Week 15: The Game Industry

The Industry has seen a huge growth in this past few decades, it has become a case where nearly every home has a computer and access to the internet, if not you might be considered a lowly cave dweller worthy of being shunned by modern society because you don’t know what “LOL” means. Harsh but true.
The industry has grown in terms of more advanced gameplay, graphics, people working on a title and budget. There is a huge amount of money to be made if done well seeing some titles edge into other areas of popular culture (Tomb Raider the movie, Diablo Books, World of Warcraft trading cards, Halo figures and Final Fantasy music collection). It is quite safe to say that every kid from the 1990’s will grow up surrounded by a game of some sort.
The view of gamers and games have changed from the generic fat, over 40, balding game enthusiast living in his mom’s basement to well..nearly everyone. The market has divided into many different sub markets and you can get a game for anyone.
Game and GameStations are cropping up in every town, almost like Starbucks –except without the overpriced coffee. Of course with this huge increase in market, the money and the budget has also grown – rivalling the movie industry. However since everyone nowadays wants everything done at super lightning speed, games need to be released quicker with polished graphics, an amazing score and inventive gameplay and be affordable to the consumer (not that easy to do). As a student hoping to get a job in the games industry I have to realise that my job in theory could go to someone in outsourcing, it’s not affordable to have all these highly educated employees doing the same job that someone on the other side of the world could do – and do it a lot cheaper too.

Another point that I wanted to make was where the industry might go. With technology increasing in complexity it gives the designer more scope to really let loose with their imagination however we’ll easily see saturation in the market as games and ideas just get repeated and hauled off as some new game. Popular games of yesteryear will just get remade and done up with fancier graphics and not to mention the many, many games that will get sequels and trilogies in order to make more money out of a title.

Still for the moment I’m intrigued to see what will happen next, perhaps the merge of many different ideas and genres. However if the game industry ever starts to run out of ideas and merge Mario and Star Wars together or Link in a GTA set up then I’ll give up with the industry and retire to Tahiti.