Is Facebook one of the Four Horsemen of the Gaming Apocalypse?
When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”
— Revelation 6:5-6 NIV
After an interesting conversation during a call tonight, and some deep thought of my own, it does make me wonder where the industry is headed these days. With Social Media sites on the rise as gaming platforms, primarily for the sake of this article, Facebook. As well as a lot of companies now gearing their efforts towards development and publishing to make use of these platforms it has me thinking.
I’ve had a lot of people comment to me that they’re finding more and more games that just aren’t catching their interest anymore, or are down right boring. I’ve noticed this myself that a lot of times games aren’t really innovating anything new, just putting on shiny new clothes.
Of course there are plenty of exceptions to this, but not as many as there once were. And to be candid, a lot of the games found on Facebook are without a doubt, boring as crap, yet they get millions of players daily and the market is growing constantly with more and more companies and indie teams getting into the act.
Is the industry headed for another crash before we see a renaissance of creativity and an explosion of innovative creation across the board of games? Honestly, I don’t know, but at the same time as more companies pull away from making console games and of course the continuing stigma of PC gaming aside from the MMO market. (Which is constantly being accused of being clones upon clones upon clones of this game or that game?)
Where is the industry headed?
Where will our new gaming experiences going to coming from?
Has the bubble burst again?
Tough questions; and maybe a bit of an alarmist bent to my thinking as I look over the scope of the gaming space these days. A lot of companies have been cutting stuff, shutting down, restructuring, and changing direction, so on, so forth, etcetera, and etcetera.
So I but it to all of you dear friends and readers, is this new explosion of gaming on social platforms a sign of great change that will push the industry into a new era of creativity or is Facebook the rider of the black horse, preparing to spread a famine amongst hardcore games and gamers while it sows the seeds of meaningless fluff?
Comment below.
My thoughts are that gaming is advancing too fast to keep up with itself. Compare the cost of developing a game a decade ago to now. An increase of like 1000% easily. In some cases more.
And for what? Shiny graphics? We could learn something from the movies here, shiny effects don’t make a good film. People are still going back to classics like the original Star Wars trilogy, Aliens and Ghostbusters cause those were damn good films. Yet movies like 2012 get criticised as being pretty with no substance. Games are taking the same path.
The big name games are all safe. The sequel, the franchise, the clone, the guaranteed sale. But really what does FIFA 2010 have that FIFA 2009 doesn’t? Or 2008? Or 2007?
What does social site games mean? Will the industry crash? I don’t know. I’m not a business analyst, I couldn’t possibly predict that, where I to guess I would say we’re seeing the result of trying to rely solely on very expensive development when the consumer base isn’t large enough to sustain it.
What I am sure of is that more people playing games is a good thing. Having games more accepted as a pasttime is a good thing. There are people playing Farmville and Cafe World that would never touch a game normally.
This is a good thing and helps to make games more accepted among the masses where there is still the fear and taboo of games being these awful things that turn children into murderers.
I’ve heard of people (and some friends) say they don’t play some games because the graphics suck. The friends that have said this really aren’t considered ‘gamers’ to my standard. It sucks hearing someone say that because there are so many games out there where the gameplay makes up for the lack of graphics. I guess there’s two sides to every argument and I don’t know the direction everything will move. Big franchises are going to remain on top with shiny graphics, while up-and-coming juggernauts like Farmville and such are taking a whole different approach.