RolStoppable said:
I was refering to non-essential products for human life, but of course my post was open for misinterpretation because I didn't mention that. Computers became a requirement for a lot of jobs, so that would make it possible for a lone company without any competition to keep selling flawed OSes for a long period of time. Video games on the other hand are forced to continually evolve, because if they don't, they run into the risk of becoming boring and that means they have no value for the consumer, hence they'll decide to not buy the products. On the other hand of the spectrum, if they push for cutting edge technology too much, they will become too expensive and likewise, consumers will also decide to not buy them. |
Well, actually what happens is that when competition is too harsh in a given genre (let's say the most used and abused, FPS), in the best case there can be a few that sell well and succeed, or at least decently and survive, and a lot others that bite the dust. In the worst case, as you say, the fragmentation can be so excessive that combined with higher costs and thinner profit margin, prevents every contender from breaking even. More than from competition itself, this negative effect comes more from mental laziness of too many publishers and developers wanting to exploit overused genres. Lack of competition would be worse, though, games wouldn't evolve and they'd stop selling for this.
When the worst happens, and it already did several times in the past, there are crises from which the best ones hopefully survive and new developers rise from the ashes of the defeated ones. Alas sometimes also immensely talented developers succumb, luckily nobody kills their members and they can go to work elsewhere, but there are always projects that suffer or are cancelled when this happens.
