Do We Need Annual Sequels to Games?

It seems to be a growing trend in the industry for games to release sequels every year as oppose to the every 2-4 years we expect from most sequels. Most recently appears to the Assassins Creed franchise, Ubisoft appears to be releasing Assassins Creed: Black Flag (the next in the franchise) later this year when Assassins Creed III only came out last year. On top of that they also have Assassins Creed: Rising Phoenix coming out on PS Vita. Assassins Creed is now arguable Ubisoft’s biggest franchise and it seems the big franchises can get a game every year, following in the footsteps of Call of Duty and FIFA, or any EA Sports game for that matter. More recent iterations of the Call of Duty franchise have added very little to the franchise and FIFA 13 did not improve nearly as much on its predecessor than FIFA 12 did. With very similar games coming out year upon year, is it worth paying full price retail for a few new bells and whistles?

To be fair, Infinity Ward and EA Sports aren’t nearly as guilty of releasing (arguably) worthless sequels as Capcom is. Much of Capcom’s history is based on releasing sequels that don’t exactly inspire innovation, probably at most fault is the Street Fighter franchise. In the early 90s it was the release of Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, Super Street Fighter II and Super Street Fighter II: Turbo. Each version added minimal changes, arguably not enough to warrant a whole new game. With so many versions, it’s no wonder Street Fighter II is Capcom’s best selling game to date (although being an incredible game in itself did help). Even today, in a world of DLC, Capcom still insisted on releasing Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, a sequel to Marvel vs Capcom 3 with refined gameplay, balancing and a few new characters. Ultimate MvC 3 released less than a year after the original, packaged as a new retail game and rightly so had people furious.

Hulk, it's not Spidey's fault Ultimate MvC 3 wasn't released as DLC

Capcom though is more the exception rather than the rule but it does beg to differ, in a world of DLC, is there a need to bring out sequels this often? £40 is a lot to be paying for a game and you’d hope that in about 9 months it doesn’t become outdated as talks of the sequel begin to murmur. After which, you don’t really want to spend another £40. DLC on the other hand can cost from £5-£12, roughly a quarter of the original price. At the moment DLC is often used to add a few new missions to games, but it could be used for much more. Instead of paying £40 for FIFA 13 imagine if you could pay £15 and get all the updates, tweaks and new modes (essentially everything FIFA 13 has over 12). I’m no programmer, but I know that small tweaks can be put in as an update, this regularly occurs as bugs are fixed so in theory it is possible. Or, imagine buying Call of Duty and then the next year getting a bunch of new maps, guns, missions and modes, all for a cut down price. Halo has been doing this for years already, adding new modes and playlists, for free!

Obviously, this sounds like a fairy tale world where big corporations actually care about their consumers. No developer is going to sell an update for £15 when they can sell a ‘new’ game for £40. However, in the world of PC games, something similar already happens. This is most apparent with The Sims franchise. The first Sims game launched in 2000 and now is currently on The Sims 3, that’s roughly a game every four years. Maxis, the developer has released many more Sims titles than just the three you would expect. The series releases countless expansion packs for its games, usually and half the price of the original. These expansion packs often add huge new content to the game, adding a totally new dynamic that other games would put into an outright sequel. For those of you who don’t know The Sims is a game where you control people living in a house and dictate their lives as if they were real. Each expansion pack gives you new items for your characters (known as Sims) as well as new places, actions, opportunities and more. Since its release in 2009 The Sims 3 has released 9 expansion packs! Each and every one adding a whole new dynamic to the game, and Maxis don’t seem to be slowing down with the release of another later this year. If you bought the game as well as all 9 expansion packs you would have spent £165 in almost four years, on one game! If Maxis released a Sims game annually at £30 each, they would have made £120. So, expansion packs actually have the potential to generate more revenue than standalone titles. Also, gamers get choice as to which packs they want to buy and so pick and choose the features they will utilise, a win, win?

