Posted September 03, 2012
Looong Version
So, I'm going to ignore the tired bullshit of "You just enjoyed those games because you were younger then. Nostalgia = Your Opinion is Wrong. The End.", and look at things more practically.
Every generation of games has derivative knockoffs. That's been the case for as long as video games have existed. So, argument over? Knock off for lunch?
Nope.
The difference is that now it's the top-billed SUCCESSFUL games that are derivative rather than ONLY the cheaper knock-offs. The AAA market is FULL of redundant sequels, regurgitated gameplay and dumbed-down/streamlined/simplified (whichever you prefer) mechanics.
To understand why, you need to know the motivations of who is creating these games.
Currently, the two main forces are Developers and Publishers. Or Indie and AAA.
So rather than comparing Old to New, I'm going to compare New to New.
1) Indie Games Industry
It's booming now because of mechanical (and now visual) variety.
The market is finally large enough to sustain that variety at their level, and because of their indie-nature, they are actually compelled to innovate, rather than just compete at a "business as usual" level.
Mechanical interactions are greater in variety in a genre or sub-genre of gaming, and the player generally has more autonomy in how to use them.
And even the "derivatives" of the successful indie games tend to create overlap for design. (Terraria vs Minecraft.)
Otherwise, the market tends to reject direct/inferior copies more quickly. It's competition at work, or at least closer to a market that isn't choked out by monopolistic practices.
2) AAA Games Industry
Compared to the AAA scene where a small handful of HUGE publicly-traded companies control or flat-out own nearly ALL development.
The two best selling games of last year were both direct derivatives of their respective franchises (Skyrim, of TES, and CoD4.4 of CoD4.x.), keeping in mind that despite this, they outsold their competition by MIND BLOWING proportions.
The best selling game for the last 3 years was a derivative of other shooters.
So what gives? Is it solely the market's fault? In a way, yes. But more specifically, there are too few Publishers who control the market.
It's an oligopoly (near-monopoly).
Fewer suppliers dictating what goes on sale in a strong market = bad for the consumer's choices.
There are about 10 major gaming publishers involved in mainstream gaming, but half of them are the impotent fallen Japanese giants (No direct offense to Japan, but it's clear that apart from Nintendo, Japan doesn't have nearly the influence over gaming that it used to), and among the 5 biggest western publishers, three of them wield distinctly higher influence over the market than the others (EA, Ubisoft, and Activision-Blizzard).
Personal Example: Tribes
I waited for YEARS for another game like Tribes. This year, I finally got my wish.
Why didn't I even see such a game for 7 years? Because Activision refused to sell the rights for such a long time after absorbing Sierra, even though they clearly weren't doing anything with the IP.
And since no other publisher was going to make such a game (since it would work poorly on console controls), it wasn't going to get made period, because that would betray the oligopoly.
It wasn't that there was no market for it (as Tribes Ascend clearly disproves in hindsight), it was that said market was of no interest to the few publishers in the oligopoly.
Of course, barring necessity goods, you can only bend economic forces so far; not break them entirely. The consequences of an oligopoly is that when someone wins, they win BIG. When they lose, they lose just as big.
Stakes increase as the market demographic/overlap decreases; by broadening their games to have wider market appeal, they have ironically shrunk the acceptable design space, and have DECREASED the potency of their games appeal in the long run.
Some have called it "Genre Homogenization", but I prefer to call it "Genre Inbreeding", since the problem becomes more pronounced with each generation of sequels.
If the customer's only choices are Derivative Game A and Derivative Game B, whichever one wins is going to win by a HUGE margin (due to the nature of popularity).
Tangent on Multiplayer
Multiplayer is essential to games that aren't procedurally generated, and to developers who don't want to spend more time/money creating static content. This is how CoD4.x effectively took over Halo's role in the shooter market. Don't take my word for it, check out online usage numbers of Halo Reach before and after CoD4.3: Black Ops. The correlation could not be any more clear.)
