Is the Gaming Industry Crashing?

[gigantor21]

I have several problems with his argument.

- There were plenty of shitty games on older consoles, dumped out by companies wanting a quick buck. The PS2 had no shortage of shovelware; revisionist, myopic history by the Internet leads people to act like it was all Ico's and Devil May Cry 3s. Indeed, it happened on ALL of the most successful systems in each gen, including the NES.

- As Otaku said, his point about game quality was undermined by his emphasis on endings, rather than the entirety of the games. The complaints I've heard about Dead Space 3 and Call of Duty are more holistic; people say the former abandoned it's roots while the latter is stenciled in year after year. I didn't even know people didn't like the ending for MW3, TBH.

- His constant focus on stock prices was also too narrow in scope. Why no mention of any of the companies' earnings? Or sales numbers for specific games? The constant rise in dev costs? A wider range of evidence would've made his point far more convincing. Instead, it came off as incomplete; he cited Ubisoft's stock price, for instance, but they posted some great earnings recently.

- The point about mobile gaming was contradictory. He cites it as being a distruptive force due to the drop in quality of console games, but mobile development is FAR more similar to the old Atari situation. That's where the real mass production of dubious crap is going on; much lower dev costs and manpower, alongside a user base even Nintendo's handhelds will never touch, has opened the floodgates.

I do think that gaming is in a tenuous situation right now, but he did a pretty mediocre job of explaining why IMO. I think the console market is going to shrink--by how much will depend on what happens--but I don't see it crashing outright.