Even in a rich man's world money isn't funny

The problem with expansion packs is that they change the game to such an extent that it often requires the games to be installed and hence possibly why it has not caught on within console games. However this could change, there are rumours the new Xbox will require you to install games and will not allow you to run the games off the disc. This seems like a great opportunity, if implemented correctly, to allow expansion packs into the console market.

The games industry is ever changing, particularly the way we buy games. In the past few years Steam has taken off, Free-to-Play seems to be the next big thing, while mobile devices have shown how you can sell a game at a tiny price and still make it profitable. The next generation of consoles could see a huge change in the way we buy and play games. Gamers love a bargain, developers love to make money, with the right infrastructure we could see annual sequels replaced by big DLC packages similar to Expansion Packs. It seems like a win for everyone, but what really decides if a change like this will occur, is if developers and publisher make more money from it that the current model. Money makes the world go round, the real and the virtual.

Should all Games Require an Internet Connection?

SimCity comes out today in the UK and came out earlier this week elsewhere (damn you rest of the world!). It’s the first proper SimCity game by developer Maxis since 2003 and there’s a huge focus on multiplayer play. Different players take control of different cities and develop alongside each other, potentially in real time. This is EA’s excuse for making the game require a constant internet connection, you can’t play the game without one, that coupled with a server issues has led to the standard trashing of SimCity on Metacritic user reviews, as I’m writing this there are 1,180 negative reviews with an average of 1.5 (out of 10). This is clearly an issue that has riled much of the SimCity community, but with piracy being such a huge issue, is it right for developers to require an internet connection?

Let’s not kid ourselves, EA has clearly implemented this scheme on SimCity as DRM (Digital Rights Management), in other words to stop piracy. Piracy is a huge problem for all media industries, film and TV suffer just as badly as games and music suffers worse. Beside the point that it is criminal, piracy gives developers a hard time. They lose money because of it because fewer people buy their games. You may think that someone like EA or another gaming behemoth may not be affected, you’d be wrong. These companies are still profitable despite piracy, but the situation could be very different. Video games are one of the lesser affected industries by piracy so that with the fact that most people never see or hear about developers means the effects are often a little less evident. EA may not be crashing down because of piracy, even Maxis will probably survive despite it, but its smaller developers, those without huge financial backing and with whose livelihoods depend on one game, they are the biggest losers from piracy.

The kind of video game pirate publishers don't hate

I mentioned in a previous article that developers can invest lots of money into a game and often rely on one game at a time, particularly the smaller ones. By putting all their eggs into one basket, there is a huge risk involved and if that game fails, then the company may also go bust. Smaller developers need all the money they can get, they do not make millions, many struggle to simply stay afloat, so the loss of a tens or hundreds of copies can be detrimental potentially. Every year, countless games companies are shut down, earlier this year we had THQ, a huge games publisher, close down, no doubt piracy played a part in that.

These small developers are often independent and so not only do they get less funding, less of their games get bought, pirating an indie game means you are denying a larger percentage of potential profit than if you pirated a blockbuster game. The indie game development scene is trying to find a way of reaching out to a wider community, if that wider community is not buying their games, indie developers may have a very limited future.

Almost everyone will agree (most hypocritically) that piracy is wrong, most people however don’t care. They do not see the effects of it and are stuck in their own individual world. Even those who don’t pirate may have a problem with anti-piracy measures. These measures, like requiring a constant internet connection can be frustrating and problematic and they punish the good, the bad and the ugly.

Though not as big a problem in the Western world, not all gamers have access to an internet connection. By implementing such a scheme means you have already alienated a proportion of your market, hence you are already losing money. The number of people cut out must be less than the number who would have pirated the game but have instead bought it, otherwise it makes no financial sense.