This, in turn, means that even if the loser made profits, it lost out on economic profits, which basically means that whoever won gained more market share than whoever lost; often by taking market share away from the loser (assuming the market did not grow or shrink. Economics can get complicated :\)
(The MMO market is the prime example here, actually, but it goes beyond the scope of this topic)
Tangent on Skyrim an TES
(Though Skyrim, is a slightly different case. Despite being a prettier, dumbed down copy of Oblivion, it outsold everything because there aren't many games like it in the first place.
Honestly, I would like TES games a lot more if Bethesda would quit subtracting depth from them each iteration, and fix their monstrous glitches/bugs)
HE HEART OF THE MATTER: They compete to make their games accessible rather than unique or truly innovative because they are fighting over a smaller number of markets that they themselves, limited. And if "Increasing Accessibility", means eliminating depth, then so be it.
This has become especially true following the recession. Most of the gaming giants are falling in some manner or another, and the very greatest have fallen the furthest.
In a regressing market, their motivations have changed from to creating new markets, to sustaining their existing market. To eliminate competition directly rather than expanding their folios; primarily by outlasting the other guys.
In other words: "Don't change what works." became "Preserve what works, ignore everything else, and hope we outlast the other guys."
Incidentally, this is probably why companies like EA and Activision are stockpiling IPs they will never commit to or sell. Better to keep such properties away from possible competition than to let anyone else have it.
It's counter-intuitive, but that's what they're doing, because they fear innovation.
They fear losing that wide-market appeal, even as they flail helplessly.
They fear breaking their own oligopoly which they have profited greatly from for years, and no for-profit company would ever want to lose that.
And the longer they stick to this cycle, the worse it becomes, and the better those Retro Games look.
So it's NOT just Nostalgia Goggles; it's NOT just asshole hipsters whining (though they are out there, loudly whining to anyone who will listen). Many of these old gaming giants ARE stagnating if not dying.
Even Activision is merely treading water, rather than rising exponentially as one would expect.
And this explanation/wild tangent went on for entirely too long.
So, I'm going to ignore the tired bullshit of "You just enjoyed those games because you were younger then. Nostalgia = Your Opinion is Wrong. The End.", and look at things more practically.
Every generation of games has derivative knockoffs. That's been the case for as long as video games have existed. So, argument over? Knock off for lunch?
Nope.
The difference is that now it's the top-billed SUCCESSFUL games that are derivative rather than ONLY the cheaper knock-offs. The AAA market is FULL of redundant sequels, regurgitated gameplay and dumbed-down/streamlined/simplified (whichever you prefer) mechanics.
To understand why, you need to know the motivations of who is creating these games.
Currently, the two main forces are Developers and Publishers. Or Indie and AAA.
So rather than comparing Old to New, I'm going to compare New to New.
1) Indie Games Industry
It's booming now because of mechanical (and now visual) variety.
The market is finally large enough to sustain that variety at their level, and because of their indie-nature, they are actually compelled to innovate, rather than just compete at a "business as usual" level.
Mechanical interactions are greater in variety in a genre or sub-genre of gaming, and the player generally has more autonomy in how to use them.
And even the "derivatives" of the successful indie games tend to create overlap for design. (Terraria vs Minecraft.)
Otherwise, the market tends to reject direct/inferior copies more quickly. It's competition at work, or at least closer to a market that isn't choked out by monopolistic practices.
2) AAA Games Industry
Compared to the AAA scene where a small handful of HUGE publicly-traded companies control or flat-out own nearly ALL development.
The two best selling games of last year were both direct derivatives of their respective franchises (Skyrim, of TES, and CoD4.4 of CoD4.x.), keeping in mind that despite this, they outsold their competition by MIND BLOWING proportions.
The best selling game for the last 3 years was a derivative of other shooters.
So what gives? Is it solely the market's fault? In a way, yes. But more specifically, there are too few Publishers who control the market.
It's an oligopoly (near-monopoly).
Fewer suppliers dictating what goes on sale in a strong market = bad for the consumer's choices.
