With all these companies laying off workers, Midway is struggling to stay afloat and many others are taking nosedives The awesome increase in graphical quality we have seen will slow down greatly with the lack of spending money.I disagree on that last part. Gamers still expect quality. Bad looking games will sell even worse when people's pockets are being pinched. As far as Midway, they haven't really done anything worthwhile in a hot minute so in many respects, their failure as a game company makes sense.
The games for the remainder of this gen (many longer) will end up being on par if not lower than what we have been getting as companies try to cut costs so they can stay in business, the quality titles we have come to expect from everything will become few and far between shortly and the big budget game dev's will be effected greatly.
I disagree on this as well. Unless they drop the price of games, people will still expect the same level of quality. Companies that make cheap games sold at full price will have horrible sales because of this expectation. I think developers of big budget games will do OK. Stock price doesn't affect anything unless a company is going to be sold or bought. Its 100% after market and tthe corporation doesn't receive any money from stocks outside of the initial public offering or subsequent offerings. Developers with money in the bank and still making big budget titles will likely dominate over everyone else, assuming low budget games are selling for $60 as well.
The big guys can weather the storm. Its just like in real life. Who's gonna be hurt more by the slow down in the economyt: The millionaire CEO with enough money in the bank to get spend the rest of his years sitting on a beach in Brazil, sipping Daquiris while getting served up by Brazilian chicks (Big Developers) or the assembly line worker who was barely making ends meet (Small Developers)?
I dont expect to see many new IPs, just sequal after sequal of established, high selling, IPs like Gears and halo.
I agree, but how is this any different that the current state of the market? The best selling games this year were all sequels (MGS4, GTA4, Fable II, Madden, CoD5, GeoW2, etc).
The only bright side of this is that the indie devs can now make a huge name for themselves as the large companys are reducing spending and the market is in general shrinking. these indie devs that can make great games on a very low budget can go out and prove themselves and prehaps make it to the big dev world once the market starts improving again
Its not cheap to make a retail quality game. These indies will have success on PC (assuming they aren't pirated to hell and back), XBLA or PSN making small titles, but I think they'll have a harder than ever time making a full blown retail game. Not only do they not have the money to make something that can compete with what the big boys do, publishers aren't gonna be willing to try out new IPs or untested studios.
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