By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Gaming Discussion - Is the number of genres for big budget titles shrinking?

I won't comment on the Indie game stuff, or digital distribution in regards to the number of genres.  I do see innovation and maintaining of older genres via digital distribution and stuff over cell phones.  However, I did want to look at the large budget titles.  I write this to ask if anyone would think I am wrong here.  What I am observing is that the number of genres on the top end look like they are shrinking.  I am seeing things reduced to a smaller and smaller pool, and genres merging.  In the past, you had RPG, driving games, FPS, RTS, adventure games, strategy, sports, puzzlers, fighting games, and others I have missed.  Now, what do I see?

* Sandbox games.  Basically a map with preconstructed missions and various stuff you can do on the map going from preconstructed mission to preconstructed mission.  You can take the games and put them in a different time period, but they still fit under the sandbox genre.  For example, yes it is a western, but Red Dead is in the same genre as Grand Theft Auto.

* First-person shooters.  Throw in third-person shooter here.  Yes, there are some minor differences, but the camera being futher back doesn't mean you don't line up crosshairs and fire, and take cover, while you play Wolverine and wait for your health to regenerate.

* Racing games.

* Music games.  This genre has shrunk, but still here.

* RPGs.  JRPGs still pop up, but seem to be waning.  Western RPGs have seen growth, but it looks like the expansion of sandbox genre, is pushing it increasingly closer to Western RPGs.  With games like Mass Effect 2, the fusing of the two genres looks like it is happening more so here.

* Fighting games.

* Linear story driven action-adventure. Alan Wake, Uncharted, and others would fit this. It would seem like this genre, to a larger degree, ends up also appearing as the single player front-end to the FPS genre. 

* Sports titles.  Still a staple though, but really aren't tops in sales.  So long as there are sports fans, they are around though.

 

In all this, and maybe I missed a few, I am seeing contraction and merging going on here.  If I am off, let me know, but I see less diversity now, particularly as budgets increase, in the top titles that get marketed heavily.



Around the Network

I find this quite interesting. The more obvious answer is that with more technology and capabilities, developers want to do "more". It's a lot like cellphones... they try to put everything in there. This is abig problem because games start to lose their identity in key aspects of what the actual word "game" means and have to rely in storylines and gimmicks to stand out. That's what I think, anyways.



 

Where's the contraction, exactly?  We've always only had a handful of popular genres at a time, and as that genre(s) grew more crowded you saw developers start to try to stand out by bringing in concepts from different places.



How about also factoring in getting investors?  I believe the normal method for drawing in investors works against a key element of the entertainment value of games, which is novelty.  In order to get investors, what is invested in needs to have a proven track records.  So, investors see a genre sells well enough, so they will fund a title in that genre of choice.  End result is a possible reduction in genres on the high end.



richardhutnik said:

How about also factoring in getting investors?  I believe the normal method for drawing in investors works against a key element of the entertainment value of games, which is novelty.  In order to get investors, what is invested in needs to have a proven track records.  So, investors see a genre sells well enough, so they will fund a title in that genre of choice.  End result is a possible reduction in genres on the high end.

Investors rarely buy into/fund a specific title, they buy into/fund a specific company.  Remember, investors may own a corporation, but they do not necessarily run the corporation.  That premise is the (original) core principle behind limited liability.  To illustrate, the investors of Nintendo do not tell Nintendo what titles/systems to create, and are in fact kept in the dark about specific titles/hardware like the rest of us.

More broadly, you're giving me a hypothetical.  I can not argue with this hypothetical, because I lack the time/data/foresight to do so.  I can only tell you that the hypothetical is not currently occuring, and that past data indicate it is not likely to happen.



Around the Network

you forgot platforming, LBP was a massive sucess after all, and then there Heavy Rain whatever genre that counts as (arguably a budget title) and 3D dot game heroes, there is a lot of innovation still out there, though I do agree that the bigger budget titles seem to be rather predictable 



insanity_driven said:

you forgot platforming, LBP was a massive sucess after all, and then there Heavy Rain whatever genre that counts as (arguably a budget title) and 3D dot game heroes, there is a lot of innovation still out there, though I do agree that the bigger budget titles seem to be rather predictable 

If you look at the smaller cost titles, you see more innovation.  LBP definitely seems to be an exception though.  My focus is on what looks like what gets the large marketing budgets.  It looks like a decline on the top end.  I am not sure LBP is that large budget also.  It tends to ride more of the user generated content wave by Sony.

I think I ignored platformers, because they tend not to be things drawing developer wars the way the other ones I listed have been.



Yes

 

thread/



“When we make some new announcement and if there is no positive initial reaction from the market, I try to think of it as a good sign because that can be interpreted as people reacting to something groundbreaking. ...if the employees were always minding themselves to do whatever the market is requiring at any moment, and if they were always focusing on something we can sell right now for the short term, it would be very limiting. We are trying to think outside the box.” - Satoru Iwata - This is why corporate multinationals will never truly understand, or risk doing, what Nintendo does.