Monday, November 19, 2012

Is Advancement In Gaming Sustainable?

Games are rapidly becoming more and more impressive graphically, musically and in terms of scope. As the next generation of consoles appear starting with the WiiU and followed by Sony's and Microsoft's next gen consoles, games will require more money and manpower to churn out. Costs of making games will increase and so will the profit that investors expect from developers.

What concerns me is that now games need to sell much better than before to be considered a success. Kingdoms of Amalur did pretty well in my opinion, selling 330, 000 copies, yet the studio closed down. There are many other studios shut down, or faced layoffs by EA and Activision.

If this is going to be the pattern of things, we may well see a drastic drop in creative titles from big name publishers, instead just getting remakes, sequels and established IPs. Creative titles will come from Indie devs, usually without the high production values from publisher funded games. The 'middle' budget games will slowly disappear and it's sad because this is normally where new franchises appear.

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