The gaming market has been flooded with crappy "retro" consoles.

[Barry Burton]

54 minutes ago, crazyflyingdonut said:

Most modern games are trash nowadays.

 

Resident Evil 2 would like a word with you!

 

As far as these retro consoles go, this is nothing new. Before, it was arcade games in a joystick that plugged into the RCA jacks on your TV. Those things were fucking everywhere. It's an easy market to cater to, because nostalgia is a really powerful tool and helps people resonate with old memories.

 

It's also an easy market because you have a crowd of people who complain about availability of older games, and that companies like Nintendo should have them in some form of media because often, piracy is the only way you can play some of these older titles without spending an arm and a leg. I agree with this!

 

It's not so much expensive to buy an older console... It's fucking expensive buying the games, and having them available in multiple formats is a step closer to NOT having to pirate ROMs. It's great that I don't have to buy a Switch to play some NES/SNES games, because I don't just have $300 to drop to play Super Metroid. I can buy a NES/SNES Classic at a reasonable $60-$80 though, and play the games I actually want to play. Sega releases their classics all the time too. CD based games? Good luck! CDs rot over time and get scratched up. Good thing Sony has a respectable amount of titles available in digital format (even the PSX Classic is great after being modded!) It's hard to stop piracy if people can't play older titles on demand.

 

Also, NES/SNES classic controllers are amazing. Great quality. Even Sony's shitty PlayStation Classic and its controllers are built well.

 

 

[geo]

Are they consoles when they only have a set number of games? But yes there sure are a lot of plug-and-plays now. There were a lot a decade ago, but wow... there are so many now. My Walmart has half an isle devoted to them. I see them at a lot of stores.

 

Actually... before the NES mini there were all sorts of $20 - $60 mini plug-ad-plays, but with like 4 games. The Sega ones had 60 depending on which iteration you bought.

 

With real consoles getting clones all of a sudden that let you play real Genesis or SNES or NES game cartridges, as of 5+ years ago... patents expire and without legal fears, they can mass produce such things.

 

Now there's even $300 - $400 1/3th scale arcade games.

 

Some speculate that it's a different type of advertising. There's a sea of games on store shelves, but these stand out, not to buy them, but as a gateway drug and to remind people hey what's Capcom up to? What's Sega up to? Someone from Nintendo has specified that Nintendo on mobile devices isn't a money making venture so much as marketing their brand to get people into the $60 games. Back to the plug-and-plays a cheaper price for $20 - $60 they turn into gateway drugs since you don't need to spend $300 to play them or go hunting at swap meets or eBay. I've had such terrible luck on eBay over the past two decades, so I don't try anymore.

 

And streaming will never be the future of gaming. Too many people have poor Internet connections. Google couldn't even make Google Fiber work. They just bounce around from one idea to the next hoping it becomes big and cut it in 5+ years when it doesn't. OnLive didn't survive, even if that was 10+ years ago.

 

As for the crash of 1983... wasn't there one company spear heading it all? Now we have three, two of which their video games are mere divisions of grander brands.

 

Atari's failure still baffles me. They made $200 million on PacMan in 82. They made 10 million or however many copies of E.T. hoping it would sell more 2600s.  They came out with the 5600 at the end of 82. No one understood it was better. There was just an enormous 2 year crunch for the company. No one wanted a new console that soon. Then, like all games from a previous generation when a new console comes out, those previous generation games don't sell that well.

Edited April 19, 2019 by geo

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Cynical said:

Epic is basically owned by the Chinese government now

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

[unerxai]

The only retro consoles that I consder worth buying are the ones from Nintendo (espcially the SNES mini). The SEGA ones made by AtGames, aside from being shitty, have games that you can already buy really cheap on Steam (and other digital platforms, I assume). The PS classic was a disaster.

 

EDIT: I forgot the Atari 2600 ones. Most of them don't include the paddle controls yet come with games like Breakout. I hate them.

[Doomkid]

Here's a little history lesson to loop us back to square one that this thread started with:

 

Cheap plug and play consoles and shitty bootlegs are not new and have always had a negligible impact on the overall gaming market, even when the tech wasn't super ancient.

 

In the 90's, Nintendo was getting their ass kicked by Sony in terms of console sales, all the while the entirety of East Europe, South America, Russia and China didn't even have legitimate Nintendo distributors, it was 99% pirated crap and bootlegs and in some cases they were plug and play consoles (almost always very cheap NES on a chip hardware). Even while getting beaten by Sony and essentially only making sales in Japan, North America and the rich parts of Europe, Nintendo remained totally solvent. By the early 2000s, Nintendo actually did have legit distributors even in poorer parts of the world, so they were finally getting a chunk of money from these parts of the world that previously going entirely to pirates and bootleggers.

