The State of the Gaming Business

[DanneSandin]

torok said:

All games you cited sold well, except probably Sim City because it didn't worked at all while the other only had specific issues. RE6 sold well, it only didn't met their expectations. Capcom is a company that has management issues and a lot of them. That's why they are in trouble, even if it isn't serious. By the way, your claim that they are focusing in mobile goes against the link you posted, that claims that they want less releases and with higher quality. Capcom lacks focus, and they are trying to gain it.

THQ had good game series. Metro was published by them too. But their main revenue stream was casual/movie adaptations. When these things moved to mobile, THQ had to do a force move to AAA with zero experience. Then they tried to recreate their initial uDraw tablet success on PS360 but it flopped hard because people weren't interested anymore and they ended up with a huge inventory write down that costed them millions. THQ died because they went AAA to late and never went with full force by internal conflicts between their AAA division and their casual studio.

Looking at the PS4/X1 software sales, hardly any titles is flopping. Basically everything is selling 1M+. Even remasters like Metro are outselling the original game. The industry is getting back at their health. 2013 was a tough year because the last gen went far too long. Game sales took a nose dive. Right now, PS4/X1 are recovering the market, but they will only finish the job in 2015. If they were released Q4 12, the transition would have been smoother and publishers wouldn't have suffered a bad year.

My point is, what in the current software sales would make anyone think that the 2014 market was worse than the 2013 one? We had the biggest new IP of all time, even remasters sold well, most games sold 1M+, a lot of them reached 2 or 3M. There isn't a good case here to talk about software sales.

Maybe I was unclear in the OP; Sega is focusing more on mobile gaming, but Capcom have opened up a mobile studio as well from the profits of MH.

Yeah, I heard that the uDraw was the main reason why THQ failed. I think, if they had stuck with their three major franchises (DS, Metro, SR) and developed them further an profiled themselves as a mid-tier publisher, things could have gone better for them. All of those series received good scores.

Yes, it seems as if the industry is growing and getting healthier, but what about all the shitty practices publishers have? Day on DLC, microtransactions, game breaking bugs, bad online (some times for months). Won't that sooner or later turn people off?