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Previous: 2000-2005: 4-player battle?
UPDATE: over a year has passed since I wrote this article, so I thought a little update on what happened in 2006 was not entirely irrelevant.
All in place
As the previous cycle is ending, each console manufacturer has their plans. More of the same for Sony, who will be launching its very powerful PS3 in 2006, with the same strategy than for the PS2: convince gamers and developers than it’s the strongest, and back this up by offering backward compatibility with the most popular library of games: that of its previous machines (more or less 8000 PSX and PS2 titles).
The Xbox will be back too, a little sooner, having learned from its previous mistakes. Its design is much improved, it recruited key developers, it’s backward-compatible, too, and has a stronger internet strategy than its competitors. It will offer rich community services - for a price: gamers subscribing to its premium services will pay a small monthly fee. Will it have the same effect than with MMOs - making players forget games they are not tied to? Contrary to last time, when the Xbox came last and never could catch up with the PS2, this time Microsoft will strike first and release their console months before its rivals.
Nintendo persists with the Gamecube strategy - will it work this time? It refuses to enter the competition for the most powerful console. It doesn’t believe that online gaming is what players want either. Instead, it still tries to offer a different experience - one that could federate non-gamers and hard-core users. The Revolution (the name of their newest machine) is spearheaded by an admitedly revolutionary and intriguing controler. It also goes further in retrocompatibility than its competitors: it will be able to play Gamecube games, but also to download titles from Nintendo’s glorious back catalogue - that’s 20 years of gaming, compared to Sony (10) or Microsoft (5). It will also be launched last.
For the PC, the equation is pretty much the same than before: machines keep getting stronger, developers are more and more experienced, genres are more and more entrenched, internet is a natural part of the equation, like gravity to the real world.
Dark omens
This may look quite promising, but the industry is in danger like never before since 1985. Alledgedly, the market as a whole keeps getting bigger. Yet, over the last few years, many historical developers went bankrupt, and many more could follow. While some analyst predict that the growth of the games business will go stronger in the next ten years, some other fear a Great Disaster like the one who caused the downfall of Atari. Why?
The minimum development budget which is necessary for a game to even be noticed by the public has gone from a couple of thousand dollars in 1980 to probably over $10m today - and that doesn’t include marketing expenses. Worse - out of the thousands of games released every year, only a couple make it big - the names we all know. Maybe a hundred, probably less, are profitable to some extent. A hundred more break it even. And as for the others...
Fact - games become more complex, and gamers still want more. They want bigger games, but not necessarily more diverse. Not necessarily many. Publishers are more and more risk-adverse. As they can’t finance many projects, they concentrate around a few, backed by strong licenses. Some acquire competitors or developers only to get an asset like a license and a technology, then shut the shop down.
New markets, like Korea and China, pass from opportunity to threat status: they’re full of talented developers, whose creativity has been ignored for too long - Everquest, the most successful western game to date, gathered fewer subscribers than its Korean competitor Lineage.
Hardware manufacturers also play it rough on developers: games now have to bring something unique to the machine. An expensive to develop and to maintain online component is more and more often required. Manufacturers can and do refuse games more and more often.
But the greatest competitor is different in nature. Many players don’t understand why they have to pay for a service they can have for free. On PC, mod developers create competitive, professional-quality games - for nothing. Some professional games also offer a free online mode, massively multiplayer or not, which mobilizes more and more of the player’s energy and time. Dedicated gamers spend roughly the same amount of money they used to on their hobby, but this goes to buying new computers or paying the internet connection - not as much to buying individual games.
Finally, in our entertainment societies, video gaming is no longer the only digital leisure, and is also threatened by non-gaming industries, such as the DVD business and the online music industry.
That’s why developers die. Who need another, different football game when you can have EA’s FIFA and Konami’s PES every year? Who needs new videogames characters when the old one can still be recycled - and that the movie industry can provide new faces?
But there is hope...
Fortunately, a world where gaming boils down to a dozen or so big releases a year can not (yet?) exist. First, retail can’t allow it. They need to be able to offer a vast number of references to customers. And retail usually get what they need.
More generally, everybody needs diversity in game development, players, publishers and developers alike.
Players, ultimately, need to play the games they like. Being able to choose to enjoy one game rather than another one is their only way to influence the game industry.
Publishers and developers should see the independent development community, in all its forms - from free web games to professional, published software - as a giant R&D lab. It’s not certain that the next big thing will come out of it (although this has happened repeatedly in the past, see Grand Theft Auto), it’s the best way to experiment what works and what doesn’t. After a sucessful game is released, it’s fairly easy to explain why it works. These reasons may not always be the real ones, but it’s definitely easy to find out many. But when a game that had everything right fails, it may be more difficult to analyse the causes of that, but it’s also more enlightening. It is not great successes that have pushed this industry forward - or else, we will all be playing pac-man clones today! It is rather great (and smaller) failures, ideas that are not exploited to their fullest, imperfect but perfectible designs.
so what lays ahead?
In an industry built on change, nothing is certain - especially the future. Conventional wisdom would suggest that games are going to be more and more technically advanced, and that network play will be more and more important. Will that happen? I think rather that it will become easier to make the games that developers want. Some ideas that were impossible to implement years ago will now become easy to integrate. The better games won’t necessarily be those with the most advanced technology, but those whose development team master well what they implement. The analysis of past games which haven’t lived up to their "promise" will continue and will fuel the creativity of developers, which will be increasingly inspired by other media. And undoutedly - there will be one or two major innovations in this next cycle, which will completely reshape the game landscape. The best part of it is that we don’t even know where they will come from...
