According to the latest report
from research firm Forrester based on a 10,000 household mail survey (the same report we blogged about earlier),
consumer interest in video games is falling. According to the survey results, 43% of North American consumers agreed
that they play less games now than they did two years ago, compared with 34% that disagreed. The reason for this fall
in interest could be partially attributed to the transition between previous and next-generation consoles, but there
are some deeper problems that should be addressed.Firstly, a gender mismatch within the gaming industry still exists. 20% of males consider themselves active gamers, compared to 11% of women that say the same. This is certainly an improvement over previous generations (where the ratio was more like 10 male gamers to every female gamer) but the inequality is still evident today. Our prescription: more games made by women, for women. We'd go as far to suggest that a form of affirmative action within the games industry should be implemented.
Secondly, in the mindset of consumers games are still too expensive. According to 48% of gamers games still fail to offer good value for money. The report finds this surprising when considering a comparison to movies (games typically offer 30 hours of gameplay compared to a 3-5 hour movie with extra features) but we suspect the problem is more a matter of quality rather than quantity. Fortunately, the report provides evidence that advertising in games is acceptable to around 25% of respondents, providing that it meant cheaper games and provided that they don't interfere with gameplay. Publishers - take the hint.
(Page 1) Reader Comments
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I could be wrong but this might actually might be the best time for Nintendo b/c they will offer something fresh and a different way to play games at home.
/waits for people start being childish and start calling me a fanboy
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There are plenty of games that are worth the money. The problem is that there are way too many more that aren't. I've bought some of the one's that aren't but I waited to get a good used price.
I would have to say I play games more now than I did two years ago; I mostly played just a couple of games on my computer and my gba during my commute.
Now I read ebooks & listen to music on my gbm (yea my wife got me the tiny upgrade), get the music & blog on my computer, and play games on my ps2.
I'm always gaming but the medium changes.
I even play some of those old games like chess & go, where there's no screen involved at all.
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God, please no. Affirmative-action-style approaches result in reverse discrimination. For the VG industry, it would likely be implemented by requiring certain quotas, such as every one in five games must be targeted at a female audience. This might work if enough research was done to determine actual interests of female gamers... but I suspect we'd just be flooded with more "Barbie" and "My Little Pony" games.
I think the VG industry should invest some cash into the research, because the first developer to really attract the average girl is going to hit a jackpot.
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Gamers only have their best game experiences to relate other titles to. One person may really enjoy a particular FPS, but when he/she plays a different one it will often fail to provide the same good experience as the first. The same goes for any genre.
For me, after playing Ninja Gaiden, God of War wasn't really that exciting...just temporarily amusing. While I find myself wanting to play Ninja Gaiden again, I have no desire to touch God of War again. However, this could easily be reversed for someone who played GOW first and NG second.
Even with sequels, developers are often unable to bring the same excitement that the original provided. Just like movies.
I think what games need to survive is more creativity and more consumer awareness. I think we miss a lot of fantastic titles just because we've never heard of them, or there was a lack of advertising.
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That is true...I'll admit that...but people eat them up and for the most part they are still fun.
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Most often, gamers buy the game, play for 3-4 hours, lose interest and feel depressed.
The question is: How long before gamers conclude buying a game for 3-4 hours of mediocre fun is a waste of money?
Until then, gamers will buy games, because they love games and they long for great games.
Rental services, such as GameFly, are a big help in this context.
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a) barely
b) it depends on how you measure them, i.e. compared to what? Are we measuring Christmas of 2005 vs. June of 2005 or vs. Christmas of 2004?
By some measures, sales are dropping, not rising. And even according to the stats that say sales are rising, they're counting revenue, not units sold. That includes Xbox 360 games that cost $60 and the Xbox 360 console itself that costs $400 if you can get it bare, which you can't. So all those people who spend $800 on a bundle are included in those numbers, and that makes up for a HELL of a lot of people who just stopped buying games completely over the last year or so.
Personally, I totally believe this report. For one thing, it's not a huge disparity between those who say they're playing less and those who say they aren't. It's a 9% difference. So, those of you who still play and know a lot of people who do are perfectly believable. But that doesn't mean the industry doesn't have a problem.
If 9% more people say that they're playing fewer games, then by definition you are going to have a contracting industry. That may not show up right away in revenues because prices are going up at the same time. But as happened with the music and film industries, eventually that drop in interest starts to hurt. What the music and film industries did in response was to continue to raise prices further to try to make up the difference, and this went on to an insane degree - for a while CD's cost like $20, and movie tickets in my area are up to around $12 now (up for $6 just 10 years ago!). All that does is drive more people away, and now those industries are both in a world of hurt with no easy way out. You need to grow your consumer base; you can't continue to grow your revenues forever with a shrinking base of consumers. Price gouging only goes so far.
I think it's almost self-evident that there has been a lot of grumbling lately about the quality of games and the level of innovation in the industry. It's reached almost a fever pitch, and has gone beyond the standard hardcore gamer crowd. I mean you see it talked about *everywhere* on the net, from game-centric sites like Joystiq to mainstream media sites like CNN and MSNBC. And that attitude is borne out in this report. There is a widespread malaise about the current crop of games and systems. Yeah, no doubt part of that is just people getting sick of their PS2's or whatever and wanting an upgrade. But just browsing around as I do (and I've been doing it quite a bit lately, being laid-up after major lung surgery), I'm seeing what appears to be a much deeper level of discontent than simply a desire for more powerful machines and better looking graphics.
The industry is in need of a shakeup, and a shakedown. I think we're in a period right now where nobody can really predict what's going to happen to break the industry out of this slump, or even if it's going to happen before things really start to spiral out of control. About all you can say for sure is that the same old, same old ain't gonna cut it anymore.