The internet is not a universal amenity, it may seems so in the West but go to slightly poorer countries where gamers still do exist and you’ll find people who are left out by such schemes totally. Even in the West, though most people may have internet, not everyone has a connection that is fast or reliable enough to handle a game, so that’s even more people cut out, unnecessarily you could argue. Playing an online game and seeing lag and frame-rate drops will show you how many people still don’t have an internet connection that is good enough for pristine gaming. Not only is there the speed of the whole service but the reliability of it too. Cheap ISPs often have poor service and games will require a constant uninterrupted connection. You would have seen your FIFA match destroyed by poor connection as if a certain Turkish referee had come and refereed the game. In SimCity you might see hours of hard work destroyed by an intermittent connection as if you’d unleashed a disaster in your city.

"EA Servers are down, we apologise for fu***ing up your game"

It is not necessarily on your side either. EA has been having server issues all week with SimCity (and for a considerable amount of time longer for other games), thus stopping people playing a game which they have paid £35 for. You've done nothing wrong, and yet you can’t play your game because EA have screwed up (again).

With the internet always comes the idea of safety. Though unlikely, having your game constantly connected means that it is more vulnerable than if it wasn't  SimCity for many will still be a single player game and running the risk of losing something in game or having your account hacked is not worth it simply to play multiplayer with others.

Piracy is a huge problem for the gaming industry and it is only gaining momentum. Already developers are going bust and this will only continue unless piracy rates decrease. But no one likes being forced to do something, particularly when you feel like you’re being punished for the wrong-doing of others. In order to stop piracy developers, publishers and distributors will have to find a more ingenious method. At the end of the day, can you really prevent piracy? The only way to stop it is to change people’s mind sets. Gamers need to be persuaded to part with their cash, not be forced to. Publishers need to take a more softly softly approach. They need to deal with the situation like Gandhi and not like Stalin, after all, India is a rising superpower and Russia, well isn't.

PS4 Reveal: What has Sony learnt from Microsoft?

On Wednesday Sony held a huge event and officially announced the PS4 (sort of). They were sparing with details but announced some key changes. Firstly, the PS4 would not support DualShock and their controller is a little different. They also announced some hardware specifications as well as some new social features of the system. There were the clear beginnings of an evolution of a console generation, part of that was Sony fixing the PS3’s shortcomings with ideas from Microsoft (as I prepare to be lynched by PlayStation fanboys).

"For Man Hands!" (not my words)

The biggest and most detailed part of the announcement was the new PS4 controller. The controller has taken several points from the 360 controller and although it hasn’t copied the 360 controller outright it has definitely been influenced by it. The PS3 controller was often described as “for small girlish hands” (not my words) and it appears Sony have reacted to this, the PS4 controller is much bulkier than the PS3 controller, part of this is due to the touch pad but it is generally bigger too. The two handles are thicker and more ergonomically shaped than before, they look as though they fit your hands a lot better. This is much like a 360 controller which is considerable bigger than a PS3 controller.

The shoulder buttons (that’s L/R1/2) no longer stick out of the top of the controller and instead are incorporated into the curved top of the controller, like with the Xbox. This should make it easier to wrap your fingers around the buttons. The triggers have also changed (thank God!). The PS3 triggers (L/R2) were one of the worst things ever created by humans. They were convex and were prone to not being pushed properly and fingers slipping off. How Sony could make such a terrible feature is beyond me. The triggers were so bad that when making Call of Duty, Infinity Ward had to switch the default fire and aim down sights (scope) buttons to R1 & L1 instead of R2 & L2 (like on Xbox) because they felt that players would become frustrated at not being able to be as accurate. There's even a big market for PS3 trigger grips, which make the triggers more like a 360 controller. The 360 has concave triggers which are not prone to slipping off as much, are more easily pressed and feel more like the triggers of a gun. In response Sony has drastically improved the triggers, making them straight, so in-between the PS3 and Xbox. The face-on shape of the triggers is also similar to the 360.

"Those triggers, I think I feel sick"

The thumbsticks have also changed. They now have outer ridges, drawing similarities from 360’s concave sticks. They are still parallel unlike on the 360, but the ridges mean there is less slipping of fingers like there was on the PS3. The ridges act like a concave pad, while retaining the convex pad of the original PS3 controller, so Sony have taken some from Xbox, but again they have stuck partly to their own guns and not totally ripped off the Xbox controller.

