
@Smartguy
My mind immediately thought you were about to write "do you feel lucky, punk? Well do ya?" I'm a huge Clint Eastwood fan so I couldn't help but think that, lol.
Cool quick read.
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/04/21/report-game-ind…
I'm a bit old fashioned and I usually have to be pulled into the next thing. My wife is slowly dragging me along to the idea of getting a smartphone rather than having two devices – one for music, aps, etc, and the other to make calls. I kinda like being able to leave one at home though.
I also really like physical media for games. I understand it from a development side. But if the option is there to buy either the physical or digital model, I have no problem with that.
What I hate is not having a physical copy. I hate the concept of having to pay for something twice if my wife wants to play it on her XBOX that less than 20 ft away in the next room. I mean, why is it that I can hand her my disc for Oblivion, but she can't play my DLC unless I shut my XBOX off and give her my HDD? Why can't I put an XBLA game on a memory card and let her try it? I get that they want to fight piracy, but she's in the next damn room and I've already paid for it.
At least having two iPods in the house, we can still load a single profile onto separate machines and not have to pay twice for the same content withing the household. Unless they can figure out a work around that lets the consumer share, at least within the household, then I don't want it at all. I'd still likely resist it if they did because it's not my preference. But the current model for handling downloadable content doesn't work for me in the least.
I completely agree that an iTunes-like model would be much better than the way PSN and Xbox Live work today. I hope, perhaps naively, that Microsoft and Sony will be more flexible with their next systems. To be fair, PSP downloads work for me across multiple systems. Hopefully that's a sign of things to come.
I do like the way the PSP and PS3 work together. The Minis can be installed on many PSPs and the PS3 at the same time. The PS1 games can be played via network directly off your console. So thats at least something.
Even a way to put in a list of say, up to 4 gamertags, that all content purchased would be valid for. Then if you want to pass a memory stick around the house to different machines or whatever, you can. Or a list of console serial numbers tied to a single router IP. I'm sure there has to be a logical workaround that doesn't force the consumer to buy a game or it's content twice.
If you can buy the Family Pack of 4 Gold Accounts for the price of 2 (or thereabouts), then there's proof that they understand that people in the same house have different profiles. But it's like they've only half thought this whole concept through.
@Ray
It's hard to find a 70% drop in price after 4-5 months lol.
Yeah the pricing needs to change. I do not like the method MS employed with chapters for Fable 2.
I'm not sure that the retailers are the culprit necessarily. MS, Sony and N have agreements in place for price floors for specified times. Then after that window the physical copy can be marked down. The digi stores will be no better if other digi stores can't compete on the platform. EA wants $60 for their games on Steam. F that.
I love the concept of all digital and being able to have the things of the future of gaming that we have been talking about for a while now, but the idea of not having a physical copy to be able to pass back and forth between my xbox and my fiance's (bedroom and living room xbox's) or having to pay twice to be able to use the games on different accounts.
I think I can even get past the idea of not being able to trade in games or resell them, but I will expect the quality of games to be better or tell me much more about the game before I make a purchase. Not being able to play a game on my account and then have my fiance play the same game with her account without paying twice is my biggest issue—maybe if I can find a job I won't care about that as much.
As long as they sell discs I will never buy digital copies of games.
I'm really pissed at the moment.
PSN won't let me sign in. I keep getting some error code. This means I'm out of playing DCU, a game I am paying to play.
When I got my RROD, MS compensated me for a month of Gold access. I have a feeling that Sony could give a rat's ass that I'm losing money on their screw up.
Damn Anonymous.
PSN has been out since yesterday. There's a rumor that it was the hacker community, but I suspect it's just a technical error. If I'm wrong, it's a better story. Sadly I couldn't even get Netflix to work, which messed up my lunch break.
I was watching Netflix on it just fine yesterday after dropping out of DCU and spending time with my wife on our wedding anniversary (yes, we got married on 4/20 so I could remember the date). I watched Look Who's Talking with my daughter, left Netflix, started DCU again, and it signed me out and started.
Naturally, I blamed Kirstie Alley's fat ass for breaking my PSN first, but on further research, I found out about the Anonymous attacks.
Anyone subscribed to DCU or PS+ should be compensated. This is ridiculous. With all the trash talked about MS… I must say that they are on the ball when it comes to compensation for loss of a paid service. Nintendo… beats them both hands down in that department.
I just told my wife about this, and her quote was "WHAT?… that's not right".
Ray… who can write a letter to about this?
Happy Anniversary to you and your wife. Mine's tomorrow (the Earth Day thing was a pure coincidence).
Happy Anniversary to you and your wife as well.
Our wedding happened fast. We had been engaged for like 5 years. We were in Downtown Pittsburgh making our arrangements to move out to CA and walked past the County Building. At which point, we just walked in to get a marriage license. They asked us what date we were going to get married on, and we looked at the calendar to see that 4/20 was a week or 2 away. I said "4/20… that's a date I can remember".
In the next week or so, I was married by a judge (I should have asked for a jury).
We planned ours for a while. It was a bad year to have an April wedding. All these dates fell on a Saturday:
April Fools Day
Tax Day
Earth Day
The day before Easter (horrible weekend to make people travel).
We more or less decided that the 22nd was the least of the evils, although we did consider doing it on the 1st and then as we were standing up there just turn to everyone and yell out, "April Fools!!!"
Earth Day AND Good Friday this year? Ugh…..
LoL, mine's next week on the 27th. 7 yrs here!
Write a letter to Kevin Butler?
Is he now the VP of Hacker Attack Compensations?
@N8
Maybe they'll credit you some playing time. Blizz would in bad circumstances and Netflix does as well.
Speaking of Blizz… until yesterday, I was under the notion that I had never played any of their games. Come yesterday, I found out I was wrong.
My son has recently discovered a TV show from our time that he has been watching alot and quoting all the time. This show… is Beavis and Butthead. The other day he came down the stairs with his shirt over his head talking about how he was the great Cornholio.
Anyway, I opened up my ROM's to show him the Beavis and Butthead game from back in the day. When it was done, I started looking through my other old SNES games to see what I had. In there, was "The Death and Return of Superman". I started it up, and found out that Blizzard made it. I had no idea.
So… I have completed at least one Blizzard game in the past.
I tried to get on PSN earlier and learned that it's down. Sucks, but how can Sony compensate people for it. They don't charge for online play so they can't give you a free month card for something that should be free anyway, right? They're saying it has something to do with the Japan troubles but I believe it's the hackers.
… I DO pay Sony for a service and so do you. I subscribe to DCU, you subscribe to PS+.
If I wasn't paying anything, I wouldn't be complaining.
Good point, I forgot about that. I want one month of PS+ for free.
I'm not even worried about a month. If they did that, I would be ecstatic and have great things to say about them.
T this moment, my expiration date and time (which I know via an email from DoNotReply@ac.playstation.net on 2/28/11) is 06/17/2011 @ 10:54 PM. If they just push that date back to compensate for the amount of time PSN has and will be down for… I'll be satisfied.
If they don't… I will never give Sony another penny for anything PSN related.
Interesting if hackers are the case. Sony contracted out net security recently.