| HappySqurriel said: I find it difficult to believe that used videogame sales are really impacting the industry when there is nearly a Billion pieces of videogame software and roughly 200 games that sell more than a million copies in a year. What is killing the industry is that for every piece of software that sells a million copies there are 2 pieces of software than need to sell a million units of software that fall far short. |
Which, of course, just highlights the developer arrogance and apathy that I mentioned before. A developer with a reasonable level of humility will produce a game within a budget which the likely-worst-case sales scenario would still cover the cost of. That is not how most developers think, however. A great deal of studios make the games that they want to, regardless of actual demand or interest in that kind of product, do no analysis of market impact (opting instead to assume that past market trends will continue or that everybody will love the game because the studio that made it loves the game), spend a huge sum making the game look as good as possible, and then are baffled when their product which most people didn't want fails to sell well enough to cover the ludicrous and unjustified budget they allocated for it.
The developers most hurt by used game sales are those arrogant developers who ignore consumer demand. These "single serving games" that have no replay value and occasionally not much first-play value are the ones getting hit the hardest, especially when they're uninspired "clones" of more popular games (how many Halo-alikes are there now on 360? How many FPS games does one console need?). The developers who are doing the trailblazing (or have done the trailblazing historically) and setting the trends, however, don't seem to be doing that badly. The reason for that is simple enough: in 2006, the cycle of the industry got rebooted. And we're currently in the part of the industry cycle where innovation is rewarded, and imitation is punished.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
