Everything is failing! Another video game crash is on the horizon!

Or not.

Well to be honest they seem to make games a lot different these days. I Always thought they came up with a core mechanic and made sure that that core mechanic (jumping or shooting or puzzle solving or...) worked and was fun to do for thousands of time. All the other things weren't all that important. SO they created very fun and addicting games.

Now they seem to think they know how a game mechanic works and don't seem to put much effort in it, resulting in bland gameplay that in most game gets boring in long game sessions. All there time and budget seems to go in graphics and not in gameplay. (and buy graphics I mean all aspects of it: how the level looks, physics, mo cap, interaction,...)

Too ambitious is surely one point. All the people I know including myself constantly overestimating their own abilities. In real time everything just takes much longer than in your imagination. So I guess that many programming teams despite their professional experience, constantly aim too high and either get into time pressure or financial problems and deliver an unfinished, buggy, unpolished game. Remedy would be to design somewhat simpler games.

Second is that they do not get enough outside input, connections with the consumers. Even if all the dev people are big fans of their developed game, it still can be that consumers find it boring. You just live in your own fantasy world when surrounded by people who are like-minded. For example an official statement from CDP shortly before release of Witcher 2 was that Witcher 2 is much better than Skyrim. Guess which game was more successful.

Poor programming? I don't believe so. If you have enough experienced programmers and enough time, modern games should be doable.

Lack of imagination? Doesn't matter at all. Every year there is a new soccer, baseball, shooter... game and people buy it. You just need to make something similar to what's already there but with a tiny bit better graphics and people will buy it, because they are bored with the previous version.

Missing a big enough target audience, because of genre or style. I.e. the Darksiders games.

This is why gaming is massively antithetical to big business. Gaming is a artform in a constant state of flux, and ambition is necessary to create good games. It's not like a movie, where the bulk of the creativity comes in the scriptwriting and acting and is more a matter of skill and time than actual finances.

The depth and ambition of a game will affect its budget and resource management massively, and yet, it is still possible for one individual (at least a very talented one) to create a masterpiece that a corporate team of 100 would make. Not only that, but tools to create great and unique games that are artistically valuable are available for free, while the big-business approach is constrained by budgets with too many fingers in the pie.

Not to mention that gaming will never achieve the same kind of mass appeal that film has for one simple reason - time. Watching a movie takes up 2-3 hours of your time. Listening to music can be done in the background. But games require expenditure of time and effort that many people do not have. Gaming is something that you really need to have a passion for. And when major publishers expect constant growth in returns, this expectation flies in the face of the inherent problem of trying to market gaming as a mass market product.

I never noticed that. Whenever I have car trouble they are right there for me. :P

It somehow sickens me that everyone seems to measure success in financial terms. This obsession with money will the downfall of society, I swear.

How do you measure success? Knowing that you created a game that is artistically valuable, that you feel good about and that will be remembered for years to come, or creating a soulless cash-in that makes you lots of money but is forgotten in a year's time and that nobody is playing now?

Let me give you two examples from 2003: Beyond Good and Evil and Enter the Matrix.

Beyond Good and Evil was a labour of love for Michel Ancel, and despite glowing reviews it sold ridiculously poorly. The passion that went into the game is apparent, and it is a game that is still remembered fondly ten years down the line. Hell, you can still see copies of it sold in retail stores today (under the Purple Hills label for €5 in Germany).

Compare that with Enter the Matrix, a game that was made with one purpose in mind - to make money as a tie-in to The Matrix Reloaded. It sold 5 million copies, and yet it is remembered with a great deal of cynicism today. Very few people have fond memories of it, and I can imagine that it was pretty soul-destroying for the devs.

How is The Witcher 2 remembered today? As a game that is well-written, a labour of love of a development studio that decided to stand in the face of commercial bandwagon-jumping.

How is Skyrim remembered today? As a buggy, drawn-out mess that was rushed out of the door to maximise profit and with DLC of patchy quality at best.

Skyrim might have made more money, but I consider Witcher 2 to be the more successful game.

I know that this might be a controversial way to address things, but you have to look at it from the company's point of view as well. No matter how much we somewhat complain about the issue games costing $40/50/60 nowadays, I think some have made the point that, when you adjust for inflation, the cost isn't really significantly higher than you would have paid for a typical game in the past. I think I saw somewhere that Ishar 2 for the AMIGA cost 30 pounds back in 1993. That's $46 without adjusting for inflation already.

In that sense, games are somewhat cheaper in terms of real money than they were in the past, and they need to be because they are more mainstream nowadays. However, being mainstream means that AAA games have to appeal to the lowest common denominator. This means a strong focus on graphics (with certain exceptions, i.e. DS games) and other sorts of snazzy special effects. This all costs a lot of money and time, which in a traditional business model has to be supported by a big company that has to meet the demands of investors who want constant improvements on a daily/weekly basis or w/e. The obvious net result is that AAA games usually don't have a long production time, and even if they did, the focus is often more on making people admire the screenshots and eye candy more than the game play.

Ultimately, the point is that AAA games today are more of a popular commodity like movies than hobby material as they were 10+ years ago. Indie development is definitely a way to combat the issues that AAA games face, but it has its own issues too.

Too high budgets, too much copy-and-paste (i.e. just mimicking other successful titles), too much focus on super-shiny-HD-graphics, too little focus on the game actually being fun. Oh and far too much outsourcing. If ten or so companies and sub-companies work separately on different parts of the game, the whole will never work together as intended.

i think a very big problem is publishers saying "o look! game X <yesimplyingcodhere> sell good, so if our game looks like game X it will also sell good

example: i recently watched the angryjoe review of aliens:colonial marines (don't have it myself) and one of hid big complaints (aside from the AI and such) was that 3 of the 10 levels were COD clone human vs human only fights, in a franchise about awesome monsterous creatures like aliens!

this way the dissapointed fans of the aliens and made it feel half-*ssed (again, that was his opinion, and that of the belgian game magazine i read), while not really appealing COD-onlyplayes because it was not COD

Trying to please too many people at the same time, with the sole aim of making massive profits. Mega-budget games are FORCED to be aimed at Joe Average because he's where the money is and publishers need to first of all recoup their money and then (hopefully) make a killing. But this necessitates making compromises and dumbing games down (or "streamlining" them) to the point where they become mediocre and characterless, a bit like a lot of pop music these days. Unfortunately commercialism has ruined video gaming, just as it has ruined a lot of things. Gaming and making games is essentially something CREATIVE and not something commercial. It's no great wonder to me that the PC games industry has ended up in a pickle. I've still got faith, though, that something amazing can rise from the ashes. People who make games should not merely be technically or commercially brilliant people, they need to first and foremost be CREATIVELY brilliant people.

Misuse of budget.

Too ambitious, ie. they use too much money on developing the games and expect them to sell very high to cover those inflated expenses. The can be only so many high-selling CODs out there.

Unfortunately (for game publishers) people are more and more becoming accustomed to pay only few bucks or so to get something to play, which may be why many parents rather buy their kids IPad games instead of XBox360/PS3/Wii games.

I think the big publishers are slowly learning though, now they are starting to release sub-$20 games as well, like that new Far Cry 3 spin-off, or Gunslinger. So they are at least trying to adapt to changing market.