Burnwinter wrote:
That's pretty much how I see it too. They've worked out a way to pile a vast proportion of the creative capital, risks and talent into a handful of blockbusters expressing a thorough-going heteronormativity, and those blockbusters make a vast amount of money.
Exactly. And everybody thinks that way, but the market only supports a few blockbusters at the time. The consequence is that we're ridden with all these carbon copies while the industry, as a whole, runs at a pretty devastating loss. Take Square Enix, for instance. They have been firing people to the left and right because they failed to meet the sales expectations for Tomb Raider and Hitman. Tomb Raider "only" sold 3.6 million copies during the first retail month while Hitman managed 2.7 million (or something similar) in the same timespan. It's ridiculous. People are buying more games than ever and yet the crisis is getting bigger every year.
And the real kicker is that practically nothing in these games cost much money. It's all spent on marketing. The game engines were there right from the start. Most of the environment is procedural. They're both ridden with the usual gameplay mechanisms that have been popularised in the last decade. There's very little invention. They're both genre products, like most games are, who have the players spend most of their time on path finding and third-person cover combat.
Burnwinter wrote:
PC is not really an exception but at least there's an alternative
The difference with a PC is that you can, at least conceptually, segue directly from consumption to content creation or proper conversations without getting out of your seat. That's the threat - that people might occupy their time some way that's outside the revenue mechanism.
This is essentially what's been driving the indie culture in the last five or six years. A lot of people who release games for free or very little money, take great creative risks and have an open dialogue with the players is a terrifying thought for anyone who just spent 35 million dollars on a new sandbox game. It levels the playing field, just like it did with popular music when mp3s arrived and literature once printing technology became common knowledge. Back then record companies and book publishers were going bankrupt. Today video game publishers are running the same risk. If anyone can create a game all of a sudden, of what use are those four thousand employees that Ubisoft have in that old factory building in Montreal?
We touched upon this when we discussed Unity the other week. It's a complete nightmare for any capitalist consumer-based system. So you get the compromises, like consoles that are supposed to open up new platforms but don't really do it. They're just looking to gain a little bit of control over the one area where their business unexceptionally have failed: the one that currently lies outside of the established industry.
