irish government finally gets the finger out re games

Stev_o

Blowfish wrote: »

It's anything but niche. At the rate it's going by 2014 online/mobile games will be generating more revenue than 'traditional' retail games.

Sorry but it's going to be horribly niche. We are going to see more prevalent studios struggle because even though they conform to successful online micro transactions they simply don't get the player base to get a return on investments.

Mobile phone game market is flooded with amateurism and yet again the people who are going to be making them will be small studios who will experience levels of piracy that will equate to the PC and Xbox piracy rates combined.

Game market is in a bubble.

Overheal

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

We have more game devs than jobs, trust me. I know

I always try to comfort myself in knowing there was more than one good reason to drop - and not just the fact that I had stopped dragging my ass into class.

Still trying to get my community college to acknowledge the 45 semester credit hours I got there though

Blowfish

Stev_o wrote: »

Sorry but it's going to be horribly niche.

It's already 33% of the gaming market revenue, it's not a niche, even now.

Stev_o wrote:

We are going to see more prevalent studios struggle because even though they conform to successful online micro transactions they simply don't get the player base to get a return on investments.

That's a pretty amazing statement considering the player base is soaring. It's being driven by mobile and (ironically enough) PC gaming because the barrier to entry is so low.

The 'traditional' publishers need to adapt. The likes of EA have already started by purchasing PopCap, Playfish, Ohai funding SWTOR. They can see what way the market is going.

Stev_o wrote: »

Mobile phone game market is flooded with amateurism and yet again the people who are going to be making them will be small studios who will experience levels of piracy that will equate to the PC and Xbox piracy rates combined.

Yes, the market is yet to be consolidated, which will remove some of the smaller studios, but that's actually a pretty normal occurrence in the lifecycle of an industry/market.

As for piracy, the whole point of a lot of the heavily online based stuff is that because of the way they are designed, pirating them is difficult to impossible.

pixelburp

With the explosion of smart-phone ownership, app stores seem to have become hideously bloated with a rash of small games & widgets, all made by equally small companies clamouring for attention and a market that sometimes doesn't exist. It feels like a modern day gold-rush, or another dotcom bubble growing, and I can't see it ending well.

The mainstream games industry is a fragile enough entity at the best of times, nor is a particularly stable career choice tbh; so I can't see how the mobile market isn't priming itself for a crash similar to the one that happened the games market back in the early 80s. Everyone and their mother wants to be in the mobile market, and I'd wonder how many of these SMEs have actual business plans beyond "Step 1: release killer game/app X. Step 2: ... Step 3: Profit!"

hooradiation

Raskolnikov wrote: »

It's true.

Profitability for just about all the major computer games companies has dropped like a stone during the recession.

Well that's a half truth, there is a recession on - very few lines of work do better when the world economy is in the shitter then when it isn't.
Also, we've already had the expected bout of studios closing, people like realtime, pandemic, Free Radical Design who were on shaky ground when the recession hit.

So yeah, while profits have been down (but bear in mind we still have the most lucrative time of year coming up - they call it black Friday for a reason) there is a marked difference between that an industry being in decline.