Simonc at GameSetWatch has some interesting thoughts on whether free games are a threat to the AAA game publishers. He concludes that some consumers may “get their ‘fill’ of games from the free Flash-based ones.”
Personally, I think the competition driven by free (or ad-based) games put out there by non-game companies to drum up business for their main business lines will only force the real AAA publishers to innovate (or find innovation and exploit it), and the best games will continue to thrive as they outpace the free loss leaders (though they may put in more and more ads, till they become as bloated with product placement as hit movies are today).
Wind-up toys, once a mainstay of toymakers and a delight to children, are now shoveled over the counter along with Happy Meals. But the best toymakers have gone on to create innovative and genuinely fun new toys over the years.
July 30th, 2007
At least, that’s the headline of a Times Online piece, quoting Electronic Arts’ chief executive.
Obviously, I don’t agree. Dozens of genuinely fun video games exist. But the article touches on something that’s been bothering me since I first subscribed to PC Gamer about five years ago (a subscription I have since dropped).
That is, that almost all video games are created to fit within industry categories—FPS, RPG, RTS, and so on. Some spectacular innovation takes place within these categories. For instance, Thief: The Dark Project and its sequels
used the FPS genre to present a game with a very different feel.
And there are hybrids. I’ve seen a lot of games touted as “Action RPG” or “FPS-RTS hybrid.”
But we don’t see new categories. I remember the delight with which I played Ultima Underworld, which basically kicked off the FPS genre. And back in the 80s, people would put out just about anything as a commercial game, hoping it would stick. Such innovations are very few and far between, now.
Understandable, of course. Top-of-the-line games are much, much more complicated and expensive to produce than they were in the 80s. Companies want to make bestsellers, and it’s much safer to invest those millions of dollars in a tried-and-true game with a slightly different skin and some tweaks or refinements to gameplay than it is to come up with something truly fresh.
I think, therefore, that the truly great, new, genre-changing games will tend to emerge from independent innovators. Some absolutely terrific (though simplistic) Flash games, for instance, show up that experiment with just what makes a fun game. More will come.
These innovative games may not be the best, but when someone hits on a great formula, the big companies will probably co-opt it and make an A-list game out of it.
July 9th, 2007
