the community |
 |
17.6% (109) |
large corporations (like EA. Activision) |
|
44.1% (274) |
mobile (and casual) gaming |
|
3.9% (24) |
critics |
|
1% (6) |
the media |
|
6.4% (40) |
other |
|
13% (81) |
none. The industry is moving at its own pace, and nothing is holding it back. |
|
13.8% (86) |
Poll: What is holding gaming back, as an industry? Pages PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NEXT | |
I 'unno. As much as I might dislike the fanbase, they are keeping all the devs rolling in teh monehs, so I can't fault them. If forced to choose, I would have to say... increasing dev costs, I guess. They certainly have not done big-budget, AAA titles and favors, and have made the AAA business quite a bit more risk-adverse. But, good AAA games are still coming out, and the niche, indie, and downloadable scenes seem to be doing just fine. I just kind of wish AAA devs would mix things up a bit more... :( | |
Well said. I picked "other" because: Games are being treated just like rock and roll music was back in the 60s, the 'young' people loved it and the 'old' people didn't. Then the young people got old and the old people died so now rock and roll is serious stuff. [edit] OP: Holding the gaming industry back from what? | |
Elitism "Playing it safe" can count as well. | |
I was going to post this, but since it's already here... | |
Elitists. 'Nuff said. | |
The Vault. Remember a while ago when Movie-Bob (under the guise of The Game Overthinker) did his video entitled Open the Vault? If not here it is; Obviously there's a far bigger market for the next big thing, the next big console, the next installment of the big franchise etc. That being said, even the worst of movies are still available on some format or another whereas something like Predator on the NES can't legally be played unless you have the original cart, a working NES and the ability to play it on your TV or monitor. Bob's example (Dragon Warrior) is probably the better one since I didn't see it on the virtal console a couple hours ago and it's quickly becoming my favorite NES game and a JRPG I really wish I had to grow up with. It's hopeful and foolishly optimistic to hope that I'll be able to buy and play Ninja Batman Baseball, Superman (arcade) and, Simpson's (arcade) before the year is out without hitting the lottery. Emulators can be a good idea but I don't want to break the law if I want to play these games that are no longer available. Right now, I can go to Wal*Mart and buy TMNT 3. It's a piece of shit, even with the nostalgia glasses fogging my vision. I can buy every season of The Simpson's on DVD as well but I can't play their arcade games unless I either find a Chuck-E-Cheese that has them both or, find a privet owner who's willing to let me buy, rent or, use them. I think that's pretty messed up.
This too. I don't object to Gamestop being around but I do object to Gamestop gutting and, assimilating all of its rivals except Play-N-Trade and any other mom-n-pop stores. Gamestop needs some competition dammit! Haven't shopped there in about a year myself and strongly advice other people to buy their games elsewhere if/when possible. | |
Where is the option for "it's not"? Treating the consumer like shit or simply ignoring feedback is not holding the industry back. Consumers may become angry at the industry but until we speak with our wallets then nothing is going to keep the industry in check, let alone hold it back. | |
There is no 'community'. That suggests a level of agreement and commonality simply not present in the disjointed mass of gamer voices. There's just 'the masses', the teeming horde of conflicting viewpoints and ideas. This makes it hard for the game companies to make their products work, as catering to one section of the fanbase alienates another, and there's no way to 'win'. So they focus on catering to the largest groups, because that's where the money is, and thus new releases tend to be very close to the mold of old favorites to cash in on familiarity and nostalgia. Or the companies cater to the "casual" gamer with mobile games, or Facebook games, which causes the rest of the masses to sneer, and use the word "casual" as if it were the greatest of insults one could give, like it was a BAD thing for people not to devote majorities of their time to entertainment products. In the end, games are released, and it's up to the critics to point out flaws in the game, so the masses can learn the negative points, and weigh them against their own ideas of what the game should be to determine if it's the game for them. Too bad that doesn't happen. If something other than a purely technical flaw is pointed out, the rallying cry goes up that the critic "didn't get it" and the masses start to battle once again. The media takes interest in these battles, and journalists decide to try and cut their teeth on the issue, basing their own stance on the most vocal sections of the masses. And so the cry goes out once again among the rest, someone else "didn't get it" and the battles only intensify. So, in the end, the answer is Other. What's holding the industry back, ironically, are the fans. Because the fans want games that are familiar but non-traditional, harder but easier, longer but shorter, simple but complicated, and artful but straightforward. | |
I smell a 'Game's as art' thread... | |
Yeah and that has totally helped games get better...oh wait. Now everything is a dumbed down action game for the masses because it has to sell a billion copies to retake its absurd budget and thus must play it 100% safe and not try anything new. All while massive oversized publishers continue to try and justify their own existence by churning out blockbuster title after blockbuster title. Yup...that is totally the direction I am glad gaming took. | |
It's not really being held back, it's just being held up a little in it's progression, mainly because of the big ass publishers generally screwing things and people over and unpleaseable fanbases preventing devs from taking risks. | |
A lot of people are going to say big industries because hating on big industry is the 'cool thing' to do | |
