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enrageorange on 19 March 2012
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noname2200 said:
enrageorange said:

The retail business is whats killing any innovation with gaming. It is the reason why last year only 10 of the top 100 best selling games(according to vgchartz) were new ips, and all of those 10 "new ips" were either dance games or party games with the exception of dead island.

On the other hand if you look at last year's big sellers on the digital front, there are countless of new ips. If the digital platform gets bigger it will only help innovation. Sure big publishers will likely keep things the same. But new development teams will be forced to make exciting new games to compete with the big dogs, which wouldn't be possible in the retail market due to the high costs of distributing a game and having the retailer/publisher take a 70% cut of the profits.

I haven't looked at the data yet, but I'd argue your mixing correlation with causality. The retail space is still far bigger than the digital space, so it receives the most attention (and therefore money), which in turn spawns a desire to play it safe. Digital can buck this for the moment because the market isn't as accessible or developed yet, so the standards there can be lower (and thus less expensive), which leads to developers taking on more risk. If this developer gets his wish, the digital market will receive the same scrutiny, and dollars, as retail, so the cycle will begin again, and the top 100 digital games will be sequels et al. Only now the 70% cut will skip the retailer and go straight to the platform holder/distributor, as well as the publisher who's putting up the umpteen million dollars the game costs to develop, and the umpteen million more it took to properly market it.

You might be right to a degree, but I suspect things won't be as extreme as you believe.

but nowadays the vast majority of retail games, are also being sold on pc and available as digitial downloads. How are these "indie and small team" digital games able to compete with the huge budget "retail" titles. Its because so many dozens if not hundreds of brand new ips are released each year on digital services like steam, that eventually someone actually makes something that is really freaking good, and that product ends up selling a lot. There is so much "shoveware" being produced, that some of it is bound to be good.

You could see it in the early years of the wii when it was very very popular. It was the console to develop cheap games on, and while a lot of them were utter garbage, some of them ended up being creative, crazy and imaginitive new ips. IMO innovation is mainly being hurt because of the high cost of development, but also because of costs involved with selling games on retail. Obviously development costs will be high regardless of the distribution if you want your game to look pretty, but regardless of what the exact numbers are, developers/publishers get a much bigger share of the profits from digital sales than retail sales, and thus are able to take greater risks because its easier to make their money back.