Off the controller now and there are a couple of other items which Sony has taken inspiration from their great rivals. The PS4 will ship with an included headset, like the 360 did, albeit it wasn’t a great one. Shipping with a free headset meant all Xbox users could speak to their friends and 12 year olds could trash talk and swear at the online community. Meanwhile, 12 year olds on PS3 had nowhere to voice their deeply intelligent arguments and political viewpoints, instead they’d have to buy or find a headphone and microphone system.

Aww, how polite

Sony has also revealed Playstation Eye, a Kinect like camera for the PS4. Sony has seen the huge amount of money Kinect made for Microsoft (even if no one ever used it after buying it). Though not terribly good for gaming on its own, Kinect has redeeming features. It has been well utilised as an addition to the gaming experience as oppose to the centre of it. Mass Effect 3 and FIFA 13 both have used Kinect to voice over tactical commands. Also, when using non-gaming features of the Xbox, Kinect is very useful. It allows you to navigate the 360, using its apps (like watching TV/BBC iPlayer/4OD etc) so you don’t have to do anything with a controller. You can tell your Xbox to pause or search for something you want to find, all without having to get up (as if TV couldn’t get lazier). Even though Kinect is reviled by hardcore gamers, casual gamers are attracted by it. Much like the Wii it allows new gamers to play games and makes a whole new market for the Xbox, one Sony never truly managed to capitalise on with the PS3. This is however something that the Wii hit the nail on the head with.

Sony has also mentioned that it will release a PlayStation app that will work similarly to the Wii U’s touchscreen controller. The app will display extra information in-game such as maps, among other features. This takes from Microsoft’s Smart Glass app which allows Xbox users to  use their phones as an input the Xbox’s menu, again so you don’t need a controller. Microsoft predicted that there was a future in incorporating phones and tablets into the console gaming experience and it seems that Sony seem to agree.

PS4 profiles will also have their own profile page. The page shares similarities with the profile screens on 360s. They show your trophies, games, recent activity etc. The page in itself is very similar to Xbox Live profiles, without the addition of avatars. However, in all honesty the profiles take more from Steam, the PS4 profiles appear to be an amalgamation of the two. Sony is incorporating a greater social element into their consoles, something the 360 has been slowly working with beacons that tell Facebook users you want to play a game (though not in a Jigsaw kind of way). No console has yet truly mastered social media integration. PS4’s share button on the controller suggest Sony are trying to do that.

The Xbox has several features over the PS3 and Sony appear to have attempted to rectify these with changes on the PS4. The 360 controller took heavy influence from the PS2 controller and was thus the best controller on the market. Sony chose not to update their controller and were left with something that was a little out-dated. People generally like the PS3 controller because they are used to it since everyone has a PS2. Xbox managed to win over a huge number of those PS2 owners with their controller. The PS4 controller has evolved and taken much from the 360 controller. Controller evolution goes from SNES to PS2 to Xbox 360 (to maybe PS4?) Xbox pulled it off this generation, there’s nothing to say Sony won’t do it this time. Sony has also taken features from Wii U and Steam which I briefly mentioned, so it’s not as if Xbox are perfect Kings of this generation. So when Microsoft possibly announces the next Xbox in April, we could be seeing many of PS3’s better features on the next Xbox. (Hopefully that'll stop me being lynched)

Could we see Advertising in Console Games?

Some say money makes the world go round, others say it’s love. In reality it’s probably advertising and marketing. Marketing makes people love products or brands which in turn makes people lots of money, so maybe all of the above statements are true (After all, it sure isn’t gravity that makes the world go round, what a ridiculous idea!). Advertising is all around us these days, TV, cinema, billboards, newspapers, even now spamming our phones in some kind of Orwellian plan to melt our brains. Games on our phones regularly feature advertising, but how close are we to a future where advertising invades that little box under our TVs.

