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Forums - Gaming - Did Apple accidentally enter and kill the videogame industry?

Zones on 15 July 2011
mrstickball said:
Apple stumbled into the market about as much as Facebook has.

That is, their gaming market was a by-product of their innovations, and not the central focus. As for your question - if apple has effected the industry, its obvious they have. 3DS isn't selling well, and I believe that iOS and other app stores are largely responsible. I predicted this years ago well before the 3DS was even announced. It was inevitable for consumers to change their preferences to a device that had more features and opportunities to offer content to the population, while offering a very similar gameplay experience.

The real question is what does Apple do to encourage their gaming and application ecosystem. Product discovery on mobiles is the real issue: hundreds of thousands of applications, with only a few hundred being usually known to consumers at any given time. Microsoft is doing a great job with WM7 and their XBL integration - smaller numbers of very well-done games to a high degree get marquee placing and discovery options, while non-XBL games are allowed and put in another market.

If Apple can fix this, it can improve its ecosystem to eventually wipe out Nintendo and Sony's share of the market, or at least force them into even more synergistic devices Sony's Xperia Play (which is in the right direction, IMO).

Finally, the idea of a 'real game' and qualifying it with a subjective argument is baseless. Just because you don't think something like Angry Birds a game does not mean it isn't any less a game, played as a game, or sold as a game. Its sold/downloaded hundreds of millions of copies at a speed that Bejeweled 2 hasn't even seen.

  Furthermore, we're only at the start of what gaming will be on smartphones. We've gone from mostly simplistic, time-wasting $0.99 games to seeing more and more games of significant quality from major studios. Given the sales of Infinity Blade, we will see more studios work to build large games for touchscreens, and successes that are very notable in the emerging market.

I want to clarify that by real gaming, I mean traditional gaming. So I don't think I need to be lectured about the subjectivity of my definitions; I am very well aware Angry Bird is considered a game and is enjoyed by many.

Anyway, I think you bring one of the points which I wasn't very clear about before; the difficulty of showing the presence of the many titles being released on iOS due to the abundance of them being released daily. Personally, I think the high number of titles being released daily is one of the worst thing happening to this industry, in long-term. I believe the industry standard is getting lower and lower because it used to be that everyone's can be a gamer, not it seems with what Apple has, everyone's can become a game developer.



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Zones on 15 July 2011
famousringo said:
Zones said:

 

Angry Bird can be a very addictive game, but its success, alongside most iOS games, is due to the simple fact that the game is competing with boredom, not other games. So its sales and popularity gives a wrong perception to what makes a great game in the industry.

The problem with the pricing of most iOS games (not just Angry Bird) is that they indirectly hurt the industry by not allowing much room for games with high development budget to be developed on handheld platforms, because a higher budgeted game would need a higher price point. And so I don't think Angry Bird is particularly shallow, but I think the industry, and indie developers, are getting more shallow, as everyone's trying to cash in from the iOS platform.

Searching titles like "Bird", "Tiny", "Doodle", etc. would bring you hundreds of copycats games in the App Store. I think a good example would be Gameloft and how they seem to get away with copying everything successful. You know, in the description of BackStab, it quotes a site saying "This is a game that costs £3 yet provides the same amount of entertainment and graphical brilliance as a PSP title that retails for £25", and I think that's a huge problem for the industry in long-term, because a game like this, or Shadow Guardian (which is an Uncharted clone) would make it harder for people to justify the original games' price. For example Uncharted: Golden Abyss would be at least $40, while Shadow Guardian is $5 or occasionally less, and that price disparity could potentially put the real developers out of business if they don't find success, leaving us with cheap clones and maybe an occasional great game like Cut The Rope in the handheld market.

To clarify, I know lower price is better for consumers, but here, obviously, I am talking about the overall industry.

Oh, and thanks for your suggestion, I'll try that game later to see how it is.

 


Your first paragraph is pure bullshit. Angry Birds competes with thousands of games priced between free and $15 and it wins because it's accessible, fun, challenging, polished, and offers great value. It's massively successful because people love it, and that doesn't give a false impression of what a great game is, that's exactly what a great game is.

