Did Apple accidentally enter and kill the videogame industry?

[famousringo]

Zones said:

 

Angry Bird can be a very addictive game, but its success, alongside most iOS games, is due to the simple fact that the game is competing with boredom, not other games. So its sales and popularity gives a wrong perception to what makes a great game in the industry.

The problem with the pricing of most iOS games (not just Angry Bird) is that they indirectly hurt the industry by not allowing much room for games with high development budget to be developed on handheld platforms, because a higher budgeted game would need a higher price point. And so I don't think Angry Bird is particularly shallow, but I think the industry, and indie developers, are getting more shallow, as everyone's trying to cash in from the iOS platform.

Searching titles like "Bird", "Tiny", "Doodle", etc. would bring you hundreds of copycats games in the App Store. I think a good example would be Gameloft and how they seem to get away with copying everything successful. You know, in the description of BackStab, it quotes a site saying "This is a game that costs £3 yet provides the same amount of entertainment and graphical brilliance as a PSP title that retails for £25", and I think that's a huge problem for the industry in long-term, because a game like this, or Shadow Guardian (which is an Uncharted clone) would make it harder for people to justify the original games' price. For example Uncharted: Golden Abyss would be at least $40, while Shadow Guardian is $5 or occasionally less, and that price disparity could potentially put the real developers out of business if they don't find success, leaving us with cheap clones and maybe an occasional great game like Cut The Rope in the handheld market.

To clarify, I know lower price is better for consumers, but here, obviously, I am talking about the overall industry.

Oh, and thanks for your suggestion, I'll try that game later to see how it is.

 

Your first paragraph is pure bullshit. Angry Birds competes with thousands of games priced between free and $15 and it wins because it's accessible, fun, challenging, polished, and offers great value. It's massively successful because people love it, and that doesn't give a false impression of what a great game is, that's exactly what a great game is.

Your second paragraph just misses the point. Why are big budgets important? What's important is that consumers get games that they have fun playing, and developers get paid enough to make a decent profit on their investment. Big budgets are only useful if they bring the people more fun (in which case they'll pay for them) or developers more money (which would again require people to pay for them). If iOS really is killing big budget games, that inherently means big budgets aren't doing their job and they need to go.

I'm not sure what relevance knockoffs have to anything. Every successful game franchise or genre inspires mediocre knockoffs. C'est la vie. If Gameloft really can deliver all the fun of Uncharted at a fraction of the cost, then they win. You worry about a lack of originality, but this console generation has brought us 6 Call of Duty games and 5 Halo games (excluding Halo Wars) so far. That's before we get to the knockoffs. Originality is a rare thing in any medium.