Disclaimer- This will be heavily opinionated. If this does not fit your opinion then I appreciate that but don't take it out on me.
So the gaming industry isn't in the best of shape currently. We've all seen it - EA voted worst company in America, The WarZ crisis and the hatred at CoD: Ghosts spawn system. It's my mission to try and see why this is happening. In my opinion, Developers and Publishers are doing a few things wrong.
Firstly, there is a massive problem with, well I guess you could call it coping but it's not real copying. Companies are seeing an idea become popular and trying to replicate it in an attempt to earn money. So far we've seen it in zombie/apocalypse multiplayer survival games originating from DayZ mod of Arma 2. Honey Badgers (Imaged above) is an example of the type of game influenced by the success of the Angry Birds series. There has been countless MOBAs released from the success of DOTA 2 and League of Legends in recent years. It would be unfair to say all of these were because of the originals but a lot have been. When I review games it's the first thing I look for - Has this got any aspects that resemble that of another popular game and to what extent is it. Unfortunately, it's not just the small companies either. EA's new beta of Dawngate even had what appeared to be the same character movements from League of Legends itself with some design aspects of Infinite Crisis. The idea of the MOBA genre is to make money from the competitive scene, not just the characters in the game being sold. I get that there's a lot of games out there so it's hard to come up with unique ideas but I've done it and I'm not even paid to think up ideas. Get your research and idea generation departments replaced by gamers who know what they're on about.
My second point is to do with creativity. Again and again we see sequels of popular games that aren't as good as everyone thought they would be but they still sell. A good example of this is Call of Duty: Ghosts. It bought very little new features to the series other than a few game modes, new guns etc. but nothing major. Yet still people paid a large amount of money for it and then complained. It happens every year, people buy the game and get angry at it then buy he next one the year after expecting something different. In business terms it's what is known as a "cash cow", it requires very little work and can be milked for money continuously. What companies should be doing is to reinvent things, make things different so that people gain interest, just something to set it apart from the last game. Assassins Creed must of realised that they needed something new from Ezio because 3 was so much better than the past titles. Bioshock Infinite went from Rapture to Columbus and it is winning a lot of Game of the Years. This is the kind of thing that companies should be doing. As I said before, hire gamers for research, because no corporate high level market analyst knows as much about gaming and games as a gamer.
Think about that guys, and don't forget you can leave comments and opinions below.
By Patrick (FromFearRises)
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