If you have an Xbox, advertising has already invaded that little box. The Xbox dashboard is already littered with adverts, so much so that the “Play Game” button is not the biggest onscreen. As mentioned games on phones regularly contain adverts, these games are all free to play and one of the most popular ways for developers to claw some cash back when the game doesn’t cost a penny. Free to play is becoming more and more popular bet is yet to truly manifest itself on consoles. There are countless numbers of free to play games on the PC and many of them are good if not fantastic. Games like Planetside 2 are almost, if not totally, the quality of a standard retail game that you buy. This is a game that never forces you to pay for anything, nor does it punish you harshly for being frugal. If free to play continues to take off and does also hit consoles, there’s a good chance we could be seeing adverts.

So how do I actually play a game?

So why is free to play so appealing? This, in an industry where developers are scrimping around trying just to survive and whose entire business model can depend on the success of a single game. As I’ve mentioned often, gaming is not mainstream like TV or film, so developers need to make it so if they want to survive. They need to attract more individuals to the market or need to persuade those already in the market to be spending more, the former is the easier option. By making games free to play consumers have no worry about making an investment, if they don’t like the game, they get rid without any fuss. When buying a normal game it is a risk, you may read reviews and be recommended by others, but at the end of the day, you may disagree with everyone else and hate the game you just bought for £40. That’s money down the drain and money that you may not want to spend on a game for some time. 

The increasing number of free to play games and the success of Steam sales shows that gamers are becoming less and less willing to play a high price for a game. Steam sales regularly present games for under £10, often under £5 and sometimes under £3. And these are for big mainstream titles, over Christmas, Deus Ex: Human Revolution cost roughly £3 on Steam. The industry is moving further and further away from the big £40-£50 game and it will be interesting to see how the new generation of consoles prices their games.

I aint paying £40 for a game I can get for free, that's £2 an hour!

Adverts are often annoying and frustrating to watch, particularly when targeted poorly. Many of us would love to be rid of them, this is a large part of the success of the BBC. It has no adverts so that you are not disturbed and its one hour shows are actually an hour as oppose to forty minutes. The success of free games on app markets shows that people are very willing to invest in a free game, even if it has adverts. The fact that it is free overrules any annoyances people generally have with adverts, particularly when they are tucked away and don’t really bother us. This formula goes beyond the games industry however. Freeview on TV, the channels you don’t have to pay a subscription for, they run purely on the power of adverts, generating large incomes. By being free, they have a larger market and so advertisers pay more because more people are watching the channel and by extension the adverts put on it. Advertisers pay huge amounts for television adverts and hence many TV channels continue to run in this form, with new channels popping up. For example, MTV, which you have to pay for, have a free channel, VIVA, in order to try and get the best of both worlds. In the newspaper industry, free newspapers are just as profitable as standard ‘pay for’ newspapers, thousands upon thousands of free newspapers are given away free every day on the London Underground as commuters go to work. When they return they sometimes get free magazines which also are profitable businesses. The newspaper industry is struggling to compete with new digital media on phones and computers, so some, like the Evening Standard, have gone free in order to stay afloat.

In a recession-hit world, many people have less disposable income and so will gladly take up an opportunity to get something for free, even if you have to go through a pesky advert. However, the key is that the advert cannot bother them. Gamers must feel they are not losing the experience due to an advert, they must not be put off by it. The advantage of the game being free cannot be outweighed by how annoying the advert is. This means advertisers are walking a tight line when balancing noticeable and persuasive without being pushy and annoying. If the advert detracts from the game, the game doesn’t get played and no one wins, except the consumer, they haven’t lost a penny.

"Those times when you're just waiting for the match to start"

Advertisers will want to be more and more successful and so will push the boundaries more and more of what is an acceptable level of advertising. People are greedy and so will push very hard, sometimes at the detriment of the user experience, though if the media being used is incredibly popular, companies know they can be increasingly pushy. Look at YouTube for example. It started with not adverts at all (a long time ago) then came up small pop ups when you were watching a video. Then came big adverts on the YouTube homepage that took up huge amounts of space. Then came adverts before a video starts, but that you can skip after five seconds. Now, there are even 30 second long adverts before a video starts which you cannot skip. If your video is one minute thirty seconds long, then adverts could potentially make up a quarter of the two minutes you spend on that video! This succession is a distinct possibility for games. They may only be small popups in corners of screens now, but you may soon have to watch a full length advert just to play Angry Birds and further into the future you may be waiting to start a Halo match online, but all 16 players have to sit and watch an advert first.