 

The moral of the story is: Nintendo games were being played around the world by the 90's despite only like 50% of them being authentic purchases and they still were doing very well, financially speaking. That was back when the tech was somewhat relevant too - Now these plug and plays are almost purely for novelty purposes, so their impact is even smaller these days then ever before, despite being a popular flash in the pan for about a year or so recently. As far as I can tell it really has had no impact whatsoever on the triple-A development process and the greater gaming market as a whole. I mean I guess it forced the Chinese bootleggers to come up with a new shell in which to house their shitty NOACs, but it was nothing new.

 

Now, as for the other arguments to be made that actually do pertain to triple-A development - gripes about things such as micro transactions and 'forced' DLC and whatnot else - that's actually a whole separate conversation unto itself. I do see these things as awful, but they are clearly not slowing down the gaming industry one bit. The cash flow is still as strong as ever. When legitimate gripes like this still have 0 impact on sales, which has more or less been the case for several years now, it leads me to speculate that there is nothing resembling a crash on the horizon.

 

tl;dr: The shitty practices of many modern AAA developers have not prevented these companies from remaining ultra-lucrative, meaning there is little evidence of an upcoming crash, despite how vocal some gamers/gaming articles are about it (understandably). They can't help but keep buying the new shit and that shows no signs of stopping. Plug and play consoles are literally not even a factor in the discussion of whether or not a crash is coming (hint, it's not).

Edited April 19, 2019 by Doomkid

[Jason]

you know what my grandpa always said:
"dont like it? dont buy it"

if it's so bad then why pay attention to it? it's not harming anyone and it's not making such a big impact that it gets rid of good things entirely. just stop giving it what it wants (attention) and move the fuck on with your day. that simple.

 

2 hours ago, crazyflyingdonut said:

Most modern games are trash nowadays.

Resident Evil 2
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Uncharted
STAR WARS Battlefront
DOOM 4
DOOM Eternal
Halo
Super Mario Odyssey
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
A L I E N: Isolation
Minecraft
Assassin's Creed
Devil May Cry
Overwatch

^ I assume you've never played those games before sir.

 

 

2 hours ago, crazyflyingdonut said:

It's all just Call of Duty sequels

you are truly loopy if you think that's all there is in modern gaming

[Caffeine Freak]

The only people who believe there will be a second video game crash comparable to the 1983 one, are the people who don't really *understand* what the video game industry was like in 1983, and how different the video game industry is now from what it was back then. Today's industry isn't what it was in the late 70's and early 80's, where you had the developers basically just taking marching orders from a bunch of upper boardroom execs who didn't even understand the industry and were completely disconnected from the creation process of the games. The game industry crashed in '83 because the people who made all the real decisions didn't understand anything about what they were doing, because the industry was so new at the time. They saw it as a cash cow, and tried to milk it as though it were something similar to movies or action figures, when it was really similar to neither one of those.

 

In simple terms, they quickly flooded the market with a bunch of low-quality trash, both in terms of games and consoles. The market STILL gets flooded with a bunch of low-quality trash games, and that's partly because these days any putz with a decent desktop PC and an internet connection can throw together a shitty game and upload it to any number of different platforms. And that's not even a bad thing, really; it means there are plenty more learning tools and paths to success for anyone who wants to get into the industry. Sure, it also means that you have to sift through a lot more garbage on Steam. Gamers had to do that in decades past as well, except they had to do it on the shelves at Gamestop or Bestbuy. There are also a shitton more game companies now than there were in the early 1980's, and plenty of them still put out trash games here and there. But compare a big budget game flop in the early 80's to today. E.T. is a great example, since it was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. It was hyped enough and had enough money poured into it that when it failed, it shook an already volatile industry to its foundations. Conversely, when you have a major big budget flop today like Battlefield V, jobs are going to be lost and possibly a studio gets shuttered, but it isn't going to offset things in such a way that the entire industry is suddenly destabilized. Today's industry is far too big, diversified and reactive to be threatened by a big budget flop, or even several at once.    

[YukiHerz]

It's only gonna get worse from now on.

(yes, this is that same GameHut with the cool game prototype videos, he done fucked up now)

[Kira]

4 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Lots of good points

I agree with everything you said, but personally I don't think another* video game crash would happen solely on the grounds of bad practices or piracy or whatever. Development costs are following an exponential curve all the while a game selling 5 million units instead of 6 is a "disappointment" to shareholders (numbers are made up but you get the idea). In that climate, it's a matter of expectations versus what the accounting is in those companies. My intuition is that if somehow both cross before development costs are slowing down, it's going to get bloody for the big players. Nobody gives a shit about angry gamers and everyone plays games anyway, financial markets is where it's at.

