According to Ubisoft’s Alain Corre, the market is desperate for new ideas and if it doesn’t get it, spending on video games will continue to fall.
Alain’s concerns arose after it was reported last week that sales for the UK games market is down 38% year-on-year.
Why? The answer is simple – UK gamers are becoming increasingly tired of sequels and cookie-cutter games which in turn has seen an estimated £130m loss across the sector.
“There have been too many ‘me too’ games in the business in the last few years,” continued Alain.
“After a while people will go ‘eh’ and move on. But give them something fresh and they’ll buy a console just for your game.
So what has retailer GAME got to do with any of this? Well everything, actually.
Popping into our local GAME branch during my lunch break Friday just gone I was surprised to see no new releases adorning the front gondolas – the first thing you’ll see on entering any GAME store up and down the country. In place of what should have been Dragon’s Dogma and Lollipop Chainsaw was another re-release of Battlefield 3, yes a game that is more than half a year old.
After a look around the store I eventually stumbled across a couple of copies of both Lollipop Chainsaw and Dragon’s Dogma unceremoniously stuffed away in the lower regions of the PS3/Xbox360 charts.
Knowing the store manager I asked “Why aren’t GAME promoting these games, it’s not like they’ve had poor reviews, quite the opposite?”
“We only a had a couple of copies of Lollipop Chainsaw in on each system, same for Dragon’s Dogma the other week”
What are GAME playing at? How on earth are consumers going to become aware of new games when even the UK’s premier retailer are ignoring them in favour of pimping an 8 month an old game that everyone has already bought and played?
Game retailers are the last line of defense in promoting new games and products into the conscious mind of the general public, but if all we can expect from these retailers, these so called “pillars of the games industry” is this continued stance of ignoring new ideas in favour of gambling everything on making a quick buck via the same old games or, worse still, those that are more than half a year old – a strategy that has not only seen GAME close nearly half of its stores, but one that continues to see the retailer struggle – then how can the games industry expect to turn things around?
Some within the industry claim we’re not heading for an industry crash because we are, in fact, already in one – it just happens to be a slow burner.
I’m beginning to agree with them.
I think a lot of it is also to do with the price of the products.
Now, of course, when you look at the time and money involved in the creation of these games and the price per minute of entertainment ratios offered by games you could argue that they are incredible value for money.
But, the rate of inflation has gone up. Commodities such as, gas, electric, petrol, food etc. etc. have all gone up leaving people with less spending power.
People are becoming more frugal. Plus, with the rise of cheap app games on mobiles and tablets, and free facebook games people are looking elsewhere for their entertainment fix.
Carbon copy games and yearly—full price—releases of sports games that offer little more than the previous version certainly don’t help. But I think that’s certainly not the driving factor here.
I can certainly see a crash, but then like a Pheonix rising from the flames I can see traditional video-gaming returning in force when the digital market-place becomes cheaper and subscription-based cloud gaming finally takes off.
When that future arrives, there probably won’t be anything around for GAME to promote…
… And there probably won’t be a GAME either.
I certainly said “certainly” far too many times there.
Some good points Leeray, and yes price is also an issue. I also agree with your view on the return of traditional video gaming via the digital market place et-al.
Perhaps I’m being over harsh on GAME, but it does annoy me when various factions of the industry harp on about the importance of the retailer when it’s clear that they’re as much of the problem as anything else. I mean, pimping an 8 month old game simply because two new, quality titles don’t fit the required criteria for “big brown shooters”?
It’s clear GAME have learnt nothing from their recent struggles and so you’re right, when the industry does does shift direction they most likely won’t be around to see it.
This is the thing that generally happens in retail.
GAME are only doing what they think the customer wants, and this is through their own personal market research.
To be honest, quirky games are a niche, and only the “real” games enthusiast will consider buying them. But they don’t make up the majority of the gaming public.
I’d say the majority of the gaming public are the ones who will purchase FIFA year-on-year, and of course, buy COD XIIVI even though it’s still running effectively the same engine as Quake 3. They’re probably the same people that hail Transformers as a great film because it’s got tit’s and arse and fast, sexy cars in it. It’s also obvious why EA wants to gear Battlefield towards this market, because that’s where the real money is.
GAME also, will promote the shit out of titles geared towards this market, because unfortunately, the “real” enthusiast probably makes their informed purchases off the internet.
It’s the same as in Tesco for example. The majority of people will only buy unblemished, perfectly round apples. So Tesco will themselves vet their sources for these particular apples, which soon leads to a situation in which other factors such as taste and shelf-life are compromised.
Now, we have perfectly unblemished, round apples in Tesco but they’re all as sharp as lemons.
