Did Apple accidentally enter and kill the videogame industry?

[richardhutnik]

mrstickball said:

Zones said:

I want to clarify that by real gaming, I mean traditional gaming. So I don't think I need to be lectured about the subjectivity of my definitions; I am very well aware Angry Bird is considered a game and is enjoyed by many.

Anyway, I think you bring one of the points which I wasn't very clear about before; the difficulty of showing the presence of the many titles being released on iOS due to the abundance of them being released daily. Personally, I think the high number of titles being released daily is one of the worst thing happening to this industry, in long-term. I believe the industry standard is getting lower and lower because it used to be that everyone's can be a gamer, not it seems with what Apple has, everyone's can become a game developer.

 

And this is bad how?

Given the layoffs, studio closings and the like, I believe its a boon for the industry: Rather than requiring massive financial capital in the tens of millions to release a title on handhelds or consoles, smaller studios can create and release titles freely, thus building portfolios to move on to bigger projects within the smartphone environment, or other environments like PC and console.

Furthermore, the massive number of titles released need not be a significant impediment to the industry. Its more a question of how to properly integrate game discovery into the digital market place. Although its more noted on iOS/Android, it still exists on markets like PSN and XBLA where a few major titles get significant press and have massive evergreen presence, while other games fall off the face of the earth.

Eventually, developers and the app store creators will figure it out and integrate proper tools to ensure that the cream rises to the top. iOS has a ton of great games - its just a matter of promoting and ensuring these games get the recognition they deserve.

Only when the cost of entry and producing content is low enough, do you really get much in the way of innovation, and novelty.  If the development costs are over $10 million, then you have issues.  You can get stuff like Minecraft done on the relative cheap.  And that title, while not costing a lot of money, relatively speaking, has won over a large number of fans, even with its blocky graphics, and has run against the current trend of linear to the extreme gameplay single player. You can also look into the boardgame realm with the Kickstarter projects to.  Dev costs are really low, but you have content that will be very replayable, and at a lower cost.  What gets lost is the ability to follow what you get in a Hollywood production (someone would say this is "real games"), in that you don't get a dozen people working on sound, you don't get voice acting and so on.  What you get is a game, that lives or dies on game play alone.