In other words, you want gaming to die. Without appealing to the masses, the fanbase will only ever decrease, and games just won't be profitable or viable anymore, and they'll stop being made. Gaming will die because everybody stopped caring. | |
Nothing. Gaming has never thrived so much (also anyone who said "mobile gaming" is a few sandwiches short of a picnic) | |
large corporations. not because "hurr durr they're evil and only want moneyz", but because of a fear of failure. game devs should be given absolute reign over their product without corporations butting in to make things 'safer' so it sells better. they are constricting creativity is what i'm getting at really... | |
Stagnation caused by large publishers pressuring developers to stick to recreating what they have already done but making it bigger and "better". Indie games are where all the innovation is happening. EDIT: I must point out that as a whole gaming is progressing hugely. Its just the big mainstream games that are not moving fast enough. | |
Go play only pong and nothing else for a few days/weeks/months/years until you cant stand it anymore. Then come back and tell us why we dont need better tech. Better tech allows better AI for the opposition in our game, better tech allows for larger worlds and more in depth gameplay. With more space and more detail developers can make better stories, more relatable characters (As you start to climb out of the uncanny valley the characters become more relatable) OT; I picked large corporations because they strangle IPs and force companies to do stupid shit like tacked on multiplayer at the expense of singleplayer, unreasonable deadlines that lead to horrible games and or yearly releases. A close second would be consoles in general, but not because they are teh evil but because the average console user seems to need games dumbed down for them. Then again this comes back to the corporations for forcing devs to appeal to the widest possible audience, which is very rarely a good thing. | |
A little off topic, Fountain? This is the first time I have seen it and.....what the hell? And those interpretations, hahahaha. I am sorry, but to me, those interpretations listed seem to be extensively stretching this whole thing. On Topic, I would honestly say it is the community, because effectively, it is the community that make or break the game. They are the ones who decide whether it be a work of art or not. However, I don't like this whole art discussion as one can not be objective while analysing art. I prefer to declare or categorize something based on fact, rather than interpretation, but that is just me. However, I would be interested to hear why people think the big companies are to blame. | |
Just about everyone would get tired of playing the same simple game over and over. On the other hand, I've played most of the SNES library multiple times. I don't really ever get tired of the SNES library no matter how many hours I put into them. Also, Tale of Symphonia isn't old school, but it's also not super graphics intensive by today's standards. And I've played it over 600 hours. And to be honest, I like my retro-graphics. It looks nifty.
I guess better AI would be okay. But wouldn't better AI be just as well achieved by spending more time making better AI instead of better graphics? You'd have plenty of processing power for AI if you just dropped the graphics. And few groups are really using most of that new computing power for AI. Tell me how many modern games use their computing power for AI rather than graphics.
That doesn't seem to be the case typically. Gameplay doesn't seem to have gotten better at all with better graphics.
I haven't seen anything like that. Today's stories honestly don't seem really any better.
Only if you want photo realistic faces. Which I don't. And seems like a ridiculous waste of time. They should spend the time working on good gameplay, not realistic graphics. If I wanted realism, I'd go outside. Give me some good old 2D sprites and I'm good to go. | |
Next person to whinge about consoles having old guts gets curbstomped. Consoles have below cutting edge tech because filling them with the latest and greatest would put their price point well above what people will realistically pay for (see the PS3's launch for a good example of this). Consoles are about affordability and being easy to use. Also, not everyone wants to fiddle around inside their machine, some of us just want to boot it up and start playing. OT: I don't think there's really anything holding gaming back, but there are definitely a few things that it would be good if they changed. The higher budgets meaning less new ideas and more safe bets is a bit annoying, but the indie devs seem to be more than picking up the slack there. | |
I gotta say, I'm finding it tough to think of anything really holding the industry back. I think right now we're living in a grand time for the medium (let's face it, we're basically the dominant medium of every great new frontier in media and technology for this decade. The internet, social media, smartphones, fucking Kickstarter and the list goes on, and it's doing wonders for profits, size and reputation), but if there's one thing I think we could do more of it's establishing a standard development procedure and development team make-up. Not only would it make things a little clearer, but it would do wonders for people like me who've had to scrounge it off docos, dev-diaries, blogs and things like Extra Credits to get a very fractured understanding of how a game goes from concept to release. | |
Biggest problem right now is the escalating cost of content. It makes AAA games expensive, makes publishers very reluctant to take risks, and makes single player campaigns shorter and more linear as art directors can't bear the thought of users skipping content. We need much more use of procedural generation for models, textures, levels, NPCs, everything. I voted for 'corporations' because this stuff is technically possible, it's anti-innovation executives and entrenched 'traditional content pipeline' types that are holding us back. Second biggest problem is legacy console tech; the worst bit is not the low-fi graphics, it's the limited physics, AI and procedural that you can do within current console CPU & RAM limits. | |
