Denis Dyack has been having a good old moan about the state of the industry, claiming that too many games are being made, and that consumers are in danger of being overwhelmed if we don't embrace a "single platform." As I look at the five Guitar Hero games that are slated to release in a single year, I must say that ol' Denis might have a point on this one.
"There were 300 or so games released last November," explains Dyack. "We're in a state of performance over supply. We're making more games than consumers can possibly consume. Marketing is having a disproportionate effect over the success of games because there's so many out there people are ignoring us."
Well, you know how best to fix that, right? Maybe if you stopped making games, other studios would follow your lead. Go on Denis, take one for the team and boycott the idea of making anymore Too Human titles ... please?
Jim Sterling serves as reviews editor for Destructoid.com, head of the Podtoid podcast, and produces a number of news stories, original features, one-of-a-kind videos. With his passionate argumentative style, controversial opinions, harsh delivery, and dedication to brutal honesty Sterling is a name that you can't help but recognize.
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Contest:
10:40 AM on 07.17.2009
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If you build it right, we will buy it up. For every Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2, Call of Duty 4, there's 20 or 30 Too Humans, Fractures, and Bionic Commandos. If they spent less money and time trying to fool us into thinking Too Human is as good as, say, Call of Duty 4, and spent all that money and manpower on building a better game... oh, the wondrous possibilities.
For every good game out there there's 10 pieces of crap. Movie tie-ins, GTA ripoff's, God of War ripoff's, oversaturation of brands like Guitar Hero, stupid mini games collection...
I've embraced one plataform only and i'm very happy about it, of course, i can't play things like MGS4 or LBP, but as long as i get my RPG's i'm fine.
If you want to sell more games, Dyack, make better games. Adapt or die.
Too Human, for example. I dig it, but its got to go back to GameFly next week. Too many cool games I want to play in my Queue. Same happened with Locke's Quest. Solid game, but i can't make the commitment with other very enjoyable games staring me in the face, or otherwise chokeholding my attention (BlazBlue came out of NOWHERE for me).
And that's not even considering solid downloadable titles that I want to get into.
However, turning off the valve and saying "oh please, no more games! I don't want new content" is kind of a ridiculous notion. I don't see any reasonable solution to that issue that doesn't involve good games *not* coming out, which would suck, right?
SPREAD THEM THE FUCK OUT, YOU PUBLISHER TWITS.
The trick is to make a game someone would buy above any other title, not because they have no alternative.
The trick is to make a game that rises above the others, not to make a game that no-one has an alternative but to play.
Of course all the games need to stop releasing at once in the holiday season, and it seems like publishers have been realizing that lately anyways.
1. someone with no job or a kid who is out of school and has all the time in the world
2. independently wealthy
you are not going to buy most of the games that come out, the fact of the matter is that even when you are unemployed you MAY be able to go through 4 or 5 games a month if you game for most of your waking hours doing it and not perusing any trophies or achievements, which if you are a ps3 person isn't bad but if you are an xbox person it doesn't even come close to the release numbers per month
if you make a multiplat today and it does bad your staring at the bill for blu ray production and dvd production, a one two punch that has taken out more than a few devs, add the recession on top of that and the price of failure is horrible, for some it was essentially instant death. multiple consoles can exist just fine but they all have to use a similar format or it all goes downhill. This console war ( I hate that term with a passion) will in all likelihood be decide by format and production costs rather than the games , its just getting more and more expensive to do the multi format thing and thanks to the recession the money pools drying quick and soon it just won't be financially possible (hell it already isn't possible for some) to do this anymore and there just gonna cut a format off.
So yeah THIS gen will probably go to one console BUT in a normal economy as long as the two consoles use similar tech they can exist just fine.
also yeah releasing all games in a single timeframe is just stupid, even if you can afford them all you probably won't have time to play them all, I'm actually happy to hear some of this stuff got delayed.
The REAL issue here is that he released his BAD game at a BAD time. SOMEONE testing this game must have told them it was tedious and needed work, but the guy continued singing its praises and overhyping AND they chose to release during the holiday season.
Unless you are a big-name, ACTUALLY GOOD game, you can't make it during the holiday season.
Pretty obvious really.
Dyack is an overhyping smug git, but he's not totally useless and definitely capable of making decent games.
That's part of the problem: In the first place, Eternal Darkness came out before Too Human, and the former is better than the latter, which implies that Dyack is losing his touch. In the second place, Dyack has made his intentions clear: He's going to focus entirely on the Too Human franchise, even if it means leaving the Eternal Darkness franchise in the... um, dark.
Personally, I'd love to see him work on Eternal Darkness 2, or at least see him sell the rights to a company that will actually make a game out of them... On second thought, that would have to be Nintendo, since they also own some of the rights (e.g. the "insanity effect" idea) and I doubt they would give them up.
Over-saturation problem solved.
Either way, he's got a minor point of relevance that he totally botches in the middle of his clown show. There are in fact too many games. Whether or not that is a bad thing is open to interpretation, but there are definitely more games that I want to play each year than I will ever have time for to say nothing of having the money to afford.
But how is one console going to do anything but make that worse? There aren't that many games on 360 (exclusives, obviously) that I have any interest in playing, but there are a few and if there were only one console I'd probably own that console and have that many more games competing for my attention. Maybe he meant that his game would sell better if there were more people who could play it, but that'd also be true if he didn't make crap.
I'd be all for the One Console Future(tm), except there is no way that would end well. How would you decide whose "One Console" would get released? Would it be a console by committee? Would everyone (assuming at least established developers, publishers, current console rights holders) be consulted? How would you keep the specs from being dictated by a couple of top players paying top dollar to control it?
There's no way Microsoft would be kept out of the decision making there. Sony couldn't even keep them from putting their finger in the Blu-Ray pie, despite NO ONE using their weak video codec (to the best of my knowledge, which includes 0% research and 100% the feeling I've gotten from reading a couple of articles). I like having the choice of not buying predictably unreliable crap from Microsoft and would have no recourse but to spend the rest of my life kicking Denis Dyack in the nuts every 15 minutes if this were ever to come about.
And that's not even as bad as what would happen if (and it hurts me to say, because I've been a life-long fan) Nintendo's philosophy were to win out, which going from hardware sales at this moment would be the sensible thing to do if install base is your prime objective as I assume Dyack's to be. At least with a Microsoft console my hands would eventually adjust to the pain of using their controllers and when the console was between trips to the shop for repairs there would at least be games other than Dokapon Kingdom that I'd want to play on it.
Now isn't there some meme along the lines of "Dear Denis, Shut the fuck up! Sincerely, hpv" that we're supposed to be propagating?
Three words : Wall Street Crash
Sometimes I wonder what it be like if all we had was HL2 and the mod community.