Once again on the actual main topic of this thread... Dragon Age OUTSOLD EXPECTATIONS on the PC and yet they still do this. Ridiculous.
AdrianWerner said:
nope, they faded while your beloved big budgeters were all rage, now that those big productions are gone those genres are coming back
... What kinds of big budget games are you referring to, here, if you're bringing things all the way to 2004... and what scale of budgets are you referring to... I still think we are talking about very different things...
Remember, budgets depend on the time they are from. A "big budget" 1994 production is very different from a 1998 one or a 2008 one... each must be compared by the standards of their time. There used to be much more variety of higher-budget games. And they used to be PC-centric -- today, you can only really take that for granted with MMOs and hardcore strategy games, for almost anything else there's a good likelihood that console versions were in mind from the beginning too...
If you design the PC game as it would have been anyway that doesn't always affect anything, but if you compromise your PC design because you're also thinking of console gamers, or make your PC game simpler because you think it's what gamers want now, that's very different. And that happens a lot these days I think.
How is it a problem? It's only such if you assume that the only correct way for PC gaming to exist is to be densely filled with big budgeted exclusives. That's just your opinion, in reality there's nothing wrong with being niche. Most hobbies people have are niche and nobody sees it as a problem.
Plus, you seem to be shocked that games from niche genres don't have monsterous budgets. As it hasn't been this way in pretty much every single entertainment medium.
Of course niche things have smaller budget. The point is though, more genres used to be popular. And even just within the genres that are now popular, things were different. Not better in every way, there are some great things about PC gaming today, such as the easy access of games from all over... but different, in ways both good and bad.
2004 was the boiling point and the moment when the market changed, but it was the highest point of this trend. It was the time when truly big games got insanely expensive to make, but still most pc devs didn't see the change soon enough to push the brakes down.
Once again, no, you're wrong. 2004? As I said, by 2004, the North American PC gaming industry was already well on the way to dead. That process started in about 1999, as budgets started to go past sales.
The late '90s to early '00s era was PC gaming at its best, but it also was sadly on the verge of decline... you are at least right that that moment was obviously not sustainable. But it is quite odd that you extend things several years past the beginning of the problems. It started earlier.
1999, one year after gaming's best year ever (across all platforms), was the year that Sierra and Lucasarts, two of the best developers of the '80s and '90s, began to self-destruct. Lucasarts refocused from a developer which made all kinds of games to one that made just Star Wars games and the occasional Indiana Jones game. By the early '00s they shut down most internal development and became the Star Wars/Indiana Jones licensing house that they are today. Sierra dropped their signature genre, adventure games, closed their original studio and many others, and began shedding people, studios, and projects in a multi-year collapse that ended up in their being assimilated and destroyed by Activision. Both collapses started in 1999. As the two were two of my five favorite developers at the time, this really was a big blow... which was made worse several years later as Interplay, another one of my top 5, also struggled almost to a halt. They were brought down by the fact that Brian Fargo, Interplay's founder, had messed up badly in the mid '90s when he sold the company to Titus, a decision which turned out to be an extremely bad one... at least unlike Sierra and Lucasarts though, their premiere studio, Black Isle, kept up a very high quality level until the end. Sierra and Lucasarts admittedly had let their quality levels drop some, with games like King's Quest VIII, Star Wars: Force Commander, and such.
Not really. Modern niche games often have bigger budgets that what you considered "large" in late 90s. However around the time Half-life debuted the acceptance for niche dropped to hell. People were stiill making them, but in majority of cases those titles turned into swan songs. One niche game after another was launching and then flopping epically, dragging it's devs down. Nowadays niche games are doing fine, while back then they often led to death of the developer who was making them. The moment FPS and RTS populairity reached their peak was the moment everything else started to slowly die out.
Budgets naturally have to rise with time, as tech gets better. When I say "large" or "small" I would always mean in regards to the time it's from, of course. You can't directly compare development costs from one era to the next directly.
Compared to budgets from their time, the kind of "niche" games you are probably referring to from the past had much higher budgets proportional to big-budget games from the time than the "niche" games of today do. Of that I have little doubt, though it'd be helpful if you'd give more examples of what you mean by "niche" versus "large"...
The moment FPS and RTS populairity reached their peak was the moment everything else started to slowly die out.
Tying those two things together just makes absolutely no sense. How in the world do popular, successful PC games somehow kill it? No.
You're right that that is the era when things started to falter, but saying that games like Half-Life are somehow why is ridiculous. It happened because of budgets, greed, over-reaching, bad decisions in some publishers (such as the ones that took down Sierra and Interplay; in both cases the problems were much more internal than systemic, I think.) and Microsoft going console. And some other stuff, see my thread.
