I was disscussing something like this with my friends the other night. How does the gaming indusrty plan to grow, if they're constantly increasing the complexity of the systems.... Basically it means that they need more people, and more money just to get a game ready for the newest hardware, but that leaves little money to put into inovation and creativity.

I was browsing through the Gamespot news, and came across this transcript from the GDC conference. i read the entire thing, and they were all pretty important and good points, but Greg Costikyan hit the nail right on the head... and if as developers they're this worried, then we as gamers should be more worried. We get wrapped up in cool graphics, and intresting ways we can jump from one building to the other, but lets face it, thats' why after 2 weeks of playing a game, we're all ready to hop on the next bandwagon... We're luckily one of a very small minority who don't mind blowing 400 bucks a month on games, becasue we like to do that in our spare time, but there's a lot of gamers out there who can't afford that much, they would like to, but they can't. Outside our little world of gamespot is a lot of people who refuse to play games anymore because at the end of the day, The Sims Unleashed, is still just the Sims and Driver 3.... is still just Driver.

I think we're just as much at fault as the publishers... they sell what they know we'll buy, and until we decide that we're not gonna pay for sh*t like Halo 2.5 ( If that's true... I'll kill my XBox ), we're gonna keep getting this mainstream (sometimes un-completed ) crap shoved down our throats... and eventually, no one will be there. Maybe I'm off, I don't pretend to know exactly what goes on in game design, but I do know that if developers are as scared as this, then we should be twice as concerend, yet how many of you have heard of this before? How many of you read, or saw a recap of this? These are serious problems that no one is adressing, and I'm frankly pretty scared for the future... but maybe it's just me.

Here's the entire rant from GDC... http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/18/news_6120449.html