It would just change the landscape though, just as the 1983 crash allowed a vacuum for Nintendo. Just like the PC market suffering through our early 21st century allowed for Valve to break new grounds and create a new statu quo. Just like AAA companies being stuck at making Hollywood shooters and battle royales allowed the rise of KillPixel, creating a new entertainment empire with WRATH coming like a motherfucker (OK that one is entirely made up).

*: not saying "second" to make @Cynical happy. Also the dude is making good points on streaming games. I'll add that Esport might get so common in coming years that input latency will prevent streaming from making a dent on personal computing (unless they beat the speed of light), as is VR where latency means redecorating your place with your breakfast as a theme. Breaking bottlenecks on the later for a metaverse kind of experience might bring the hurdles down a bit though, but not enough for whatever fully immersive and complex experiences will be around by then.

[D4NUK1]

This thead have some entittled opinions of games, it's like GASP is not like the old ones.

And to the people saying all new games are just rip off of CoD or Battle Royale, can stop the circle jerk? CoD clones (AKA MW2) it's a old genere now that should be a new trend of Arena FPS soon enougth, and there a just a brand tittles of Battle Royale that stay in touch, meanwhile others are dying in. 

Nintendo it's doing the best this generation and they will keep making original games, that most people here will not play because they are more PC gamers that are figthing vs Epic that consoles gamers that are made by a new public.

 

[[McD] James]

39 minutes ago, jamondemarnatural said:

This thead have some entittled opinions of games, it's like GASP is not like the old ones.

And to the people saying all new games are just rip off of CoD or Battle Royale, can stop the circle jerk? CoD clones (AKA MW2) it's a old genere now that should be a new trend of Arena FPS soon enougth, and there a just a brand tittles of Battle Royale that stay in touch, meanwhile others are dying in. 

Nintendo it's doing the best this generation and they will keep making original games, that most people here will not play because they are more PC gamers that are figthing vs Epic that consoles gamers that are made by a new public.

 

 

I like Nintendo's games, as they're usually very well designed, but originality hasn't been one of their strong suits for a very long time. 

[Graf Zahl]

17 hours ago, crazyflyingdonut said:

And don't even get me started on mobile games. Mobile games in general should not be allowed to even be qualified as "games". Most of the time, you're trying to buy stuff with in-game currency, or watching a 45-second unskippable advertisement in order to gain more in-game currency! What are some great things you can buy with in-game currency? USELESS BULLCRAP THAT ONLY SLIGHTLY ENHANCES THE GAME! Not really anything to do with any kind of actual gameplay.

 

Don't tell me, I worked there. The entire gaming industry has turned into a shark's business by now where quality no longer matters - the only relevant thing is to get rich quick - or go down. Most go down.

If you want to point fingers, please point at Apple. Their monopolistic App Store for iPhones started the entire mess. It's a business model where everybody loses, except Apple itself. So ever more inane money making schemes were devised to sever people from their money and get some return on investment. And everything that proved to be successful was then copypasted to PC gaming as well. :(

 

Do I need to say I no longer work there? Nowadays I earn my money developing 'serious' software, at least in this type of business the finances are still healthy and I do not have to be concerned about how well the smoke-and-mirrors-style advertisement works to peddle the next piece of garbage to the unsuspecting customer.

 

[Kira]

1 hour ago, jamondemarnatural said:

And to the people saying all new games are just rip off of CoD or Battle Royale, can stop the circle jerk? CoD clones (AKA MW2) it's a old genere now that should be a new trend of Arena FPS soon enougth, and there a just a brand tittles of Battle Royale that stay in touch, meanwhile others are dying in.

Just in case I was lumped in, I want to say I wasn't serious myself with the CoD/BR thing.

 

I'd like to know where you see that trend for Arena FPS on the other hand. The only noteworthy one since 2016 (!) was Quake Champions and it's bleeding its player base so quick if they mess the next update, this game will be on official life support (it probably already is). UT4 is abandoned and the Diabotical hype is "if we have 2000 players WE MADE IT".

 

Otherwise we have Quake Live having a few servers alive and everything else has less than 5 active servers per continent on a regular day. Good enough for the veteran afps player (and they do pickups on Discord or IRC anyway, for any game), but nothing worth paying attention for the industry. I did notice a few recent entries on Steam and a maybe promising Early Access one, but the numbers seem on par with what we got for the past decade (and most will probably die again).