But no, I am sure that the success of Half-Life had nothing to do with, say, why Grim Fandango sold below expectations. That was more because the adventure game genre was already in serious decline, since the million clones of Myst failed to sell (overload any genre and that happens), taking out the whole genre with it...
It's very complicated, and very hard to find the exact reasons for this kind of thing (the US/Western Europe developmental focus all moving strongly in the console direction). I don't have an entirely satisfactory answer yet.
They did tempt devs, but what's more important is that they tempted gamers. Every market has limited ammount of money in it. As long as there are only small fishes in that pond it's ok, but once you put couple giants in there the food is no longer enough to sustain the whole ecosystem, the smaller predators die out. Eventualy the big fished grew into sizes that were too big even the whole pond, so they needed to jump to another to keep growing.
However once they left, there suddenly was once again plenty of food there, thus the population of small fishes started to slowly getting rebuilt.
Gamers? Gamers follow the games. Microsoft went console and sold gamers on Halo, so they went console... had Microsoft stayed on PCs instead, many more people, and developers, would have stayed on PCs...
If you look at sales of big PC hits you will notice that before late 90s it was rare for a game to sell many millions of copies. When million or even multimillion sellers started to become more common, they simply have eaten a large portion of how much money there was left to be spent on less pretty, more niche and less advertised products. PC market was constantly growing during 90s, but not fast enough.
Every generation of consoles overall has sold more systems than the generation before. That is, over time gaming gets more popular and successful. I have little doubt that this is true on the PC too -- hardcore PC-centric gaming is dying, but casual PC gaming is in its best shape ever thanks to Facebook games and such.
That is, I'd expect newer games to sell more overall than older ones... and also, the pie (PC+console at least) gets larger over time.
I do think that MMOs have had an impact on sales for other genres, though. I mean, with so much time and money going into games with monthly fees, cash shops, etc, people have got to be spending less on other games... that's got to hurt things.
DD helps with two biggest hurdles for any niche product: avaibility on shelves and profit margins. This along with less competition from giants has created much more friendly enviorement for independent devs (I don't mean just indie, but broadly those devs that aren't owned by everybody else) and it shows. Look at it this way, on consoles DD is much weaker and there market is filled with big budgeted games, have you noticed that in few shorts years independent console devs became almost extinct? While on PC they still form the majority of active studios.
What about any of the points I made about this, though? You say this without even referring at all to my points on this exact subject, such as that for the average person DD-only games are much less visible than boxed products, that going DD only cuts you off from the mass market and instead focuses your sales only on your core base (that is, that it's in somewhat less healthy), etc...
As for publishers, I don't think that you're really right about that. If you are, it's only because those PC studios you're referring to are mostly in Eastern and Central Europe, places where the big American and Western European publishers haven't gotten in as much... can you really show that, say, in America PC developers are mostly independent, while console developers aren't?
I mean, it might be hard... first you'd actually need to find PC-centric developers in the US. That leaves you with MMO companies only, I guess. And a lot of the bigger ones are tied to major publishers. There are exceptions of course, but really the whole industry has been consolidating, not just the console side.
You're right that DD has been a big boost to indie developers, though, certainly. It's much easier for indies to get their games noticed than it used to be, and that's fantastic. Huge boost to gaming.
Actualy it is genre wise. We've seen ressurgences of genres and game types that were dying out 8 -10 years ago. At the same time the games we are lacking (pretty much mosty exclusive FPSes), didn't even exist in 80s. Of course there are differences, but I've just meant the general trend among genres and push to niche, hence why I described it as "modernized version of what it was in 80s and early 90s."
That isn't true. Can you name even one genre other than adventure games that is in better shape now than it was ten years ago? Other than FPSes and MMOs, I mean...
One genre (adventure games) is not a sign of a wider trend.
It is? I'm not seeing it. There never has been less variety in mainsteam (ie.with big budgets) cosole gaming as there is now. Not to mention console exclusives have pretty much died out too because of rising costs. Nobody is willing to make one unless he gets paid by MS or Sony.
Even though it is true that on consoles genres have shrunk a bit, with the current stupid idea that 'hardcore means FPS' or whatever they're thinking, still, I think it's incontestable that the console market has a much better genre variety than the PC market does.
I don't. I think it is how it used to be, or at least quickly heading that way. It's you who can't accept the reality and have baseless expectations that it should be something it never was.
Your ideas of what the PC market was, and is, make no sense...