I was following news about the EA
shareholders meeting today, and the more I listened, the more I
became irritated with the whole situation with gaming as it is. John
Riccitiello continues offering “more MORE MORE!”
when I can't help but feel like I want less. Here I sit, I have so
many video games that I've purchased that I haven't even had time to
play them all yet. I have a life, I have friends, family and other
responsibilities that I need to keep in mind, so I don't have 100% of
my time to devote to experiencing all these games, no matter how good
they may be. And, let's be honest, even if I had absolutely nothing
else in my life, I would still not devote 100% of my time to gaming
because I just can't.
I am human; I have needs aside from the basic food, water and sleep.
I can't just ignore my need for social interaction, no matter how
much I may want to.
So, I
find myself wondering why Riccitiello is trying to convince people
there are all these great games and projects in development and how
that's going to turn EA around. Why tell us all how more is going to
expand their business when I'm too busy finishing the stuff that I've
already got to care? Unless they're developing “Mass Effect 4”
or some other game I'd really love to see, I'm not going to care.
And that's pretty much the problem with the top-tier games nowadays,
it seems: none of them seem good enough to justify their price tag,
and even if the price on all of them came down, I still wouldn't care
much because I just don't have the time to devote to actually play
most of them.
We
live in a world where the majority of gamers are adults. A
generation has been raised on video games, and as that generation has
come of age we have found ourselves being more directly marketed to
as a major consumer bloc. But now that we've reached such mass
market levels, I think the real reason the industry isn't growing is
because it has failed to adapt to the changing demographics. Adults
have responsibilities and are far more careful about both their money
and their time than children. It stands to reason that, eventually,
you would reach a point at which you simply cannot produce more
variety because there's already so much variety that your consumer
base just can't keep up.
Video
games are not movies or novels. There are not many ways you can
really accurately compare them as media for telling stories, but you
can compare them as time-fillers and as mass market products. Think,
for a moment, about film. How many movies are released in a year?
Quite a few. But how long are movies on average? Let's say, for the
sake of argument, that the average is about 90 minutes. That's an
hour and a half, and seems pretty reasonable for an average film.
Now,
how much time does a player spend on an average video game? That's a
lot harder to figure out, but we can generally assume it will be much
longer than a movie. 90 minutes out of your day is a significant
amount of time, but not an unreasonable amount of time that a person
might spend once in a while. Video games often times will be played
for hundreds of hours, and even sometimes for days or
weeks. Mind you, I'm not
talking about days in the sense of how long you are interested in a
game, I'm talking about real, total time spent playing a game can be
that much. How is someone who enjoys playing games going to ever
find the time to play all the games they might be interested in if
all the games that are available take that much time out of their
lives? And then you have DLC, which, when done right, extends the
life of the game even further.
It's
sort of like trying to get more advertising revenue from tv
commercials by telling your audience to quit their jobs and watch tv
all day. It just isn't feasible. Not that I don't love variety, but
I love my DVR also because it allows me to watch the shows I want to
see without having to schedule myself around them constantly. I
believe this is the problem with the mainstream games in the
industry: they're all vying for the attention of the same people and
finding that too much competition is becoming as bad as not enough
competition, like a million different tv shows competing for the same
half-hour time slot.
Why is
this a major problem? Well, because major publishers are cutting
down deadlines and pushing games out faster and faster. The only
reason this occurs is because they want to provide greater volume,
more games in a shorter amount of time, but this means employees
become overworked, quality and, in turn, quality assurance gets cut
and we wind up with games that don't live up to their own potential.
Huge budgets are being spent on games that will not sell as well as
they could because they're being pushed out before they should be.
At the same time, games that normally wouldn't have multiplayer are
having multiplayer features forced on them as a means of extending
their gameplay, meaning the games that do get played are also being
played longer.
As a
result, consumers find they have fewer opportunities to enjoy games
they otherwise would have loved, developers stretch themselves thin
to meet demand, publishers waste millions of dollars on risky
investments and valuable intellectual property is drained until it is
a dry husk of its former self. We find ourselves with publishers
encouraging developers to produce the same thing over and over again
in an effort to benefit off of what worked in the past instead of
experimenting with new, innovative ideas.
In
short, when it comes to the laws of supply and demand, we have more
supply than we have demand for. Big budget games are being released
in droves and aren't making enough money because they're not going
through the rigorous testing phase that refines them into truly good
games. Major brands are being mass produced and exploited instead of
grown and shared. And stock prices are falling and John Riccitiello
is making excuses.
Now,
excuse me, I need to get back to work on reviewing The Secret World.
I don't have time for this shit.