Your second paragraph just misses the point. Why are big budgets important? What's important is that consumers get games that they have fun playing, and developers get paid enough to make a decent profit on their investment. Big budgets are only useful if they bring the people more fun (in which case they'll pay for them) or developers more money (which would again require people to pay for them). If iOS really is killing big budget games, that inherently means big budgets aren't doing their job and they need to go.

I'm not sure what relevance knockoffs have to anything. Every successful game franchise or genre inspires mediocre knockoffs. C'est la vie. If Gameloft really can deliver all the fun of Uncharted at a fraction of the cost, then they win. You worry about a lack of originality, but this console generation has brought us 6 Call of Duty games and 5 Halo games (excluding Halo Wars) so far. That's before we get to the knockoffs. Originality is a rare thing in any medium.

My first point was in comparison to games on PSP/Vita and DS/3DS, not other iOS games. Professor Layton, for example, is a better game than any puzzle game you name it on iOS, but the competition is not direct, so I hope my point is more clear to you now.

Clearly though, I mentioned that I am strictly talking about the industry here, so I don't know why didn't get my second point. Fun is an abused word; more fun is not better. A decent game could be fun to someone because that person's friends playing that same game, that's especially true in online gaming; one would lure another and it becomes fun due to the social aspect between the friends. Here though, I am not arguing about what's fun and what's not, I am saying that "fun" and quality can be subjective, but the state of the industry is not, and seeing how that you could be get more money by self-developing games for iOS and smartphones, most people would eventually be discouraged to continue developing games with a longer development time under more pressure for a studio if their titles would get outsold by those cheap iOS games.

Knockoffs are relevant in the sense that iOS gaming can't seem to get much beyond the simple and unique multi-touch games in terms of originality without resorting to imitations. Again, that will not be good for the industry in long term.

 



mrstickball on 15 July 2011
Zones said:
mrstickball said:
Apple stumbled into the market about as much as Facebook has.

That is, their gaming market was a by-product of their innovations, and not the central focus. As for your question - if apple has effected the industry, its obvious they have. 3DS isn't selling well, and I believe that iOS and other app stores are largely responsible. I predicted this years ago well before the 3DS was even announced. It was inevitable for consumers to change their preferences to a device that had more features and opportunities to offer content to the population, while offering a very similar gameplay experience.

The real question is what does Apple do to encourage their gaming and application ecosystem. Product discovery on mobiles is the real issue: hundreds of thousands of applications, with only a few hundred being usually known to consumers at any given time. Microsoft is doing a great job with WM7 and their XBL integration - smaller numbers of very well-done games to a high degree get marquee placing and discovery options, while non-XBL games are allowed and put in another market.

If Apple can fix this, it can improve its ecosystem to eventually wipe out Nintendo and Sony's share of the market, or at least force them into even more synergistic devices Sony's Xperia Play (which is in the right direction, IMO).

Finally, the idea of a 'real game' and qualifying it with a subjective argument is baseless. Just because you don't think something like Angry Birds a game does not mean it isn't any less a game, played as a game, or sold as a game. Its sold/downloaded hundreds of millions of copies at a speed that Bejeweled 2 hasn't even seen.

  Furthermore, we're only at the start of what gaming will be on smartphones. We've gone from mostly simplistic, time-wasting $0.99 games to seeing more and more games of significant quality from major studios. Given the sales of Infinity Blade, we will see more studios work to build large games for touchscreens, and successes that are very notable in the emerging market.

 

I want to clarify that by real gaming, I mean traditional gaming. So I don't think I need to be lectured about the subjectivity of my definitions; I am very well aware Angry Bird is considered a game and is enjoyed by many.

Anyway, I think you bring one of the points which I wasn't very clear about before; the difficulty of showing the presence of the many titles being released on iOS due to the abundance of them being released daily. Personally, I think the high number of titles being released daily is one of the worst thing happening to this industry, in long-term. I believe the industry standard is getting lower and lower because it used to be that everyone's can be a gamer, not it seems with what Apple has, everyone's can become a game developer.

 

And this is bad how?

Given the layoffs, studio closings and the like, I believe its a boon for the industry: Rather than requiring massive financial capital in the tens of millions to release a title on handhelds or consoles, smaller studios can create and release titles freely, thus building portfolios to move on to bigger projects within the smartphone environment, or other environments like PC and console.

