"As I am writing this article, Activision is shutting down Radical Entertainment, Sega is laying off staff from their UK and U.S. offices, Vivendi wants to sell its majority 61% stake in Activision Blizzard worth $8.1bn and THQ is on life support. Over 120 developer studios have been shut down between the beginning of this generation (end of 2005/beginning of 2006) and the end of this generation (currently). If you continue to let budgets and team sizes spiral out of control, the future of gaming will be grim. There is a quote above that says: “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ I believe this quote sums up why Nintendo’s strategy will prove to be more successful than other companies in the long run. Even with Nintendo’s least successful consoles such as GameCube and Nintendo 64, not only did they earn a profit, but they stuck by those consoles an entire generation to stay loyal to their fanbase.", writes NotEnoughShaders.
"The Norrköping-based (Sweden) indie games publisher Maximum Entertainment and Manchester-based (the UK) indie games developer Merge Games, today announced with great happiness and excitement that their fantasy action/adventure/RPG “Smalland: Survive the Wilds“, is now available on the Meta Quest platform." - Jonas Ek, TGG.
"The most important games event of Latin America, gamescom latam, has unveiled the finalists for its flagship award ceremony, the gamescom latam BIG Festival, which celebrates the best in the global market of games." - Gamescom.
"The retro RPG "Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria" is now available for PC" - Jonas Ek TGG.
That's the cruel truth... But the devs should not chase realism if they can't afford it. They have powerful hardware but they are not forced to use the whole potential.
Though after reading this article I wonder how powerful the next gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles will be... Maybe it's time to put more RAM (for multitasking) and less graphical/processing power?
The whole industry will not fail anytime soon, but I think there might be some heavy changes... And those changes will require victims.
The future of gaming ain't looking too bright.
a very informative article. definitely looking forward to mind blowing graphics. but if it is too risky for them then just focus on the story and the gameplay instead. i will happily buy a game with quality gameplay and story with decent graphics
This is so true. The Verge had a great article about the state of gaming.
interesting.. funny but interesting... wii was freak luck & nintendo thinks that families & senior citizens will go running after wii U like last time.. AAA 3rd party games dont sell squat on nintendo systems.. Only (well mostly) Ninny makes games that sell on anything they put out.. They can move in a different direction but since this cloud gaming thing is obviously going to happen, many costs of development will go down & only need ONE form instead of multiconsole versions of the same game to stream across every smartphone, smart tv, computers, systems, etc.. & it will cut costs on various other things like physical distribution.. This upcoming generation will probably be the last for home consoles.. after that, if u want physical games, u will need handhelds & even thats in danger when cloud gaming takes off.. by 2016 or so the majority of households will have internet connections & a device that can run max spec'd PC quality games & nintendo will just be its own entity for family friendly fun... But most families including the ones shown for wii u ads, have tablets & smartphones so u do the math