| Alby_da_Wolf said: I hope Cliffy B is on drugs or that he too considers it a gossip-worthy exception and not a future general rule, otherwise I can see a new great videogame crash approaching, and far worse than the worst ever happened in the past. |
A video game market "crash" of that kind is not possible really. You have to understand the reasons it happened, and what's happening today is not the same thing. In the early 80s, the market was flooded with crap because anyone could make a game for Atari, or Coleco, etc. There was no way to know whether or not a game was pure garbage before you bought it, because back then there weren't even game magazines really to review games ,etc. You just had to go by the misleadingly cool box art and whatever blurb was written on the back of the box. This caused many gamers and purchasing parents to abandon home video games in NA because it just got ridiculous. Also, home computer gaming was starting to catch hold, and the arcade gaming experience was so much more advanced that many gamers preferred it as well. There were many reasons for that 83 market crash, none of them that certain games had over-bloated budgets.
TODAY, you have video games being much more mainstream than they were back in the 80s, before Tetris came along and converted so many new "gamers", before DS or Wii came along and created the "Expanded market" of last gen. And some developers are spending millions and millions of dollars, not neccisarily to make a game PLAY great, but for it to have a comparable "Hollywood" style presentation, complete with many big games now actually USING big name Hollywood actors to do the voices. That shit costs money. Big orchastrated soundtracks cost money. Shiny HD graphics on a large, cinematic scale cost money. And many of these games never sell near enough to justify their budgets, much less break even.
It won't lead to a full industry crash. But it WILL continue to lead to more and more development studios being shuttered because one game they spent a lot of money making didn't make enough money back. The budgets for any so-called "AAA" games has gotten to a retarded level, and it needs to be scaled back. But, at the end of the day, if it ISN'T, and this continues, which it most likely will, all that's really going to happen, is that you're going to see more big companies like Midway and THQ go out of business, and you'll eventually see less and less "AAA" game, not talking about QUALITY, but about the approach to game design and budget. You'll see less because there won't be anyone left to afford to make them.
But who knows when that'll happen, because sadly, there's a whole lot of "Gamestop Generation" kids out there, as I like to call them, who run out and pre-order or buy every single big Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty or Madden or Halo or God of War or Gears of War or Uncharted or whatever "AAA" release that comes along. But the reality is, it ISN'T sustainable, and that bubble WILL burst, sooner rather than later.