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The only thing worse than natural segregation (lack of woman making games) is forced segregation (men are filtered out for jobs so they can hire more women).
I, generally, see this as not only wrong, but also as unconstitutional. Equal rights means that no one gets special treatment, too.
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Someone above said that, for movies, one only needs to sit back and enjoy for entertainment, but gaming takes effort. That really is a reference to the declining quality of games. If there's one thing that all Nintendo games have in common in terms of gameplay, it's the gentle learning curves and the seamless integration of controls. New gamers always need to look down at their PS2 controller to figure out which button is the square button again, but while playing most Nintendo games, new gamers generally stop looking at the controller within five minutes. (The exception is the freakin' GameCube Z button, but that's just beating a dead horse.)
What I'm saying is, Nintendo games take much less effort to master than others' games. When I playing my first PS game, Dynasty Warriors 3*, after following Nintendo and Sega for so long, I found it rather difficult to do what I wanted. So I can understand when people think games aren't worth the money when they play so little and then give up in frustration because it takes so much effort. $40 for an hour of entertainment? Not much of a mystery when put that way.
Sorry for bringing this up, but you knew it was coming--the Revolution. The controller is bringing new levels of control integration impossible to achieve with sticks and buttons pushed and pulled by thumbs. We've been through this a googol times and more; the roll, pitch, yaw, and face direction cannot be approached, much less equalled, by conventional methods of control. Even this alone will, in my prediction, create much more interest in gaming. People won't be turned away by the complex control schemes, and people will realize that, if mastered, games actually are worth their money, and much more so than movies. Putting input into an entertainment device will be a GOOD thing, because it means different output and hence renewed gameplay and entertainment, whereas no matter how many times you watch a movie, it's always the same thing, and that will and does get boring.
* After mastering the controls the second time around, DW3 has since become one of my favorite games on the PS2. I'm not disputing the wonderful gameplay and entertainment value available on non-Nintendo platforms, I'm saying that it takes too much effort to get there, and that is what turns off non-core gamers.
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http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/02/commentary/game_over/column_gaming/
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The one thing I loved about the 80s was that I could buy a new game every weekend as a kid and it didnt matter if it was crap cos it was only £2! I don't expect those days to return (i love great visuals too much), but £40 or £50 per game is hard to justify at the moment - especially for what are essentially tweaked upgrades per sequel. ;-(
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*cough* EA *cough*
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"We'd go as far to suggest that a form of affirmative action within the games industry should be implemented."
Of course, because a particular *hobby* is something that all people *must* like? So for every recreational hobby/interest, we're going to completely retool them until the participant base matches general population's demographics? That's interesting considering most hobbies start as one person thought ______ was interesting/fun and so they did it and a few other people happened to dig it too. I didn't know that hobbies had to have mass/universal appeal as part of their validity. I think people are starting to to forget/misinterpret that "all men are created equal" is meant to imply equal opportunity for all, not that all people should actually be equivalent.
I think you could pack 100 hours of gameplay into something, but the shock value of spending $50/$60 bucks might not wear off. It's also interesting since a concert or two can also run that much or more (mostly thanks to Ticketmaster's ****-you-b/c-we-can fees). Not that I like spending that much on games either, but who doesn't want something for less? Of course, that's were used games come in if you've got the patience to wait for the buzz to die down (which I often can). Of course, the scary thing is with the push for digital distribution of games, the used game market might disappear.
On to advergaming, I'd spend the extra $10 so that I don't have to hear Subway radio ads when driving around in PGR (assuming the radio DJ feature returns), etc.
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While I'm hoping the Revolution will shake things up, I'm still not holding my breath because this is a problem for the entire industry IMO.
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That would be when Microsoft suggests a $59.99 pricepoint for third-party 360 games. One that almost every publisher has went with. Idiots.
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Would you rather we only reported all the nice and fluffy stuff about the games industry?
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What I'm trying to say is that articles critiquing the industry are great, more sites need to follow your example. But the frequency of articles on here proclaming another video game crash boarder on irrational, espically when everything I read says the exact opposite. But that's fine, it's your call. If this were a politcal site, I guess you would be, what, left winged and I would be more towards the right. And I think that's great. You can post all the articles you believe in and I (we readers) get to debate and challenge it.
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I like story lines that make sense. AI that makes sense, games that make sense even if it is fantasy. I like mature games that are not geared to teenagers. As a result, I am much more picky about what games I choose given the cost of each. The industry should wake up and develope product for the entire audience, not just teenage boys. If there were more "flavors" available, there would be more people doing the gaming. Why should really younger kids, females of any age and older gamers all like or even put up with game selection geared only for teenage boys?
I have been told that my new XBox 360 is ready for me to go down and pick up. I have had real second thoughts about even getting the thing. Few recent games have given me the joy and satisfaction of the earlier titles that I played years ago. I am afraid of it being more of the same-o, same-o.
I also think part of the problem is that for as far back as I can remember there have been the promises of "just wait, the games one day will be awsome, we just need more processing power". What we have gotten with our quantum leap in processing power over the years is buggier games, huge memory requirements and not much real improvement other than "eye candy". So basically, we are tired of waiting for the promises to be fulfilled. This industry could learn something from the phrase "under promise and over deliver" as opposed to the other way around which is what we have now.
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Finally, I'm waiting for the PS3, I still hope that Sony can make it right.
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See if you can spot the similarity:
I'm tired of all the fascism, racism and hate in the world. I'm waiting for a German dictator to make it right.
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