Is shrinking market size all that bad?

[Dr.Henry_Killinger]

nomad said:

 

Dr.Henry_Killinger said:

Last Gen was the biggest in terms of console sales, 260 million from the previous 190 million of the prior generation.

And yet many people claim that their favorite generations were the earlier 3,4, or 5th generations.

Sure, many more people became gamers and gaming as a hobby became a lot more mainstream and acceptable.

Furthermore, Gaming garnered a greater focus and budgets skyrocketed, but is this really such a good thing?

With a growing market and more money being pumped into the industry, we have more risk on developers, and instead of these larger budgets giving us more innovation, diversity is actually decreasing. Games are being designed to appeal to as many people as possible rather than making as good an experience for those who actually like the genre, and gaming is stagnating as a whole.

Perhaps a downsizing and a refocus is actually what we need.

Dr.Henry_Killinger said:

Well, this is a Gamer Centric view. And growth isn't always good, these ballooning budget size an mass appeal low substances games are akin to tumors.

A healthy market is a lot better than a bloated one, and refocusing I thinking will make the market more healthy.

This is where I got confuse on you OP (and it seems a few others). What you mean by "mass appeal" is not the same as appealing to an untapped population to expand the market. I think what you are saying about "mass appeal and growing market size causing stagnation" has little to do with the exapansion of the gamers population. 

They are not increasing budget on these AAA games to expand the videogame market, but to expand thier userbase/fanbase. They are doing it to tap into an already existing market. For example GTA, does little to expand the market. It taps into those who played the prevous GTA games, CoD/BF gamers, Sports/Madden/FIFA, etc. but not the smart device gamers and those who had little interest in games.

With a shrinking market, audience diversity either stagnates or decreases. I think there are two main answers to a shinking market in-order for companies to stay afloat. The first is to do the same tried and proven approach. The second is to take risk to expand the market. Unfortunately, tried and proven is what most will do. This mean developers will focus their money on what they know will work, rather than taking large risk on unique games. So, yes, a shrinking market is usually bad.

This is what I'm trying to suggest, focusing a larger less focused based at the cost of a smaller more dedicated base. At its extreme, this is like mobile vs console i.e 60 million users for 1$ game and 1 million users for a 60$ game. For sake of argument lets say the cost is completly indicative of the budget and the budget is completely representative of the quality. They both make the exact same amount of money theoretically, but it will be much harder for a 1$ game to have 60 million users than a 60$ game to have 1 million users