Furthermore, the massive number of titles released need not be a significant impediment to the industry. Its more a question of how to properly integrate game discovery into the digital market place. Although its more noted on iOS/Android, it still exists on markets like PSN and XBLA where a few major titles get significant press and have massive evergreen presence, while other games fall off the face of the earth.

Eventually, developers and the app store creators will figure it out and integrate proper tools to ensure that the cream rises to the top. iOS has a ton of great games - its just a matter of promoting and ensuring these games get the recognition they deserve.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

richardhutnik on 15 July 2011
Zones said:
richardhutnik said:

An industry, in this economy can't expect to have 8 figure budgets for game creation, if not 9 figures, and not expect to have large degree of fallout with studios closing.  They have to run smaller budgets and come up with games that can say sell a few hundred thousand and studios not go under.   What you have with Apple is a platform for smaller budget games to be able to survive and developers not go under.  If the response is the lack of "production value" and you don't get a movie-like experience, then so be it.  If the market can't bear this, then you won't get it.  People can yell at Angry Birds all the way, but if that is what people want, that is what they get.

 

I agree and I am okay with what you are saying, but not on expense of what has made this industry where it is today. What I mean by this is, the real gaming is becoming more and more irrelevant, it's like real gaming becoming second to iOS gaming.

I know that's currently not the case, but that’s becoming more apparent day after day.

 

The problem with the console gaming business today is that it isn't really doing a lot of innovation.  Because they are trying to get to be top sellers and making hundreds of millions, they see a genre and try to refine and out production value their competitors.  They all see that FPS is a big deal, so you have EA doing what it is with Battlefield 3.  There is marginal differences between Battlefield and Call of Duty or Homefront.  They all copy features and try to one up one another.  Same happened with the music industry.  You don't see chances being taken as far as new games, like you do in the handheld market, or Indie stuff.  The expense will be that the industry is going to price itself out of the market.

And exactly what is "real gaming"?  A game is a game.  A game can have low production value and provide greater entertainment than something with much higher production value.  For me, and you can see the CADERS stuff I have (casual and retro gaming), the stuff in the casual and retro gaming IS real gaming, and what the videogame industry pushes now is a model to be like the movie industry, following the same business model and hoping pre-orders takes the place that box office does for movies.  It is a bloody market with lots of studios going under.  It causes Bizarre Creation to fold, because they decide to produce a kart racing game.  It is producing stuff like Enslaved, and people whining it didn't do better.  It is high production costs, single playthrough titles, which will push $10+ an hour to be entertained.  It is the opposite of what games were, stuff you could replay over and over.  It went against the arcade model of accessible AND deep.  Now it isn't deep, it is dumbed down, complete with really polished production value.  For me, that isn't REAL gaming, that is wanting to be Hollywood. And if the end result is them falling to Apple, the industry has itself to blame for wanting to become Hollywood, because they feel they aren't respected enough.

Also, heck, for most people, games ARE distractions from life where you just go to have some fun, and don't care if it has that extra level of awesome, complete with realistic physics and voice acting.



Mad55 on 16 July 2011

They did what? Man i highly doubt apple could ever produce a ip and sell it for 60 dollars and sell as well as say mario or call of duty. Apple is not seriously in the industry in my opinion.



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hamburg113 on 16 July 2011

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richardhutnik on 16 July 2011
mrstickball said:
Zones said:


I want to clarify that by real gaming, I mean traditional gaming. So I don't think I need to be lectured about the subjectivity of my definitions; I am very well aware Angry Bird is considered a game and is enjoyed by many.

Anyway, I think you bring one of the points which I wasn't very clear about before; the difficulty of showing the presence of the many titles being released on iOS due to the abundance of them being released daily. Personally, I think the high number of titles being released daily is one of the worst thing happening to this industry, in long-term. I believe the industry standard is getting lower and lower because it used to be that everyone's can be a gamer, not it seems with what Apple has, everyone's can become a game developer.

 

And this is bad how?

Given the layoffs, studio closings and the like, I believe its a boon for the industry: Rather than requiring massive financial capital in the tens of millions to release a title on handhelds or consoles, smaller studios can create and release titles freely, thus building portfolios to move on to bigger projects within the smartphone environment, or other environments like PC and console.