The only thing I can really think of and this is hardly a huge major thing is that Devs are repeatedly releasing games with a huge amount of bugs in them, like not small ones who might not notice if you're doing a quick runthrough but ones that ruin the game or cause it to crash every single time and that either make the game impossible to play or just bloody frustrating. | |
EA. Not necessarily large companies as a whole (despite what could be considered bad about them, ZeniMax/Bethesda are quite excellent at pushing the industry forward in a good way), and there's more to it than just EA, but they've been leading the charge in crappy everything for years now. They nickel-and-dime customers, ruin developers, have horrible customer service, and in general only seem to care about the bottom line. And then they have the gall to hide behind an "artistic integrity" argument when what they put out is some of the worst "art" ever to be called "art". | |
Money. Publishers want to see large returns on games so we're on a tight leash as to what we get. Examples being the MMO market. We're still doing the same things and following the same kind of paths as we did in Ultima Online. All thats happened is MMO's have been polished up and improved in some ways but it's nothing different. As much as I want to like GW2 it still doesn't look like anything we haven't seen a hundred times before. We rarely see anything truly "new". That isn't because developers can't make the games it's because people want to see a return on them. They want to make money and the easiest way to do that is to polish ideas that are already there and make them shiny again. We won't "move forward" in leaps and bounds until we stop paying them for mediocre. | |
Another vote for consoles; the consoles this generation have been worthless pieces of junk. Also casual gamers. | |
I think that gamers who call other gamers lazy and stupid just for having different tastes are what's holding the industry back. | |
the background stuff. the AI especially. Sandbox games really need an upgrade in the background things. everything as a general rule is static and revolves around the player. there are exceptions but its still a minority. i want to play a game where i walk into a forest and the animals and plants arent just static and never changing, they grow and breed, die of diesase, migrate. i want the AI to suprise me. "i saved that village from bandits and now its got a palisade and more buildings from trade and i can see them being built, wow" | |
Yes it fucking is! Not everyone wants a challenge. Some people want something they can pick up and make explosions with. There's nothing wrong with devs making easy games for such an audience, nor is there anything wrong with devs adding in piss easy difficulty levels. I'm one of them. I don't care what anyone else says about it, I put my games on piss easy from day one. I don't want a challenge, I want fun with a side of rambo-esque badassery. If you want a hard game that's fine, but not everyone does, and people like me are just as legit an audience to make games for as people like you are. | |
I dont do all that fancy breaking up of quotes thing So I will just do bullet points in order, so without further delay! - you may replay that generation of games again and again, but I am sure you interspace it with modern gaming, which came about with new tech - I said better tech, not better graphics. They are not the same thing, better tech encompasses higher powered CPUs, better storage space, longer battery life, as well as graphics. And...thats not how it works, if you scale back graphics processing power doesn't get stronger. Graphics is completely different from the CPU in the machine. Most graphics cards have their own dedicated CPU these days. - Again, I didnt say graphics, I think you are far too hung up on that word. Tech =/= Graphics. With better tech comes rather interesting things like Mass Effect, where you bring in saves from a previous version of the game that populates the next game in the series with choices that wouldnt have been there. - Just because someone doesn't take full advantage of what is available to them makes it no less possible. - Just because you don't want something doesn't mean its not something others want. I think the indy companies who focus on lil side scroller 2d things should grow up and make real games, but doesn't mean that I would try to force my view onto them. | |
Publishers! They dictate on which platforms the game will be released, the dictate the funding, the deadline and they usually fuck up everything. Just look at Mass Effect 3. It should have been one of the greatest games ever made. If Bioware had more time it would have been. Unforgivable sin EA. Unforgivable. | |
There is nothing holding game back right now besides the people who play it. When people demand schlock, people get schlock, which isn't to say good things don't come out, it's just that they are inevitably overshadowed by the piles and piles of crap that comes out. Gaming as a medium is young and it is going to take time for it to reach the heights of things like film and books. For now all we can do is sit and watch as gaming grows and develops and try our hardest to contribute in anyway that we can. | |
Gaming did fine before it became main stream and for people who don't like mindless action games games becoming main stream has to nothing to advance games. Some genres have even been almost completely stalled for the last decade as publisher began refusing to take chances or publish games without mass appeal. Eliminating mainstream gaming would not kill or even hurt games for the rest of us. | |
This. Not to say that all sequels/remakes/reboots are bad. I've played a lot of them in my time and I've enjoyed the vast majority, but yeah. All things have to be prepared for a certain amount of risk in order to move forward, but when so much money, and so many jobs are on the line with each new AAA game that ships people just can't afford to take risks at the moment. | |
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I would say, in no particular order, Publishers, Gamestop, and gamers themselves.