I think the most we can do is to vote with our vaulets, but it seems as if most people just don't give a crap about shitty game practices. I don't think it's a smart thing to let us gamers have an input in how things are done. First of all, we don't understand business, which is what gaming is to these companies, and secondly, we're entitled shits that doesn't always know what we want. If we ran this business, all we'd get was the same kind of games over and over again.

No, what we need to do is to vote with our money. But we can't even do that proparly it seems. Maybe WE are what's wrong with the industry these days...

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?

If THQ had stuck with their main franchises and stopped the casual division of messing with their budgets, they would still be up today. But again, that isn't a case of an industry problem: it's heavy mismanagement killing a company.

Day one DLC isn't a bad practice. It's not a matter of "it could be on the game" it's a matter of looking at it from a project management POV. You factor the cost of doing something (manpower, equipments, external costs, distribution, returns) add how much you want to profit and, of course, factor in the taxes. If you that bit of the game is sold separately, it's because it wouldn't fit on the profit margin of the original package. And it's naive to believe that all DLCs that aren't there day 1 aren't made in parallel with the game. Microtransactions however, are a bad practice.

Bugged games (incluing the one with online issues) aren't new. It exists since the Atari 2600. People just don't buy games on these conditions and that's the punishment publishers will receive. However, it's necessary to notice that most of the games reported as "completely broken" aren't as bad as the internet media says. I played Driveclub online since the beginning and even if unstable the online features in single player were working most of the time. The first patch solved basically all issues and the second one killed the problem. Even then, most sites report the game as broken even now, something that I can confirm it isn't. AC Unity was reported as "unplayable", while a lot of my friends have it and say the game is good. I can't talk about MCC, but I believe things are pretty similar.

Edit: And I don't see the problem with season passes. It's just a cheaper way to get all DLCs. I bought the WWE 2K14 and TLOU ones just because they were cheaper than buying even half of the DLCs separately and I had interest in all DLCs.

I feel like a lot of publishers are playing it safe and are designing games that appeal to a very specific demographic so that leaves us with a lot of different things to be desired. Though I don't think there's going to be some sort of "crash" because there are a lot of gamers out there but not enough to blow every budgets out of proportions to create uninspired games.

Edit: "it is an unfortunate fact of life in the world of entertainment that the unique is rarely successful, and the successful rarely unique. And when the great God Cthulhu in his cosmic thrown crosses his legs to sneak one off causing the stars to align and allows something that is both unique and successful to come out it all but guaranteed that it won't be remaining unique for very long because the imitators will arrive bringing golden calves to worship while Moses...." You get the picture.

So I take it the industry is doing just fine according to you? =) I can't disagree with that, but I also feel like there's some shaddy shit taking place as well, things we as consumers (in general) just swallow and pretend to be ok with. But then again, maybe I'm too "old school" for all of this =)