 

If anything, the recent APEX maelstrom signifies that BR are in vogue for a bit yet (and for all the headlines saying it sucked up all the other BR's player bases, each of the notable ones still dwarf something like QC to an order I don't really want to double-check myself).

Otherwise there has been a string of cool retro-FPS announced or in Early Access but they are mostly indie and indies will live on and do their own thing no matter what, so it's not really in scope for this discussion. The Doom revival is noteworthy though, and it's not like I'd have problems with FPS doing something "fresh and new", provided they avoid predatory business models and are trying to be fun games first thing.

[NiGHTMARE]

15 hours ago, TheMegaKid said:

Resident Evil 2

Wolfenstein: The New Order
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Uncharted
STAR WARS Battlefront
DOOM 4
DOOM Eternal
Halo
Super Mario Odyssey
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
A L I E N: Isolation
Minecraft
Assassin's Creed
Devil May Cry
Overwatch

^ I assume you've never played those games before sir.

 

A few games I would add to that list:

 

The Last Of Us

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Dishonored 2

Horizon Zero Dawn

Resident Evil 7

Marvel's Spider-Man

God of War (2018)

[Novaseer]

On 4/18/2019 at 9:00 PM, Graf Zahl said:

And it needs to take the entire posse of AMERICAN game companies with them

Erm... that would include id Software...

[Graf Zahl]

You mean Zenimax, don't you? Let'em burn!

 

[D4NUK1]

3 hours ago, Ajora said:

 

I like Nintendo's games, as they're usually very well designed, but originality hasn't been one of their strong suits for a very long time. 

Maybe i will change that not for Nintendo Game's but games that's only on Switch or play better in Switch with their indie powerhouse, also will take Splatton 2 and the new Pokemon as good and original. New updated Smash is also cool.

 

 

[D4NUK1]

2 hours ago, Kira said:

Just in case I was lumped in, I want to say I wasn't serious myself with the CoD/BR thing.

 

I'd like to know where you see that trend for Arena FPS on the other hand. The only noteworthy one since 2016 (!) was Quake Champions and it's bleeding its player base so quick if they mess the next update, this game will be on official life support (it probably already is). UT4 is abandoned and the Diabotical hype is "if we have 2000 players WE MADE IT".

 

Sorry about doble post, but was talking now how vintage CoD will be a new genere as Arena FPS, sorry about that misunderstanding, my english is not the best.

[crazyflyingdonut]

44 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

You mean Zenimax, don't you? Let'em burn!

I have no idea why you're labelled as "Salty", because everything you have said in this thread so far seems to be similar to how I feel.

[Cherno]

My two cents:

 

1. In the 1983 videogame market crash, videogames were still a new thing and regarded as a fad that was over. This is vastly different from todday or even 20 years ago when videogames are in every household and on every smartphone, and the industry rakes in more than Hollwood movies.

 

2. Is the market actually being "flooded" by these retro consoles? Contrary to 1983, these products are not as heavily marketed as the big consoles and they also are not meant to be competitive with these. I'm not sure if the lot of em actually takes away anything more than a token of the big consoles' market share.

[TheNoob_Gamer]

23 hours ago, crazyflyingdonut said:

And don't even get me started on mobile games. Mobile games in general should not be allowed to even be qualified as "games". Most of the time, you're trying to buy stuff with in-game currency, or watching a 45-second unskippable advertisement in order to gain more in-game currency! What are some great things you can buy with in-game currency? USELESS BULLCRAP THAT ONLY SLIGHTLY ENHANCES THE GAME! Not really anything to do with any kind of actual gameplay.

Play some actual gems like Shattered Pixel Dungeon (a free RL, and usually RLs don't force you to pay shit to progress), Mobile GTAs (the official ports from Rockstar that is) then come back and tell me. There are actual good games on mobile devices, they are just hindered with popular trashes.

Also, don't forget that a hell of a lot of NES games are impossible to beat (they are basically arcade games that you don't have to pay twice or more to play) and the N64 controller sucks.

[Avoozl]

22 hours ago, TheMegaKid said:

Resident Evil 2

Wolfenstein: The New Order
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Uncharted
STAR WARS Battlefront
DOOM 4
DOOM Eternal
Halo
Super Mario Odyssey
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
A L I E N: Isolation
Minecraft
Assassin's Creed
Devil May Cry
Overwatch

^ I assume you've never played those games before sir.

Opinions though. Some of these games are not recent and older such as Minecraft in 2009, Halo in 2002, Assassin's Creed in 2007, Devil May Cry in 2001 and Resident Evil in 1998, but some of them did get remakes and remasters while one of them is still getting updated. Wolfenstein 2 didn't do that well but personally I don't think it was a good game. As for Battlefront people tend to prefer the original games mostly the second one.

