Is the Gaming Industry Crashing?

[Dodece]

While I personally don't agree with everything in his analysis. I hardly ever completely agree with anyone's analysis. I have to say though that the core of his argument has some merit, but pushing games out the door unfinished. Is not the real problem, but a symptom of the real problem. Which is that a lot of companies are practicing horrendously poor time management. Which is not only resulting in a poor delivery subsidized by shady business practices, but is actually the root cause of the explosion in game budgets.

Small teams working longer on projects are many times more efficient. Then throwing a human wave at the task. The increase in production speed is in no way justified by the excessive costs. Especially when it results in a fairly substandard product. That might anger, or even alienate consumers. Smaller teams, and longer time tables also allow games to see a lengthier design phase. Blitzing is cutting that design phase down dramatically, and that results in rampant copy pasting previous games into newer games.

I think his argument for the result of symptom though is probably accurate. The big players are indeed overcompensating, and it is really only a matter of time before the public tires of it, and starts to look almost exclusively to smaller players, and more efficient big players to service their needs, and once that happens publishers like Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, and even Nintendo are going to feel a real pinch. Honestly I can't explain why Nintendo opts to copy paste so much. Maybe it is just fear of doing something different.

That isn't the whole industry however. Both Sony and Microsoft seem to be using common labor pools to augment smaller teams. So that the teams can incubate their games longer. Zenimax on the other hand seems to give their teams just plain long development cycles. The same seems to hold true for Take 2. So it hardly seems to be a universal phenomena. That said I think that only about half the industry will crash. The other half seems to be fairly healthy. So maybe we will have a one year or two year reset.