It will probably be a long time before adverts hit console gaming, but it is still a distinct possibility. Several other industries have succumbed to the allure of marketers, others forced into it by the economy or a dynamic market. Before we see adverts two things have to happen. Free to play really has to take off, by having a significant market share compared to standard retail games. Marketers also have to work out how to best utilise the gaming industry for advertising. There is still time for both those to happen and advertising will inevitably reach gaming, just as it will everywhere. By 2084 adverts will probably be messaged into our brains as Big Brother decides what is best for us and what we should all be buying, but until then, we have Apple for that.

THQ Defunct: Is This the Beginning of the End?

Every year, more and more video game developers are becoming bankrupt, falling into administration and being wiped off the face of the earth. The most recent of these, and arguably one of the largest, is the announcement of THQ’s bankruptcy. Until now it had only really been small, plucky developers but THQ is the first big dog to fall. Some remnants of THQ have been saved by other companies but some like Vigil, developers of Darksiders, weren’t as lucky. Thus many people have unfortunately lost jobs, something that seems almost too common in the industry. Don’t be mistaken, for the winners the industry is profitable and lucrative bringing in billions for some, but if this is the case why are there so many unfortunates in the world of video games?

Average day in the life of a video game developer

At the moment the video game industry is largely top heavy, meaning it is a few companies who hold most of the wealth. Though there may be many different developers, many of these developers are owned by large conglomerates and even the ones that aren’t have their games published by huge companies like EA or Take-Two. With so many layers in the business model the profits of a successful game don’t always filter totally down to the actual developers who created it all and hence although a game may be hugely popular, the developer may not get as much as you’d expect.

Often, a game with a big publisher won’t have just one developer. One developer will get the lion’s share of the work, but much of the work will be outsourced to other teams within the parent company that have no other ties to the developer itself. For example, LA Noire was mostly developed by Team Bondi (who are now defunct), but Rockstar (who are in turn owned by Take-Two, see what I mean when I say business layers) dealt out a lot of the work. The MotionScan system which records actor’s faces, which LA Noire is most famous for, was created by Depth Analysis. 1940s LA was recreated with a huge input from Rockstar North (GTA) and the PC port was made by Rockstar Leeds. Rockstar San Diego (Red Dead) also played a part. LA Noire was a huge commercial success, but remember this profit goes to Take-Two, Rockstar, Rockstar North, Rockstar San Diego, Rockstar Leeds, Depth Analysis, amongst others. This is a huge ‘sharing’ of the wealth and this is from a game that was a success and made money, just imagine what happens when a game doesn’t do well.

Not every developer gets this Life line

Making a game is a long and expensive process. It requires a whole development team to be dedicated for at shortest a year. Games rarely take less than a year to be developed and even hitting the one year mark is difficult and only usually reached by larger developers with huge resources. Hence, a developer can go a long time without any income, particularly if it is a start-up. So when the game is completed and released, the all the developers hopes are pinned onto that game. If the game flops, it can spell disaster. During the process, developers can invest thousands if not millions into a game and if that is not recouped by the game that required that investment, then the company has lost money. Sometimes this can be such a great loss that the company gets such little income that they can’t pay their debts, so go bankrupt, into administration and just hope that someone saves them. There is little room for error in the gaming industry, developers put all their eggs into one basket and if nothing hatches, it’s curtains. This is often the way many developers find themselves at the mercy of big publishers. The developer has a reputation due to good games they made in their past, but their current project has ended in failure. Thus a big publisher swoops in saves the company and now owns them. The advantage of this is that when you have a big company looking over you, you get some of their money for development, you get help from them both business wise and creatively and if anything does go wrong, they can help thanks to their huge cash flow. On the other hand, if the parent company doesn’t believe the developer is going anywhere it can choose to sell or just close the company, and you’re back to square one.