[Caffeine Freak]

4 hours ago, crazyflyingdonut said:

I have no idea why you're labelled as "Salty", because everything you have said in this thread so far seems to be similar to how I feel.

 

And you sound salty in this thread as well. This shouldn't be a mystery.

[Cynical]

3 hours ago, Avoozl said:

Opinions though. Some of these games are not recent and older such as Minecraft in 2009, Halo in 2002, Assassin's Creed in 2007, Devil May Cry in 2001 and Resident Evil in 1998, but some of them did get remakes and remasters while one of them is still getting updated. Wolfenstein 2 didn't do that well but personally I don't think it was a good game. As for Battlefront people tend to prefer the original games mostly the second one.

By Resident Evil 2, he doesn't mean the 1998 game but rather the compete re-imagining of its story that came out earlier this year.  Likewise, with DMC, I assume he means either the Ninja Theory game that came out in 2013 or the brand new Devil May Cry 5.

[TheNoob_Gamer]

On 4/19/2019 at 7:32 AM, crazyflyingdonut said:

It's all just Call of Duty sequels, games with more microtransactions than gameplay, and the occasional good game (usually made by an indie developer) gets ignored despite the fact that it's what people would like, because there's too much trash to talk about that the good game receives no attention whatsoever

Oh, f**k no, indie gaming industry are mostly about "pixel-art roguelites", "retro throwbacks", "early access" at this point. (Despite that, some of them really stand out.)
But then again, most of the AAA singleplayer games now are basically interactive movies. 

Edited April 20, 2019 by TheNoob_Gamer

[Avoozl]

36 minutes ago, Cynical said:

By Resident Evil 2, he doesn't mean the 1998 game but rather the compete re-imagining of its story that came out earlier this year.

Well I did mention "but some of them did get remakes and remasters". I originally thought it was unfair to mark a remake or remaster as a new game but I guess maybe I shouldn't have assumed that the remake of RE2 was more like the original with a new coat of paint and fixed up game mechanics like other remasters or remakes of games usually do.

Quote

Likewise, with DMC, I assume he means either the Ninja Theory game that came out in 2013 or the brand new Devil May Cry 5. 

Well he mentioned the new versions of games such as Doom with Doom 4 so when he said the original game names for the others it threw me off and I thought that he actually meant the older games.

Edited April 20, 2019 by Avoozl

[Avoozl]

35 minutes ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

Oh, f**k no, indie gaming industry are mostly about "pixel-art roguelites", "retro throwbacks", "early access" at this point.
But then again, most of the AAA singleplayer games now are basically interactive movies. 

Honestly I don't like new pixel art games as the art techniques they use tend to be more pixelated looking than say official VGA pixel art games from Sierra or Lucasarts. It's hard for me to explain what I mean exactly though.

[Caffeine Freak]

7 hours ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

and the N64 controller sucks.

 

What? What is this blasphemy?

[TheNoob_Gamer]

1 minute ago, Caffeine Freak said:

 

What? What is this blasphemy?

Oh, I'm a casual when it comes to controllers, so in my opinion, N64 sucks simply because the buttons and the layout feel weird.
But it is subjective though, I tend to speak/write retarded stuffs when I'm not feeling normal.

[Graf Zahl]

On 4/19/2019 at 5:12 AM, Doomkid said:

tl;dr: The shitty practices of many modern AAA developers have not prevented these companies from remaining ultra-lucrative, meaning there is little evidence of an upcoming crash, despite how vocal some gamers/gaming articles are about it (understandably). They can't help but keep buying the new shit and that shows no signs of stopping. Plug and play consoles are literally not even a factor in the discussion of whether or not a crash is coming (hint, it's not).

 

Sadly you are most likely correct here. But as it always is with abusive business models, they tend to work for a certain amount of time but ultimately will collapse. But as things are, the entire industry is one huge ultra-toxic clusterfuck.

 

The biggest risk factor for game publishers is the ever rising budgets to outcompete the competition and it will inevitably lead to what we already see with movies: Products will become ever more franchise based with novel ideas being shelved for being too risky and as a result more and more money will end up in the hands of less and less people, the rest will either die or be reduced to second tier products.

 

I'd like to compare this with the life of stars. The top tier produces, both for movies and games are in the Red Giant phase, i.e. the relatively short-lived aftermath of a healthy and productive life. In this phase ever more resources get burned to keep things afloat but ultimately the spendings needed to keep going on will outrun the revenue. And then it's time for the next generation.