Gaming Lounge

[Goemar]

From what I've seen, piracy isn't even the biggest issue (outside of the PC market, but that's another story) with developers right now. Piracy is an inevitability. Someone WILL break the security on your game and it WILL be distributed illegally. Developers need to accept that and instead of focusing (so hard) on trying to fight an unwinnable war, they should focus instead on the other issues that they have.

With Ubisoft dropping the "always-on" crap and people being very vocal about how much it sucks I can't see DRM being a problem for much longer. I'm not saying it'll go away but I can see it being a lot more 'invisible' then it currently is. Console-piracy is fairly low and PC games will always be pirated, no matter what. Making the games easier to install and play would lessen piracy but in the battle of Free Vs Not Free some people will always choose free regardless of morals. Free-to-Play is becoming a bigger thing now but for higher budget games I just can't see it working as it stands. Rewarding early buyers with future DLC (not On-Disc DLC or just launch DLC) always helps along with keeping the game supported.

To me the biggest problem is that everyone and their grandmother is trying to produce AAA movie-quality titles (or just FPSes) with insanely high budgets. If one fails or you get low return, bam, you're millions in the red. Almost nobody is willing to make different types of games or take risks with smaller projects. If all the games are basically the same thing, people will stop buying them because they feel it's a waste of money since they already pretty much own the game. Or they'll turn to piracy. Nobody wants to pay 60 or 70 bucks for a game they already own.

What we need are new, innovative, games and not REALISTIC SHOOTER 647836483267 or else the industry is just going to keep going in this downward spiral.

Compared to the PS2 days I think we're seeing more risks in smaller games thanks to a more robust downloadable game service. Braid (even if it's creator is a bit of an arse-hole) was very risky. It could have flopped, and flopped bad. I think we're seeing more stupidity in how games are presented (aka the new Hitman) but as innovation lies I think the industry is actually getting better. I mean look at that cool Puppet game on the PS3. That's different.

Your never going to have enough people say "I'm getting sick of CoD/FPS 256" and stop buying. It may have it's ups and downs but the big AAA "change the number call it a new game" games are always going to be around. And that isn't a bad thing, they have there place. And for some people that's all they want.

It's companies like Zynga you need to watch. Clones, as in actual clones not sequels, are the danger. When we get flooded with Angry Birds (which is a great example along with TF2 on how to keep people playing and make money) clones that's when we're in real trouble.