Furthermore, the massive number of titles released need not be a significant impediment to the industry. Its more a question of how to properly integrate game discovery into the digital market place. Although its more noted on iOS/Android, it still exists on markets like PSN and XBLA where a few major titles get significant press and have massive evergreen presence, while other games fall off the face of the earth.

Eventually, developers and the app store creators will figure it out and integrate proper tools to ensure that the cream rises to the top. iOS has a ton of great games - its just a matter of promoting and ensuring these games get the recognition they deserve.

Only when the cost of entry and producing content is low enough, do you really get much in the way of innovation, and novelty.  If the development costs are over $10 million, then you have issues.  You can get stuff like Minecraft done on the relative cheap.  And that title, while not costing a lot of money, relatively speaking, has won over a large number of fans, even with its blocky graphics, and has run against the current trend of linear to the extreme gameplay single player. You can also look into the boardgame realm with the Kickstarter projects to.  Dev costs are really low, but you have content that will be very replayable, and at a lower cost.  What gets lost is the ability to follow what you get in a Hollywood production (someone would say this is "real games"), in that you don't get a dozen people working on sound, you don't get voice acting and so on.  What you get is a game, that lives or dies on game play alone.



Linkasf on 16 July 2011
mrstickball said:
Mr Khan said:

Given that the 3DS still lacks killer apps, its performance has piss-all to do with the iOS devices

That statement could be made with more confidence if 3DS fails to kick into gear after this holiday season, but for now we can primarily attribute its malaise to the lack of reasons for buying the device as if it were in a vacuum


And I will still hold true with confidence for the next few years as both Vita and 3DS fail to meet the unit sales of their predicessors. Certainly, 3DS's price and lineup contribute to the lack of sales, but I still believe the main issue is that there are other, better comparables out there.

Still though, 3DS has certainly underwhelmed thus far, and I attribute that to it being more advantageous to purchase a smart phone and play its touch-screen games vs. buying another touch-screen device. Nintendo adding so many smartphone features to the device tells me that Nintendo knows its competing with such devices, and is trying to make it a reasonable value proposition to drop the money on the device - but I simply can't see the proposition for it.

My 3DS says that I've been playing my games for over 100 hours in just these 2 weeks. I wonder what the IOS device is telling me?



Linkasf on 16 July 2011
RolStoppable said:
The video game industry has been on a severe decline this whole generation, but during the first half of this lifecycle it was covered up by the success of Nintendo systems and games which all sold leaps and bounds better than in the prior generation. Pretty much all the growth you have seen can either be attributed to Nintendo or the rising costs of Sony and Microsoft hard- and software gen over gen. When it comes to the number of gamers, the industry (Nintendo excluded) has terribly failed this generation by shrinking their market. If it weren't for the increase in multiconsole ownership, the numbers would look even worse.

Now that Nintendo has destroyed their own market (by refusing to make games for these people which continues with the 3DS), it becomes obvious that the industry is in trouble. It has nothing to do with Apple though. They are basically just bystanders watching the video game industry destroy itself.

Yes I can't wait for the next videogame crash. It's what us game players need to get back to what games used to be like.



mrstickball on 16 July 2011
Linkasf said:
mrstickball said:
Mr Khan said:

Given that the 3DS still lacks killer apps, its performance has piss-all to do with the iOS devices

That statement could be made with more confidence if 3DS fails to kick into gear after this holiday season, but for now we can primarily attribute its malaise to the lack of reasons for buying the device as if it were in a vacuum


And I will still hold true with confidence for the next few years as both Vita and 3DS fail to meet the unit sales of their predicessors. Certainly, 3DS's price and lineup contribute to the lack of sales, but I still believe the main issue is that there are other, better comparables out there.

Still though, 3DS has certainly underwhelmed thus far, and I attribute that to it being more advantageous to purchase a smart phone and play its touch-screen games vs. buying another touch-screen device. Nintendo adding so many smartphone features to the device tells me that Nintendo knows its competing with such devices, and is trying to make it a reasonable value proposition to drop the money on the device - but I simply can't see the proposition for it.

My 3DS says that I've been playing my games for over 100 hours in just these 2 weeks. I wonder what the IOS device is telling me?

What is your point? I am glad you enjoy your 3DS, but my argument is that there are a lot of people out there that may prefer gaming on their smartphones, that may not buy a 3DS or Vita because of that.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.