This idea of big companies owning smaller ones happens everywhere in the world. The film industry is also a largely top-heavy industry with a handful of Hollywood companies owning pretty much everything else in existence. Arguably, the film industry is more top heavy than the video game industry and the often have much larger budgets than video games, so why are there not the same level of redundancies there?

This comes back to the development cycle of a game being longer than a year, whereas a film can be all completed in roughly five months with three of those being for filming. In some cases a film can be all done and wrapped up in one or two months! Although a film studio will pin all its hopes on one film like a developer will, the fact that it doesn’t take as long to make a film means, that you go less time without income if the film flops, thus you can keep the bailiffs at bay for a little longer if all goes pear-shaped. 

Films also often have larger budgets than games, so surely there is less room for failure. But turn to the other side of the spectrum, films with small budgets. Simply due to the nature of games, producing a game that is polished and of high technical quality is expensive. It is much easier to produce a film on a low budget. Aside from huge CGI effects and planes exploding most of the best technical qualities of a film can be made with most cameras and a creative director. Also, commercially available editing software is often sufficient in editing a film. Often also, artistic creativity is less dependent on technology in films than in games. Hence, you can make an amazing film on a low budget and though it might not have the blockbuster effect of a big budget Hollywood film, but the artistic merit can still shine through. With a game this is more difficult, as a community we focus so much on graphics and how visually stunning a game is that this makes up a huge portion of our opinion of a game. Creating a Crysis like environment takes time and is expensive and so if a game really wants to be one of the best, it has to invest huge amounts into technical achievements like LA Noire’s MotionScan. Therefore, it is harder for a game to stand solely on its artistic and creative merits, these are often upheld by the underlying technology upon which the game has been created. Also, due to video games’ largely computing based roots, developers cannot keep the same technology. Technology is constantly evolving and hence part of the budget needs to go into Research and Development of new technologies, which is very expensive.

A real danger if you're a "Video Game Nerd"

But then returning to the Big Budget films, Hollywood consistently makes films with huge budgets and consistently makes a profit on them. This is largely because their target audience is much bigger than that of the video game industry. Watching a film is a mainstream activity, there is no social stigma to it. It can be social if you go to the cinema, or relaxing if you stay in and watch something at home. When you say you are going to watch a film, no one thinks “so he’s going to waste 2-3 hours and not do anything productive”. Video games on the other hand have a very different image to the general public (some people still believing they are the work of the devil). Telling someone who does not play games that you are going to stay in and have a few hours on Xbox can have a negative effect. Gaming still to many sounds antisocial, lazy and a damaging way to spend your time. People who watch a lot of films can be considered to be cultural or arty or that they have a hobby. Someone who plays a lot of games can be considered a lazy, nerdy loner with nothing better to do with his time. Video games, though rapidly gaining popularity, are not a mainstream past time and still have a large social stigma that other forms of media do not have.

The entire video game industry is structured so that is cruel and punishes mistakes. Though the victors gain hugely, the losers can often face fatal blows. Large companies still make large profits but small developers can have a hard time surviving. The industry will either become more top heavy with fewer companies gaining more power, or developers must find a different way of structuring business models to survive. On the other hand, we could help as a community and praise artistic achievement on the same level as technical achievement allowing for smaller developers to make a name on a smaller budget. This will also help the indie market grow. The Video Game industry is still young in comparison to other media industries, it is still developing and learning how to work in some cases. There is still maturing that needs to occur with those making games and those consuming it. Video games are not a mainstream industry yet and until it is, it’s difficult to predict where it’s headed. Films are a mainstream industry and have been for a long time, they are a top heavy industry, so there’s a good chance a Hollywood of gaming may emerge, but then again, they are two very different industries.