| Gamerace said: The industry is still young and indeed in many ways flawed - like many other industries were before it. One could make similar rants about the comic industry or music industry or movie industry or book publishing (which is in shambles in Canada because all the bookstores are now owned by one person (or Wal-f---ing-mart) and there is no profit margin and hence as a writer - you better market your own dang book (unless it's a sure seller). Porn industry. In the end it's all about the almighty buck. And I haven't seen journalistic integraty in a long time. CNN sucks up the the government so hard it's practically government propaganda (or was haven't watched in ages). And Fox... please. All news outlets of all forms prostitute themselves for ratings - or die. But for the games industry it's undergoing a huge transformation, new giants are forming, old ones are dying and must certainly old business models are being shook to their foundations. The next five years will be interesting. |
I think a point of concern is that the videogame industry is skating on really thin profit margins. While it isn't as doomish as what you had with the fallout in the early 1980s (videogames just dropped off the shelves completely), and you are likely do have videogames established as part of the cultural landscape, being young, it can get very adversely affected by another crash. You may end up being down to, AT MOST, one home console maker, and the net sum of videogames being 99 cent apps you download. This ends up marginalizing videogames even more3 than they are now.
I would say that it might be appropriate to not say that my concerns about the videogame industry (minus specific quirks to it) is valid to all forms of entertainment we can distribute today, where you have to make it big, or you fall out. It could be that the videogame industry, without the established mainstream outlets, shows greater dysfunction than the other forms of entertainment and media.
I have also had visions of creator Hell, around the Internet, where it is like Second Life in that, you have to work decades on things in a media, UNPAID, in order to eventually get a break you did. There is so much content that you end up not being able to charge for it. But you can't drop out either. What happens if this becomes the norm across across large numbers of industry? Not a lot of money means no trusted gatekeepers. No trusted gatekeepers means pot lota and devaluation of properties. This devaluation ends up leading to a hell of no income.
