Email: The rise of costs, the fall of gaming

Hey Malstrom,

I have been a reader of your articles and blog since Birdmen and disagreeing has been more exception than a rule. My views on the Wii’s success, the DS, the 3DS and the Wii U basically align with yours and I have a lot of respect. No other video game blogger that I have seen writes in such a curious manner.
However, I could never think of a question to send to you because you often elaborate what you mean through other emails.

Now, I am writing this because I would like to present an article to you that our recently founded site has put up and I am very interested in your opinion on it.
The subject at hand is rising budgets in video game development and the numerous developers who fell victim to mismanagement, ‘artistic vision’ clouding business sense or other factors. The intent was to position the “hardcore gamer” notion that the next Xbox and the PS4 are going to leave the Wii U in the dust graphics wise and we would see a repeat of this generation as an irrational proposition.

I was the editor of this article and I personally made sure that the author keeps it light on hyperbole and includes a lot of research and facts.
None of us are professional business analysts but I would humbly say this article has a more solid base than 90% of what paid video game “journalists” put up.
Here is the link.

 

I would be extremely grateful if you at least mentioned this on your blog. I know you despise people who try to write emails to specifically be put up but… well I can’t say this is much different and I won’t pretend I’m not basically asking for fan base leeching. I like honest approaches. You have a lot of intelligent readers that I would be delighted to see involved in the conversation and our site’s goal is to give people like that a platform. 

 

We want to put professional sites to shame with well founded editorials and I am confident we can achieve that.
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I am curious as to why you chose development costs as the subject of the article. Only developers and publishers care about the development costs, and they have numbers on the costs for current and upcoming game systems. In other words, they have more information than someone not in the game industry will have.Perhaps a more interesting move would have been to detail how the decision would affect consumers. Everyone assumes ‘more power’ means things are better for the consumer. This is not true. The ‘more power’ always translated to ‘more cost’. While people may say, “This is 2006’s argument,” the difference in the price of the Wii and PlayStation 3 at launch was evident of these two different philosophies.
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People say the Wii launched ‘cheap’. No, it wasn’t. For what the Wii was, the price fit the hardware appropriately. There are advantages and disadvantages to the ‘power’ of the console. The advantage of the Wii path was that it could launch at the price it did and remain profitable. Another advantage of the ‘lower power’ is greater console survivability. What good is a powerful console like the Xbox 360 in 2006 when so many Xbox 360s broke down? That doesn’t sound good for the consumer. More power often means more things can go wrong with it.
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Instead of focusing mostly on the rising development costs, I would have focused more on the declining consumer base. If it were not for the Wii and DS, the Seventh Generation would be nothing but decline. Rising development costs were not seen as rising due to the increase in audience growth (caused mostly by population growth and economic prosperity).  With the trend of audience decline, rising costs become a great concern.
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We’re back at the same question that started Generation Seven: how does gaming grow? Will greater graphics grow the audience? It hasn’t been. What did grow the audience was interface changes.
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Even if development costs remain the same, the decline in the audience should be terrifying.