If you ask anybody that knows me what my one passion is, within a mere second or two they will instantly say gaming. I love gaming, I love the industry, I grew up on, and it was my third parent. Where as mum and dad my teach you the abc’s, gaming taught me that all you need for fun is two paddles and a ball, yet for some bizarre reason, I dislike tennis. Anyway, back on to the point, it’s safe to say I live games, sleep games, it’s my hobby and within the near future will once again be my life. I grew up playing the classics and will admit that I did prefer Nintendo over Sega, and still do favour Nintendo to this day, but even the father of gaming has me worried. I’m not worried about children playing adult rated games, or the affect of gaming on today’s society, nope; I’m worried that sooner or later we are going to be at a stale point, if we’re not at it now. What am I talking about you ask? Well it’s simple, how many independent developers do you know of right now, not many I’m guessing. They’ve either been purchased by the mega corporations or ran out of business due to spiralling development costs. What does this mean, how does it affect gaming? Well that’s simple, all these independent developers that once made some great games are now forced to make rehash after rehash of pretty much the same game. Hell, just look at Electronic Arts, how many titles did they release last year? How many were not sequels to sports games or movie tie ins, you could probably count how many on one hand, at most one hand, one foot. So what if the smaller companies aren’t here anymore, what does it matter, they don’t do anything, do they? Well history has taught us that the majority of advancements in the industry have been by the little guys. Take the games that redefined the industry, doom, made by ID software, one of the only independent developers left out there. Then we have people like Sid Meier, how pretty much helped define the strategy genre with the Civilization series, but yet even he is now behind a big corporation (Take Two if you’re interested) and what has happened since the take over, a new Pirates (which was out over a decade ago) and a sequal to Civilization. No new titles that he is capable of creating. It’s the same everywhere, big companies are afraid to try something new and just stick to the same old formula, come on EA, how about a new product instead of Sports game 2069. There is still hope, we have seen some quality new brands released over the last year or so, such as Guitar hero and with E3 demonstrating there are some new titles in the work, Spore, Assassins Creed, Mass Affect, Gears of War, and Supreme Commander to name a few there is still a chance that maybe one day 90% of new games will be something new, will be something other than a sequel or movie tie in. But how can things change? Well like all things, everything revolves around money. It costs an estimated $8 million; let’s see that in numbers shall we - $8,000,000 to make a standard PS2 game. How can smaller companies afford that, and what with the PS3 and X360 both branding development costs almost double that of the last generation, how many brand new titles are going to appear? How many smaller companies are going to risk their whole future on one game, if it succeeds then great, they are secure for the time being, but if it fails they disappear into the history books. The gaming industry is the biggest industry in the world, surpassing the movie industry by over $1 billion each year. They make this much profit, but yet they continue to charge top dollar prices for games. We’ve all no doubt read or heard about companies loosing money (mainly because of development costs,) but when they announce their profits they still continue to boast huge profits, often running into the double millions. It seems that not even the gaming industry is safe from the big corporations and with the likes of Microsoft picking off smaller development houses as and when they feel like, there seems to be little hope that the gaming industry will once again return to it’s best days, which in my opinion are Retro and early Playstation. It seems it can only go in one of two ways, maybe we’ll end up sports title 2076 or movie turned game # 352, but then again, maybe we’ll be surprised and things will once again be about the important things, the games, and the people that play the games, but I seriously doubt it.