XBox getting unfair blame for gaming sales

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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051226-5844.html

Ignore the downplayed launch here. The important thing (for us gamers) is the attitude investors are having towards gaming right now. Not too good. What this will probably mean is some more acquisitions and mergers, meaning bigger devs and less risk. Meaning more sequels, movie games, comic games, and classic remakes.

The industry really needs to get it together. If they can't keep the sales figures up, producers are going to green-light fewer and fewer games. And we will see a depressed market. Eventually, a depressed market means fewer competition, and the uprising of smaller devs that can flourish with the lessened competition, but these cycles could last a few quarters.

Before you dismiss any of this, look at how fickle people are with their pocket money. The movie industry has been taking it on the chin for a couple of years straight now, the music industry even longer. And piracy is less to blame for them than you would suspect. People were spending that money on gaming, instead. You can't have one industry devoted to entertainment increase by tens of billions of dollars and not have other industries suffer losses. It is like what horse dealers were saying when Ford came along, or whalers with Edison.

The only company I can think of that is going gangbusters right now is Apple and the media player market. And Hi-Def TV's. Something has to explain an 18% drop in a multi-billion dollar market. Gas prices, perhaps?


Edit: This blew me away: "of the top 100 games, only 13 are neither sequels nor movie/TV licenses"

[ShadedNine]

The movie industry goes through the same phases. You do tend to lose out on a lot of the smaller studios, but then you suddenly get the little guys with small budgets producing a big hit, jumping into the spotlight. In turn, the big guys want to capitalize on this potential, and open their eyes to similar talent that are easy on the budget, and can reap big rewards...they can afford to make these high risk investments.

It certainly sucks, but all we can do is put our money where out mouth is. A few good developers will still survive it anyway. Bioware for one, merged with another developer, but remains free from any particular producer. They should be able to weather out the worst of it with their capital, and continue to invest in unique intellectual property. Sometime afterwards, as dev tools become more refined and even easier to use, you'll see a small uprising of open-source and small or even solo projects, which may in turn grow into new AAA developers....

[swivel]

I blame the consumers who keep buying all the crap, and ignoring the jewels. Several great games this year sold horribly... while bad ones sold millions.