Kindly give me some examples of some of these mid tier titles. What constitutes a "mid tier" title? Do they cost the same as a new top tier title at retail?
It's about costs and sales, I'd guess (just a guess because we have no data on game costs) around a million dollars or two and a few hundred thousand sales but profitable. And yes, they do. Price is not only about how much work (money) is put into a title. As for examples, I guess games that sold a few hundred thousand copies but still had sequels would qualify.
Also during the last generation, kindly show me the rise of indy games on services like PSN or XBL.
The low end market is not a replacement for the middle. It's a good thing that platform owners are trying to take advantage of this, but it's mostly not relevant to the power issue, as this market is much less dependent on it than the top end.
I'd also like to remind people that games like Demon's Souls or Dark Souls albeit exceptions give the current state AAA game design paradigm show that when the games start to stagnate, that for most part the free market responds to new unique ideas that do not possess the best graphical presentation.
It's not just about graphics (and afaik the Souls games weren't exactly bad at that). It's about production costs as a whole, including big name voice actors, reliance on cross-media "IPs", focus testing and even marketing (which in itself can be on the same order of magnitude as the game itself). And it's not that innovation will cease to exist completely (although notice where the Souls games have come from) but that it'll be much rarer and will proceed in smaller steps. Graphics is a large part of this though. There will always be a few games like this, but as things go on, there'll be ever fewer of them.
Yes costs will undoubtedly rise, but at the same time, the technology that improves will dictate what can be done in a game and to what extent. The next gen is mostly about middle-wares that are about ease of use and reduction development, thereby control budgets. I don't think any game during the era of PS2 or Xbox or GC had in its production pipeline, had things like face capture or motion capture that started to merge industries together in unique ways and allowed for greater immersion. Even today not every game does it and it's not a prerequisite for success but it goes to show that technology has matured enough in a medium that is still considered in its infant stages compared others.
Epic is touting their own engine as saving money by only increasing development costs twofold :-/ There's a limit to what you can achieve with better tools. And whether you think technical development is good or not, it certainly eliminated a lot of competition and made the console market much more homogenous - a typical consequence of any market consolidation process which transforms a market into a much less competitive one. This is good for the large publishers that survive the cull.
Yes, it's shitty that the big developers are becoming so damn risk averse but pretty pictures won't stop the a bad game from being bad (MoH:Warfighter comes to mind in recent time) and nor will it help sell copies. The one advantage at the beginning of a generation is sowing the seeds of new IPs that can leveraged in years to come. And this generation on PC and on next generation console (Sony esp) we'll see an substantial increase in Free to Play games.
No one said that production quality is enough ffs. It's a requirement, and that's enough to raise costs and thus decrease risk taking. But not having pretty pictures means fewer sales though. And your talk about "IPs" that are "leveraged" is actually a pretty good reflection of the problems with the industry.
A lot can and will happen in the next 6-8 years that will shape the gaming industry just like it did this generation (which people sometimes conveniently forget). Holding on the past hoping things won't change for better or worse is a fool's dream.
I have no idea what this means. You think it's practical to ignore what always happened to development costs because maybe next time it'll be different?
I'm tired of game developers who forgot the past. Even in the '80 there was a graphical race going on between consoles; between arcade systems. And back then, it was expensive too! I remember reading articles about devs crying about tech becoming too complicated at the dawn of the PS2/xbox era release on Ancient-GAF and how rising costs were going to kill gaming developpement.
Well, Nintendo was doing that already around the middle of last gen iirc. And it's pretty obvious that the graphical race cannot continue forever, even MS and Sony will recognise this. MS has a tactical advantage against Sony as they're in a MUCH better position to continue this race, in which Sony can even die, so maybe they'll force it for one more gen, but it'll be very, very difficult after that. If developing games costs money and better technology means they cost more money, this can only go on as long as the market expands. Once it stops, which may happen this gen, there'll simply be no space for this growth.
