Is shrinking market size all that bad?

[JEMC]

Dr.Henry_Killinger said:

JEMC said:

Your mistake is thinking that developers are trying to appeal as many people because the market has grown when actually, most devs love that big market because that means that there will always be someone who will like their game. Your Dark Souls example fits this perfectly.

But the truth is that publishers (not devs) try to appeal to as many consumers as possible because game development and specially marketing has become a lot more expensive. And it's because of that, that if the market shrinks publishers will force devs to make games that appeal to the vast majority of consumers, not the other way around.

Big market => room for everybody # small(er) market => someone will have to leave

That's not entirely true. Niche Market's don't change in size very often. For example if Dark Souls was on Wii instead of PS3, it would sell significantly worse, because it's market would come from Demon Souls which was also a PS3 exclusive.

And consideding that Devs need a lot more money from publishers, they are more under their control then ever. If Devs are targetting a smaller base, they need less money and thus publishers have less control over them. If a dev needs 1 mill to make a game as opposed to 50 mill(small by todays) standards, the publisher isn't going to make them appeal to a larger audience just to recoup 1 mill as opposed to 50 mill

I mean we only have to compare 7th gen to 5th gen to see the effects of market size on dev publisher relation ship and the diversity of games, rather then entertaining thought experiments.

True, niches markets don't grow, but game developing costs do.

It's not the same to develop for the PS2, a console that outputs at 480p with low textures than for the PS3 or now the PS4 where gamers want demand 1080p graphics with pretty textures and lighting and... well, the whole package. That is what is causing budgets to rise and make publishers demand games that appeal to a bigger audience.

Just look at the budgets of the games during the last gens

http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649

With a smaller market, what will happen is that either publishers invest less in the games, opting for either less games but as big as they are now (AAAs) or as many games but with smaller budgets (so worse graphics and/or smaller worlds, maybe even shorter). Whatever the choice they make, we lose.