There are about 10 major gaming publishers involved in mainstream gaming, but half of them are the impotent fallen Japanese giants (No direct offense to Japan, but it's clear that apart from Nintendo, Japan doesn't have nearly the influence over gaming that it used to), and among the 5 biggest western publishers, three of them wield distinctly higher influence over the market than the others (EA, Ubisoft, and Activision-Blizzard).
Personal Example: Tribes
I waited for YEARS for another game like Tribes. This year, I finally got my wish.
Why didn't I even see such a game for 7 years? Because Activision refused to sell the rights for such a long time after absorbing Sierra, even though they clearly weren't doing anything with the IP.
And since no other publisher was going to make such a game (since it would work poorly on console controls), it wasn't going to get made period, because that would betray the oligopoly.
It wasn't that there was no market for it (as Tribes Ascend clearly disproves in hindsight), it was that said market was of no interest to the few publishers in the oligopoly.
Of course, barring necessity goods, you can only bend economic forces so far; not break them entirely. The consequences of an oligopoly is that when someone wins, they win BIG. When they lose, they lose just as big.
Stakes increase as the market demographic/overlap decreases; by broadening their games to have wider market appeal, they have ironically shrunk the acceptable design space, and have DECREASED the potency of their games appeal in the long run.
Some have called it "Genre Homogenization", but I prefer to call it "Genre Inbreeding", since the problem becomes more pronounced with each generation of sequels.
If the customer's only choices are Derivative Game A and Derivative Game B, whichever one wins is going to win by a HUGE margin (due to the nature of popularity).
Tangent on Multiplayer
Multiplayer is essential to games that aren't procedurally generated, and to developers who don't want to spend more time/money creating static content. This is how CoD4.x effectively took over Halo's role in the shooter market. Don't take my word for it, check out online usage numbers of Halo Reach before and after CoD4.3: Black Ops. The correlation could not be any more clear.)
This, in turn, means that even if the loser made profits, it lost out on economic profits, which basically means that whoever won gained more market share than whoever lost; often by taking market share away from the loser (assuming the market did not grow or shrink. Economics can get complicated :\)
(The MMO market is the prime example here, actually, but it goes beyond the scope of this topic)
Tangent on Skyrim an TES
(Though Skyrim, is a slightly different case. Despite being a prettier, dumbed down copy of Oblivion, it outsold everything because there aren't many games like it in the first place.
Honestly, I would like TES games a lot more if Bethesda would quit subtracting depth from them each iteration, and fix their monstrous glitches/bugs)
HE HEART OF THE MATTER: They compete to make their games accessible rather than unique or truly innovative because they are fighting over a smaller number of markets that they themselves, limited. And if "Increasing Accessibility", means eliminating depth, then so be it.
This has become especially true following the recession. Most of the gaming giants are falling in some manner or another, and the very greatest have fallen the furthest.
In a regressing market, their motivations have changed from to creating new markets, to sustaining their existing market. To eliminate competition directly rather than expanding their folios; primarily by outlasting the other guys.
In other words: "Don't change what works." became "Preserve what works, ignore everything else, and hope we outlast the other guys."
Incidentally, this is probably why companies like EA and Activision are stockpiling IPs they will never commit to or sell. Better to keep such properties away from possible competition than to let anyone else have it.
It's counter-intuitive, but that's what they're doing, because they fear innovation.
They fear losing that wide-market appeal, even as they flail helplessly.
They fear breaking their own oligopoly which they have profited greatly from for years, and no for-profit company would ever want to lose that.
And the longer they stick to this cycle, the worse it becomes, and the better those Retro Games look.
So it's NOT just Nostalgia Goggles; it's NOT just asshole hipsters whining (though they are out there, loudly whining to anyone who will listen). Many of these old gaming giants ARE stagnating if not dying.
Even Activision is merely treading water, rather than rising exponentially as one would expect.
And this explanation/wild tangent went on for entirely too long.