Go on, buy an apple from Tesco, and then compare it to one bought in an old-fashioned green-grocers. The taste difference is like night and day.
There’s just too many factors at play here and they all point towards a future crash, or a complete re-organisation of the industry and market. I wouldn’t worry too much, we’ll still get those quirky games, but they’ll be somewhat lower budget, but as game development becomes cheaper this too will improve.
Also, you’ll still get those big brown shooters. But I’m sure there’ll be less of them as publishers start looking at projects in a more scrutinising fashion.
One sorry fact of the future though is, we’ll probably see the death of the traditional hard-copy. It’s too wasteful and too expensive to survive in the long term.
Good luck finding an “old-fashioned green-grocers” these days.
Having said that, if you DO, can you see if they can get hold of Beautiful Katamari? That always seems to stump staff at my local Game, the supposed ‘specialist retailer’ :/
Hey I live in Bexhill. Everything’s old-fashioned. We’ve only just reached the 1980′s down here.
When The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off hit the cinema near you make sure you go and see them.
Sadly, we don’t have a cinema down here. The old folks thought moving pictures and sound were a thing of witchcraft and so burnt the place down.
Tesco apples certainly are ghastly.
See also their meat, their veg, their supposedly “Finest” ready-meals…
As for the publics buying habits you could argue that they only buy certain titles because that is all they’re aware of, as pointed out. Show them something different and you’ll change their buying habits. Show them the same thing over and again and eventually they get bored, as we’re now seeing.
When I ran an indie, we always used to promote the games that we liked but that didn’t sell very well.
The Fifas 7 CODs don’t need promoting.
Beyond Good & Evil sold about 2 copies at launch in our shop. It was universally ignored.
After the game had been out for about 8 months I decided to do an experiment.
I hooked it up to the shop’s PS2 console and let it run on loop. You’d be surprised how many people stopped to ask what game it was. They were genuinely interested.
After a couple of minutes of us telling them what it was and how great it was, they’d usually buy it.
We did this with loads of games and the sell-rate was about 60-70% (which was bloody good considering they didn’t want/hadn’t heard of the game before)
This shows that if you promote a game, it will sell.
Game/Gamestation are run by idiots who either don’t know or don’t care. They take the easy option and choose to pack their shelves with identical generic crap.
Their days are numbered and the indies will rise from their ashes.
You might get a few converts. But I’m not convinced that the general gaming public would buy into Lollipop Chainsaw’s flashing, colourful imagery. It screams “HEY I’M A GAME!!” and for all the right reasons, it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. That’s the problem for that particular game. The general gaming public don’t want gamey games. They want the faux element of realism. To kick a ball in the kick-or-head-a-ball simulator. Or to shoot or knife in the Shoot-Knife and Teabag simulator.
You know what I mean?
There’s a reason why POP is pretty crap, it appeals to the lowest common denominator, it aims to appeal to as many people as possible.
Lollipop Chainsaw doesn’t aim to do that. The aims of those developers there are to show off a style and hope that enough people buy into that style to cover their overheads.
Your “REAL” complaint isn’t with the retailers or the publishers it’s with the general populace. They just don’t have any taste.
Look at the real music aficionados, I’m sure they just hate the charts and moan about how some talented musician/writer gets far less coverage/money than those like Lady Gaga.
Again, with the film buffs. You think they like anything that comes out of Hollywood, Hell no. Have a guess which version of “The girl with the Dragon Tattoo” do they prefer? I bet it ain’t the one that they can watch without reading at the same time.
Yeah the games industry is 38% down, that’s because buying console games is becoming less POP… The new POP is facebook and appstore style games… Until the “proper” games industry adopts the same model.
That is.
In a bizarre sense then an industry crash is perhaps the best thing that could happen?
I think so. Like burn all the crap and start again.
This is also part of the reason why I don’t think The WiiU will be that successful. And why Microsoft and SONY are holding back somewhat (they can see something big happening, they’re tentatively waiting to see how cloud-based gaming takes off).
A shift is necessary to get rid of dead wood. Manufacturers, distributors and retailers will be hit the most, but then, money saved that end will be passed on somewhat to the consumer with cheaper prices of digital versions and subscriptions.
Samsung have already struck a deal with Gaikai to produce TV’s with cloud gaming built in. BT have a deal with Onlive so expect a gaming subscription package with their broadband in the future. Apple are producing a TV and already have a cloud service and there’s the Steambox on the horizon. Not to forget that facebook games will become ever more complex and facebook will penetrate every device that you own, from computers and mobiles to TV’s and washing machines.
Soon, you’ll be able to play any game you like on any device you like any time you like.
The only downside is that you’ll never actually own it.